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Stark wrote:What does it matter? If you're a 'fan', even if it doesn't sell now to anyone who uses it it'll get traded around. The idea that 'favorite' games need to be snapped up so we can have more of xyz is probably wrong. It's likely the idiots of 'gaming journalism' are just creating value with their 'news'.

The only THQ franchises I care about right now are COH and Metro. That doesn't mean I won't be curious about anything that seems odd at first glance.

What about Dawn of War?

WH40K license wasn't up for grabs, so anything to do with it is locked away.

weemadando wrote:WH40K license wasn't up for grabs, so anything to do with it is locked away.

Sega/Creative Assembly do have permission to make Warhammer Fantasy games, so they should be able to get a WH40K license if they want one.

bilateralrope wrote:I wonder why they didn't place a bid while everything was getting auctioned off.

Judging by that comment about how they're "not as flush with funds" as the bigger companies, I'm guessing Platinum expected one of them to pick up Vigil and so didn't bother joining in the auction. But since no-one bothered to buy them, it's left open a chance for someone to snatch up a moderately popular IP on the cheap.

xthetenth wrote: Considering that brands are pretty much the only way to sell publishers on something, being concerned for a brand in a genre you liked that doesn't get much play at all isn't irrational at all.

I liked new brands this year: probably more than established brands. Too open-minded for gaming?

Rewarding companies for dredging up rusted shambles from the past like Homeworld when they could just make a new game is what creates the desire for bankable brands in the first place. And not having brands like Homeworld is NOT why nobody makes pew pee spaceship RTS games anymore.

Yeah, Stark has converted me on this.
I thought Gears was great at first. I thought Assassins Creed was crap at first. The best game I have played everyone else on the planet panned.

What "branding" has shown us is that people end up hating brands over time because they either don't change and don't innovate enough and if they do change and innovate then they aren't honoring the source material, canon blah blah blah and it might as well not be the same brand anymore.

A perfect example of this is AC/DC and Metallica.
Every time Metallica put out an album, it changed and they alienated groups of fans and now no one cares about them. AC/DC has put out the same album since 1980 and has all the same fans they had since 1980, but basically now nobody new cares about them.

If you got rid of, or more accurately, if people could ignore branding and not adhere to it like it is holy, then most of the problems fans end up having go away as well as allowing the creators to create without worrying about silly made up rules.

If you want to play Homeworld go back and play Homeworld. Hell, get the PDS mod just to complete the head up the arse nostalgia ourobouros.

Or you could try one of the many space strategy/tactics games since then.

Games like Flotilla, SPAZ, Weird Worlds, Sins, Captain Forever, Space Rangers...

Fuck that's just the ones that are jumping into my head.

Just the mention of PDS wants to make me throw up.

Those are space games, but only Flotilla was 'Homeworldy', in the sense of being a 3D Spaced RTS. Even then, it was much different. The others are just games that involve space ships.

Sure, but that's kind of the point. They're all space strategy/tactics games. But each is different - they're not endless repetitions of the same core design.

I think the 'branded' games I've enjoyed in 2012 were RE6 and goddamn Halo of all things. The biggest games in the world are huge brands (like BLOPS) but even faceless companies like Capcom are making good original games.

Like Hav says, brands are by nature restrictive (even if the creators behind them aren't) because people want more xyz, rather than they want more good stuff by whoever. If someone made a cool spaceship game, who cares if it's branded Homeworld? That's right: all the idiots who want Homeworld 'back'. Your desire for it gives it value, nothing else.

And man, killing the Gears brand was the highlight of 2011. One of the biggest names in console shooters to 'huh'? In a few weeks.

'Homeworkd' doesn't mean 'the useless third dimension that only existed to expose the inability to control roll' to me, it means stupid space exodus, huge empty slow levels, bad mission scripting, bad balance, and HW2s hilarious difficulty scaling.

And sins does literally all of that anyway. Well, except giving the AI 6 battleships because you saved up for 3.

Established brand games from the last year that I enjoyed?

Hitman Absolution - which took a lot of heat for changing up the game design and mission structure.

Spec Ops: The Line - which is Spec Ops in name only.

XCOM - which threw out 95% of the original gameplay in favour of making it accessible, but not "dumbed down" YOU STUPID TWATS WHO CAN'T UNDERSTAND THAT THOSE TWO THINGS AREN'T FUCKING LOCKED TOGETHER.

Max Payne 3 - it lost the noir and comic book look, but gained a lot of new design and art features.

Hey, all these games weren't just endless retreads of the exact same design and art. Fucking shocking that...

Spec Ops is a pretty funny example because you have to imagine the brand was used solely to get sales. I wonder if the devs wanted to use it, or if it was a publisher idea.

IIRC it was pushed on the devs as a "revive this franchise".

Which is weird because it hardly had a legacy. Spec Ops II (which I got in a bundle pack way back when) was fucking dire.

I think there's an inevitable trend that any franchise which iterates often enough will lose sight of the reason why people played it in the first place.

I think a key reason why it happens is that devs buy into their own publicity. Bioware reckoned they were really good writers and screwed up Mass Effect 3 because they forgot what they were (slightly) competent at was character writing (even if it's the same six characters over and over, at least they're used to them). Epic thought that their combat setpiece design was the balls and that was good enough, so Gears 3 was a transparent set of boxes full of enemies.

There are others, of course, that lose their way for other reasons. Square thought that people loev their cutscenes so they sacrificed any interesting elements of design that Final Fantasy had previously had, etc.

I loved a recent talk about Ni No Kuni which was all "PEOPLE IN THE WEST ARE GOING TO LOVE THIS GAME, IT'S REALLY GOING TO BE THE BREAKOUT JRPG THAT SENDS IT MAINSTREAM! LOOK AT THE ART!"

And in the next breath: "I'm 10 hours in already and they still haven't opened up the world map, or the battle system - IT'S SO DEEP, THERE'S NO WAY THIS WILL FAIL."

Man, Ni no Kuni, if only they released the DS version over here, then I might actually buy it.

A part of branding is certainly a narrow definition, and this year we saw a bunch of games that showed brand owners didnt really understand why their brands were successful.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBkKvTf ... ata_player

That's an excellent breakdown of Tony Hawk games and how they slowly lost the plot and forgot what was important.

Given Tony Hawk is one of the best examples of murdering a brand I think it's a good piece.

weemadando wrote:I loved a recent talk about Ni No Kuni which was all "PEOPLE IN THE WEST ARE GOING TO LOVE THIS GAME, IT'S REALLY GOING TO BE THE BREAKOUT JRPG THAT SENDS IT MAINSTREAM! LOOK AT THE ART!"

And in the next breath: "I'm 10 hours in already and they still haven't opened up the world map, or the battle system - IT'S SO DEEP, THERE'S NO WAY THIS WILL FAIL."

I thought the breakout jrpg was called final fantasy and this happened eons ago.

No, they're talking about Halo/CoD kind of mainstream. Apparently just having Ghibli attached will do this.

I wonder, since Volition is in Koch's hands, will they resurrect the Destroy All Humans series after the DAH3 debacle? I've been playing the first two games and been enjoying it and I hope if Koch does make a fourth installment, that it won't suck.

weemadando wrote:No, they're talking about Halo/CoD kind of mainstream. Apparently just having Ghibli attached will do this.

Ah. a wtf alright. The people who like totoro and play video games already play jrpg, the people who like totoro but dont play jrpg aren't going to be persuaded by this. Lol

AniThyng wrote:

weemadando wrote:No, they're talking about Halo/CoD kind of mainstream. Apparently just having Ghibli attached will do this.

Ah. a wtf alright. The people who like totoro and play video games already play jrpg, the people who like totoro but dont play jrpg aren't going to be persuaded by this. Lol

It's like the people who think that having hardcore wargames like Battle of the Bulge on iPad is pushing those mainstream.

Sure, it's on a very mainstream platform and you've made, by what all accounts is an EXCELLENT wargame, but it's still a heavy wargame and that's just never going to flip the Angry Birds switch.

It's a typical manner in which publishers fondle the industry for that next great sale though. Find a bunch of nerd chic stuff, tie it together and gamble on it becoming explosively successful. The problem is the AAA+ level popularity some franchises have is really more from pure luck than anything objectively unique about these games. Halo didn't do anything Quake hadn't done before it. It was in the right place at the right time. Trying to force lighting to strike where you want it seems to be a pretty poor business strategy.

The smart thing for certain genres to do at this point, like milsims and strategy games, is to operate within their financial means. I think some studios figured this out years ago, like Paradox and Battlefront.

Some idiots like Bohemia and the racist homophobes on Subsim.com continue to hold out the belief that AAA success is just around the corner. Yet it's also the market's fault for being populated by 12 year olds playing CoD that Jutland or Combat Mission aren't selling millions.