Lamashtu

XBL: AdesteInfidelis/Jboure (use my room-mate's XBLA tag whenever I'm at my uni apartment). 
Mic: Yes. 
Location: SoCal (US West) 
Notes: Pad warrior. Still getting used to the nerfs to Lambda/Nu

"in general the story in an RTS and a fighting game take a backseat in my opinion. So what RTS game has a good story we can compare starcraft to? Obviously you can't compare it to let's say an rpg. "

http://www.viddler.com/explore/kinger/videos/38/

The "You are here" at the end really makes it for me.

Relic Entertainment

" In a different time and place, in a different scenario I think Treyarch might get more credit.
 
They seem to be a reliable workhorse that does what has to be done. The fact that they always seem to be working on either "those other games" in a franchise led by an incredible developer, or "we need one of these now" games is a testament to both their flexibility and their dedication.  I have no great love for any one of their games in particular, but I respect what seems to be hard work, in a tough situation on a day to day basis. "

That embodies my feelings on Treyarch to the letter.

I feel that Treyarch has very competent people working for them, but because of oppressive oversight from Activision, has had their creative voice strangled and left their potential untapped.

Now here's my theory on things:

As we all know, Activision was incredibly reluctant to gamble on a new setting for Infinity Ward's venture with CoD4. So, they turned to Treyarch to work on safe, "reliable" CoD3 set in WWII, which from what I've been told, came together in a single year. A year of pre-production, development, play-testing, and iterating; a year of crunch, developers spending nights in the office, and families broken apart due to those folks never spending enough time at home. Combine the fact that they had to develop a Wii version alongside the HD console versions, and deliver a relatively bug-free and stable product is a feat of superhuman endurance unto itself.

And perhaps after the unexpected success of Modern Warfare 1, Activision loosened its grip on Treyarch for but a moment to concentrate on micro-managing the making of Modern Warfare 2, allowing Treyarch to think outside the box. Though I was disappointed that WaW still used the same gameplay mechanics, I thought it was a great effort for them to explore some of the untold stories of WWII. As a history buff, I thought what Treyarch did was phenomenal, and there were many subtle touches to the game that I felt passed over some people. The idea that the Japanese defenders of the South-Pacific were fighting by sheer will and unfaltering faith in their emperor and they were prototyping the guerilla tactics of the Vietcong twenty years later really hammered home the point that they were a completely alien and foreign enemy to the American Marines. And though there are some inaccuracies (for example, a Tiger I tank in Stalingrad when the first of those were fielded at Kursk the following summer), WaW really gave you the sense that fighting on the Eastern Front was uncompromisingly brutal as we saw German grenadiers callously massacring wounded Russians writing in pain, and three years later, the Soviets doing much the same in the sacking of Berlin.

I also thought that the ending was quite a clever design decision, as in real-life, no-one truly knows who was responsible for being the first to plant the Hammer and Sickle banner atop the Reichtag, as multiple Russian units have claimed responsibility (even going so far as to remove it, bring in a camera crew, and putting it back up themselves). So it's only appropriate that the silent protagonist is the one who props it up.

I just hope that people give these people at the very least a vote of confidence that they'll do a good job with Black Ops rather than dismissing them in the wake of this very ugly Respawn vs. Kotick business.

(NOTE: I had originally planned to include this as a part of my original blog post, but didn't want to scare anyone away with an even bigger wall of text).

 
As I'm sure you all know, Treyarch has constantly been labeled as "the B team" of the Call of Duty franchise, the breadwinners for Activision's FPS department in the lull between Infinity Ward releases. However, if one actually looks at the review scores objectively, they didn't release outright terrible games, save for their Minority Report adaptation, which to be fair, was par for the course as far as movie adaptations go. That said, Treyarch went way beyond the call of duty (no pun intended) when they made Spiderman 2, which introduced an open-world mechanic that was a breath of fresh air into the superhero game formula that was sorely needed. And imagine my surprise while researching for writing this I learned that despite Call of Duty 3 almost being universally considered an abysmal game, the game press at large thought otherwise, with review aggregates at GameFAQ and Metacritic at 8.8 (X360 version) and 82 respectively (then again, it IS Metacritic, so make of it what you will). What's even more surprising is that the reader average score for the 360 version was an 8.5. Granted, this isn't as high as Infinity Ward's offerings, but my point stands that for the most part, Treyarch's games aren't the critical piles of shit most people make them out to be.

But enough of that, I'm turning this into numbers game. Since people are more partial to qualitative arguments rather than quantitative, I'm going to take this out of review score territory if you don't mind. As we all know, Infinity Ward originates from 2015, the team behind Medal of Honor: Allied Assault (little-known fact: Console cheats were enabled in the ONLINE portion of the initial retail release of the game, which led to a rather hilarious situation where everyone was shooting at each other to no effect due to god mode being enabled). Since then, the leading creative forces went on to develop Call of Duty 1 and 2 proper as well as the two critically acclaimed Modern Warfare games.

Now I'll go on record, I thoroughly enjoyed Call of Duty 4. The game has a fantastic first impression on people, whether it be from trailers or picking it up for the first time and its presentation values are top-notch. However, that's the most praise the game will ever get out of me, as it will never be on my pantheon of "greatest games ever" which includes the Half-Life series, Homeworld, Company of Heroes, and Rainbow Six: Rogue Spear. When I first played the campaign of Call of Duty 4, I genuinely had a good time. But, after subsequent playthroughs (and the last stand portion of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Snipers of Chernorbyl... ahem... One Shot, One Kill on hardened difficulty) the gameplay flaws of the game became glaringly apparent. The biggest issue of which was the fact that CoD4 was the exact same game as Call of Duty 2 and 3; the MP-40 might as well have been a reskinned M4A1 (and this goes out to Respawn Entertainment, if I have to deal with another guy I shot who pulled out his pistol with his last breath and quick-time dogs in another one of your games, I swear to god, Encino is a 20 minute drive from where I live...). Another problem of CoD4 arose from the fact that the game was painfully linear, which is what we come to expect from a Sci-fi or WWII shooter, but with modern day shooters like Rainbow Six, ArmA II, and Battlefield, we've come to expect a much more free-form approach to level design and encounters.

That in mind, people often underestimate the pedigree of the Treyarch roster. Treyarch today is actually the result of a merger between the company and Gray Matter Interactive, the folks behind the competent expansion to CoD1, United Offensive, and... *drum-roll* the fantastic single-player portion of Return to Castle Wolfenstein.

So is Treyarch a "great" developer up there with the likes of Valve, Relic, Blizzard, Bioware, and Irrational?" Well, no. But then again, Infinity Ward really isn't either if you cut even deeper into things. But my point is that Treyarch isn't getting the confidence and kudos it deserves. From what I've seen of Black Ops, the game could be a rental or a purchase on Steam when its on sale for $40 (though Kotick would likely say: "Good luck with that."), which is more than I could say for Modern Warfare 2, of which the most exposure I've had with it is me watching my friend play it whilst the two of us commented on the completely bullshit plot and general sameness between it and Infinity Ward's previous games.    

So what's with the Rainbow Six Raven Shield icon for this bit of news? Granted, it was the greatest of the Rainbow Six games, but I fail to see the relevance.