vimes

Are we economicaly comparing here LucasArts and Team17 ? Okay, LucasArts makes tons, and I mean tons, of cash with Starwars game thanks to three developers of which one has only one arm. And, come on, how much do you think an adventure game might cost compared to any other popular genre? How much do you think Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds or Force Commander has cost to this company ? It's not as if we were talking about a studio which only makes games... not distributing them. We must be honest with ourself. LucasArst used to be a ground breaking company; now it has become what every selling company is supposed to be : an investor that wishes, hopes and makes eveything so that its safe investments will generate large amounts of money. And, honestly, we can blame them but in the end, video game aren't yet considered as an art , so suicide projects can't seriously be funded. There is ni Humanism here. EDIt : I'd fucking prefer this situation to be different.

Well, I'll let aside Silent " When are they going to stop " Hill 4 and GoldnEye "I'm raising good looking producers" Rogue Agent. Now for the rest. Half Life 2... man, I've been watching videos and trailer for x years now. I'm tired of looking at stuff without knowing if the game will integrate them in the end [ remember the DirectX 9.0 Demo ?]. Vampire The Maquerade: Bloodlines. A Troika game made with money, THAT looks interesting. I just hope they didn't sell their souls to the FPS devil and applied their knowledge regarding RPGs. There were a bunch of video ( 5 if I'm not wrong) quite detailled about the gameplay and interactivity and seems to need some adjustment/tweaking. Now, Fable ... an ambitious game by Molyneux. Hey, doesn't that really sum up the whole idea ? Anyway, as it has been out of Molyneux's hands for three years, it seems that Fable has become a real game and gained in "matters" (dunno if this is the right word) and we can hope that it will be more fun than Black & White. Anyway, this video is pretty interesting (I didn't get everything though) as it shows a team that seems pretty cool AND realist. Both the Carter guys develop opinions about video games that pleases me a LOT and they do it with quite a sens of humour : it's really nice to watch people talking clearly about features ingame without making a fuss about it. What is also quite impressive is that they all seem to be eager to play to the game they've been working on for 3 years. Question is... will it be realeased on PC?

People tend to see everyone that play adventure games and enjoy it as fanboys whose main occupation is to put silly puzzles in their everyday life and to communicate with other people using poor vocabulary... Well,the last part might be true but, hell, I do love adventure games but i'm not an integrist. Why do I love both Monkey Island and, for example, Deus Ex or Planescape Torment... because they both make the same feeling in me. Puzzles, fights or dialogs are just different features that build a universe, a story... and when a game contains all this ingredients and mix them with a good recipe, even if there are less puzzles, even if it is no Point n Click game, it must goddam good. I must admit that there is nothing that disappoints me more that new adventure games serving the same old soup invented 10 years ago. I dream of a GTA like with less action and more dialogs [ MI5 should have been like this]. THAT would be a great improvment in the adventure game industry.

Marek : "It was one of the few pre-Half-Life-OMG-We-Can-Tell-Stories-With-This-Genre story-based FPSes" I think you're quite wrong because the tale of Outlaws is rarely told IN game sequences. The story is good but it's told in a very common way that is, during the cutscenes To me Outlaws = gorgeous cutscene + wonderful musics BUT it is a shitty game in a lot of aspect. First, the ingame graphics are, erm, poor ? And this was the case even when the game was first released. Then, the game design sucks : every town look the same, the saloons are non-lively... its really a pity compared to what is described in the cutscenes. I'm not fond of remake or sequels but with nowadays technology and gameplay knowledge, a new Outlaws would definitely be worth it

These days, there are a lot of dev teams declaring such things as : " Yeah, now, the 3D Engine is done, we can begin thinking about the gameplay" or "As you can see, there's a lot of physical interactions with NPCs which will surely be a central point of the gameplay that OH! MY! GOD! we haven't yet implemented despite the fact we're 3 months from the release day!!" My point is.. do you need a complete 3D engine to create a gameplay and begin implementing it ? Shouldn't it be the other way around : defining a gameplay and then see what kind of engines are needed ? Right now, some friends and I are developing a little VR application and the gameplay was thought, defined and partially tested long before we chose the 3D Engine .. is this wrong, dad ? Is this right, or did I miss some crucial point regarding this matter?

I got a few ideas but.. does Lacey mean anything ? That could be useful.

We all know already that games are full of art : graphics, design, sound, storyline... but is it possible that, one day, a game would be seen as a piece of art ? Isn't the fact that games are meant to be fun preventing them to reach a new state ? Should we hope for this "ascension" or not ? The only games that come to my mind as a piece of art is The Dark Eye, an adaptation of Poe's short stories in which you incarnate both the murderer and the victim of a crime. It made the player experience feelings and made him thought about matters that couldn't be encountered in any other game and in a way other media couldn't propose. And now, I call defense.

I was quite fond of Moore's works (especially his first film) but I got less enthusiastic when I discovered that he's pretending to build documentaries. This guy is making great satyrical, nearly propaganda movies but he's not showing reality, he only shows one side of the coin intentionally forgetting points that doesn't "help" his point of view. Aniway,Moore's movies are great shocks which consists in one of the best way to begin to think about some hot topics ... but audience shouldn't close the debates just after they've finished watching the movies.

I was thinking about things that aren't related to basic reactions such as fear, enjoyment, excitement... well quite like these but all mixed up and whose origin is quite unidentifiable at first. I didn't mean I was thinking about reaction I can get, for example, by looking at some paintings by Magritte. Pff, well, I should have agree with Jayel

To me, it is something, whatever its form, that "speaks" to you, that makes something within you move.

I wonder what made you think that was 3D in the first place...

Nom d'un ptit bonhomme, this is the second most educative topic I've ever read. Thanks for everything!

These guys are so talented, I wish I could bring my drawings such a definite style.

It is, isn't it ? It isn't ?

errrr 2001 - A Space Odyssey ?

It isn't a 3D model.

I'm not fond of real-time cellshading but your argument here is..eeerr.. completely stupid? I mean do you even imagine the animation work behind, let's say... anyrandom camera movements (I'm speaking for example a huge circular up and down travelling) ? It's impossible. When you know how much it took for the bests of the bests in 2D animation to add cartoon characters in Roger Rabbit or Looney Tunes scene... and that is for "static" camera movement... you'll soon realize that it's foolish to use your solution. To me, the answer is in high polygon models and/or real time cell shading technology.

I was making a mini-thesis on games two years ago and I had made the statement that the game industry is right now in the state of the movie industry during the 50's 60's. At this time, there were a lot of directors called "engineers- directors" which meant that really drive their movie-making process around a technical point of view : 3D, makes up, cinemascope, the firsts cheap crane had really fed the movies of these times. Sure, some directors weren't in this state of mind but the movies were really brought forwarded thanks to these "engineers-directors". Eventually, these guys learnt to use these new techniques as a mean and not an achievement. I think it's typically the state of current game industry. There are lots of "engineers-game designers" regarding a small amount of real creators but we can hope that it will change. Now what's a little frightening is that we have reached a level of technique improvment that should allow more creativity and less trend... but it's not the case. And, Jake is right, most of studios are constructing their vision of games around a gameplay innovation allowed by some brand new technologies neglecting previous ideas. A quite accurate example is IA a few years ago, it had become the hot topic of games and every developers were preaching the "dynamic characters with unpredicatble behaviour" point of view. thing is, it's nice but's xstupid because you can't give a soul to randomly generated people and, moreover, you can't drive a story!

I think lots of people here and there use the word realisme in place of credibility. I mean, BGE isn't a game that is realistic in every aspect nor is Half Life : their world is believable.. and I wish this subtility could be understood by graphic-pepole because if everyone goes for photo-realism models or textures, every games will look the same at the end.

Uh Jake, whut ? Nevermind, I thought it was the grapefruit discussion forum. This was a free absurd joke

I don't know... it depends on the game. For example, while playing Mafia, you gotta to betray someone- you just gotta do this -and the player is never allow to choose to stay on this character's side. It's too bad. It's frustrating On the other end, some game posses such a good storyline that several ending aren't needed. In fact, what really annoys me with the several endings process is that it's often cheap : it's like projecting a movie and ask the audience ten minutes before the end of the story what kind of end they want. And what really annoys me with a single ending is that it doesn't really use the power of interactivity give by the media... and you end up with a storyline very similar to what propose others media. What could be interesting, on another hand, is to give the player multiple views on the same story; Farenheit is scaveging this way but I wish it would be more subtle. Imagine a game similar to Mafia and let's say that the beginning takes place when each member of the hero's family has just been killed by a gang and that an opposite gang propose the player to enter the "Family" to avenge these murders. What could be really cool is to allow the player to : - be part of the mafia and become a real schycho Joe Pesci Style - be part of the mafia and keep a moral attitude - become a policeman and always be on the side of Justice - become a policeman and become a "ripoux"( don't know the word in english) you know a bad cop With a very dynamic environment where things also happens off-screen, with the mafia and police doing their stuff, it would be quite easy.

Something like 18 months ago, I was still getting game from p2p... and most of the times, I wasn't playing to them... but you know I got this "gotta own, gotta own, mine, onllyyy mine" behaviour of the guy that has too much time on his hands. And then, I realized that games didn't mean't anything to me anymore : games didn't had a value in my mind and I had lost the frustration of the wait and so forth,the joy to open the game box for the first time. And then, I began to see that I wanted to earn my living by making games and I was like " I just don't want to end up like some doomed poet sleeping under bridges, ending his life as a demonstration-guy in some supermarket just because some guys like ME didn't buy MY game" And so I stopped.. or nearly, because now I play from times to times, the complete games for an hours or so to get the main "feeling" of the game, a representative look that demos unfortunately can't give.

I'm just done playing Mafia and, fucking jesus, this game is SOOOOOOOO frustrating. So frustating, in fact, that sometimes, at night, I wake up, load the game, play the extra-free mode and I drive for a few minutes litterally bedazzled by how Lost Heaven is looking and then break in tears just by remembering that the freedom that is promised to me is just totally fake. Die, you stupid screenwriters!You'd better do a movie than a game!

I'm not reazlly fond of trying to know the ancestor of Command & Conquers 4 - Tiberium Dawn... what's more intriguing is to fond out what really interesting gameplay ideas didn't make it to nowadays game.

Fuck, I never managed to finish this game : either I hadn't enough little kids to go to the castle or I was stuck in the video game or space worlds. Never seen the end.