This is, of course, bullshit.CaptHawkeye wrote:Halo didn't do anything Quake hadn't done before it.
Halo did open areas with relatively freeform vehicle sections which hadn't to that point been a feature of FPS games, as well as the effect that the regenerating shield mechanic has on combat flow (you can hid and the fact that weapons are designed to be relatively balanced, frequently used up and discarded, and are strictly limited in how many can be held at once rather than only existing in a few fixed caches and collecting into a giant arsenal. These have basically since become the standard for FPS, to the extent that it's hard to imagine an FPS coming out now that allows the player to hold ten different weapons of gradually increasing power.
Those weren't necessarily why it was successful, but it's false to say that it didn't do anything novel, it did rather a lot differently to what had been the norm up to that point, and those design elements themselves have been highly successful in that they have been frequently and widely copied.
What Halo did was take the foundations of the current FPS genre and add a few extra things to them. That's how gaming genres develop over time, they do the same thing that the last game did plus one or two extra things, or with one or two systemic changes.
The point about matching the budget of the game to the likely popularity is a good one, there's too much emphasis on "we must make this game a gargantumegahit" in AAA development, but I don't think it's going to happen whilst we're in a market with a single price point. If you make your slightly cheaper (and therefore worse looking, slightly jankier) game and release it at the same price point as the super polished AAA monster then people will not be happy to pay.
How much better could the reception of Alpha Protocol have been if it was released at £30 instead of £40? Would the review lies have been less prominent if they'd been accompanied by "but hey, it's a bit cheaper so give it a go".
