Fallout one of the best game franchise revivals

Commiered said:
It's only western megapublishers that seem to need to make 10 zillion dollars from every title and castrate it accordingly to try and get every last possible casual gamer buying
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Honestly, between JRPGS, FPSs, and Platformers, our niche just gets left behind. The kids are either:

A. Too young to understand such complex games.

B. Too complicated of a learning cuve for your casual gamer.

C. Not cool or actiony or shiny enough for those Michael Bay lovers out there. In the same category, Fallout won't let people stand on top of defeated foes faces and hit the squat/prone key over and over again.

D. Lack of multi-player capabilities.
 
Fallout won't let people stand on top of defeated foes faces and hit the squat/prone key over and over again.
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In all honesty, that was one aspect where Fallout disappointed me.

X-Com is a very profitable game to develop. Which is why it is being developed now. As an FPS.
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X-Com as a franchise? I wouldn't put my money on it. Using the X-Com brand name made sense in the beginning - sure, people remembered X-Com was a great game. But today's new generation of gamers doesn't play or remember X-Com, which means the title means to them as much as Yrtoggaf: The Legacy of Giblets. Besides after so many different developers, so many bad sequels and concept changes I don't think it's a positive brand name anymore.

unprofitable ? In which terms. Jagged Alliance was good enough to see a sequel. And its still one of the most known franchises ammong Tourn based fans. Right next to Fallout and X-Com. Saying JA wasnt succesfull is like saying Fallout wasnt succesfull.
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Jagged Alliance was profitable. Jagged Alliance 2 was profitable as well. I love those games, in fact yesterday I was playing around with 1.13. Don't get me wrong here.

I'm talking about a potential sequel. Would it be profitable? No.

JA2 and X-com represent a unique era in PC gaming. Up to that point game mechanics evolved along with computing power. The more powerful the computers, the more features a game had. X-Com Apocalypse? Show me an AAA 2010 game that complex and I'll mail you a vodka. (Disclamer: offer valid only in the EU, conditions may change when I sober up)

However that's when things started to change. Features began to vanish, graphics improved. Games became LESS complex. LESS features. We had fully destructible walls and terrain back in ninety fucking four and a generation later the guys at EA/dice suddenly wake up saying "GUISE GUISE YUO HAVE TO LOOK AT TIHS WE MADE DESTRACTABLE WALLS N SHIT".

What the hell were those guys doing the last decade and half?

And go look at the AI. Even though we have a hundred times the computing power we had in 1994, the AI hasn't improved much. In fact in a lot of titles it has gotten stupider. I played this game, Splinter Cell Conviction... and while I don't expect my enemies to analyze my strategy, predict my moves and adapt accordingly - hey wait, that's exactly what I expect an AI to do in 2010, not the tactical thought somewhere between a 1994 sectoid and lemming.
 
archont said:
hey wait, that's exactly what I expect an AI to do in 2010, not the tactical thought somewhere between a 1994 sectoid and lemming.
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They are dead convinced that they can walk through a wall, a chair or a table?
 
X-Com as a franchise? I wouldn't put my money on it. Using the X-Com brand name made sense in the beginning - sure, people remembered X-Com was a great game. But today's new generation of gamers doesn't play or remember X-Com, which means the title means to them as much as Yrtoggaf: The Legacy of Giblets. Besides after so many different developers, so many bad sequels and concept changes I don't think it's a positive brand name anymore.
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Fallout as a franchise? I wouldn't put my money on it. Using the Fallout brand name made sense in the beginning - sure, people remembered Fallout was a great game. But today's new generation of gamers doesn't play or remember Fallout, which means the title means to them as much as Yrtoggaf: The Legacy of Giblets. Besides after so many different developers, so many bad sequels and concept changes I don't think it's a positive brand name anymore.

And yet Fallout 3 was pretty damn profitable.
 
I blame the gaming media. At first, they were pretty cool; they reviewed things fairly and made good critiques. Fallout 1, for example, has around an 8.9 or so on Metacritic, and it's an RPG classic. Nowadays, they've completely changed into a hype machine. Would you be more likely to buy Fallout 3 if a magazine said it was rated 7.5 out of 10 because while it had good exploration and sidequests, the main quest and gameplay have very big flaws? Or would you buy it if it was described by Gamewhatever as a 9.8 and perhaps GotY because it was such a brilliant move by Bethesda to add things like VATS and create an atmospheric world? Yeah, if I were an uninformed consumer, I'd pick the latter. Bottom line is, new video game journalists are useless hype machines.
 
Ausir said:
And yet Fallout 3 was pretty damn profitable.
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1. X-com was 1994, Fallout was 1997.
2. Fallout had a clear numeration that separated sequels from "primary" titles
3. The Fallout brand name wasn't as dilluted as X-Com. Tactics wasn't actually bad, and BOS was the only real problem.. X-com had only two good games (apocalypse and the original), the rest being pretty bad.
4. There's little competition on retro-post-apo ground for Fallout, but various people have made a dozen or so different "spiritual successors" which nearly quote the game verbatim at times.
 
X-Com Apocalypse was in 1997, same as Fallout 1 and year before Fallout 2. Both series had two bad or somewhat bad spin-offs since then. I don't really see much of a difference here. Fallout also only had two good games.

And in both cases the fans of the original are not the main audience, although in both cases the franchise name still being recognizable as a classic is a plus. In case of Fallout 3, the target audience were fans of Oblivion, in case of XCOM, the target audience are fans of BioShock.
 
Nontheless, X-com had a more dilluted brand name than Fallout, I think you'll agree on that.
 
Indeed. X-Com has:
  • UFO: Enemy Unknown (1994)[1] (also known as X-COM: UFO Defense)
  • X-COM: Terror from the Deep (1995)
  • X-COM: Apocalypse (1997)
  • X-COM: Interceptor (1998)
  • X-COM: Enforcer (2001)
From what I can gather, purists like the first game the most with the next group including Apocalypse and/or Terror of the Deep (which is basically the original game set underwater). Interceptor and Enforcer are the black sheep of the series.

The breakdown really is pretty similar to Fallout (not including F3), with an extra bad game. If it's more diluted, then it isn't more diluted by much. I'd say that the argument that it's more diluted is further damaged when you throw in canceled games.
 
It depends on how well they can sell the brand, the original game is still praised and cited as a great by critics so if they can do something like what Bethesda did with the Fallout brand...
 
The Dutch Ghost said:
archont said:
hey wait, that's exactly what I expect an AI to do in 2010, not the tactical thought somewhere between a 1994 sectoid and lemming.
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They are dead convinced that they can walk through a wall, a chair or a table?
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Close. Rather they come to look at the same window I've just pulled 5 or 6 of their mates through previously or walk in the exact same spot where I've sniped a pile of half dozen of their buddies with my unlimited ammo. At least the other Splinter Cells made up for weak AI with level design that was like a series of puzzles but they got rid of this to make a linear Max Payne ripoff that is ridiculous. Older games were far fetched but you could with one eye closed believe that a super agent could sneak and combat his way past 20 or so guards per mission, but SC:C just was a caricature with Dolph/Sylvester/Serious/Max Fisher slaughtering 100 goons per level in open combat. Another series I really enjoyed raped and disfigured in the name of consoletardation.
 
archont said:
I'm talking about a potential sequel. Would it be profitable? No.
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Why not? Games aren't required to have a budget of a bazillions dollars.

Fallout as a franchise? I wouldn't put my money on it. Using the Fallout brand name made sense in the beginning - sure, people remembered Fallout was a great game. But today's new generation of gamers doesn't play or remember Fallout, which means the title means to them as much as Yrtoggaf: The Legacy of Giblets. Besides after so many different developers, so many bad sequels and concept changes I don't think it's a positive brand name anymore
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I don't think you can apply this kind of reasoning. Unlike X-com with Fallout you buy a setting, story and various kind of designs (like VaultBoy). The new X-com instead looks like a completely unrelated game with a couple of ideas very loosely based on the series. I mean, other than the reasearch angle and the randomly generated levels what else ties the new game to the old ones? Frankly I don't understand what's the point of using the X-com brand in this case.
 
Why not? Games aren't required to have a budget of a bazillions dollars.
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No, but to make a true X-com sequel you'd have to have AT LEAST the same tactical/strategic complexity as the game we all love from more than a decade ago. But since technology has advanced we want the game to reflect that. Things that were impossible to do in the original X-com would be implemented here. Everything from the screen resolution through interface design/usability to graphics and AI algorithms has improved, and we want the new x-com to reflect that. We had destroyable environment in apocalypse, so we should have at least the same level of destroyable environments today.

However the environment back in apocalypse was very structured, graphically simple and 2d. The game was built around the idea of destructible environments.

Thanks to executive meddling, today's games need to have UBER NEXT GEN graphics, AT LEAST LIKE THAT CALL OF DUTY GAME BECAUSE BOB KOTICK IS RICH SO I WANT YOU TO MAKE ME AT LEAST AS RICH AS HIM.. sorry.. anyway, the more intricate the graphics, the harder it is to implement interactivity. Even I, although I don't consider myself a very good coder, could easily built a system like apocalypse used. However if you'd want that nex-gen 3d feel, you'd have to deal in absurdly complex math, incredibly advanced physics and superhuman optimization to make all of that running smoothly. Or you could limit the scope of terrain deformation and stick with the simpler (but still awesomely awesome in today's world) Bad Company 2 model, right?

Then comes the amount of non-cool stuff that the player has to do. By non-cool stuff I mean the logistics and strategic decision making. I mean tactical thinking. Thinking isn't fun, according to the executives. If players wanted to think they'd pick up an encyclopedia or play chess or something, right? Thinking is for nerds. The more thinking and logistics the game demands, the higher the entry barrier. It means that your 13-year old angsty teen won't buy the game because it's "boring en ghay" - and a sale from a more sophisticated gamer is worth as much as the sale from a 13-year old boy. And there are more 13-year old buys than sophisticated gamers.

Then come the controls. X-com being a game about management among other things requires a lot of input using a mouse. Controlling the game with a pad would be difficult and cumbersome.
 
I was trawling my memory of some old '90s gaming ready for necromancy, and thought - Syndicate! I loved that game, and now we have the technology to actully make it work. I did a quick 'goog and it is being done, but for EA. So I'm not holding my breath.

How about Alpha Centauri? Now that's a game I would go and buy. The developer is still in business, and has a bit of a penchant for game revivals.
 
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