Good series ruined by the biz

[Meight08]

Westwood deserved what it got.
They worked for 5 years on an mmo which costed millions to make and sold miserably. They were working on another mmo at the time which would also cost millions to make.
They fucked up it was their own fault they are dead now.

 

[w00tage]

Diablo - Blizzard fired all of the original Diablo team, so now Diablo 3 will be a dumbed down console game for kids rather than the violent, satanic hack & slash pseudo-roguelike we all know and love.

I'm glad he brought this up, 'cause now I can possibly have a question I've been wondering about for a while answered.

When people bring up dumbed down, I assume it meant a game was less complex, gameplay wise. But according to this, is he suggesting a "dumbed down console game for kids" means a game without violence, adult themes (i.e. satanic), and feelings/actions/items that make you feel like a bad-ass (i.e. being pseudo-roguelike)? It's strange that he mentions "hack & slash," 'cause hack & slash doesn't get any more dumbed down than that.

Help a brother out, folks. Is a dumbed down game a game that is simply not complex, gameplay wise? Or a game that does not contain any explicit content? Is it both?

It's a game where all you have to do to win is what the developer puts in front of you, so that it's just a matter of following obvious directions instead of actually using your brain in any way. Kind of like a popcorn movie versus an actual story movie.

Example in Skyrim - the "puzzles" to solve to open doors in a certain dungeon consist of pillars engraved on multiple sides. You rotate the pillars until the engravings face the correct way, and generally there's a pattern to match.

In a non-dumbed-down game, the clues to the pattern would require the player to apply a minimum of intellectual effort, such as having the backstory for the dungeon contain a story from which the pattern can be deduced, or having the pattern revealed piece-by-piece during the previous parts of the dungeon (painted on ceilings/walls, represented by altars, etc.).

In this one, the pattern was engraved on big, impossible-to-miss rocks about 30 feet before the puzzle room. I remember thinking "hmm, why are these big rocks here with the religious engravings on them? There's no reason at all for this culture to have put 4 big rocks here with those engravings, it's just an antechamber. *shrug* guess I'll never know". Then I walked down the corridor and hey, there's a pillar puzzle with the same engravings *facepalm*.

Now to be clear about my motivations, I am not a puzzle guy. I watched an LP of a puzzle game to see if I'd enjoy them and was completely unable to fathom any but the most simple ones. But seriously, that's insulting to anyone. That's literally a 5-year-old level of intellectual challenge in an M-rated game. So it's understandable why many people playing an M-rated game feel a little gypped by being treated like they have the intellectual capacity of 5-year-olds.

 

[Netrigan]

SiN... pushed out before it was finished to compete with the first Half-Life.

Not only was it unfavorably compared to Half-Life because of its reliance on cut-scenes (cut-scenes, that's for babies), the game breaking bugs made it unplayable for many people on release. Once they patched it up, the game proved itself to be quite a lot of fun.

 

[snagli]

I still weep at night for Westwood. They planned to make the franchise SO MUCH BETTER. And the EA came along and skullfucked them.

 

[burningdragoon]

Legend of Dragoon in that since they never made a sequel, it never became a series. Ruined, I say! RUINED!

 

[Smithburg]

You forgot Mass Effect.

And Star Wars Battlefront.

And KoTOR. And how Jedi Knight was superceded by this Force Unleashed crap. I just want Jedi Knight 3.

They made Jedi Knight 3

 

[Atmos Duality]

It's a fan-rage keyword that can mean a lot of things
It can mean that;
Making things accessible. You know that in some games you have to scroll down several menus to take the action you want. Putting that action on a hotbar is dumbing it down.

You make it sound as though that is strictly a good thing.

Or it can literally mean that features were removed because they were too complex for target audiences.

"Too complex for broader audiences", would be more accurate.
Legitimate complaints for "dumbing down" don't exist in a vacuum; you need a basis of comparison, which means an existing fanbase or market.

Enthusiasts are willing to put more effort into learning the game, and they get a bigger sense of enjoyment out of that, which is kind of the point of the game. This doesn't make them "superior" gamers (as the common "elitist" argument goes); but fans of something more specific.

If subtracting features subtracts depth and meaningful player choice, it's dumbing the game down, without question. If subtracting features doesn't change much, or actually improves the game in general, that is streamlining or making the game accessible.

There are business reasons that favor actually dumbing the game down (profit potential).
I'd like to think that business alone is not enough reason to justify a game's existence; otherwise, why make any other game than a homogenized "market ideal" game?

And that's exactly what AAA gaming wants and does.

For anyone not satisfied with that needs to find alternatives, and fortunately, those alternatives exist now, or will exist soon.

AAA gaming must hate this, if the recent failures of several market megagiants is any indication.

 

[endtherapture]

You forgot Mass Effect.

And Star Wars Battlefront.

And KoTOR. And how Jedi Knight was superceded by this Force Unleashed crap. I just want Jedi Knight 3.

They made Jedi Knight 3

Jedi Academy was more of an expansion if anything.

 

[42]

I'm amazed at the presumptuous nature that a game that hasn't even been released yet has been dumbed down for the console tards. Diablo III hasn't even come out yet, can you just wait a bit before you start making criticisms?

Well, there was that beta last weekend that allowed people to play the first bits of the game, as any class they wanted to, up to level 13. That is where I presume most of the criticisms come from (I know it is where I got mine).

well.....It's a beta. i dunno what you were expecting. same thing happened before BF3 came out, and Halo: Reach. everyone thought it was the shittest thing since 2 girls eating shit out of 1 cup thing. I tend to think that the Betas are not what one would base an entire opinion of a games quality on, considering the nature of the state the game your playing. Its not a criticism of you, your allowed to have first impressions, I'm just saying experience the whole game.

EA sucks ballz.

 

[GonzoGamer]

Wouldn't it be easier to mention a series that hasn't been ruined by the Biz?

I can't think of a single game franchise that has continued to have a high level of quality throughout its entire lifespan.

@ the OP, I wouldn't say Shenmue was ruined by Sega going out of business. It was ruined by everyone buying a PS2 instead, hence making Sega go out of business

First series that comes to my mind though would be Silent Hill of course, when Konami, for reasons that only God knows, thought it would be a good idea to outsource the series to Western developers.

It would be a shorter list.
I'm really having trouble thinking of one.

BTW please tell you avatar to stop hypnotizing me. I think I may have just been staring at that thing gyrate for a half hour.

 

[MelasZepheos_v1legacy]

There's a lot of great games that we all wanted a good sequel to but we never got it because the developer was mismanaged into bankruptcy, bought out by big publishers, or some other type of disastrous corporate upheaval. Here's some I thought of:

Diablo - Blizzard fired all of the original Diablo team, so now Diablo 3 will be a dumbed down console game for kids rather than the violent, satanic hack & slash pseudo-roguelike we all know and love.

Fallout - A series of bad decisions ruined Interplay, thus ruining Black Isle. Now all we get is Oblivion with guns. Rest in peace, Van Buren.

Everything made by Rare - The quality of Rare's games dropped significantly after they were bought out by Microsoft. Now they have shifted their focus entirely on developing games for use with the Kinect peripheral. R.I.P.

You seem so certain about Diablo. It was my understanding that it wasn't actually released yet, and it would thus be hard for someone to draw an objective, non-fanboyish opinion of it.

I like Fallout 3, probably one of my favourite games ever actually. And I went back and played FO2 out of interest. It did not age well in my opinion.

So Banjo Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts wasn't a good game released to good reviews that was fun and reminiscent of their old style? Perfect Dark Zero, while perhaps not as hyped as it should have been, wasn't a brilliant FPS? Kameo: Elements of Power was just any other action-adventure game with no sense of self referential humour that again received positive reviews? Conker: Live and Reloaded wasn't utterly hilarious in every way? Hang on, that's almost every game Rare released since the takeover, and Goddamn if I didn't love every single one.

If I had to choose a series that was genuinely ruined by the business, I would say Knights of the Old Republic. It needed a third game, and it needed a decent ending to the second game. Instead it was rushed out and wasn't very good.