I liked the original as well but really enjoyed FC2. If you haven't tried FC2 on a PC using KB+M I highly recommend it. I also have a 24" IPS widescreen monitor so the graphics in FC2 are photorealistic. I know I'm in a minority here but that game was the sweet spot for me in so many ways. Practically no HUD, no hand-holding after the tutorial intro, a well designed map with lots of variety, a good selection of balanced weapons without going overboard, and engaging combat. Ignore the respawning checkpoints that so many complained about by simply not backtracking unless necessary (why would you want to anyway?). FC2 is light on wildlife but it's not a big game hunting sim. I would have enjoyed crocs in the rivers and lakes for a bit of risk and intimidation and maybe some lions here and there but it was no big deal for me. The game is also not bloated with a bunch of crap purely for DLC rewards nonsense. To me, FC2 was well done in terms of delivering the atmosphere and immersion of hit and run tactics in the bush. I wrongly expected FC3 to be a polished version of FC2 (albeit back in paradise world) but instead they gutted the game and turned it into Simon Says, "Press this key." If you enjoy jig-saw puzzles that have maybe 10 or 12 pieces with a cardboard mat that shows you where each piece belongs...FC3 is the game for you.
The market that grew out of the success of these easy games like CoD/Ace Combat/Mario Kart were never going to get into the hardcore segment to begin with. The "masses" that you speak of were never interested in more hardcore genres. Like you said, when the gaming market was largely hardcore, it was also pretty niche and smaller market as a whole. I see two distinctively separate market within the game industry; casual and hardcore. What you are doing is acknowledging the difference when it comes to product, but for some reason think that the sales volume between the two can be freely interchanged. Think about it... without the mainstream series like Call of Duty or Battlefield, do you think all those people would have gotten into ARMA series instead? Do you honest think it's plausible that ARMA 3 could be making $500 million in 24 hours of its release just because Call of Duty or Battlefield games didn't exist? Or would the casual consumers have looked at FPS gaming in general and simply said "screw this"? The latter is far more likely in my view. It's akin to arguing that TV is downfall of books because look at all those people watching TV... surely if TV didn't exist they would be reading all the books! (they wouldn't) That being said, my point here isn't to argue that hardcore gaming is dying. It actually is stronger than ever with more money and resources flowing into it than any other time. Just like you mentioned, niche games like Elite: Dangerous managed to get millions even before they showed presentable demo people the niche market for those exists, it's just not as large as casual nor will it ever be. I also still stand by my other argument. Dumb ass casual games existed even long time ago before the "Playstation revolution". BTW I agree that revolution happened, but not in the context of hardcore/casual segment... what happened was death of arcades as home entertainment system got beefy enough to compete with single-game dedicated hardware of arcades. Back on the old games, the difference is, those games just used to flat out suck without doing anything remotely cool back then and hence didn't generate much sales. Excitebike, Paperboy, Frogger, Topgun, Double Dragon, Doom, Warcraft, Dune II... old, easy, casual and dumb compared to modern counterparts (this isn't to say old games were dumb... the point is that dumb ****s did exist in droves even in the glorious old days).
Thanks for the links. I use Amiga Forever to play DM and CSB (along with a lot of other Amiga games). It's been a while since I last played DM all the way through though. DMII...are you referring to Legend of Skullkeep? I found that easy. The only thing in it that was frustrating was the little guy that would run up and steal some of your stuff at random. Yes...Elite Dangerous...I am so looking forward to that release. I hope it inspires other developers to follow a similar path and gives the younger members of the community a taste of something they may have never experienced. Back in the late 80's I was a Beta tester for Epyx games. It was a lot of fun and I got the game for free as a reward.
I want to chime in here with another aspect of game development that seems to have a role to play on both sides of the fence. Namely, the expense of game development. Games today can cost as much as $40 million to develop. They are like making movies so companies and investors are naturally interested in making sure they recover the expense of development. This makes niche markets a tough challenge. Casual games with a broad consumer base will have a much easier time of it for obvious reasons. I think the hardcore niche market games could be produced more economically if they could find a way to build on previous releases instead of apparently always starting from scratch. For example, creating a WW2 flight sim of the European theater has been done several times by different companies. But they should by now be able to take the code from previous renditions and use it to get a jump on developing an updated version. I don't know much about game development so I'm basing this on what seems like common sense. I wish this aspect of gaming was more transparent so the gamers could understand why things happen the way they do.
This was definitely true, but isn't the opposite the case now with development of digital distribution channels along with general market acceptance of "indie games" rather than just knocking off lower budget game as "craps" as they might have done in a decade ago? Also true about building on previous releases and that's not just hardcore gaming but pretty much every single games out there, not to mention if you build sequels, you have an opportunity to build up a recognizable IP. DCS series does it, ARMA series does it... what you are describing on second half of paragraph is more akin to licensing out game engines, which is also getting more common I think. Anything more/different is just flat out stealing other people's work though so it's probably good that we don't have that lol
After the death of the Amiga nothing interested me it was all rubbish including the snes and megadrive. The games were easy and aimed at children, I looked to Japan and got myself a Neo Geo mvs through grey import, long before the internet was even around. I also had a 286 pc which was pap for gaming tbh, most games were cga and ega which was astep backwards from the amiga, However the svga titles were stunning like xwing vs tie fighter, Secret of monkey island and Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe but these were few and far between at the time. Check out how inferior the pc was to the amiga at the time. http://m.youtube.com/#/watch?v=cETl8PhUy_E&desktop_uri=/watch?v=cETl8PhUy_E The Neo Geo was a true hardcore gamers console for connoissers alike. It blew anything clean out of the water at the time for performance and raw playability regarding anything 2đ like fighting games, platformers and shooters which were the biggest genres at the time in the dying arcades and megadrive/snes. Edge once ran a 10 page spread on the Neo Geo and said at the end of the article If you consider yourself to be a hardcore gamer then have you ever owned a piece of hardware with the SNK logo on it? I loled.
Umh, for me neo geo was more of an arcade machine with very, very expensive games. The deepest stuff were released on PC and SNES.
Epyx were pretty epic with there athletics games, my favourite was california games that was fantastic,another genre we dont see anymore.
So you lost interest in gaming since Amiga phased out... are you then saying that those Amiga games have more thought provoking and complex gameplay than they do now? Because your position was that games currently are lot simpler and easier so I'm curious how this new opinion of yours fit into that initial claim. If all you wanted to talk about is how superior Amiga was to PC back then... ok, so what? They both look pretty darn crappy compared to what we got today, and no I'm not talking about graphics, I'm talking about just the raw gameplay. I actually did own Neo Geo. You are way overhyping that hardware. It was good for two things, which was to play arcade shooters and SNK fighters (which is what I got it for, to play Samurai Showdown 2). The software library on it otherwise was seriously lacking. Like you said, it was good home version of DYING arcade.
For Connoisseurs indeed. Those systems were bloody expensive. Here they were Fl 799,- for the system and Fl 500-550 for a single game. With inflation that's still about €799 for the system and around €500-550 for the games if they were sold today. Insane prices....
Hardcore isn't defined by owning stuff, If somebody is passionate enough to work on something instead of taking it for granted, I'd say they're hardcore. I don't own much in the way of games, but I was hardcore enough to end up with a BS in CS because after spending hours debugging dos / win 3.11 due to trying to get my games to work, I was comfy with technical crap while my friends fled in terror from it. SNES was and is awesome, FF 6 is still one of the greatest games ever made even if it isn't hard. If you missed the whole SNES era because you felt the games were too easy, then you can generally find the japanese version of the ROM online which is usually harder. I'd recommend at least trying out FF IV & VI.
Your missing the point im trying to make youve gone off on a tangent... Overhyping the hardware i dont think so, You could actually take your memory card out at home and continue where you left off down the arcade way back in 1990/91/92 long before sony even invented the memory card or even invented a console. How was the software library lacking it was the king of everything regarding Shooters, fighting games and Platformers long before 3D Wolfenstein and DooM even existed, its was the cutting edge of the cutting edge. Personally i dont believe that you ever did have one because if you did you wouldnt make a silly statement like that as anybody that did have one back then was simply blown away as nothing in the world could match it and anybody that didnt have one wanted one so your talking tosh, go hit up wiki again. @Dustpuppy i had a snes and a megadrive, I liked a few games like Link to the past and few others but the Megardrive was crap i thought, Mortal Kombat and Streetfighter 2 was ok but then i actually owned the arcade board via PCB as well as other PCB games on Supergun so alot of the Arcade games were just weak clones compared to the real thing so i quickly sold both of them. We all have different tastes in games remember and the earlier FF games have never interested me even though i tried them. I loved ff7 though played it through to the end 2 times.
Yes but at the time nothing could come close, hence the massive price, I used to buy my games second hand and i used to work hard to get my money as a teenager but was one of the best experiences when friends came around, epsecially the sound, the sound was mindblowing and the gameplay was perfect. Basically an Arcade in the home along with the Supergun JAMMA which i still actually have in my possession today.
It's not always a case of dumbed down, but more a case of older functionality that offered more freedom. A nice example is the "cover mechanic" vs good ole crouching. Crouching looks a bit retarded but at the end of the day is faster and doesn't limit you as much. You have to manually strafe out and all of that stuff but you can halt the whole damn thing in the middle of it instead of being "obstructed" by nice and smooth animations.
Thats a fair comment but how would you know if you was not old enough to play the old games? In 20 years from now you may prefer how some games played in 2012 than in 2032 even if they are newer and look better I know that you love Mass Effect games with a passion which is great. How do you know in 20 years time that if Mass effect is still around then that although it will be much better looking than any Mass effect game that came around before it, The feeling that you got from Mass effect 2 will never be matched regarding the feeling that you got playing it. You go back and play ME 2 in 20 years and you actually prefer it to ME 15. Thats what im experiencing now, not all old games are better for me, some or drivel but i find some are better than there newer modern day equivalents.
He can go play them on emulators or watch videos of it on youtube if the former is not available. I'm not missing anything. You are dodging the issues you setup. First you said casual games are pushing hardcore games out of the market... to which I made a very much on point argument about how two market sales are not exchangeable and hence that view is wrong. Then you just skip over to talking about how Playstation dumbed down games... yet when I present list of famous yet dumb old games, you suddenly start talking about how Amiga was better than PC back when Amiga was out... like why the hell did you even go that off topic? What is this 'tosh'? I had one and it was overhyped. Spent maybe about 2 hours on it tops because all those fabulous arcade games you are talking about, guess what, I can pay maybe $2 and get all the playtime I wanted out of them.
I agree on how casual games are pushing out the hardcore titles, though my version of hardcore are pretty much games like deep rpgs (witcher), fps's like S.T.A.L.K.E.R and Arma series. Casual in my view are games that are flash in the pan pass timers like COD/BF3, Skyrim/Fallout, Gears, basic racing titles like the NFS series and all those games on the many app stores out there. Casual is where the money is at the moment imo, people these days arent really interested in having to use their brain during down time on the weekends etc, but hopefully when these new consoles com out we'll see some increase in size and creativity. One thing i feel PC gamers need to let go of is this strange idea that pc gaming is all of a sudden going to reclaim the spotlight of pubs/devs just because of a very small change in console hardware and from ive read, architecture. Ports are always going to be ports unless a dev takes the time to do a pc spec version, which is something the can be done now and has been done over the life of this curret gen of consoles.
I see lot of people saying that and I just don't see it... In order to be pushed out of something, you must first be occupying it. I just don't see how hardcore games could have occupied casual gamer's purchase list at all. Are there seriously a huge group of gamers who loved Operation Flashpoint but once they saw Call of Duty, they switched to casual and did not buy ARMA 2? Such scenario just looks implausible. A much more plausible scenario in my opinion, is that the hardcore consumers keeps purchasing the hardcore stuff, with modest growth to the number of said consumers. Then there is a separate and much larger group of consumers who were never interested in hardcore games (or video games in general) to begin with, that began to purchase these new casual games once it was polished up enough to be ready for mass consumption.
