@jadegl: I agree. I think what happened here was a really healthy and positive conversation between a development studio and community that you rarely see happen so directly in AAA games, so it sucks that there are people trying to demonise this without a particularly good argument. In fact it sucks that there are people trying to dissuade developers from having conversations with their critics in general. It would be a very detrimental path to go down and this whole thing reveals a gross misunderstanding by certain people on the role of criticism in arts and entertainments. Of course, you could argue that even if this was a healthy interaction, the exact content of Blizzard's decision wasn't particularly good, but this is mostly being argued along the lines that any sexual content being removed from a game is bad by default.
Your post also reminds me of another thing Kaplan talked about: Homogenisation. Decisions like this help open up a game to have more diverse personalities in them, but I've been surprised by how much certain people want to rail against not just regurgitating the same ideas in the "nerd culture" space over and over. And there is a deliberate effort to treat situations like this in terms of extremes. There are a lot of people putting forwards the idea that either artists are never affected by outside opinion or the vision of any artist is open to threat, even if that's not how it works at all.
@maestro17: I don't think because that was the choice taken in MGS, that means the argument doesn't hold. You could argue that Konami did not stay true to Snake's character by adding those high profile weapons, although I would be much more inclined to argue that while stealth has always been a significant element of Snake's character, it isn't an absolutely essential part of who he is. I mean he's not exactly an Agent 47. Or perhaps if you do take stealth to have been an essential part of his character, recent changes can be seen to be taking Snake in a new direction. The bottom line of my argument was really that you can't have a character with heavy, loud options who also has an essentially stealthy nature to them. Largely stealthy? Sure. Completely stealthy? No. I can see that my example might have been a little flawed flawed though, so let's try another one.
Suppose we were making a Telltale-style adventure game and writing out possible dialogue options for our character. Let's suppose our character is meant to be this dark, mysterious, professional figure like Batman. Most of the dialogue options we're going to write for Batman are going to be intimidating, pessimistic, glib, and clinical. Then supposed we threw in some bright, poppy dialogue options where Batman is full of optimism, innocence, and generally cute. It wouldn't fit in the game because you've given the player a choice directly contradictory to the character they're playing. From the second a player saw anything in the dialogue options beginning with "Gee whizz mister!" they'd think "What is going on?".
@whitegreyblack: I've been torn for a while between getting Kentucky Route Zero or not. I'm so interested in it, but other people have warned me off of it because of the obvious cliffhanger issue. I have similar feelings about Dreamfall: Chapters. For D4 specifically, I think maybe it could have done with taking a page from other media in similar positions.
There have been plenty of TV shows in their first season or first novels in a series where the creators' didn't know if they were going to make another edition and so they gave them stories that worked as self-contained pieces with some questions unanswered and plenty of fuel for future events in those universes. D4 barely tries that. It's weird that it calls the first two episodes "Season One" because they're not structured like we'd expect a season from the majority of media.
@yyninja: You're right about the Kinect thing, I hadn't thought of that. And you're right about the side missions, although I'd framed it a little differently in my head: It feels like the side missions teach you little about the characters because there's not that much to learn. Besides one or two of them the characters seem fleshed out just enough for them to work for the time you spend with them in the core story. They almost all have a single personality quirk, which means that prolonged time spent with them was never going to turn into anything significant unless the game was willing to create deeper characters and that doesn't seem to be at all what D4 is about.
It's kind of odd that the game has so many flimsy minigames, because the draw is obviously the core story content. Maybe they felt they needed to flesh out the runtime a little or that they needed more gameplay. I kind of wish it was more popular just so other developers could see an alternate way to design modern adventure games, not that I have any problem with the Telltale format.
@mach_go_go_go: I'm not sure I'd go that far, but it is deceptively good. Access actually put up the whole soundtrack on YouTube and the descriptions under each video have a note from the devs on how that track fits into the game. It's a nice touch.
This sucks. I did experience some serious weirdness with Halo 5 today, although to start with I wondered if it could also have been the recent 500MB patch that dropped in the Xbox One or just 343 being weird. I later worked out it made sense for it to be connected to the recent XBL downtime. I sympathise with the messages of DDoSers like these, but the ways they're trying to convey these messages often seem poorly thought out.
@frybird: While the problems with the game suck, it's good to hear from someone else about this. I agree with what you're saying, but if you are getting hitching make sure you've done the firmware updates. You shouldn't have to, but the way Harmonix are talking that should fix the hitching issues. If it doesn't, this gets a lot more worrying.
This is exactly like one of those IGN April 1st trailers. I predict the VO guy is gonna have a promising career in the world of text-to-speech software though.
Even as someone not interested in wrestling or the WWE games, I liked this review a lot. I think there's something interesting about seeing a developer's struggle to try and properly systemise this odd mix of acting and sport.
gamer_152's comments