Sarevok wrote:Is it really fair to bash RA 3 for all story and poor gameplay ? I mean people play bad games with good stories all the time. Most of the best selling games of past 5 years had been purely story based with poor gameplay that lends to very little or no replayability whatsoever. Yet no one pans them for being interactive movies.
Yes.
Long answer, I'm sure I pan them for it too, but I am a gaming misanthrope. It's a fair criticism because what they're doing is trying to sell me a game, not a miniseries. The reason I agree to give them 50 bucks for a game is that I want to have some kind of a specific experience, that's why I choose an RTS and so forth, I want that RTS experience. If they pull a fast one on me and deliver a shoddy RTS with nice packaging then I have a legitimate complaint, I specifically purchases a game and if the gameplay is bad, then the game is bad. I might like the packaging but it still means I've got a legitimate reason to be unhappy with my purchase. If you buy a car and then realize that the engine is terrible, having nice seats and dashboard doesn't make the car beyond criticism, it just makes the lemon ride smooth.
Also, it's very simple to have good gameplay. If it wasn't so simple I wouldn't be able to mod these things and make them better in, like, a week's work solo. It's not like the developers have a big decision between good gameplay and porny actresses,
you can do both. The staffers involved don't overlap much, they'll have time to do it.
So I'm not giving them a free pass just because it may be profitable to use cutscenes to trick people into thinking their game is well made, all that does is say you can exploit a buyer, and that's not hard nor legitimate. If it's a bad game on it's own, then it's a bad game, end of story. A bad game can be a good business decision and a fine product, but I can criticize something for being bad
if it is bad. You don't always need to choose the most generous metric. You need to use a basis of comparison to other games of the similar type, like SupCom, CoH, Warcraft III, etc. Not all of those games are very good, so I'm sure RA3 does a fine job, I just want it to man up and show me after C&C3's suprising lack of depth. I really, really liked that first week or two of C&C3 until I realized how easy it was to rush through and dumb the gameplay down, so I'm no carrying a grude, I just want to see that their gameplay model has altered some.
It's really that basic--does the game stand on what games stand on? If not, then it's a bad game. But you can't judge a game by the numbers in terms of income, or the Sims would be the best RTS ever too. Sarah Palin may be attracting votes to the republicans, but that doesn't make her a strong candidate, it shows people are stupid. If the game sells well despite having no replayability, it just shows people are stupid, or that game purchase numbers don't include returns. :p
"
- PeZook
