Posts by Furyo

  • Level Design Survey Results

    I think some of these are definitely skewed by the fact most people who took the test are modders or modders and pros at the same time, answering mainly as modders. But it is a good exercise regardless, makes for some good figures to take a snapshot of what being a modder means today

  • Gearbox Rumored to be Working on Halo 4

    I completely agree, if you were a PC gamer you knew about CS. The question is do you consider 2000 era PC gaming mainstream? I certainly don't. For the past 8 years now, the advances in terms of ease of use and general user friendliness of gaming as a whole continue to be exponential. Steam is responsible for making this happen on the PC, but Microsoft and Sony, and even more recently Nintendo reached the untapped part of the gaming market and got a lot more people playing, and finally got gaming a mainstream audience, so much that even general media now can't help itself but talk about video games daily...

    I'm saying it's in these new people you find the majority of Halo fans. And this is precisely why the previous posts in this thread relating to how Halo had not invented anything got me to post. It's exactly because these new gamers had nothing to compare Halo to in their own knowledge of the gaming market that it grew to its cult status. And this is why I'm saying it's to them our own Doom and Wolfenstein and Duke Nukem, there was nothing else when these came out that could even withstand the comparison

  • Gearbox Rumored to be Working on Halo 4

    Jetset, obviously there will be exceptions thrown here and there by Mapcorians, but really if any of us considers himself part of the mainstream audience, he really needs a reality check. The very fact we're spending time online discussing things makes us part of the top 1% of the most savvy gamers around, let alone the fact we actually make games for a living (well many of us at least).

    And even if Duke/Wolfenstein/Doom were your first shooters to play, no one will argue that you had to be in a pretty particular group of people to know these games even existed when they came out. You had to have the PC that would run them, something very few people were even interested in at the time, and there was no marketing to speak of, this was all word of mouth, you played these games because you had heard about them or someone had given you their copy.

    When you compare those days to the huge marketing effort that a few games like Halo and Gears of War get from Microsoft, the differences are just gigantic, and yes to the vast majority of young gamers, Halo may be the gateway to other shooters, but it's less than likely the other way around.

    I've seen CS mentioned, but even that, when it came out even officially, wasn't anywhere near as mainstream as Halo's marketing campaign. And in pure practical terms, before Steam, playing Valve multiplayer games still belonged to the Stone Age of video gaming. Again, as far away from mainstream as you can possibly get. It took dedicated hardcore fans and players to even care downloading that new patch and that new update every so often. As a reminder, steam only came out in 2003, two years after Halo was already rocking the xbox world.

  • Gearbox Rumored to be Working on Halo 4

    I think what most of you guys aren't seeing is the generation gap there is for this game. If you think of guys who were born after 1985, Halo on the console is to them what Doom was on the PC for us. Even Goldeneye was our game and not theirs, they were nearly 12 then. To that generation, like my own cousin's, who I need to tell everything about the Sega vs Nintendo days, what Sonic used to be like and so on and so forth, Halo was the very first shooter they ever played.

    They could have played other shooters before, but they were either too young, or just not enough "in the know". No other shooter caught the mainstream audience like Halo has. Couple that with Microsoft's marketing department, quite possibly the best in any company, and you get yourself the halo phenomenon.

  • LinkedIn Mapcore Group

    LinkedIn will bring a horde of new features this coming friday, to all groups including ours. Here are the details I was sent:

    This Friday, we will be adding several much-requested features to your group:

    - Discussion forums: Simple discussion spaces for you and your members. (You can turn discussions off in your management control panel if you like.)

    - Enhanced roster: Searchable list of group members.

    - Digest emails: Daily or weekly digests of new discussion topics which your members may choose to receive. (We will be turning digests on for all current group members soon, and prompting them to set to their own preference.)

    - Group home page: A private space for your members on LinkedIn.

    I will take all the time necessary to gauge which of these features we may want to use if any, but as always your input will be valuable. Please reply to this topic if you wish to discuss them.

  • Eye Pet

    Finally what seemed to me a smart casual game. I really dig the promises this trailer hints at, in the same vein as the user created content LBP is going to have. I really like that part of Sony's brand right now, and I can't wait to see that in actual play.

  • Quake Live Beta

    I invited some of the mods into the beta, who then invited other guys, so yeah many of us actually have their key. I have to say I haven't logged in that many times, mainly due to Ubisoft blocking the ports. I would play during my lunch break and can't find the time nor the exact desire to when I get home....