blackbird415

well considering that video games make more money than music and movies combined. the reason people Like the fps genre so much is because we live in the first person perspective. It is the closest perspective games have to the perspective we live in our whole lives, its only natural people feel more natural in it. that doesn't necessarily mean other genre's are dying either. Game trends has ebbs and flows, it just seems like the fps genre is so dominant because it has been the most consistant genre in its popularity.

@mosespippy: high stakes was a high point in the series. That game is so damn good! I love going back to that game. just so well designed, especially for its time.

They have suspended the cap limits for a short time while they are reassessing their business plan for internet into a more tiered system. How it was before would be a warning from comcast and then an internet cutoff. If you repeated going over the limit after the first warning they cutoff your internet. Ive seen as bad as 6 months. This became a huge problem as more people use higher bandwidths than they claim (they claim only 1% of users use high enough bandwidths to get to 250 GB limit) This became an issue for them as people started complaining how they got screwed by comcast being their only possible internet provider in their location. This also became an issue for people who shared internet connections with roommates as reality came to be that more than 1% of customers were being effected by the cap. It only hurt their branding that much more. So now they are reassessing their cap so rather than being cutoff its a surcharge of 10 dollars for every 50 GB over, as well a 300 GB cap instead of 250. They still continue to claim only 1% of users are affected, but my speculation says they wouldn't be changing so much if it was.

@Chop: well, if you consider people using steam. You wouldnt be able to download shogun 2 total war in a month as that one game alone is 22GB. The average game being 8 GB of course. Then add in if you skype with people at all thats a constant up and downstream of audio and video which is not friendly to bandwidth. Netflix as well becomes an issue when a single movie is upwards of 1 GB. Then take all that and add room mates if you live in an apartment so you would have to multiply the usage by the people. This as well doesn't include any bandwidth used for work such as a photographer or graphic designer uploading raw and tiff files which can add up in size quick (ive had tiff files upwards of 90 mb per image though its more realistically be more like 25 mb). People as well like to back up files on cloud storage.

This as well doesn't include some of the innacuracies with comcast's bandwidth monitor. There have been months where I used the internet just reading articles, email, and some youtube videos and still came out to over 50 gb for the month.

So when all that adds up in a monthly cycle thats how it becomes an issue for some people. Maybe that helps give a bit of perspective for something that seems like a ridiculous amount of usage for a month.

dirt 3 as I repeat the same thing as everyone else. Its a damn good game

@Brodehouse: see what I mean??? It has some great possibilities

Kasavin worked on red alert 3 before but im not sure of any others.

@Dagbiker: defnitly a tough decision, but im going to have to go with choice. It just seems to be where more rapid innovation can take place. Thats a ton of speculation and i'm not sure I fully agree with my own point because some the most influential games for me have been linear experiences.

My main point was that many people were calling developers lazy and idiots when in reality game development takes some of the smartest people to make. Games are fuckin' hard to make and story telling in them is incredibly complicated and is such a new experience.

@Brodehouse:

Thanks for actually giving it a shot :D. It was very entertaining to read and many of the critiques you point out in dialogue systems and feel the god damn same way. Its a weird ass system.

Heres a bit of a strange question, but i've been thinking about this for a little bit. If you were to make a law & order game how would you make the dialogue system in either the investigation or the legal process? I dont know if you actually enjoy law&order, but I think it could make for an interesting video game, but it'd take some serious work on how dialogue systems function.

Reading this thread has kind of been frustrated at the shit being flung around.

Basically calling the people that make the games we really enjoy idiots and lazy.

Im not calling out the riboflavin, it was a good point to bring up.

Video games dont tend to have the best stories.

So as an assortment of questions to those who really harp on game writers and writing.

1. how much video game stories suck how would you write a game story?
2. What would be different?
3. Why would it be different?
4. How would you incorporate the interactive capabilities to enhance the story and vise verse?
5. How would your ideas for a story work better/ as good as a game that has come out in the past 2 years?

@Napalm: you sure do make some eloquent arguments....

Games dont have great writing for reasons that have little to do with the intelligence of the people working on the games. Programmers and designers arent the best writers? Who would have thought...

At the same time you get experienced authors coming in known for their writing who in the end writing just as shitty of a story (i.e. crysis 2)...

This is the newest fucking medium to date. Try comparing to the history of movies and I'd say we're doing pretty fucking good. Video games are about where movies were in the 30s.

No one really knows how to write for video games. Its such a complex and user oriented system that the sheer amount of content needed is more than any other medium. The size of the GTA 4 script is bigger than any television, movie, hell most books don't match that size. To top with trying to write an engrossing story with all the depth and intrigue people want to expect from stories of other mediums is this level of expectation that unknowingly goes above and beyond what any production studio has been able to bring.

Having the person control what the character does is a serious challenge to figure out in making a story. Companies such as valve are certainly one of the ones excelling how to tell stories and pushing how to tell their story without throttling the control of the player.

I think in many ways we can agree video game writing is not at a level that equates ground breaking stories. The ground breaking part is more redefining how a story can be told.

Video game writing is in its serious infancy and will grow over time.

I like the story elements written in the background. It kept me playing. One thing that would be cool is animating the spikes in some way. They just didn't seem like they'd be static objects. My brain expected them to animate every time I saw them. Really nice game for a first start. Better than the first couple games I built in rpg maker.