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Comments
I just hope Wii U is as easy to softmod as the Wii was (it won't but let me dream), because I'd be interested on playing this in it. Or hopefully it will be localized
So I'm playing Star Ocean: The Last Hope. You know there's something seriously wrong with a game's storytelling when I learn more about a character by reading their in-game character bio than by actually, y'know, playing the game and watching the scenes they're in and listening to/reading their dialogue.
Also every character is apparently at least five years older than I'd been thinking they were for the past 25 hours.
^Welcome to me and Final Fantasy XIII. Suffer with me.
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/118011-Wii-U-Powerful-Enough-For-CryEngine-3
So...Crytek Says the Wii U is definitely powerful enough that it can run their next game with no difficulty, and is a really powerful device overall...but they won't make any games for it, because they don't think their target audience is willing to buy it -_-
Self-fulfilling prophecy, it seems.
In other news, the makers of Gears of War do not get Demon's Souls, but want to take cues from the way they think it works.
Someone needs to explain to them that they could pull in that market.
What, you expect competence from a videogame marketing team?
I don't. That's why someone needs to explain it to them. =P
Man, this industry is so weirdly incompetent in some ways. I think about how far it has to go then remind myself it's a miracle that it isn't a smoking heap.
That's a bit sobering. He completely misses how Demon's Souls' difficulty was relational to every mechanic, from combat to economy to equipment setup. Especially economy, since it was a part of both advanced equipment and stat advancement, meaning that the game had an economic reward for cautious survivalism and intelligent spending.
My personal favorite marketing blunder is the Dead Space series. The first game didn't get a lot of marketing, and it sold a little over two million copies. The second game had a marketing budget exceeding that of the game, and sold...a little over two million copies. EA's solution? Market the third game even more, then announce that the series will be cancelled unless it sells the five million copies needed to pay for the marketing campaign. Brilliant.
I was mostly talking about how he thinks you die a lot in Demon's Souls, rather than constantly being afraid of death because it actually penalizes you. If I had to estimate, the Souls games kill me less frequently than any shooter does. But in a shooter, I don't give a shit because there's no reason not to die. But yeah, your points make it even worse.
Jesus fucking Christ. Final Fantasy XIII-2 hasn't even sold two million. They really expect the game to do better than a Final Fantasy game?
I really don't want them to run te series into the ground by overreaching and expecting so much out of them that they cancel them when they don't seen CoD numbers.
I'm decidedly eh on Dead Space. It's not a bad game, but to paraphrase a caustic but sometimes lucid brit, the game feels like it sifted through a machine to be something with broad enough appeal.
But like I said, this continual over-optimism is a bubble that's going to burst.
Maybe people should look at what Atlus does with making modest initial productions. Otherwise known as not being an idiot.
^^^ I don't see why not, honestly. Final Fantasy's heyday is over, I think. From the saturation and expectation of hypermasculine shooters to the declining popularity and marketing of JRPGs in the West, the general Western market is moving away from that kind of thing in general. It doesn't help that Final Fantasy's last really big hurrah was over ten years ago, whether you consider that to be FFVI or FFVII.
^Nah, the real last big hurrah was FFX. Though that's exactly where the series went downhill for me, especially art direction-wise.
Final Fantasy is still a very popular and beloved series. (arguable) Quality aside it still has a numerous and vocal fanbase, and FFXIII did pretty damn well.
But basically my point was two million units is not a bad range. How about scaling back your budget to ensure a profit?
^^ FFVII is the standard the rest are held to, though. Everyone's got their eyes peeled for the next Final Fantasy game that'll inspire the same investment as FFVII did, and I just don't think Square is capable of delivering that anymore. It's kind of like the OoT effect with LoZ -- although, to Nintendo's credit, only Twilight Princess has been a real attempted (and I thought reasonably successful) repeat of that.
I think the consumer issue on this matter is sticking to a series in order to receive the same experience. That sounds like good logic on paper, but I'm consistently finding that it's fresh ideas and other developers that give me those experiences of significance. Games like The Witcher 2 and Demon's Souls are, to me, the games that carry the echoes of Ocarina of Time and Final Fantasy VII for the current generation.
^ I agree with the point, and Final Fantasy is certainly still popular insofar as its genre goes, but it doesn't have much competition in the West. If there are only three hotdog stands in New York City...
As I said, quality is irrelevant when we talk about sales.
Honestly I don't think it's been that much of a decline for FF games so much as players have grown up and learned about story structure.
That plus each game is its own thing. If you don't like Star Wars you won't like XII, for example.
of course there are other reasons you can't like it, but you get the idea
Well, this brings me to another thing about Final Fantasy, I guess. Since they're mostly unrelated, each one could presumably be a different franchise with different gameplay. It's not like this is technically unfeasible, given the Square rewrites the game engine for every new installment. Plus, when you have over ten "Final" Fantasies, y'know.
But then they would have sold maybe ten copies of the last three releases.
See, there's a sad fact about media that isn't literature and it's that people overtly rely on names and franchising to sell.
Personally, I don't think it's bad that Final Fantasy has been an anthology of stories. It's a concept I can get behind. It's just that the stories are lame, the gameplay is mostly samey across the series and the only substantial differences come when you try to look at it from a macroscale perception.
^^ Perhaps, but it also imposes gameplay constraints on the series as a whole. Malk said above that Final Fantasy hasn't regressed in quality and that's a legitimate comment, but I don't feel as though those games have kept up with progressive gameplay design, either. As a result, they've fallen behind. Now I'm just wondering how far Final Fantasy can make it before it actually peters out.
^ And yeah.
I'll admit up-front that like 99% of why I hate FF is because it's probably why it's taking so long for TWEWY 2 to get made.
Team Ninja doesn't like DLC for fighting games. Too bad they don't have the same feelings about terrible games.
Crytek is the people behind Crysis, right?
If they won't do that because lol lack of audience,...
Hey Valve, make a completely silly shooter and put that on WiiU. TF2 port, anyone?
With the talk of Fatal Frame being co-owned by Nintendo and the potential use of the gamepad as a camera, I think it would be cool to have a game version of the "horror documentary" film genre.
So, I'm finally making progress in writing up my first few posts for my review/analysis blog aspirations.
I have two pages written on Human Revolution thus far, and I'm not even half done. After that is Pokemon Red/Blue, which I think will be a good deal shorter. Not sure what I'll do next, though I think Dark Souls will be in the first set of four I want to have written before I start posting them.