Theory

[icycalm]

I have a thread on this currently going on at rllmuk:

http://www.rllmukforum.com/index.php?showtopic=202307

Putting together material for an article.

[Recap]

Americanizing console games and alienating Western PC players at the same time. The X-Box was really something despite all you hear.

[Worm]

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion was mentioned, though I don't see how the difficulty scaling is attributable to consoles. More arguable is the decreased number of weapon skills, with the amusing result of "Axes" getting lumped in with "Blunt Weapons."

I never played Oblivion, so I can't really speak about those changes. But an obvious point of simplification was the interface:

The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind


The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion


Hmm, which one was designed with consoles in mind?

Oh, and here's some more detail about Napele0n's example of the Rainbow Six games: prior to the fourth game, Rainbow Six: Lockdown, you could look at a 2D layout of each level and assign waypointed instructions to your team members, allowing you to determine when they would wait, snipe, cover, clear rooms, etc. Each node could also be assigned a go-code, so during the mission you could trigger the AI's next action at your whim. The levels themselves were nonlinear, usually based on actual buildings or realistic floorplans, and offered multiple entry points.

Lockdown ditched all of this. No pre-mission planning, linear start-to-finish levels, and no sniper rifles outside of multiplayer. Player health was increased, and enemy accuracy was decreased. Overall, the game was a rather generic FPS.

EDIT: Just found this amusing quote about Rainbow Six: Vegas 2.

“I take these weapons, and look at what defines them, or what people think defines them,” Theiren explains. “For an Uzi, people think it fires lots of bullets, and it’s really inaccurate.” That, he knows, has nothing to do with reality—if anything, Uzis are considered some of the most reliable and accurate submachine guns around. But the 80s (and Miami Vice in particular) offered us the Uzi as a low-life villain’s weapon, spit-fire and out-of-control. “So I make it fire faster than it should. It’s about taking the personality of a weapon, and making it shine in the game,” Theiren says.

With 200 unique variables for each weapon, including the damage it inflicts at various ranges, how fast it reloads and when bullets tend to start dropping off, a gun in RSV2 could perform precisely like the real thing. “These consoles are so powerful, when you fire a bullet we could factor all of it in: windfall, range, everything about the history of that specific weapon, friction values for the barrel, how many times it’s been fired since it was last cleaned,” says Theiren. “We could make it as anally realistic as possible. But we’re not trying to make a live simulator.”

http://www.popularmechanics.com/technol ... 55750.html

So, in other words, away from what the early titles in the series were all about.

[Crazy Man]

Team Fortress 2:

Fast paced CTF game was replaced with a slow Team Deathmatch game.

Class specific grenades were removed which caused more class blurring and a significant loss of depth.

Advanced movement techniques were removed which significantly lowered the game's depth.

Several weapons were removed (and replaced with nothing) which also lowered the game's depth.

The balance was worse than TFC at the highest level of play.

20 second respawn timers made spawn camping a dominant strategy.

Offensive capabilities were limited so turtling was encouraged.

Armor was removed.

Shells, Nails, Rockets and Cells were replaced by a universal ammo (picking up a pistol will magically refill your rocket launcher).

You could no longer throw ammo.

You could no longer throw the flag once you had it.

Random Dice Rolls/Critical Hits were added that did 3 times more damage.

Also, good luck doing THIS with a controller.

[Evo]

Unreal Tournament.

Specifically the changes between UT2003/2004 and UT3.

In UT3 some of these include making it impossible to zoom away from a vehicle because controllers do not have a mouse wheel, larger reticles with none of the customisation if reticles you used to have.

You can't throw weapons anymore.

Fewer mutations, harder to make new ones.

Fewer game types (no new official ones yet, only modded ones), fewer people in matches (though this was changed in a patch). No more sports style tournament, instead we got a really lame story to play through.

There are less movement possibilities, rather decreasing the complexity of that part of the game. An example is the removal of dodge jumping which was hard to do, and was a pretty good advantage to those that could do it.

Worse of all was the criminal abuse done to the UI. With entire pages of options being removed, and the UI no longer easily navigable windows.

UT2004 was a god among PC games for mods as far as I am concerned and one thing that bothers modders about UT3 is that a lot of stuff was removed from the scripting tools and instead moved to native code, supposedly to improve console performance, this makes modding quite a bit harder.

[Crazy Man]

Team Fortress went through multiple revisions, from a simple TF1 with Commander Class, to a Half Life Universe 7-Day War battlefield type game with civilian populations, to its current form. The reason for these changes? Valve were looking for something that customers, playtesters, gamers would find fun - it's the customer satisfaction model.

Real work on the current TF2 didn't begin until late 2005. They were looking for something that newcomers who had played nothing but shallow games would find fun, not the established fanbase which they basically gave the finger to. They wanted a game that all the console kids would love as an added bonus to the Orange Box, not a competitive shooter. Had TF2 not been released with the Orange Box and on the Xbox, it would have been another huge failure just like DoD:Source.

I don't find having to grind for unlockable weapons to be fun.
I don't find walking out of the spawn only to instantly die because some random player got a lucky dice roll to be fun.
I don't find getting killed by a weapon that does random damage to be fun.
I don't find that in competetive play that in 6 vs 6 games without class limits teams consist of

Demoman
Demoman
Demoman
Medic
Medic
Medic

vs

Demoman
Demoman
Demoman
Medic
Medic
Medic

after everyone realized how awful the balance in the game was to be fun.

It's supposed to be a FPS, not a freakin MMORPG.

Even Sean Elliot from 1up realized how dumbed down the game was. "It's always been a franchise about skill, not luck. Why are there dice rolls?"

Guess what? Complexity and 'sophistication' didn't enter into it, because making something more complex for complexities sake isn't inherently more fun. Team Fortress 2 wouldn't have been better with more weapons, and vehicles, and twenty different gametypes, look how badly Unreal Tournament 3 did for that. Team Fortress 2 was designed around being a fun game.

Except that Unreal Tournament 3 was less complex than its previous games. The game didn't die because it had too much stuff, it died because it had too little. The competitive community found UT3 to be an unbalanced and shallow turd compared to previous titles so everyone migrated back to UT 2004.

Team Fortress was never about vehicles, loads of gametypes, or loads of weapons. It was about deep and fast paced competitive CTF play, which is something Valve failed miserably at. I played TF2 competitively and scrimmed weekly, but the more I played, the more I craved more depth. I wanted something more than unbalanced Team Deathmatch. I wanted to be able to be a huge asset to the team without having to kill anyone like in previous games. I wanted to be able to practice movement techniques and do speedruns across maps. I wanted to be rewarded for a well timed grenade or flag grab, not a random critical hit that I had no control over. I wanted to be able to grab a flag, then throw it to a teammate through a window while I sacrifice my life to an enemy sentry gun. I wanted to be able to help an engineer set up EMP traps by placing ammo packs in key locations. I wanted to be a master manipulator and get the enemy team to kill each other because of a poor spy check. Too bad Valve FORCED friendly fire to be off. When I played a Medic, I wanted to do more than hold down Mouse1 and follow my teammates which he was stripped down to.

Strafe button? Not enough buttons on a controller.

Throw flag button? Not enough buttons on a controller.

Throw ammo button? Not enough buttons on a controller.

Throw primary grenade button? Not enough buttons on a controller.

Throw secondary grenade button? Not enough buttons on a controller.

Binding a specific disguise/buildable to a button? Not enough buttons on a controller.

5 maps at launch? Only 1 being a CTF map, yet it being horrible while a fanmodcan do the same and much more.

In pretty much every single good multiplayer FPS, melee weapons are used for the humiliation of crappy players and for punishing players who don't keep an eye on their ammo. In TFC, melee did around 10 damage per hit. In TF2, they do around 55 per hit. Don't tell me that this isn't because awful thumbstick controls encourage people to screw aim and go for melee fights.

Yeah, we got a "fun" game with cartoony graphics and internet memes, and we got it at the death of the competitive scene of a franchise that has always been about competitive play. "Nice job breaking it hero."

http://www.teamfortress.com/scoutupdate/sandman.htm

As if Heavies were barely played enough, this new update is going to kill him as he's the main counter to the Scout. You would think that they couldn't have possibly have made the balance worse, then they throw this at you.

If TFC is to TF2, then Super Street Fighter II Turbo is to to Street Fighter The Movie: The Game for the Sega Saturn. It's a simple cash in that tried to bring in a new audience and cater to the lowest common denominator while screwing over the franchise's true fans. Games are supposed to take steps forward, not 1 step forward, then 50 steps back. But hey, it's got awesome graphics and funny voice-overs which are surely the true meat of any quality game.

It's always better for a niche franchise to remain a niche, rather than have it raped by developers that have no idea what made their original game so fun in the first place. TFC's competitive scene lasted for over 7 years before fading and it was an obscure mod compared to the widely popular likes of Quake 3 Arena and UT. TF2's competitive scene is nearly dead and it hasn't even been a year and a half yet since the game came out. I rest my case.

[icycalm]

If you can combine your two posts in this thread as one continuous article, and give me your name and a star rating, I'll throw it up on the frontpage as a TF2 review. If you want to do this, email me the finished text. No need to mess around with it much -- I like the spontaneity of it reading like a forum post. Just make it read as if you are not responding to someone else's comments.

As for the star rating, here's how it works:

***** Highly recommended
**** Recommended
*** Good, but has been done before, and much better
** Playable, but without much merit
* LOL

It sounds to me like you'd give it a two or a three...

[icycalm]

On that note, I would greatly appreciated it if either Evo or Crazy Man, or both together, worked on a UT3 review for me. You guys seem to know what you are talking about. Let's get these points across to a wider audience.

[Evo]

On that note, I would greatly appreciated it if either Evo or Crazy Man, or both together, worked on a UT3 review for me. You guys seem to know what you are talking about. Let's get these points across to a wider audience.

On an off topic note, would this be UT3 at launch? Because it has a free community pack coming out in the spirit of what we used to get for UT2004, and may change my opinion a bit based on what I have read... They may actually fix a few things. If vanilla UT3, then I will compare to launch UT2004, because by the time UT3 was released, UT2004 was a behemoth of mods, addons and fixes, bigger on my HDD than any of my MMOs.

[Tain]

Unreal Tournament.

Specifically the changes between UT2003/2004 and UT3.

In UT3 some of these include making it impossible to zoom away from a vehicle because controllers do not have a mouse wheel, larger reticles with none of the customisation if reticles you used to have.

You can't throw weapons anymore.

[...]

There are less movement possibilities, rather decreasing the complexity of that part of the game. An example is the removal of dodge jumping which was hard to do, and was a pretty good advantage to those that could do it.

I'd like to hear more of the UT3 mechanical changes, outside of the modding and obvious UI faults. I know of the movement differences, but are there more compromises aside from what you mentioned?

I was surprised when I picked up UT3 recently; the game has less than UT2004 in terms of modes and maps, but Warfare seemed to be a big enough improvement over Onslaught to be worth playing, and the weapon set changes seemed to be for the better. Are those changes among the reasons the competitive community isn't as big as 2004?

[JoshF]

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/111614-Xcom-Publisher-Strategy-Games-Are-Not-Contemporary

"Turn-based strategy games were no longer the hottest thing on planet Earth," Hartmann said. "But this is not just a commercial thing - strategy games are just not contemporary."

"I use the example of music artists. Look at someone old school like Ray Charles, if he would make music today it would still be Ray Charles but he would probably do it more in the style of Kanye West. Bringing Ray Charles back is all fine and good, but it just needs to move on, although the core essence will still be the same."

[icycalm]

This is not so much connected to Xboxification as to another subject altogether. Basically, the question has nothing to do with whether strategy games are still "contemporary" or not. The question has to do with whether the developer LOVES STRATEGY GAMES OR NOT. If he loves them, the question of whether or not they are "contemporary" is irrelevant. If he doesn't love them, likewise.

In this case, I haven't read the linked article or anything really on this new X-COM and the people who are making it, but I would guess that the developer doesn't give a shit about strategy games and was merely asked to create an FPS using this franchise's name in hopes of generating a few extra sales. Given the circumstances, then, any comment this shovelware-maker has on the status of strategy games are irrelevant. I mean how would HE know anything about them? If he really is a shovelware-maker he probably doesn't know much even about FPSes lol!

[icycalm]

And by the way, he is right that strategy games are not "contemporary", but not for the reasons that he thinks. He says this merely because they do not sell as much as FPSes or rhythm games or whatever -- though they still probably sell as much as they used to, and perhaps even more.

No, the reason strategy games are not contemporary is because they are on a lower branch in the tree of gaming than first-person action games. In other words, because they are not the way forward as far as increasing immersion is concerned.