There's a Secret World Inside All of Us in Devil May Cry

@Jost1 said:

@Maitimo said:

I love how "images show game still in development" is plastered over it, something you don't see too often in trailers. Basically pre-emptive damage control. Still not very impressed.

You're reading too much into this sentence.

Why is it absent from videos for every upcoming Capcom game except this one, then? Even Operation Raccoon City - a game coming from another team known for weak games - isn't prefaced like this. Normally you'd take it as read that these trailers or whatever aren't representative of the final product, but they've gone out of their way to tell you no, it will be better, really.

Maybe it's just a quirk, but Capcom and Ninja Theory have been squirming over this game a lot, and I think this is pretty indicative of that.

@text: No, see, it's not about choosing to care, it's about me liking to discuss games after they, you know, exist.

Because trailers are just that. Trailers.

I'm incredibly annoyed by how much people talk about games before they're out and how little anybody discusses any games after the fact. It's backwards and quite dumb, really.

Now, if I don't like a game after the fact, then we can discuss why for as long as you want. But the fan freakouts? Months before release? Those are unbearably stupid. Even when they're right.

So...it's Devil May Cry: Silent Hill, then?

Also: THE COLORS, DUKE! THE COLORS!

@text: I give the fuck up.

This is why we can't have pretty things. If we can judge changes to a franchise on paper, then we are doomed to be playing the same game until the day we die. Eff it. We are comic books. We'll be nitpicking about superhero costumes from a stinky basement while films and books discuss the meaning of life and the inadequacies of society as we know it.

You know what? Keep them, nerds. Keep videogames. It's clearly a lost battle. I'll just go do something else.

@NoelVeiga: Hey, uh, clear something up for me. You're saying videogames can't discuss anything meaningful...because Ninja Theory messed up a combat system? Huh. Just want to make sure I understand what you're communicating to me.

But hey, if you want to keep your inflated self-superiority away from us "nerds," you have every right to do so. Hell, why don't you tell me about the deep intricacies and profound social commentary of the Transformers film franchise, something so obviously superior to videogames?

You're ridiculous. Videogames are a lost battle because we can objectively evaluate facts about a piece of content and form opinions on the implications of said facts? That's true of literally every medium.

@text: Not at all. I'm saying that nerds (and I'm pretty sure I'm a bigger one than you) tend to have a really, really hard time letting go. That's why they like their entertainment made solely for them and that's why they will overreact to stuff they haven't seen and doesn't legitimately exist based on pre-release footage and a bunch of preconceptions.

Which, in turn, is why products aimed specifically at nerds can spend decades rehashing the same trite concepts. It's why American comic books are just about superheroes. It's why there is so little functional difference between Tekken 1 and Tekken 6. It's why some people spent a decade playing Starcraft or Street Fighter 2.

It's, quite frankly, sad.

But nerds spend a lot of money in the things they latch on to, so pandering to them is financially very difficult to avoid. And when somebody, say, Ninja Theory, wants to make a wildly different bet on a franchise, say, DMC, which has ranged from terrible to pretty good in different iterations they get to squeal and while and complain at perceived inadequacies until they generate the notion that the game is terrible before it's even out.

Look, I don't know if this game is any good (neither do you, but whatever). Here's a question, though: what happens if the game comes out and every reviewer loves it? What if the game is actually great? What's your take on that situation? What happens to all this bile?

Even though DMC4 had backtracking and that subpar Nero character I still wish the developers of that were handling this new DMC.

@Petruccio: DMC ain't that slow, yo.

@text said:

@NoelVeiga If you want to reinterpret DMC as some crazy metaphor for the modern class struggle, hey, go ahead, more power to you. So long as you keep the core of what makes the franchise good intact, feel free to mess around.

Nope. No. Not at all.

That limitation you just set is arbitrary. The name of the game doesn't restrict anybody to "keep the core of what makes the franchise good". To begin with, your opinion of what is the core of the game is just opinion. Hey, remember when they made Warcraft not an RTS? Yeah.

But let me clarify, that's not what annoys me. What annoys me is the connection between the name and the "core of what makes the franchise good". Arguably you got all of that sweet, sweet core in Bayonetta, right? Does it matter that is was called DMC? And arguably you didn't have a problem with Enslaved (which had simplistic combat) because it didn't do these things, right? So what if they make another one of those and they call it Devil May Cry? Why the hell do you latch on to the name?

THAT is what makes your position be one of those nerdrage-y, unreasonable outbursts that make gaming worse.

Well, that and that you keep going on about things you haven't played yet based on a feature list. I mean, remember when every System Shock fan claimed that Bioshock was going to be shit because they had "dumbed down the RPG elements"? I do.

Doesn't look like Devil May Cry, doesn't look or sound Japanese - not sold!

@text: Okay, a few things.

First, we clearly are not going to see eye to eye in this. The notion that the army of System Shock loyalists "were right" or "were wrong" is irrelevant. Bioshock is recognized by most as one of the best games and game experiences of the generation. On paper, the restrictions to the RPG mechanics sounded like they were going to make the game less enjoyable, but they didn't, even if they did exist. Bioshock was its own thing, going for its own balance, and it was engaging in different ways than System Shock was despite being rooted in the same design tropes. Again, I don't know if DMC is any good yet. But that's my point.

Second, there is value in the name for sure. For instance, Enslaved bombed, despite being pretty good. Had it been called "Uncharted: Apocalypse" and been the exact same game, I'm pretty sure it would have moved a few more units. Sure, it would have angered a bunch of people and most likely that would have devaluated the entire Uncharted franchise, but it would have made a difference. Now, devaluating the franchise is something previous DMC games (mostly 2 and 4) did pretty well already, so I guess Capcom figured that if Ninja Theory pulls off a Bioshock that's good and nobody gives a shit about DMC anymore anyway, so why not try something crazy with it. I tend to agree.

Third, Bayonetta is DMC. Had they put Dante into the playable parts of that game and made a new set of cutscenes and then sold it as DMC 5, I would not have found that strange. Anybody deep enough into Bayonetta and/or DMC that those two games don't feel like a reskinning job is part of such a niche group that I honestly have a hard time caring about anything they say. Go back to Jeff talking about NFL Blitz on the Bombcast and basically arguing that he's so hard-core into that game that the things he cares about are actually most likely terrible advice to make a new game in the franchise, as they have nothing to do with the experience of the game and are instead based on competitive play, exploits-turned-into-features and other stuff like that. Again, I tend to agree.

@Lydian_Sel said:

You know what? Fuck it.

If they're going to all the trouble to reboot the franchise and cop this amount of flak from the fans anyway then I'd rather they just gut this game and make it unrecognisable from any other Devil May Cry title.

Seeing the door blocked off till you killed all the minions in the room just stuck out as something really dated, to be honest I'm not really sure if that kind of thing should still fly in contemporary games.

Devil May Cry has a huge place in my heart and always will but what's the point in going through all of this drama if the only drastic changes they're making are cosmetic? The HD collection is all the nostalgia we need so Ninja Theory should just leave all of that stuff to the previous games that the fans love and make DMC the game to push the franchise forward in new and different ways.

Oh, hey, I hadn't seen this post before.

I agree with everything you say here. I too found that the most grating thing here was not how different from old DMC this was, but the arbitrary choices for carry-over things. That "clear the room to open the door" scenario was a design crutch then and seeing it back here only made it more obvious (honestly, I already thought it made no sense in DMC 4 as it was).

The most disappointing thing about this game for me so far is that they caved and flew some hardcore DMC fans to show them the game and take advice from them. They should have adapted this the way Hitchcock adapted novels. Read it once, forget about it, then do the movie without looking at it ever again.

@NoelVeiga said:

@Lydian_Sel said:

You know what? Fuck it.

If they're going to all the trouble to reboot the franchise and cop this amount of flak from the fans anyway then I'd rather they just gut this game and make it unrecognisable from any other Devil May Cry title.

Seeing the door blocked off till you killed all the minions in the room just stuck out as something really dated, to be honest I'm not really sure if that kind of thing should still fly in contemporary games.

Devil May Cry has a huge place in my heart and always will but what's the point in going through all of this drama if the only drastic changes they're making are cosmetic? The HD collection is all the nostalgia we need so Ninja Theory should just leave all of that stuff to the previous games that the fans love and make DMC the game to push the franchise forward in new and different ways.

Oh, hey, I hadn't seen this post before.

I agree with everything you say here. I too found that the most grating thing here was not how different from old DMC this was, but the arbitrary choices for carry-over things. That "clear the room to open the door" scenario was a design crutch then and seeing it back here only made it more obvious (honestly, I already thought it made no sense in DMC 4 as it was).

The most disappointing thing about this game for me so far is that they caved and flew some hardcore DMC fans to show them the game and take advice from them. They should have adapted this the way Hitchcock adapted novels. Read it once, forget about it, then do the movie without looking at it ever again.

Agreed!

I'd rather Ninja Theory tried their best to make something unique & different. Pandering to the fans just leaves them open to repeat the short comings of the series over again.

The city planner was clearly insane.

@McGhee: Me too.