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Comments
Mass Effect-style dialogue trees predate Mass Effect, yunno.
I don't see how that invalidates his opinion?
It's a nitpick.
oh
fair enough
Anyways, while the gameplay seems fairly run-of-the-mill, it's the story and general background that really drives this into true oatmeal-bland territory for me. Seriously, I don't think there's a single thing in this particular Tolkien rehash that hasn't already been done a dozen more interesting ways elsewhere. Seriously, it's like actually reading The Lord of the Rings, but somehow turns into a big, boring slog even more quickly. And when the hell did Todd McFarlane suddenly become a big buzzname for creativity and why?
I hate to say it, but Yahtzee really hit the nail square on the head with his complaint about how fantasy is way oversaturated with elves and dwarves and various other shit cribbed from ol' JRR by hacks looking for an easily-modded fantasy world template at this point.
The most bizarre thing about Amalur's lore is that it cribs names from actual Celtic folklore and then proceeds to do nothing but apply them to existing fantasy archetypes.
In any case, I'm not surprised the studio went out of business. Not happy about it, mind you, because losing a job like that is a big deal. But I can't see how they thought their cookie-cutter fantasy would be anything beyond moderately successful at best. For how inoffensive the bland mechanics are, though, they certainly didn't help. It just boggles the mind that someone -- a whole bunch of people -- actually wanted to make this game.
Just finished the second of my "Four in February" games. The first was Trauma. The second has been Shaman King: Master of Spirits.
Recettear is up next.
my post at the Caves of Narshe thread about 4 in February
my post about Trauma, after finishing that game
my post about Shaman King: Master of Spirits, after finishing that game
After playing Bioshock, I can admit that it's a good game, and it's pretty streamlined for the most part. However, I easily prefer System Shock 2 because I find it more engaging for some reason, but Bioshock is also engaging in it's own way.
How much of WoW's success is just from inertia and subscribers staying on because all their friends are on there?
^^ That stands to reason, though. A communications or social network increases in value according to the amount of users it has, both in terms of fiscal value and consumer value. So WoW is the ultimate of example of "everything is fun with your friends". Basically, there are a whole lot of factors unrelated to game design or creative decisions that make WoW what it is.
Amalur doesn't exist within the same context. Lacking the safety net of a social experience, it has to fall back on pure game content, which was lackluster in comparison to its advertising campaign the amount of hype that was built up around it. It used some Celtic buzzwords and promised a more thematic approach to the gameplay experience, but neither of those factors eventuated with as much sophistication as expected. Those would be forgivable, but Amalur falls into that special middle ground of dispassionate mediocrity. Every design decision in that game seems to have been based on what is standard and safe for fantasy RPGs.
If you turn back the clock and look at something like Hellgate: London, you'll see a very mediocre game (at best). Even if Hellgate sucked, though, it was full of bad implementation of great, creative ideas that made a lot of sense before the game code got to them. There's a respectable, passionate kind of suck that makes me disappointed that the game was bad. But Amalur just makes me reflect on the mediocrity of fantasy RPGs in general. There were no big ideas there that failed to eventuate -- just playing it safe without any real payoff. And true to its lack of vision, Amalur failed to meet its sales requirements and took its studio down in the fire.
Like I said, the fact that anyone actually wanted to make Amalur is the most perplexing part of any of this.
Also, partially ninja'd, it seems.
Probably all of its current success, but...well, people bought it at launch too
And I'd still argue that it "deserves" to succeed far less than Amalur does.
I'm not sure any one person really wanted to make the final game. More likely each person on the devteam wanted to make a game with one of the traits Amalur has, and the result is a large blob of individually-interesting traits.
Games with less vision sell well. Really, the problem was a new startup studio making a game with that high a budget. If Amalur had been reasonably-budgeted for a first release, with as many sales as it got, it would have been a hit.
http://www.destructoid.com/gearbox-embezzled-aliens-colonial-marines-money-246558.phtml
So it looks like we have a fairly definitive version of the ACM story. As I understand it:
When the game was announced, work on it hadn't even started yet. Then Gearbox did a bit of work, but quickly switched over to working on Borderlands, while still taking the pay for the work on ACM they weren't doing (which they needed, you see, to fund Borderlands).
Eventually SEGA heard about this and cancelled the project, but they more recently decided that they wanted to try to at least get some money back for this whole debacle, so they uncancelled it. Gearbox still didn't actually want to make the game, though, so they acted as "creative leads" and had Timegate do the actual work.
So, essentially, the problem with ACM is a very simple one: the people behind it didn't view it as a game, but as a way to steal money from SEGA.
I'm seriously pissed about this. Hopefully Gearbox gets sued into oblivion.
Admittedly, I was very tired at the time, as in I should've gone to bed some hours ago but couldn't sleep because for some strange reason my brain becomes overactive when I'm deprived of sleep for a few hours, which I guess synergized to this game's sheer blandness into giving me a driving need to complain about it that I just had to get out of my system.
Still, the game's background lore is disturbingly trite.
It's a mixed bag. Every expansion has made sweeping and very good changes, and most of their problem has been Activision sticking its grubby hands wherever it can. I mean, vanilla was tedious as shit, Outland had some neat stuff and vastly improved and condensed dungeon design, Northrend was...undertuned but well done, and Cataclysm had some of the most fun endgame stuff I've seen and dramatically revamped the tedious 1-60 game to boot. I can't comment on Pandaria, but if it's followed the trend I'd expect it's well-designed enough to warrant the hype.
^^^Well, now I feel dirty for enjoying Borderlands.
Shit companies can still make good products. (e.g. Disney).
Well, the thing about this specific case, and I think the reason Crimson said that, is that if those allegations were true, Borderlands was directly funded through theft.
Okay, suppose Gearbox actually does collapse under the weight of the ACM backlash. Who else do you guys think would be the right people to make a possible Borderlands 3?
Honestly? Unless the second game is even more of an improvement than I've heard, I don't particularly think the series is worth continuing.
http://www.twitlonger.com/show/l531ei
Fanfiction about David Cage's game design methodology. No, really.
Right now I think almost anyone would be the right people for Borderlands 3. Some of the design decisions someone made about Borderlands 2, mainly the very low drop rates for anything beyond whites and greens and the scaling, have rubbed me the wrong way.
If there's any justice in this world, Gearbox will get the legal shit kicked out of them and fold, while the Borderlands series will become just another footnote in the Big Book of Bad Business. I swear, this whole debacle reads like some lurid virgin sacrifice ritual, but with Aliens: Colonial Marines in place of the virgin and money in place of the blood.
I think that the state government of Rhode Island should design Borderlands 3.
Why would we want a third game? Why shouldn't there be a new intellectual property?
I'm not necessarily saying that we want or need a third game. I'm just wondering who'd be the best people to do the Borderlands franchise if it's not Gearbox.
Huh? By the time I beat the game, I was swimming in rare weapons.
I'll just leave this here.
It was mostly in comparison to borderlands 1 but I felt the game was way to stingy with anything beyond blue and even then, the scaling made sure that it would get outclassed quickly.