Alex expressed his particular view fine, but others with their "I'm a REAL gamer, so I LOVED every bit of it and the rest of you are jaded dorks" can go shove off.
FFS, only a troll could rage at the hardware itself--it's impressive, to be sure. But almost nothing--save the confusing Media Molecule project and Watch Dogs--looked like it was taking advantage of being "next-gen". It's not about graphics, god damn it, it's the concepts and framework of the games (which are hopefully new IPs). All this whining companies did about being held back creatively by the long gen, and THIS is what they offered. FOH.
Sony has to sell their console with some familiar titles to a large demographic, so is it really that big of a surprise that they had Killzone, Infamous, and Generic Racing Game? Shooter, open world, and driving game. Aside from RPGs, I think they have the basics covered as far as launch titles go. These games aren't indicative of every single game that's going to be made over the next 6 or 7 years, but are rather games to ease people into the new console by giving them something familiar. You'll get your Walking Dead and Journey-like experiences along with your shooters and racers.
There's still E3 for developers to show off their stuff and I'd bet they'd be much more free to talk about new IPs and game concepts when Microsoft announces their new console. So let's not declare the next console generation as creatively bankrupt just yet.
@alex: Eh...critical, yes, but it didn't feel aggressive to me--no more than Dan Hsu or Sessler's thoughts on it. *Aggressive* was Eurogamer's podcast overview of the conference.
I don't think the press or the consumers are obligated to fawn over every new detail. Not that it's your perspective, but that's a large part of the discourse I'm seeing.
Alex expressed his particular view fine, but others with their "I'm a REAL gamer, so I LOVED every bit of it and the rest of you are jaded dorks" can go shove off.
FFS, only a troll could rage at the hardware itself--it's impressive, to be sure. But almost nothing--save the confusing Media Molecule project and Watch Dogs--looked like it was taking advantage of being "next-gen". It's not about graphics, god damn it, it's the concepts and framework of the games (which are hopefully new IPs). All this whining companies did about being held back creatively by the long gen, and THIS is what they offered. FOH.
I'd like to refer to you the part of this article that talked about the Chinese Finger Trap. Specifically the bit about how trying to push and nudge toward progress winds up stifling it.
Those games will come. Nobody ever dreamed something like Assassin's Creed or Dead Rising could happen on any console from any previous generation. It's just something nobody thought could be done. When those games did happen, though, it was a revelation and opened up many doors to many different possible games. Point is, those "new" games are coming, but we don't know about them yet because we're nine months away from the launch of this console. The console we didn't "know" existed until last week.
TL;DR quit whining because the next gen hasn't even started yet.
I grew up on SNES/Genesis--->PS2 and skipped this gen, just using the 360 with friends. I'm a PC gamer--my renaissance has already been here in a big way.
The only reason I remotely cared about the so-called next-gen (no such thing on the PC) is so devs could stop using tech and long-cycle excuses for lack of innovation in big-budget multi-platform games. I had ZERO expectations going in, so I'm actually pleasantly surprised by the console itself.
Alex expressed his particular view fine, but others with their "I'm a REAL gamer, so I LOVED every bit of it and the rest of you are jaded dorks" can go shove off.
FFS, only a troll could rage at the hardware itself--it's impressive, to be sure. But almost nothing--save the confusing Media Molecule project and Watch Dogs--looked like it was taking advantage of being "next-gen". It's not about graphics, god damn it, it's the concepts and framework of the games (which are hopefully new IPs). All this whining companies did about being held back creatively by the long gen, and THIS is what they offered. FOH.
Hey, now. The second Army of Two was a fun, challenging TPS w/ GREAT sound design that was hamstrung by some half-baked pre-Spec Ops: The Line "morality" choices, similar looking enemies, and short length.
It deserved another follow-up to do things right, but a gritty reboot? What? It was already grey as hell. The whole reason why they have Alpha and Bravo now is because the last game forced you to choose between essentially failing your mission, or executing your partner.
On the topic of the Hitman and Tomb Raider controversies...I took issue with the silly outfits and not much else in the former trailer (47 acted in self-defense, 47 gathered their weapons for later use, no sexual positioning or erotic touching was involved, no absurd close-ups of panties or cleavage of the dead bodies were shown, etc), and see absolutely no real objective problem with the new Tomb Raider. The worst I would say is that Lara's VA sounds closer to being in pleasure than in pain in a few instances.
However, I do think putting thought-out, positive or negative discourse about portrayal of women in games is important. Like with *all* writing, hobbyist or journalistic, some will certainly be more reactionary and out-of-context than others, but at least the *ideas* are out there. That's the only way we can get things to change: having a public eye turned to problematic representations.
Sounds akin to Dark Forces to me. I came up on that late 80s-90s period of awesome SW games that were all about the agents, the cool tech that seemed borderline steampunk because of how beat to **** and handwelded everything looked, the greater universe outside of the "OMGLOOKITALITESABERPEWFORCEPUSHPEWLOLZ" hogwash.
Put a good team behind this and I'm onboard. Rookie One and Kyle Katarn>Revan and Starkiller
I'm disappointed by the lack of Terry Moore! He's an extremely talented indie writer/artist who puts Joss Whedon to shame in his excellent lady protagonists. His current book is Rachel Rising, a pretty cool horror mystery series if you're already into Locke & Key.
Another new supernatural mystery going on is Mind the Gap; haven't tried much past a sample, but it sounds impressive. Girl murdered, wanders on a different plane of existence trying to figure out what really happened.
Paul Cornell (of Captain Britain, the Lex Luthor arc of Action Comics, and Doctor Who) has a crazy mystery comic called Saucer Country about alleged alien abductions in New Mexico.
Jeff Lemire's graphic novel interpretation of The Invisible Man (Wells), The Nobody, is supposedly rather chilling as well.
Wow, I thought OMD was just going to be a one-off game. Cool! But, can the characters be customized this time around (if they have the resources for a sequel and co-op, surely they have enough to at least let us modify characters)? Runic learned their lesson, hopefully these guys can.
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