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- BL's halfassed guide to making a long-lasting gaming legacy.
| Welcome to Neo Babylon, where knowledge is power! Our forum caters to a wide variety of tastes, from gaming to RPing to arts and entertainment. If you're looking for a place to hang out and discuss your hobbies with like minded individuals, then look no further, you've come to the right place. When registering, don't forget to read the rules and be mindful of your behaviour. Now go out there and have fun! Join our community! If you're already a member please log in to your account to access all of our features: |
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| BL's halfassed guide to making a long-lasting gaming legacy.; BL used TL;DR! It's Super Effective! | |
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| Tweet Topic Started: Jun 5 2013, 07:52 AM (414 Views) | |
| -Blacklightning- | Jun 5 2013, 07:52 AM Post #1 |
BL;DR
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I posted this over at SSMB, might as well make a copy here. Be forewarned, here there be tl;dr: This probably won't come as a surprise to anyone, but I've noticed a trend in many a running game series as of late. Almost nobody seems to care anymore whether or not their products go a long way on their own. In fact many of them are treated as completely disposable - they need only last as long as it takes to make a new game in the exact same light as the old one, before they cut all support for it to convince people to spend more money. I'll be perfectly frank. This isn't just utterly unsustainable, it's also absolutely. Fucking. Disgusting. And it's just one factor of many, so I figured it would be fun to explore what it takes to give a videogame some sense of legacy. Feel free to pitch in some examples of your own, or refute mine in the case that I happen to be a fucking idiot. A GAME SHOULD STAND UP ON ITS OWN RIGHT This is essentially a continuation of the above point, really. You just don't make a game on the expectation that the next one will overtake it, because it bloody well will. I can think of a great many franchises out there just off the top of my head - Assassin's Creed, NSMB and virtually every long-running fighting game series known to man, just to name a few - that have a large number of installments in them, but the moment a new one comes out the old instantly becomes forgettable because the new game does virtually everything the old one does and better (well, assuming your developers haven't jumped their shark yet and aren't just milking the brand name for every remaining dollar of its worth). That's not to say it's an easy mentality to break, and us Sonic fans of all people know how dangerous it can be to be too enthusiastic about making an entry of a franchise stand out on its own, lest we get a change in tone so drastic it can rival ShTH or Bomberman Act Zero. There's an art to it, which requires a certain measure of subtelty and tact a lot of developers haven't mastered yet, but if I had to name one example, literally nobody in the world does this better than the Tales Of team.    These three games are united in a common set of core gameplay mechanics and themes, but not only is the core game built apon each time, they introduce brand new ones, switch around the entire cast, and differentiate the very mythos that their plots rely on, all tailoured to the games individually. Somehow they find a way to make them consistent in spite of that. The games are made in such a way that each one has its own identity, its own way to be found memorable decades after it would otherwise be irrelevant in the current scheme of things, all without compromising the identity of the series as a whole, and this is something every long-running franchise should be striving for to some extent. LENGTH DOES NOT NECESSARILY EQUAL LONGETIVITY One game may boast a minimum 60 hours of gameplay on a single playthrough, but players might never see a reason to play it more than once. Another may be completable within an hour, and have people still playing it to this very day. If this seems like a paradox to you, frankly, you probably shouldn't be designing videogames. It's just not enough to extend the length of your game to rival a TV series in hopes people will still be playing it in time for the next installment - you have to find ways to keep players coming back for seconds, and thirds ad infinitum. I'll be honest, there are a lot of different ways to go about this, but most of them tie in loosely to a basic philosophy of not compromising the entire game's scope of discovery in a single playthrough, or to put it in less verbose terms, evoke the feeling that you're only playing a similar game each time as opposed to the same one. Maybe you'll want to make multiple routes to the player's goal at any given time, or throw linearity to the wall entirely and let them forge their own paths. Maybe you'll add numerous different ways to play the game that differentiate between each other, be it via character selections, skill sets or even freakin' cheat codes (remember these, publishers? This is a thing that used to exist without charging for them as DLC!), and just to go one step further you might even make them unlock as you go instead of making them available from the start if you think you can get away with it. Maybe you'll cram the environment with tons of hidden goodies, like item stashes, collectibles, easter eggs, or depending on what kind of game you're making, entire extra missions to complete on the side at your own pace. Maybe you'll even just give players a way to fuck around with the game itself for the lolz, like debug mode or level building, or making everyone's head huge, or turning everyone's guns into bananas. There are even entire genres built around the concept of never playing the same game twice, Rougelikes and traditional Sandboxes being key among them, if you were ever to take a leaf from any of them. It's also worth noting the things that are actively damaging to the replay value of any given game, yet seem to have been taken up as benchmarks today. Most of which amount to hand-holding and robbing the player of all but the barest of involvement, among them being excessive cutscene usage, quicktime events and scripted setpieces with only one real outcome. The formermost admittedly being understandable in this age, but the latter of which there really shouldn't be an excuse for outside of sheer laziness. The closest anyone has ever come to making a player WANT to endure a QTE sequence is the Krauser knife fight in RE4, and even that is only because it was a new thing at the time. BUDGETS "This game will sell like hotcakes because we dropped $100 million on it!"  "This franchise is cancelled because it sold several million below expectation!" There really isn't a whole lot more to add to this. You don't make money by spending more money - in fact, if anything, the mark of a brilliant game developer is one who can make both a fantastic game and a good deal of sales with a relatively small amount of resources. What's really depressing in the grand scheme of things is how much money tends to be spent on absolutely pointless and redundant fluff. Did you know that Resident Evil 6 had at least six hundred individual people working on it? Does RE6 look like the kind of game that needed that many people working on it? Do you know how quickly that many salaries stack up? Who wants to guess how much of that money was spent on cutscenes and setpieces that are ultimately just obstructions to gameplay? THE DIGITAL MOVEMENT, AND ITS LASTING IMPACT Quick background here - I still have my Genesis boxed up in storage someplace, along with two chests of games. If I felt a sudden nostalgia trip, I could set it up in my room right now, shove in Sonic 2 and it'll still be playable despite the aging hardware it was designed for. If someone else wants to play it and I'm feeling especially generous, or if I want to play a game on the system I've never experienced before, I can organise a trade - over the internet if need be - and there won't be any major fuss about it beyond the possibility of human error. I find it sad to think I won't be able to think the same of many, many great games when they become as old as Sonic 2 is, whether just by way of the medium or by deliberate cockblocking by executives who see dollar signs instead of legacies. Here's the thing about digital games - they only remain legally available as long as both their publisher and the service they're hosted on. Once they're both gone, that's it. It'll fade to oblivion beyond any chances of recovery, and the only means of ever playing it again is illegally, by way of piracy, jailbreaking and abandonware servers, assuming they 1) haven't died themselves, and 2) actually had the foresight to upload a copy of the game before it became lost for good. This is a problem inherent to digital media, so there's not a whole lot one can do about it, and it'll happen quite soon too, starting with the closure of services like XBLA and Wiiware (and yes, the even more eventual discontinuation of the Xbone and its entire online-only library, before someone brings it up). It's not like you can easily swap them around amongst yourselves either, considering outside of the PC (and even then there are exceptions) most software is bound explicitly to the console and/or its user accounts, and you can't just transfer it to a flash drive and onto another console still expecting it to work.  And then there's DRM. Fuck this short-sighted bullshit. This isn't just about being unable to purchase a game when the servers die - if the game, or god forbid the whole console arcitecture, has DRM embedded in it, you won't even be able to play any of the games you spent good fucking money on anymore without more or less hacking or manipulating the console itself. Then again, a lot of publishers don't really care about this - once they have your money they hardly care what becomes of their software, save the time a new era approaches and they see the opportunity to host it there and make you pay for it a second time. WHAT ABOUT MULTIPLAYER? This is something even in the short term that a developer has to be really fucking careful about. A multiplayer game is only ever as good as its install base and, like the above point, the servers it runs off, so in order to make a multiplayer game memorable it has to have a huge audience right off the motherfucking bat, otherwise people will never even get a chance to see how it truly performs. I myself have never been able to witness the glory that is a 16-player match of Anarchy Reigns despite it being more or less the whole game's goddamned selling point, but thanks to a literally complete lack of publicity and a completely unjust delay out of nowhere the servers were ghost towns in months, and by the time I got to try it there were only two people online, including me. So this really speaks mountains as to how to make a multiplayer game last throughout the ages, and to this day there are only a select few games worthy of such titles - and honestly, most of them are Id-developed classics like Doom and Quake I. While the install base is a problem in of itself, that notably only applies to the earlier days of a multiplayer game's life, which isn't what I'm here to discuss. Once you have a community large enough to occasionally get nostalgic and hunger for a traditional deathmatch again, one way or another there's only one thing you have to do to enable that - TURN THE LOCAL MULTIPLAYER BACK ON, YOU CUNTS. Okay, I'll grant one thing only, and that's that not all games can run splitscreen without massive sacrifices in graphical fidelity. So... are you trying to tell me that the netcode is so fucking awful that it can run through your specialized pay-to-play online service choked to the brim with ad revenue, but it somehow can't run through a simple goddamned ethernet cable? There is literally no fucking excuse for that, and it would baffle and confound me if it weren't already obvious they're just funelling players into the services that make them the most money. Truth is, I didn't bring this up because a bunch of people wanting to play old games together might want to get a good old-fashioned LAN party in order, even though that is a pretty welcoming option - no, I bring this up because, with the right tools, an internet connection can be tricked into thinking it's a LAN, so online play is still possible by exploiting a multiplayer LAN mode even when the official servers are long gone. Don't believe me? EA shut down the servers for Battle for Middle Earth II about two years ago, but people are still playing the game over the internet to this very day via tools like Hamachi and others I didn't even know existed until my brother asked me to set up a few games between us. Phew, I think I'm spent for now, so I think I'll leave it at that until I have more to add. Any comments? |
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| Psycho Werekitsune | Jun 5 2013, 02:15 PM Post #2 |
Part man...part beast...full psycho!
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Oh goodie, something I can rant about myself. Case in point, The Magic Obelisk: This beautiful puzzle platformer was released on WiiWare some time in 2009 and, a couple of years later, it was quietly removed. After inquiry from the fanbase, they discovered that the reason it was removed was because it sold poorly, or something to that effect. In the end, a lot of people, myself included, missed out on a fun experience because the developer didn't have the foresight to take measures in which to make this game available forever, in one form or another. You want another, more mainstream example? Try TMNT: Turtles in Time Re-Shelled, which was removed from PSN and XBLA because Ubisoft's license for the franchise expired. In other words, it's easier for you to find a copy of the original Turtles in Time, or hell, an arcade cabinet of the game than to get ahold of this game, legally. Here's another one for Ubisoft; they spent so much time marketing the Assassin's Creed franchise by branching out into other mediums that, they developed a Facebook game called Project Legacy. It was a fun time waster where you got to explore the depths of the franchise's history and characters that weren't featured in the main games. At some point, all support for the game halted with nothing but cryptic answers from tech support about this. Eventually, the rest of the game's content, which was lot, was dumped on some database for fans to read. The game, right now, is buggy as all hell and you'd be lucky if you got it to run. UPlay's site no longer acknowledges the game more than just existing and the rewards tied to it, along with the ones you received through Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood don't even work anymore (from what I've seen). From my digging, it seems that support for this game stopped when the main dude behind it went missing, but yeah, in the end, there goes a lot of wasted potential for what could have been expanded further along the road (the upcoming content boasted the continuation of an episode, with the inclusion of a whole new one, plus a revamped system with tons of new features). Finally, let's talk about games with necessary online components for completion. Aside from Achievements that are directly tied to the online service which, when discontinued, are lost forever, there are games, like Dead or Alive: Dimensions, where collectibles and character costumes were only made available through SpotPass. After only a year of this, they were completely halted, forcing everyone who didn't get them the first few times around to have missed out on them. Aside from this, issues arose with transferring data from one 3DS to replacement 3DSes where the data wasn't transferred. This is an immense oversight on the company's part because they failed to take these things into consideration for the future. Currently, the Japanese got another run of SpotPass after the game was made available for purchase on the eShop, yet other regions have had no such luck. All in all, the industry still has its foot up its ass when it comes to embracing the digital age. I'm not against everything going digital, because I know it's an inevitability, but for fucks sake, take measures to ensure your content's longevity, lastability and availability. If retro games are being made widely available digitally through multiple sources, then you sure as hell can make current games available as well. Also, drop the one time content bullshit, nobody likes it and it sure as hell does a lot to alienate the fanbase. Make it available later, one way or another. |
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| Sonia Chaud | Jun 5 2013, 04:41 PM Post #3 |
No fucks left to give.
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This is why I don't buy many new games. They just don't stand up, especially in light of the new game price point of 50-60-70 dollars. I rarely buy a digital game copy because I paid for it so I should be able to play it. Companies are so afraid of piracy and losing money they forget to actually MAKE A GAME. |
 My Steam Profile (from SteamDB)
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If having Technical Issues with the forum please post details in the Board Improvements thread and I'll look into them ASAP | |
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| -Blacklightning- | Jun 7 2013, 04:16 AM Post #4 |
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BL;DR
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DON'T FOLLOW THE LEADER - BE THE LEADER Remember what happened to Nintendo once they announced the Wii? Fresh out of their annual bout of being DOOMED FOREVER, they announced something new and unexpected that had never been done before in a mainstream console short of embarrasing peripherals with uDraw levels of support. What did their competitors do? They saw success, and tried to steal Ninty's market with motion controllers of their own. The market Nintendo had already secured well in advance just by doing it first and supporting it consistently. Why am I bringing this up here? Because it's a massive problem on the software front too, and has been as far back as the goddamned Atari era. Call of Duty has been the flavour of the generation and there's no mistakes about that, but time and time again developers force themselves to learn the hard way that success isn't actually as simple as following the leader, trying to compete with Activision for its audience of 12-year-olds that will have only a passing, if any, interest in any other games anyway. Especially when Activision can more or less just pump out shovelware (and in some cases actually has) without compromising their audience. Even assuming you do miraculously steal enough CoD kiddies to make a profit, is that really something to be proud of? People aren't going to think very highly of you (as they surely don't of publishers right now) as "that guy who makes CoD clones" - even the very concept of having to refer to your game as a clone just speaks volumes of how forgettable people find it. What developers should be doing is following not their lead, but their example. To find a niche that all the competitors have neglected, and fill it yourself. Many people say that videogaming is a very competitive market, but ironically many of the most amazing and unique games out there aren't created by instigating competition so much as avoiding conflict altogether and appealing to audiences that may never have even seen a videogame specifically geared towards them. And hell, even if you're not making calculated design decisions towards uncharted territory in the medium, it won't kill you to show a bit of fucking diginity when you're making games. Just go with what your team does best and has the most fun making, and the overall character of the game accounts for itself. And when it comes to making a game memorable, that's what counts the most. If you're just doing everything somebody else is doing for promises of money, nobody's going to remember you in ten years, at least not for anything good. IF YOU HAVE TO PACE YOURSELF, DO IT WITH TACT  Okay, so you want a really long game. Fair enough. There are ways to make that work, but understand that to do it well you need a hell of a lot of content, and looking for some means to stretch playtime artificially for no other reason than for the sake of it just doesn't work. Most of us are already familiar with the most infamous example of this, and we know it as grinding - to put it nicely, that's the repetition of a single basic action until it works to the player's benefit, most often as a means of progression. Not unlike the real life work I get paid to do, and the moment you have to compare your game to an actual chore it should already be obvious that you've fucked up badly somewhere. It's a philosophy that's flawed to the bone and reeks of pure, undistilled laziness, and it's bad enough that it's managed to plauge entire genres badly enough that it's somehow managed to become the norm in them. How do you change that? It's simple really - anytime you have to do a lot of something in order to progress, cram a lot of something else in between it to keep the player interested. Got a boss with a metric cunt-ton of HP spread across several seperate life bars? Give him more than three different attacks, for fuck's sake. Don't want your player progressing further in the story until they're at a certain skill level? Offer up a bunch of side gigs and detours in the meantime to keep them occupied until they're strong enough. Want to spread the game out with cutscenes and textboxes? Make sure they're fucking skippable I swear to god the next time someone makes me sit through 20 minutes of exposition I've already seen seven times I'm going to take a plane and a bus to their home address for the sole purpose of PUNCHING THEM IN THE FUCKING FACE. Actually, that's an even better idea. Why not just... leave the pacing up to the player? I know, what a shocking thought. Exposition into the deepest lores of the game? Skyrim did that through books, and you're required to read almost none of them. Grinding specific enemies in the game for the best loot available? In Monster Hunter you can attain a servicable set of tools and armour just by progressing, as nearly every major kill tends to give you enough drops to replace at least one of your old armour pieces. Hard-ass bosses that take a huge beating and can kill you by breathing if you're not careful? You can circumvent every boss character in Deus Ex (and for that matter the majority of enemies in the game) without landing a single blow on them personally. Because while natural longetivity is quite a feat especially if it has any sense of replay value to accompany it, ultimately, if it's not up to the player how much time he spends playing it becomes a very forced focus in the grand scheme of things, both on the developer's part and the player's. |
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| -Blacklightning- | Aug 18 2013, 05:33 PM Post #5 |
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BL;DR
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I realize this is probably going to seem like a bit of a necrobump, but a few last thoughts came to me recently and I figured it wouldn't hurt to both get them off my chest and get some closure to this overly-disorganized list of mine. We've discussed most of the important gameplay perks, some basic traits of tactful replay value, and a few of the more recent advances in game distribution (digital, basically) that will more often than not cut a game's lifespan criminally short. Off the top of my head, the only thing really left to bring up is how a game ages aesthetically, so I'ma return to this topic one last time to clear up my views on that. ARTSTYLE OVER HORSEPOWER So imagine this - you make games with realism in mind, and feel it only appropriate that your graphics reflect that. So to see your vision through, you turn to the best tech available at the time, squeeze the highest texture and screen resolutions out of it, cram as many polygons into it as both it and your engine can handle without impacting a consistent 30-60fps framerate, and ultimately achieve the coveted badge of "well shit this pretty much fuckin' looks like real life" in the eyes of many. Imagine your horror about 5-10 years later, when you look back on it and realize it's aged about as well as a child's first charcoal rubbing.  This is Gran Turismo 1. And whether you choose to believe it or not, back when it was first released it was considered that very same definition of cutting edge. If this seems incredibly odd on hindsight, there's a very good, and very simple, reason for that - technology evolves. Just when everyone thinks a polygon cieling has been reached, and there's nothing that can possibly outperform the limit of what we have now, technology finds a way. And when technology evolves, so too does the standards most games are scrutinized under. It's a blatant trap and a losing battle to fight - the only way to prevent design reliant on hardware from aging is to make effectively the same game again and again, using the upgrade in power to mask the relatively small amount of tweaks people should be justifying a sequel over. And as you can probably tell, sims like Gran Turismo and the usual mob of first person shooters are still caught in that trap to this very day. That being said, there are obvious exceptions to this rule. Many developers are so caught up in this technological arms race that they forget they have a simple fucking obligation to make their pictures appealing to the eye. Nearly all of the basic fundementals of art design are constants no matter whether you're designing at 480i or 1080p, and nearly all of them excelled the most early on, in fact, out of necessity because they couldn't compensate for their shitty graphical style with a better machine than anyone else. Fundementals like distribution of colour, ingame cues that offer a sense of direction where it's most needed, a HUD with enough information necessary for the type of game you're playing without cluttering your actual playing area, and frankly a lot of other shit that I'm less qualified to talk about than other people. People say Sequelitus does a good job expressing most of them, so yeah, watch that instead if I'm not getting the message across. REAL IS BROWN  Let me get this out of the way first - I already know what you're thinking, and you're a fucking idiot for thinking it. There is a time and a place to be fucking around with palletes until the game is an otherwise unrecognisable mess, and it annoys the hell out of me that dudebro shooters have seemingly forever poisoned this notion that you can't make a game that isn't a kaleidoscopic barrage of colour and still not look like an especially memorable game. Especially when those same hypocritical fuckwits about face and unironically praise games like Limbo for using a grand total of two. Colours don't have to be massively diverse for every game ever made - they only have to set moods. And it's moods and atmospheres that make the most unique games on the market memorable for generations to come. Well okay sure, if you're making Super Happy Platforming Game That Makes Murdering People By Jumping On Them Seem Adorable and you want to set a peppy mood, go nuts! But more often than not depending on the type of game you're making it can actually detract from the atmosphere - such as most stealth games, which usually consist of mostly black and one primary colour (such as blue for Thief, or green for Splinter Cell), or a twist in the narrative (where the colour changes to suit the mood of it, whether or not it's in advance - the Saboteur has some amazing examples of this, but most ordinary stories can alternate between warm and cool colours for tense and calm scenes respectively), and hell, even your bog standard shooter can just pick a lot of warm colours and still be gritty if it really needs to. It's an art, really. I'm honestly not the best judge of it, and some of you have probably already noticed, but it doesn't always take a chef to realize games can laser-target a bunch of colours that go together well for the circumstances, apply it through the whole game and still be appealing to the eye in such a way that people remember them for it, just as much as as someone can slap every colour into any given situation arbitarily and come off as horribly generic, if not worse. CHIPTUNE LEGACY Like art at the beginning of the videogaming eras, the best of it was born of necessity. Early consoles could only play a limited range of sound, so one couldn't exactly play death metal on it without becoming grating after a while (though I'll bet you ten bucks that someone has tried to anyway, in that era or since). So the melodies, too, had to be pretty basic of their own right - and whether it was by intention or chance, it turned out to be more memorable on a basic level than most soundtracks heard today.  How much more? If I mention the words "Sonic the Hedgehog", you'll already have a song on your mind and you'd be able to whistle it on command. Now try whistling your favourite song from Prototype. You can't, can you? Now, there's not really a whole lot further I can go on this without diving into some extremely subjective territory (how the fuck does one precisely define a "strong lead melody" anyway?), but the general idea is to have a lead that stands out really well, and doesn't take a whole lot to remember. One might say less is more - personally, I think it's fairer to say less is best when it's backed up by more, if that makes any sense. The background instruments can serve any purpose a musician chooses as long as it serves to make music sound less empty (unless that's the intention, in which case the mere eight notes you'll recall from one specific Dishonoured song more than suffices), but ultimately the lead not only has to be, well, music to your ears - if it's too complex or vauge, memory doesn't hold it as well, which kinda defeats the purpose of composing to last. TO SUMMARIZE: Okay, there's no perfect formula for a winning game, and many will still fuck it up totally even if their heart was exactly where everyone wanted it to be. So I'd finally like to stress that, informed though it might seem, this is all the views of one man - one viewing the industry from the outside, and one who has yet to design or create a complete videogame of his own, with help or without. I don't claim any of this to be absolute truth, just a guideline to build off of. If I had to truncate my observations in a way more likely to stick, this is how I'd do it: - Franchises are not level packs with swapped labels. They are not a thing you milk until there's nothing left inside. Sooner or later you're going to have to put something back in, otherwise it will run dry no matter what you do. - A game is only as long as how long the player feels compelled to play. It's not enough to make a game that can take a long time to finish - give them lots to do, make it fun to switch things up, hell, just make the game itself fun to play, and they'll come back for more. - You only need to spend as much as it takes to create the game and make your money back. Spending more does not make it better. - Digital marketplaces will eventually die, and there is nothing you can do about it. Abandoning retail markets entirely only means sending titles to die sooner, even if the global internet infrastructure can actually support it. - No, seriously. Stop disabling the fucking LAN mode. You have literally no reason to. - Success can't be cloned. Chasing the coattails of other successes only means you'll constantly drown in their shadows. Be inventive, create your own successes, and if all else fails, find a market everyone else is neglecting. - You don't need to rely on hardware to be appealing to the eye. Even the best hardware of today will still be embarrased by the hardware of tomorrow, and you're already fucked in the long term if that's all your game has going for it. - Pick an atmosphere and stick with it. Even an adventure has to have a basic, uniting theme, and narrowing its focus can only make its effects stronger if you know what you're doing. - Make a tune that you can whistle to yourself, and the world will whistle with you. - And above all else, put your heart into it. If you don't enjoy your work on some level, what do you think your consumers will think? Videogames at their prime are treated as outlets of passion, not necessarily just a source of income - and if money is all you can think of, you might as well become an accountant instead. |
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| Psycho Werekitsune | Aug 18 2013, 09:13 PM Post #6 |
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Part man...part beast...full psycho!
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You know, in hindsight, you should've posted this up on the blog as an article. It's some good shit, I wouldn't mind having a monthly "BL Tells You How to Make Your Shit Better" column to read. |
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EMBRACE THE NAKED!
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| Arcana Fang | Aug 19 2013, 03:10 AM Post #7 |
Bullshit Patrol
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place holder for music discussion. on my phone atm. |
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| -Blacklightning- | Aug 19 2013, 03:48 AM Post #8 |
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BL;DR
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You can compile all three posts into one and put it up on my behalf if you want. I wouldn't say no. Hell, you could even use some of the discussion over on the SSMB thread for some bonus material while you're at it. I just don't really have the heart to do stuff like this on a regular basis, though - a lot of it is a spur-of-the-moment kind of thing. If something compels me to rant again though, I'll try to keep you guys in mind. |
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| Sonia Chaud | Aug 19 2013, 06:56 AM Post #9 |
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No fucks left to give.
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I'm the same way about my writing...usually when I'm supposed to be doing my real job. |
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My Steam Profile (from SteamDB)
Shamanic Enzan: Appearing randomly in your life since...too long.
If having Technical Issues with the forum please post details in the Board Improvements thread and I'll look into them ASAP | |
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| Arcana Fang | Aug 19 2013, 07:26 AM Post #10 |
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Bullshit Patrol
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At least I know I'm not the only one either. Makes me feel...normal. And to add a point on music, it is actually another factor that has almost subtracted from the music of video games: voice over. While technology has allowed for greater memory storage and better use of vocal-like audio to help convey a story, it does seem that the "catchier melodies" which were not really so simple, are ingrained and more effective because they helped convey an emotion that the spoken word could not. For example, any LOZ game or any Mario game has very simple melodies, and then has complex bitchip sounds/orchestral movements, yet these games had whistle-worthy tunes that simply drenched the game in emotion when the time was needed. Now, most games have an orchestral background that truly lacks emotion because possibly we are too worried about the dialogue. I truly think that voice-overs have enhanced games and the cinematic experience they can deliver, but truly, the core of the music I consider great from games is from the era of pre-voice for sure. |
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PLEASE COME CHECK OUT THE CARD GAME EFFORT HERE ON NEO BABYLON!!! | |
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| Psycho Werekitsune | Aug 19 2013, 10:38 AM Post #11 |
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Part man...part beast...full psycho!
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Well it doesn't have to be a regular thing, you can post spur of the moment, much like I do for my random ramblings column. If you want, I can set it up for you, but what would you want to call it? |
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EMBRACE THE NAKED!
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| Sonia Chaud | Aug 19 2013, 05:18 PM Post #12 |
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No fucks left to give.
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BlackLighting Tells You Why Game Developers are Stupid |
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My Steam Profile (from SteamDB)
Shamanic Enzan: Appearing randomly in your life since...too long.
If having Technical Issues with the forum please post details in the Board Improvements thread and I'll look into them ASAP | |
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| -Blacklightning- | Aug 19 2013, 05:56 PM Post #13 |
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BL;DR
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BL;DR |
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| -Aroxys- | Aug 19 2013, 06:28 PM Post #14 |
GALACTUS
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BL;ER, more like. (Black Lightning; Epic Rant) |
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| Sonia Chaud | Aug 19 2013, 06:46 PM Post #15 |
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No fucks left to give.
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Black Blur, Typing Fast, BlackLightning the Ranter! |
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My Steam Profile (from SteamDB)
Shamanic Enzan: Appearing randomly in your life since...too long.
If having Technical Issues with the forum please post details in the Board Improvements thread and I'll look into them ASAP | |
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