Once they have the podcast setup finalized, I would really love a refresh of how the studios are setup. The content is always great, but I find the production side of it really interesting as well.
Not a great conference, but I thought it was alright. Certainly, I wasn't as down on it as Jeff and gang appear to be. I definitely wasn't disappointed. I thought the Orchestra was a really nice touch, but, it's one of those things that doesn't play well on stream.
I think that there was a definite change of tone that doesn't play well for Sony, given the brownie points they earned in the past two conferences - I'm hoping that a lot of the indie and AAA games that didn't get featured do get prominent booth time at E3. (The lack of Gran Turismo is kind of worrying, for example.)
I think the staff's view is related to experience - for example, if you've played every zombie shooter game under the sun, Days Gone looks derivative. To me, it looks kinda interesting, because I've played maybe 1 or 2 zombie shooters in my life.
Given the tastes of everybody that were on that panel, and the fact that, over the years, they've become more and more... jaded, for lack of a better term, I'm not surprised they were mostly meh at the line up.
Finally got some time to watch this - really fascinating and I hope GB does more. Kudos to Brad for doing this. I think the tech level was about right - enough that other coders can relate, but no so much the general audience gets completely left behind. You do need the right person in the other chair though, and kudos to John for also walking that line. Speaking as a programmer who works at a non-technical company, I fully appreciate how hard it is to walk that line.
Really liked this article, and glad to get some perspective on GW from the UK perspective. I've always been a 40K guy, and I really loved the sculpts, but it was just so damned pricey, and so I never really embraced it the way I embraced some of the other miniature games or other hobbies I have/had. But the universe is so bloody bonkers, I find I'm always going back. ("Blood for the Blood God!" :) )
In terms of Total War - I am one of those crazy people that owns and plays every core Total War game. (Well, I kinda fell off the bandwagon with Attila, but I'm definitely getting this one.) The TW game I keep waiting for is Total War: U.S. Civil War. Probably never going to happen though, it's a stretch for the engine, probably wouldn't sell enough in Europe, and Creative Assembly is a UK company, so, they have their own historical priorities to deal with. (Total War: English Civil War anybody? :) )
Final note of this post flurry :) -- Gaming frequently takes subjects that would normally be taboo in real life, and makes them approachable, usually from a power fantasy standpoint. We all have to decide where our individual lines are in terms of what we would consider acceptable, as long as we remember it's supposed to be fun. But like how people's senses of humour vary, people's sense of fun vary. When we look at Battlefield 1 (or any game that portrays violence), we mentally go through that calculation whether we're aware of it or not. And just because you think it's okay (or vice versa) doesn't mean other people share your opinion.
While World War 2 seems to be generally viewed as Good (Allies) vs. Evil (Nazis), WW1 is much murkier. Neither side seems really great. So Great Britain/America/Russia/the rest of the Allies, could somewhat justify the horrific casualties in WW2 with, 'well, the Nazi's are surely evil, these young people dying are dying for a good cause, to stop this evil.'. In World War 1, the reasons for war weren't nearly as cut and dried. And when general's threw thousands of lives every day at enemy trenches to gain 100 yards of territory, it does not sit as well in the history books.
Which is why it's much easier for people to play games and talk about various wars. Wars that have some popular 'romanticism' around them (in the United States, World War 2 and the U.S. Civil War) the bad stuff gets glossed over, and so it becomes a much more acceptable medium for a game.
Wars that don't have that 'romanticism' around them e.g. World War 1, Vietnam, Korea, etc. - it's much harder to put the bad stuff aside.
@giantlizardking: There is no "childish backlash." I can't recall more than 3 games that he's actually enjoyed over the past few years. No one is insisting that he or anyone else has to change their tastes. We are entitled to like whatever we want. Rather, folks are sharing a common sentiment that his consistent pessimism is kind of a drag. Oh well.
Jeff is consistently the most pessimistic of the group, but he's certainly liked more than 3 games over the past few years. (Jeff's Top 10 Lists, as a case in point.)
I also think what people forget, and why I cut him some slack, is that he's been around gaming for a LONG time, and as a professional to boot. He's seen a ton of stuff, and that means you have to do something really different to surprise him. I think that's why Super Mario Maker scored so highly with him - it's probably the first real surprise he's had in years, and (arguably) the one game that demonstrates the usefulness of the Wii U gamepad. (And even then, he pointed out the Lode Runner level editor - I probably spent dozens of hours as a kid editing and playing Lode Runner.)
It's much harder to get excited over a shooter (or any genre) when you've played dozens, if not hundreds of games of that type over the years. It's the reason why old people are, in general, grumpy. :)
@charoftheflame: In my experience, a lot of people in a community push for changes that end up destroying the fun of whatever they play, because they don't see/care about the side effects.
I would hate to have to balance any sort of competitive multiplayer game, because the signal to noise ratio would be so low.
@stressedoutcat: Yeah - I own a GTX 690 from a few years back that did SLI / 2 GPUs on a single card. Granted, these are pretty niche products, but yeah, I thought if you were big on PC gaming and knew what SLI was you would have heard of this and other dual GPU cards.
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