800 pound gorilla Capcom Rips off Twisted Pixel

[AMT]

Why innovate? If people will buy the products that require less work, why use more resources to make a game that won't sell more to justify it?

[weemadando]

Why innovate? If people will buy the products that require less work, why use more resources to make a game that won't sell more to justify it?

Because in Western game markets there's been reasonable proof of the law of diminishing returns.

Look at:

Tony Hawk series
Music games (Guitar Hero/Rockband)
Medal of Honor series

And the way that CoD is going (after already having the peak and falloff in the WW2 stakes).

Turns out that annual iteration generally doesn't give the best results. You'll have growth and a peak, but then it falls.

Meanwhile, it would seem that you could still be publishing Tony Hawk 2 in Japan year after year and get 10s in Famitsu and top the sales chart.

[AMT]

So? As was stated before Japanese companies care about Japanese profits. Anything else is gravy.

[TheKwas]

Some very brief research is showing that Rockstar Games are indeed very guilty of throwing out rehashes. As Stark already pointed out, Electronic Arts is guilty of rehashing to the extreme with their sports games. Is it similar with the Command & Conquer series and their Medal of Honor games? A glance at GameFAQs reviews of StarCraft 2 is showing that people think it's little more than updated graphics and a new campaign. I didn't get a response for specifics on how SC2 isn't a rehash in this thread.

I missed it in your post but that's pretty accurate. SC2 is essentially SC1 with prettier graphics and a few new gimmicks. The gameplay itself is nearly identical.

Wait what? Actually try playing the two games one right after the other. Other than the fact they're both RTS's they play completely different. The mechanic overall that Blizzard gave SCII makes it possible to actually control multiple things at once without having APM in the 300s. SC1 was absolutely horrible in terms of play mechanics (seriously, no rally to minerals, 9 unit control groups? I can list the faults for hours) and there was waaay to much micromanagement required simply to get a half decent economy going. SC2 fixed basically all these problems. Granted, the solutions were already implemented in other RTSs since SC1, but Blizzard tends to implement old ideas better than anyone else.

On top of that, nearly every unit in the game is new or has significantly altered characteristics, which means brand new strategies and tactics. Not sure how nearly all-new units that can be classified as a "gimmick" when it involved a complete overhaul of strategy.

I suspect the reason why people say the gameplay is identical is because they haven't played SC1 in 8 years and when they play SC2 they think "Hey, reminds me of SC1". In reality, I can't think of an RTS series that has had such a big jump between the first and the sequel (which, granted, is to be expected given the time gap). Complain about sequel rehashes all you want in this thread, but I don't see how SC2 is a good example of that.

[Chardok]

Are you being serious? Are you really arguing that SC2 is that much radically different/better than SC1? I...honestly don't know where to start. Are you trolling? You are trolling! Oh, youuuu! You got me. Okay - well played, sir!

[SAMAS]

Just for the record, that was a Dick move by Capcom(Mobile), and I hope someone got raked over the coals for it.

*snip bullshit*

Seriously. The sooner Japanese game developers die off, the better the gaming market will be for it. At least the US and Europe have had a really, really brutal life-cycle for most devs which has forced innovation, and if not innovation, then at least iteration and improvement to the forefront.

Rather than just iteration and iteration and iteration.

Spoken like a true gamer

Of course, when the western games and their "and improvement" comes out, guys like you and especially Stark are the first ones to dismiss it as more of the same anyway. But I guess that's okay when your "side" does it.

NEWS FLASH: Iteration ain't a bad thing. With whatever level of improvement, is a fact of life in the gaming industry on every continent. Whether it's Nintendo, BioWare, or Croteam. Do you know why Shigeru Miyamoto keeps making the same plumber rescue the same princess from the same Turtle-Dragon all the damn time? Because he's damn good at it, and every variation is *gasp* fun. It's not about story, it's about what borderline-sadistic obstacle course has been laid out for us this time?

Because at it's heart, that's what a Mario game is: You're at Point A, you need to get to Point B. Good luck. You could be bopping turtles in the grassy hills, shooting through space, or running ahead of a roiling cloud of burning ash. In the end, you're just putting yourself through Miyamoto's latest test of observation, judgment, and twitch reflexes.

Or Monster Hunter. Yes, it's all grinding monsters to get better gear to kill even more monsters. That's why it's called Monster Hunter rather than something like Saga Primordia: You Hunt Monsters. It's probably one of the least pretentious games out there. To paraphrase Yhatzee with full knowledge of the irony involved: "You want a story, here's your story: Monsters over there, KILL THEY ASS."