Bst.Mvi.Evr.
You may say “I don’t care what you think, DOB,” to which I’d respond, “That’s some tough talk for someone with an acre of dicks in their mouth.”And even when you meekly protest that they don’t measure dicks in acres, I won’t be able to hear you.
Because of all the dicks.
Wow, I never thought this day would come but I'm disagreeing a little with you there Mazy.
I didn't like the Bourne-esque action one bit it was too much flip-flopping between camera angles and it only pissed me off when I saw it. The action was sweet tho and I'm giving the film a 7/10.
Quote from SteppenwolfI disagree. There were a number of mods for Half Life 2 that released early and they completely failed in terms of popularity. Players today want polished mods otherwise they will bash you to death. Hiring new staff for a unpopular mod is also very hard if not impossible.Your comparison to CS also seems a bit out of place imo. No mod will ever again reach this level of success. Critizizing Jeremy for a lack of success? We must live in two different worlds. Both his mods won a "Mod of the Year" award. One of the mods won "make something unreal" and spawned a games company. It doesn't get much better in this day and age for a mod maker. A proper design document would have made the only difference. Then we could have released Insurgency 1.0 a lot earlier. Thats the only way i see how this mod could have been more succesfull. And for this was not Jeremy to blame.
You are totally disregardig my reasons for criticizing. I said that he would have had a lot more success if he had done it the way Hourences described with the team that he assembled. I'm quite aware that his mods have received some awards but I strongly believe that this is mostly due to his excellent ability to find talent and getting them onboard with his projects and thus creating something great.
I don't really get why you can't compare INS with CS, and stating that no mod will ever again reach the CS level of success is a bit narrowminded. It's like saying back in 1980 that you'll never need more than 10mb of hdd space. (my point being that people will always outdo what has been done).
Yes you are right about some mods failing when they release early, but this is because their idea was bad from the start and poorly executed, so gamers didn't even see the potential in them. I am talking about what a talented group of developers (like the ones on INS) could have accomplished. If ins had released early there is a small chance it could have failed, but I doubt that since most people on the team had a strong passion about creating something. Also worth mentioning is that those mods that release early and fail would have with 100% certainity failed later on "during development" without ever releasing anyways.
You bring up a good point there Minos, when you say players would get pissed off with 100mb patches every other week. But the only thing that really takes up space is maps, and you don't really need to update them very often, I also said every 2 months, which is a very acceptable timeframe.
While steppen and peris provides very valid points, I think they've learned the wrong lesson from their experiences.
let me just start by saying that I agree 100% with the list Hourences made, lets look at a small exerpt;
Great and super efficient design. You cant make the next GTA game as a mod. You cant make a WOW clone as a mod. You cant make a mod with 30 playercharacters, 6 different environments and 29 levels, and 4 types of gameplay. You need to go for something that is doable.
This is where Insurgency failed. Ofcourse you will waste huge amounts of time when you try to make a complete game without a design document. What I think Hourences is trying to say is that you shouldn't have done that in the first place, you should have started small and released early and built ontop of that with a release every other month. This way you wouldn't have needed a design doc, you'd change things and test them as you go and spot bad stuff very early.
I do not believe Jeremy is doing a great job at leading his mods when he does the same mistakes over and over again. The best talent he got is getting a lot of talented people to join his mods, but if he had gone with the fast-release (or fast internal builds and playtests with little or no art involved yet), then I believe his mods would have been more successful. Let's just compare the CS with INS, the two mods are fairly similar in what needed to be done (and in gameplay 
), but one took the early-and-often release approach and the other didn't. I would not call Insurgency a hugely successful mod when looking at what might've been; Insurgency had one of the best teams that any mod leader could want, and I strongly believe they could have done a lot bigger and better.
Now, to remedy this whole situation (the need to make something big and successful to compete with "real" games), I would not go and write a 100 page design document that every modder in the team needs to read so you are sure everyone is on the same page, it would just lead to frustrated modders thinking they will not be able to share the joy of actually helping with the design of the mod. Besides, if there was a few things in that document that was wrong or at best looks good on paper but would never ever be good in a game, then you are royally screwed. If you go for the fast release (or fast internal build) approach so that you can playtest all your ideas in a new prototype of the "final" game every week then I think you could accomplish a lot more. Just remember that CS started with 1 room, 1 player model and two teams and it just grew from there, like any healthy mod should.
You could argue that your mod wouldn't be downloaded by half a million (or whatever) like insurgency or red orchestra was at first release like 3 years after it was first started, and that because of this it wouldn't be counted as a very successful mod. But I'll bet you everything I own that if you make smaller releases early (after like 4 months) and built it from there it will generate a lot more downloads eventually and when you reach the 3 year mark you'd own beat the half a million with a million or more...
Quote from SteppenwolfWhat i was saying is that rpg's used to be mindful fun, not mindless fun. And this fits perfectly in this topic.
yeah, but I was talking about games today. I do not think you would be able to sell a game (massively) that had puzzles that took hours to think out, or even 10 minutes, since most people just wanna shoot and aim and see fancy effects.
You can say whatever you want about how you are not like that, hell I'm not even like that myself, all I'm saying is that this is how I think the majority of players are.
Great discussion tho, I'd love to hear everyones opinion on the matter.
You make a good point, but it doesn't take half a million testers to test an encounter... it takes 50.
I'm not saying it is wrong of blizzard to do what they are doing, all I'm saying is that I agree with Cliffy's point of view on the negative effects that releasing a beta will have.
the last episode I laughed one time, when stewie explained where he got the money from by saying he was a field reporter and they switched over to a video
I gotta agree with Cliffy on the beta comment, they ruin a lot of games. Most recently the new wrath of the lich king, because of the beta (PTR), most top guilds had the time to practice on everything in the expansion and it took them less than 70 hours from launch to level up to 80 and clear the entire content of raid bosses (should have taken over 2 weeks imo).
Not that I love Cliffy or anything, because I side with Mazy on the punchable face thing, but I gotta say he has a valid point when it comes to Mirror's edge, I think little we've seen of the fighting looks really... bad 
gotta agree with the majority here and say yes.
Quote from kleinlukaYou can't generalize it like that. There are still a lot of games that don't fall into this category and that do generate sales.
If it was that simple there would be no more strategy games, rpgs, etc...
True enough, you got the fps/rts which (if they are good enough) will fall under the competitive games genre that people play to win because thats the most fun part in the game. But there are no rts/fps games that I know about that became popular because it was so hard. Take StarCraft as an example. the single player is piss easy and all you really need to do is play with your units and you'll manage with the game (easy mindless fun), but when it comes to multiplayer you need to actually focus hard and be fast and really play to win. The winner formula for a rts/fp (any?) game.
But I don't think the major population of gamers fall into this category and thats what Im referring to when I say "people". I don't know about you guys, but if I made a game I'd make a game that I knew "everyone" would play.
I didn't really see how rpg's are not mindless fun tho (unless you count mmorpg's which are a whole different category all together since they incorporate so many different genres).
I still think peris has a point.
When people play games they do it to have some very easy mindless fun (which is why the games scene has derailed into every game being the same generic simple minded achievementsy game.)
Point and click adventure games doesn't fall into that category, and I know for my part it's because the last few ones I've tried was too hard and I don't want to spend 10 hours looking for the right lever to pull in 50 different drawn rooms.
Quote from Izunouh.......given how many MMO related consulting projects I've done and am still working on, I kind of feel obligated to keep aware of what's going on in the biggest one out there...so yes I'm getting the freakin' expansion pack and yes I pre-ordered it but it's more of a business expense. Am I going to walk over to Best Buy (dangerously 10 minutes on foot from my house) for the midnight release?
To answer, I quote the Major of Imaginationland: "FUCK NO!"
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Hahaha you sound like a drug addict with excuses 
Anyways, I've taken 1 day off work (friday) in order to hang out with my buddies on a small LAN party and level up ! : )
Quote from HourencesLooks really interesting. I will certainly check it out as soon as they port this to windows, because it is mac only atm right?
I believe so yes, but I heard its coming for windows soon...
When its done, then, I guess...
A mate of mine uses this at work as well and he's got only good things to say about it.
I think the excuse not to bring coop in because its so hard to add later when you've finished the SP part is wrong, since you obviously should've made the game with coop in mind from the beginning... Complaining afterwards that it's too hard to add in means you've failed, since it should've been there from the start.
Just my 2 cents^^ Always design a game with coop in mind from the very start, and gamers will be happier : -)
awesome sindwiller.. I've just completed book 10 (like 1 hour ago) on my reread of WoT.
Yesteday I bought:
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aye I've been following them for over a year now. Progress on NS2 has always been steady and consistent so I don't see this going away anytime soon.
I also have major belief in Max (the one that makes the engine) since he was lead engine designer on titan quest (which i loved and had a really good engine).
What I like about this game is that, like Max Payne, it's more like an interactive movie than a game with a story. (Seemingly*) I don't really know if I can explain the difference any more than that.
*At least, thats what I hope it is.
Quote from TaylorAll allocating stats let you do was choose between a cookie cutter character and a shit one. It only served to trip-up newbies.
I dont think I could've explained it better myself. Yes it was a nice feature when you had played the game for a couple of thousand hours and really knew what you were doing, but for those who start a new character for the first-> third time without really knowing much about the character type is in for some scary moments when they don't want to fuck it up.
I know I had that feeling when making my first character in TQ.. I ended up saving all the points until I got an item that needed X of this and Y of that and made sure I had specifically that (saving the rest) and I kept doing that... Which ain't optimal. I'd much rather have the game mechanics do it for me.
edit; on another note I also believe that they will introduce a large number of deviated genres to these attributes that items can reward (like expertise, hit rating etc in WoW).
