Ignorant Developers

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Ignorant Developers

So it's late, this might be a bit of a rant and what have you.

But why does it seem so many developers ask for feedback from their fans, acknowledge problems, but go the opposite way of the problem. But on the other hand it seems they might listen too much to some and give in to those stupid pressures.

And here we have Titanfall 2.

Say what you will about this Call of Duty-esque fps with mechanical but I had a pretty fun time with it(considering I don't play CoD probably helps).

With the first game it received praise but was held back by being console family exclusive to the Xbox's. And one could argue Origin for PC but that service is just not going away.


It really didn't get a whole lot of negative sayings on it. Out of everything I saw, there was a minor and major issue. The former being stupid A.I.(which most seemed rather unconcerned about but hopeful for the next game[Jokes on you]) and a severe lack of content in most places. Not a whole lot in the way of variety of weapons or titans, maps, and even game modes.

Well there was one other "major" problem, that being singleplayer missing, but that sort of depends on the camp your in, I don't think it was needed. And it's possibly made a game worse.

So we have the Titanfall Beta.

Attrition(the most played game mode) is gone.

This sort of makes sense as after just a few months this was more or less the only mode with full lobbies, at least on PC. I could see where they don't want people garnering in on just a piece of the game. On the other side it doesn't make sense also.

Titans are now pure skill based. Rather than be tied to a timer that speeds up according to performance it's now tied to the latter alone. So you could be put in a public match with a terrible team and have no chance. But more importantly this means less Titans, you know the things that make the title?

But Titans aren't really that good anymore. Their shield doesn't regenerate, you steal batteries from enemy titans to restore shields. And your allies can do it for you and vice versa, and it's just rather silly and convoluted. But it makes the titan gameplay not very fun.

And instead of better A.I. we have these weird neutral ones on a single game mode? Wtf?

Pilot gameplay feels a lot less fluid as well even with the grappling hook.


So we had multiplayer people asking for a more varied version of multiplayer and people asking for a senseless single player campaign that will last ten hours, maybe.
 

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Disappointing. Was hoping there was an upcoming game called Ignorant Developers.

And yeah, game developers seem to have all decided among themselves to cover their ears and go "lalalalala" really loud while ignoring what everyone actually wants. See: Mighty No. 9, the new Metal Gear spinoff, the new CoD, No Man's Sky, and a hundred bazillion other examples from the past few years alone. Is it their fault, though, or have we given them a license to ignore fans by authoring our own prequel title called Irresponsible Consumers? Quality and sales don't seem inextricably linked in the same way they used to be, preorders still exist, and Peter Molyneux remains at large despite the best efforts of concerned citizens to place him into some kind of gaming jail. "We're listening" seems to be code for "project your hopes and dreams onto our inevitable disappointment so that we make money regardless of its actual quality," and this somehow still works.

 
This is a great example of not posting new threads while drinking.

Regardless it's sort of a mash of a thread of not listening and listening to the wrong people. Hell I'm not even really angry the game *will probably* be shit, just that in general it was one of the easiest fixes ever but now it's barely identifiable in playing.

From what I know No. 9 suffered from a loud minority as well. When it should have more or less been copy/paste easy peasy.

And not even in the name of casualisation to bring in more potential buyers. If I get stuck with a team of crap randoms, how the hell would we win if say three of us just suck and the others are decent. I could understand the mechanic in a competitive/ranked mode, but those of us who will have few friends playing will probably be screwed in public play a lot.

And of course there's the whole campaign thing. I'm willing to see if they'll blow my socks off in the hype they're driving up that's totally not buyable and now the MP has shown that.

Konami though... let's not even go down that damned rabbit hole. It makes about as much sense as MGSV in a less elegant way.

And then there's No Man's Sky. Played that out of the general curiosity surrounding the overloaded hype. At least they sort of half assed started turning things around on their own hype, more or less saying in a very vague way, "you're probably going to hate this".


However the irresponsible consumer is not a wrong idea, unfortunately. We now live in a day and age where pre ordering dlc is a thing. Pre-ordering does not have the same meaning as it used too, at least for video games that is. Pre ordering is supposed to be just reserving a copy to have at release. Now it's about monitoring numbers(which isn't inherently wrong) but they drive those numbers up with cheap incentives, often cut from the game proper. I was against CDPR's offer of those dlc's mainly because they looked like they could have easily been cut, whether it's true or not that's beside the point. And once in a blue moon there does seem to be genuine incentives. But as a consumer what the fuck is the point of pre ordering really anything digital? One could argue preload, which is an acceptable rebuttal, but if that's the case do not pre order until that feature goes live on the store.

Edit, good lord, I'm not even done bitching, if you read this far, what's wrong with you? Will return later.
 
I believe we had other threads like this one but what the fuck, let's actually talk about Ignorant Developers. I have my own ideas regarding this and I wouldn't directly blame the developers, i.e the people who sit down and write programming code.

You know how when movies began they had all those artsy films like "A Trip to the Moon", "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" and "Un Chien Andalou"? Cinema was en emergent art form and people who experimented with it were willing to do something interesting, not just *something*. Eventually movie making became a profitable business and we got both good films and terrible films, and then we got formulas such as "action hero movies", "creature features", "chick flicks", and Michael Bay. Today, most major movies are shit. I fear we are at that stage where the video game industry is mature enough to have professional recognition and international respect, and where companies and individuals are willing to invest serious money and expect serious returns. This means taking a no-nonsense, no-risk approach and sticking to whatever stale, regurgitated piece of shit is known to sell. Sometimes, this also includes making the game some senile producers in expensive suits want, not the game people actually want. And other times, it means delivering whatever it is you have and essentially tricking people into buying it, because they know people will buy whatever they are told to buy.

My solution: ignore most mainstream games. They're uninspiring and repetitive anyway. And I don't know about you, but the actual writing (story, characters and motivation) in most major games is simply cringeworthy. Focus on the few good, major games out there like TW3 and the decent amount of indieish and crowdfunded games. At least for my preferred game genres this makes a lot of sense anyway. And in the case of expansions, extra content and pre orders, support only companies with a proven track record.

In other words, my proposal is to go from Ignorant Developers to Ignored Developers.
 
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And most games such as that are ignored. I haven't played a CoD since World at War, never touched battlefield really, and haven't even played ARMA(not a comparison but it's still a popular fps). Sure it will get repetitive, any game will. Most of the repetition of games like two of the above and even Assassin's Creed creates repetitive fatigue. It's not far different than playing a bunch of open world games I'm general.

So that's why in this particular instance I am a bit disappointed. I never bought into the hype but knew it should have been an easy release.

And you're right, it's not the actual programming developers faults(probably) but these development/publishing studios that are top heavy in management in a lot of cases. Money flies out the window towards other things that don't have to do with actual development. GTAV if I remember right had a 50-100 million marketing range I believe, don't quote me on that. And a lot of games need marketing but in a game series like GTA's case I wonder if it was really necessary.
 
the new resonsible developers for this game are developers from call of duty, they dumbed down the game to make it more like a generic fps, simple, more difficul to get titans, titanfall without titans, i'm in he titanfall forums as well and i only see very bad feedback there, some people hope that the final game is way better than the tech test, but i don't think in will change
the devs probably wanted to make this game for a broader audience, they betrayed their fanbase and loyal customes, very bad idea,
too manu bad decisions at once
 
In the very old days and maybe up to the late 90's and early 2000's, many video game "devs" were a combination of programmer/designer/artist/writer/animator. I'm pretty sure that was the case for Jordan Mechner's Prince of Persia in 1989. While limiting, this meant writers understood programming and publishers understood what's actually IN the game (if anything, because they were all the same person). This led to games like Planescape: Torment, Fallout 2 and BGII taking advantage of the platform, instead of pretending to be a movie. Granted, many of the great games from the 90's barely have any story, but they are *fun*, another thing many companies often forget about. Perhaps because the programmer/artist/animator behind them also liked video games?

What we have now is a clueless dad walking into a toy store looking for a toy train, but the weasely salesman convinces him to purchase Barbie's wonder village of 1950's sexism with all extras for his 10 year old boy who wanted a fucking Lego.
 
Probably also partly because the developers did what they wanted, not what the publisher, marketing people or strident fanbase insisted on.
 
Actually, if you are comparing film and computer games industry, the later is in much better shape, if you consider how many good games come out today, especially through crowdfunding. Pulp fiction type of art always will be present (whether in films, games and etc.). That's your common commercialization of mass market. The question is, how much good art is created at the same time in the surrounding noise of mediocrity.

With films for some reason crowdfunding didn't enable that many great results. Stuff like Kung Fury is an exception rather than a rule today. Games somehow managed to break through, and crowdfunded games are thriving. May be it's just because budgets for films always have steep entry point, and crowdfunding major films is much harder than crowdfunding major games.
 
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the new resonsible developers for this game are developers from call of duty, they dumbed down the game to make it more like a generic fps, simple, more difficul to get titans, titanfall without titans, i'm in he titanfall forums as well and i only see very bad feedback there, some people hope that the final game is way better than the tech test, but i don't think in will change
the devs probably wanted to make this game for a broader audience, they betrayed their fanbase and loyal customes, very bad idea,
too manu bad decisions at once

I'm pretty sure it was the same devs for the first game.

I really don't think they made it more casual as the gameplay goes simply because of the new inane mechanics that as a TF1 player I just don't get why.

But it's probably as Dragonbird said too. It's probably a hodge podge of crap reasons why...

I'll probably Redbox for a day at release just to see what the full game is like. My mind probably won't change.

Anyways enough about Titanfall. This is totally a "general" bitching of what's in the title thread.
 
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Computer Games not only provides fun and excitement, but also provides certain advantages. Certain computer games are believed to teach children high level thinking skills which they would benefit from in the future. Like Counter Strike Global Offensive Kaufen simulate real world situations. A child's imagination can be stimulated through role-playing and adventure games.

There are several studies linking video games with reduced cognitive decay in older adults, mitigating the effects of degenerative disorders such as Alzheimer's. There are other studies that show gamers have significantly better hand-eye coordination (eg. laparoscopic surgeons who play video games make less mistakes).

imagination and social skills are not intrinsically linked to video games though, and are probably better learned during childhood through conventional social games.

The only relevant bit about this topic (in this thread about bad design decisions) is how dumbed down most video games are nowadays, where pseudo-RPG's have arrows and pointers pushing you in the expected direction all the time, so I don't see how that helps creativity. DA2 for instance is pretty much a pointer chasing game.

BTW what's up with that CSGO link, are you trying to get people to buy the game through that site?

Edit: And exactly what kind of "real world situations" are simulated in CSGO? Unless you are a soldier or SWAT, probably none...
 
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Okay, let's continue with the ignorant developers topic please :)

Extracting something valuable from that post, what's up with devs' obsession with fetch quests and pointer chasing games and more importantly with people buying into it? I remember an old customer review of BGII (on Amazon maybe?), where someone complained about having "too much to do", everything being "urgent" and it all being "too overwhelming".
 
Extracting something valuable from that post, what's up with devs' obsession with fetch quests and pointer chasing games and more importantly with people buying into it? I remember an old customer review of BGII (on Amazon maybe?), where someone complained about having "too much to do", everything being "urgent" and it all being "too overwhelming".

Maybe it's just an easy solution to add content to the game? Sometimes those simple quests are fine if you only want to level up and don't mind the complex story. I haven't seen that much super interesting stories in games, so maybe that's something that developers can think of in the future when most people are bored with the fetching quests. But as long as there are also people who likes "less interesting" stories behind the quests, developers can continue with the easy solution.
 
Maybe it's just an easy solution to add content to the game? Sometimes those simple quests are fine if you only want to level up and don't mind the complex story. I haven't seen that much super interesting stories in games, so maybe that's something that developers can think of in the future when most people are bored with the fetching quests. But as long as there are also people who likes "less interesting" stories behind the quests, developers can continue with the easy solution.

That's precisely the problem. In RPG's and cRPG's "leveling up" should be a transparent result of your character becoming more experienced. It's the in-game resource for progress but your character is unaware of its level, so it's not a valid motivation for the character nor the player. The fact that many designers and players approach RPG's in such a way is precisely why the role playing aspect is so diluted and in many cases, reduced to only talents and "levels".

Having pointers and fetch quests in cRPG's is the digital equivalent of a "pen and paper" RPG where the game master simply tells everyone where to go and what to do, with everyone just agreeing and following.
 
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