" @Hailinel said:You're ignoring the issues that Gears of War 2 had. Most notably the notoriously buggy online play and the notion that Epic appears either unwilling or unable to use the vast majority of the color palette. Yes, Gears of War 2 features more color than the original, but in all seriousness they need better art designers. Or look at some of the games Bethesda has published in the last few years. Did you play Oblivion? I did, and I can't imagine how most of what went into that game was considered a good idea. And speaking of animation goofiness, WET had some goofiness of its own." @HandsomeDead said:As a small Spanish developer working with Kojima Productions, it's not difficult to imagine who is the team calling the shots. Same with Blue Castle and Capcom, whose only prior experience is The Bigs franchise. Were these tag team productions with major studios, I could see your point but these just seem like outsourcing projects. Of course, the different pieces of code are intended for different things but in the end, they're intended to produce one cohesive and immersive experience so when that does not happen, it looks shoddy. Especially in 2010 and when it seems like Western developers are capable of doing it. Again, to bring up Resident Evil 5, when you do the context sensitive moves, more often than not, I had Chris and the bad guy sliding into place while everyone around waited for him to finish the animation. The same thing happened in Resident Evil 4. In Gears of War 2, the chainsaw still has a slotting into place animation, but it's much more organic with what's happening around the player. It can be interrupted, the chunks spread out over whatever obstacles are in the way, it's a step up from the first game which was only two year earlier. It's these little details that make Western developed games feel far more full of life than the Eastern counterparts. "" @Hailinel said:Lords of Shadow was made by a western developer. And I don't see how it feels like things were pieced together from separate places. How is it that you separate the physics engine from the lighting sources, of all things? They're bunches of code that are intended for different functions within the software. And the idea that western games are somehow more innately playable is purely a matter of opinion, not fact. And I brought up Dead Rising 2 because you brought up the original game. While the first Dead Rising was developed in Japan, Dead Rising 2 carries over many aspects of the original's gameplay and is not somehow this all-new sequel filled with Magical Western Juices that make it innately better. In short, it's more Dead Rising, but from a development team that isn't Japanese. ""It's the ignorance of shoehorning everything that bothers you in certain games and then labeling it a problem unique to a specific culture, as though the designs produced by that culture are innately inferior. At the same time, you ignore all of the positive aspects of design that companies within the culture have produced. Then you blithely turn around and fail to notice all of the shitty design choices that western developers have been slinging our way for years. And in case you forgot, Dead Rising 2 was made in Canada. "Western games have taken leaps and bounds in attempts to push every aspect of what video games are over the past few years. They're not perfect, but they are easily the more enjoyable and innately playable games out there when compared to their Japanese counterparts. Example: Rockstar's Euphoria Engine can sometimes produce ridiculous, out of place animations but for a majority of the time, it makes the player's character feel like it exists in the same world as everything else but then I see other top tier Japanese games like Resident Evil 5, Metal Gear Solid 4, CastleVania: Lords of Shadow where it looks like the animations, physics engine, lighting sources and everything else are all pieced together from separate places, much like it was back when I was playing Devil May Cry and Onimusha on the PS2. For the past generation, I can't even think of a design choice that is unique to Japanese games that I like, so I can't mention one. And, in case you didn't realise, I never mentioned Dead Rising 2. "
And then there's Activision and all that they and their developers have wrought. Glitchy multiplayer in Modern Warfare 2. The Tony Hawk skateboard peripheral and the disaster that was Ride. And these are just games that I'm thinking of off the top of my head. Games that aren't even that obscure.
These are video games we're talking about, and ultimately, I'm not concerned if it takes an extra moment for an animation to finish, or if the animation overall isn't perfectly organic in some way. Sure, I like it to look good, but the fact that a little goofiness occurs during a context-sensitive animation is not a damning offense worth condemning all of the developers of a specific nation for. I'm certainly not going to hang the west out to dry because no one outside Japan seems capable of making a fighting game worth a damn.
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