Tom Chick responds to Wired piece

should one reward the messenger when he intentionally misuses his capacity as a conduit of information to further his own agenda?


:D
 
whirlingdervish said:
should one reward the messenger when he intentionally misuses his capacity as a conduit of information to further his own agenda? :D
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- If my advice doesn't apply to you feel free to ignore it.

- Not shooting the messenger: a reward? Interesting.

- My agenda? Go on, I'm intrigued.
 
ADVICE?

Let me guess, your position is that your agenda is to "ADVISE US"?

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAA!

You've yet to shed light on any new or previously unknown information. (I haven't either, but I don't act like I'm doing it)

You persistently ignore and brush under the rug any and all of the negative aspects of Fallout 3 and occasionally you act like we all should as well.

You try to pick apart the weakest arguments about those negative aspects that you can find and use them in an attempt to make it look like your opinions have more of a factual basis than the next guy's, when in fact they are both opinions based on the same info and neither is more factual. (opinions generally aren't factual at all, but merely based on fact, a point that from what I've read, is lost on you)

...and you're trying to play all this off like you're here to help?

That's the funniest shit I've heard in a while, and it draws startling parallels with the topic of this thread which we are getting ever farther from:

One guy thinks he's right and that he's telling us all something new, while not realizing that he's being illogical and dense.

The Second guy has an opinion that doesn't mesh with the other guy's "rightness" and the current opinion of the masses that the guy is touting.

The first guy makes some shit up that is way off topic and quite false to try and undermine the second guy's opinions...

it's a vicious cycle, people!

:clap:
 
whirlingdervish said:
...and you're trying to play all this off like you're here to help?
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Enough.

Take any personal issues you have to PMs, and leave the public berating of any sort up to moderators. Yes, he does occasionally troll, and he's teetering on the edge of a ban for it, but that does not give you leeway to start taking potshots at his character, especially not right after he makes a point that is perfectly valid.
 
archont said:
Casual is nothing but the new hype-term, like immersive was a few years back. Just like immersive, it is meaningless.
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Just because you fail to grasp the concept doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

The concept of casual game is just as blurry as the lines divding particular gaming genres. I assure you though, it's there. It's a hype-word, but unlike the previous word, it doesn't describe a kind of game, but a kind of player. While games change and the definition of immersion with it, there will always be the segment of casual players. Because there will always be a group in between those who don't play games and those who write guides, fanfic, paste their room in posters and play games 6 hours daily.
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It's pretty obvious F3 is not made strictly for us, and Beth's strategy for the game and its PR including their targeting of NMA means they want to make the big bucks from the new fans. In this light, even their manipulation of the media seems wise and understandable. But no less despicable

This is an easy state of things to perceive and there is no need to continue harping on the point.

Whether or not F3 is a good game (being dumbed down for the lowest common denominator as their strategy necessitates, I have my doubts), they sure have made fools of themselves and of the media. A good joke. They are literally whoring themselves for money. Also a free example of propaganda available for study
 
whirlingdervish said:
"not all console players are drooling 12 year olds on ritalin".
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But most game publishers and their marketing departments certainly seem to think just the opposite of that, at least concerning mentality. I wonder why. :?
 
ookami said:
But most game publishers and their marketing departments certainly seem to think just the opposite of that, at least concerning mentality. I wonder why. :?
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Same thing as 50years old mom and pa still thinking gaming is for kiddie.

Jeez. Even some movies are made for adult :ugly:
 
Brother None said:
Megaton, a town built around a crater with an unexploded nuclear bomb -- Fat Man style -- at the bottom.
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I wanted to come back with something, but I can't really come up with a name of a nuclear dud. Maybe "Las Palomares style" or "Ganymede style"?

What's with the Fat-Man-namedropping, did it, like, stick with them or something?
 
archont said:
The problem with the games today is that you need massive resources. Save for a few notable examples, such as Uplink, Defcon or certain OS games you usually need a lot of manhours. I'm not sure about the numbers, but I'm guessing F3 will take five to ten times the amount of work F1 took.
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Ah, right, the misconception of our generation. Just like it takes more work to get the bus than to walk.

So, Bethesda bought an engine they used in two games already so there shouldn't be any learning curve required. Bethesda uses outsourcing. Bethesda, as it seems, has watered down everything in Fallout.
At most, the graphic assets may require more work which is quite funny if one knows how 3D was hyped to be so much easier to do.
But I don't believe the graphics in F3 would take longer, anyway.
Bethesda doesn't need more money because they work more, they need it because they are a bunch of overpayed, lazy, lying cunts where everybody and their grandmother is a producer.
 
Jesuit said:
Are you serious? "Debating" you requires mental contortions I'm not really willing to do. Good luck.
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Those "mental contortions" you're doing are actually called thinking.

Also,
yay_i_won.jpg


archont said:
The problem with the games today is that you need massive resources. Save for a few notable examples, such as Uplink, Defcon or certain OS games you usually need a lot of manhours. I'm not sure about the numbers, but I'm guessing F3 will take five to ten times the amount of work F1 took. And as such you need to attract people.
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The original Fallout had about the same number of people working on it as Oblivion. It sold enough to warrant a sequel, two poorly designed action focussed spin-offs (Tactics and FO:POS, which funnily enough both failed) and had Bethesda willing to pay millions of dollars for the license. Why would you do that for a game that wasn't attracting people?

archont said:
You need people to buy the product. I'm quite sure most of the casual gamer population don't read many books and there are quite a few books they would enjoy. But they lack the stimuli, the advertising for it. Even if going to the library costs nothing it's still too much effort.

The same goes for the oblivion with guns thing. It's marketing aimed at the lowest common denominator. It's a gesture towards the players with an INT of 4 or less. People who are not capable or willing to digest more information at one time without feeling overwhelmed. Those kinds of people won't enjoy the game to it's fullest, but their dollars are just as good as Brother None's.
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I think it's a misconception that the largest part of the market are retarded twelve year olds incapable of thinking. Myst, a reasonably obscure and some-what involved puzzle game, was the highest selling game of all time when it was released. It was beaten by The Sims, a game which requires a little more thinking than "what do I shoot now?". Both of those games are pretty over-whelming in terms of what's involved when you compare them to something like "Oblivion with guns". It's also absurd to think these kids can't handled huge amounts of information without being overwhelmed.

Just look at Pokemon. How much useless information is there to absorb? And yet a large number of kids are able to absorb all of that information, want to absorb all that information and are capable of absorbing all of that information. What about Star Wars fans or the fans of anything else? We're talking massive amounts of information and yet vast numbers of people prove themselves time and time again that they're not only capable of absorbing it all, they want to.

waldo said:
BUT you guys can make statements fellating the game that don't conceal your own judgement despite the fact that you've only played half an hour of it yourselves?

Erm, right.
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Exactly. If you criticise a game, "it's not finished yet" or "that'll be fixed in the final release". Game reviewers buy that line again and again and again and yet every time, the problem never really does get fixed. I think the sad thing is that they're so willing to go on the attack over a negative preview. Positive previews are posted and have every awesome detail salivated over. Negative previews though, somehow warrant a barrage of abuse and accusations. It's bad enough that game companies basically buy positive previews these days too (I was actually looking for the story about Rockstar bending the arms of gaming mags for GTA IV by only allowing previews that scored the game 95%+ to be released early).
 
DarkUnderlord said:
Those "mental contortions" you're doing are actually called thinking.
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Witty. When, in the course of a conversation, I find myself responding by re-iterating all my previous points in idiot-speak so the other person won't "cleverly" misinterpret them or shift the subject, I usually call it quits. So yeah, congratulations, your bad faith arguments exceed my patience. You win.
 
DarkUnderlord said:
Just look at Pokemon. How much useless information is there to absorb? And yet a large number of kids are able to absorb all of that information, want to absorb all that information and are capable of absorbing all of that information. What about Star Wars fans or the fans of anything else? We're talking massive amounts of information and yet vast numbers of people prove themselves time and time again that they're not only capable of absorbing it all, they want to.
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I would also add that Pokemon uses a turn based combat system.
 
hmm that indeed is strange

but back to the topic, or better: one topic that surfaced here.

i always hear that game development today takes way more manhours than the game development 10 years ago. frankly, i very much doubt that.

as we have some people here that are developers, id like you to shed some light into these matters. naturally, the overall quality (as in more realistic graphics, sound etc) of games has increased dramatically, but so have the tools with which games are developed.

i can only assume that the developer GUI for fallout 1 was WAY less intuitive and overall user-friendly than the tools today. i dont know what people use, i have only used "normal" applications for an estimated 10 years with some in- and extrensity now - and my imperssion is that today you achieve a LOT more with a lot less time than you had to put into your projects years ago. (flash, cinema3d, photoshop, office... those being the "normal" applications).

so, i guess you can achieve more with less effort, thus cutting down manhours even in advanced aaa projects. and when it comes to complexity: that is not littering a gameworld with 3d-objects, but aspects that are the basis of a project... i dont know much about that, but most games published today lack severely on the compexity side. the more compelx, the more turbulence, the more friction, the more time... so less complexity would also cut down manhours.

so... why ARE games today so heavy on the human resource side? i dont get it.
 
Jesuit said:
DarkUnderlord said:
Those "mental contortions" you're doing are actually called thinking.
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Witty.
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Witty replies beget witty replies. Such is the cycle of the internets.

Briosafreak said:
Hey VoodooExtreme linked to this topic. I really don't understand why.
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To swipe at the evil fortress of nerd-hate and anger of course! NMA must be stopped before they infiltrate anywhere else!!

In the spirit of more "half-an-hour hyperbole" though. GameShark, in their half hour and in fact, after just five minutes of gameplay unequivocally state "Within five minutes of leaving Vault 101 and confronting a few enemies, it was crystal clear that Bethesda has crafted an amazingly intuitive, highly inventive combat system". Crystal Clear in five minutes. Had their skills changed? Did they try out all the weapons? Had they encountered anymore than one or two combat situations? I doubt it. I'll search Qt3 right now for the angry Tom Chick reply and suspicions of infiltration by Bethesda. Oh wai...

horst said:
so... why ARE games today so heavy on the human resource side?
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Incompetence and mis-management I think are your answers there. You mentioned tools. Well, as tools get easier, the competence required to use them reduces. You don't need to be a guru to make a character in a computer game anymore. You don't need to be on top of every latest trick in the book to make a 3d game. I reckon it's why load times in games keeps increasing too. People just don't know and don't even bother trying to optimise things like they used to.

I vaguely recall reading an article from id Software about Wolfenstein 3d and the Doom engine and the tricks they had to use to make them even work. You really had to know what you were doing. Today, the tools do it for you. It means you don't understand quite how things are actually working and so probably wouldn't even guess at how you could improve things.
 
DarkUnderlord said:
words
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ya, you might be correct there. ive had a brief stint in corporate management, and am still amazed by the 13 layers of <strike>structural incompetence</strike> managerial structures which were between my line management layer and the vp. the dotted line organigrams were never seen by the human eye for the sole reason that no structure known to man was big enough to be used as a surface for it.

what still keeps nibbling on my chins is how the size of games (in gigabyte) increased or better imploded over the years with no substantial increase of eye candy. how can a game have 9 gb of binaries and still look like hl2 with its 2 or 3 gb? in the future, i will refer to this as the "invisible war" phenomenon. its as if the system requirements on the back of the box gives gamers boners or something. a game is NOT good if it runs on your actual computer at home without you eviscerating your dog to create some biological quantum computer to put in your graphics card or use unused areas of your brain to save game files on it.
 
how can a game have 9 gb of binaries and still look like hl2 with its 2 or 3 gb?
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Weheheee... take a look at Bioware. No, actually don't... but let's look at Jade Empire... no, actually let's not. Ah, this joke never gets old.

ANYWAY, Jade Empire had around 6GB if I'm not mistaken and a large part of those where made of, guess what... cinematics. That isn't necessarily bad, but do you remember Jade Empire's cinematics? They were made with the game's engine. However, some of them were made movie files while the others simply played in the engine.
Now, why did they do such a thing, I have no idea, especially since the cinematics that came as movie files looked really bad due to the compression. I tend to think it's because of the "LOL, this game is only on one CD, it must suck!" kiddies (yeah, they exist), but it may just be that Bioware is simply stupid.
 
yes, i have played it a bit and found it entertaining, until i found out that combat was ridiculous even for console standards and dialog options werent options at all. 5 years ago i would have destroyed the cd, but today i am mellow as fuck, so i gave it to my brothers wife who loves colours, and stuff.

when i was a proud owner of a c64 (expensive as hell at that time, i dont know how many lawns i mowed until i could lay my hands on that ugly thing), i was NOT satisfied if a new game fit on one disk. even maniac mansion had 2 or 3 disks, right? so it really might be related to age. funny. perhaps that explains the SUV success.
 
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