ATB is something I wouldn't call non-broken, though.

Yeah, but there was a greater period of time between CT and CC than FFVI and FFVII, which is worth considering. Also, CT's original battle system was QUITE similar to the FF ATB system, so I imagine that they wanted to distance the game from the FF games they had at. Also, it did share some features with XG (sort of) which DID have some dev team from CT and CC on it, I believe? If that's the case, than the progression is somewhat more visible.

WA:ACF is the second game I've played (Some GBA Harvest Moon being the first) where you hit a point and the text allocation tables fuck up and NPCs start speaking in complete gibberish. Stuff like: "good candy is an excellent ship. ²¤®ðð¡. Head east of Neutchâfel to find". Being someone that obsesses over talking to every NPC, stuff like that really BOTHERS me.

Also, they took out various skills and things and generally removed a lot of the gameplay and replaced it with a bunch of additions which are only really there for the final dungeons. Yeys?

So yeah. It's not so much "Don't fix what isn't broken," as it is, "Don't fix something unless you seriously not what you're doing, otherwise you're likely to sever a thumb."

thesearingstar: Did you see my later post explaining my first post? I *really* am sorry about that misunderstanding :/

Give me some examples?



This is completely wrong. Stop telling me what I'm thinking. You're misinterpreting me, and I don't like that.

You seem to be under the assumption that I'm just ignoring these things you're talking about. I'm not ignoring them.



Motion capture's relatively new for games, but as a concept, it's not that new, and it's been used in movies for a long time. The additional animation is nice, sure, and so are the large view distances.

How, though, do these matter at all on the gameplay front?



Realistic physics is, certantainly, realistic, but I've yet to actually see anything besides, say, Gmod, this gen, use physics in an interesting way -- it's mostly been ragdoll physics and stuff like oblivion's traps which I've never actually seen work properly. Exile probably has one of the most interesting uses of game-physics I've seen, and that game's from '88.

Physics aren't that hard to model, though. I mean, Frontier: Elite 2 and Frontier: First Encounters had quite realistic Newtonian phyiscs for space flight (Which, I believe, isn't particularly common. Partially because whether or not it's fun is debatable, but eh).

I'm not sure what sort of games you're refering to, when you say AI. Of the top of my head, I can't really think of any PS2 or GC RPGs with adaptive AI. I don't play much in the way of FPSes on consoles because the controls don't really jive with me for it, but, say, Metroid Prime 1 and 2 don't have adaptive AI, I know. Very obvious pattern-based enemies. Same for the Zeldas.

On the PC front, Unreal and Half-Life both had pretty strong AI, but that was some time ago, and I don't think they were adaptive, either. I also hear Half-Life's AI is almost entirely based on what sort of path-nodes you have set up or something. UT2K4's bots were strong, but not really revolutionary. Call of Duty 2 had pretty standard AI. Same for 1. Strong, but nothing really revolutionary. More often than not, I read reviews and here complaints about the AI in a lot of new games.

Now, I do remember some very interesting simulations from the mid-nineties with really interesting AI. Creatures 1 and 2 come to mind. Galapagos was also relatively interesting adventure sort of game based around operant conditioning.

Truthfully though I don't really remember a lot of games actually having adaptive AI, so I'm guessing this is a feature from Halo or something.

I also seem to recall a few games apparently recording play styles or something, saving them across game sections, and tweaking the AI as per whatever got found in the recorder play styles, but I don't know if this feature was ever actually implemented, and I haven't heard of it in any recent games.

Downloadable content... Well, that's been around since the internet took off in the late 80s. Nethack has sharable bones files. Adventure had... user-made mods, I guess. That's not really the internet, though. Anyway. A lot of games had free mission pack type things. GalCiv I and II are recent examples. Daggerfall and some various strategy games are older ones. Morrowind also had a fair amount of free, official mods. Also, I'm not even mentioning the extremely massive freeware games scene.

The modern incarnation seems to lead to things like GTA editions that ship without content. Er, no thanks. I'd prefer stay in the days when downloadable addon content was free.

And streamlined internet play? Again, relatively newer, but nothing THAT new. Battle.net's an ooooold service. Sierra's Wow service had a decent run, I guess. Gamespy arcade's also been around for some time. I don't think modern player-matching systems STARTED with UT99, but they've been around since at least that long.

Basically, though, I'm really not ignoring the technological advancements. I'm just not impressed by what people are doing them. I don't think most devs are pushing the systems to their limits at all. They're using the hardware exactly how it's meant to be used, and not really going beyond it at all.

Also, even IF the CGIs in games get prettier, that doesn't mean the art directions going to get any better either. If you're a crappy artist or suck at 'directing' CGIs, it doesn't matter if you're working with low-poly, flat-shaded models on a PS1, or highly detailed models on a PS3.



Sure, that's dandy, but I'm not going to spend 60 dollars on a game just so I can look at the water (Unless we're talking some incredibly unlikely sequel to Aquanaut's Holiday or something).

Earthbound's soundtrack is heavily based on beatles tunes in places.  Not exactly MODERN per se, but 1960s isn't too far off.

Dungeon Man's Theme has these high-pitched squelchy noises which are apparently based on the violin bits from Live and Let Die.

Riding Tessie borrows the opening bit from Strawberry Fields.

The cave to giygas has some sample from All You Need Is Love. Which is... sort of appropriate.

A lot of the songs in general have a very Beatlesy feel, too, though. A lot of 60s music influences I guess?

Again, I didn't call you an idiot. It's supposed to read like "When you sink tens of thousands of millions of dollar's into developing a game... Then you're an idiot with no sense of economy or efficiency."

I'm sorry it came out wrong but it really, really wasn't directed at you.

I didn't call you an idiot. Re-read the post. That bit was not directed at you.



Right, right. I was more talking about development costs. I'd consider the actual printing more of a publishing cost sort of thing. Or at least I'd consider it seperate, since other than adopting a downloadable content method (in which case you're still probably paying for ad listings and bandwidth) it's not really a cost you can do much about.



I haven't seen many games I've called 'genre pushing' released since 2000. I could maybe think of a few games if I spent some time at it, but...

I also have to admit that I'm really not one to be that impressed by technology. I mean, it's nice having really fast processors and tons of memory, but it's nothing unexpected. It's been a pretty steady progression. Software wise, the technology's also being used in a pretty predictable way. They're creating really pretty and quite fast 3D games with hardware that's specifically made to do really pretty 3D games as fast as possible.

I guess my problem is that they're spending all of this money on games, getting the A/V aspects more immersive, but the gameplay's still the same stuff we've been seeing for almost a decade now.

As for exclusives, I meant what Eusis said.

Also, Mass Effect's dialogue system really doesn't sound THAT revolutionary. But it's definitely something I'd like to see in action first before I pass judgement on it. Write-ups are often misleading.



There were games that were deep and immersive experience before development costs got insanely expensive.

But I'm not really sure why I need incredibly detailed water shaders or lip animation to be immersed.

[Original post accidentally deleted. Sorry].

That's the same reason fanboys always dis games that aren't their favorite. They just can't AFFORD them.

Wait, 60 dollars for a non-special edition game? What the hell is this, 1994?

See, I see people fawning over vanillaware for still using 2D sprites, like this is some sort of immensely important thing. They're just sprites. And the actual art's not even terribly great or distinctive. I mean, it's like the early days of 3D graphics (Er, by that, I mean early days as in, early nineties. We're going to discount the fact that you had a lot of 3D games out in the 80s for a minute), when stuff tended to look like crap, but people would fawn over it just because it was in three-dimension.

I think people did this with Starfox, a game I always found incredibly slow and having rather poor play control, or Quake, which wasn't even good in comparison to the other FPSes that were out at the time (Honestly, I'd say the original Dooms were better than Quake).

I wasn't impressed by Odin Sphere, and Grim Grimoire just sounds a LOT like that crappy 'Blood and Magic' game from... SSI? that came out mid-90s.

Cute names though. The random swedish makes me happy because I'm working through FSI Swedish right now because I have NO life.

You suddenly got me wondering whether there's some connection to how Dark Force gets romanized occasionally as Dark Phallus, and how Dark Force is blatantly masculine in appearance, wheras The Profound Darkness is quite feminine. I mean, I doubt this was planned from the get-go, but I'm wondering if it did maybe influence the style of The Profound Darkness in PSIV.

Granted, she also really looks like Mother Brain, so...

!@@#%, I want someone to remake PS2 and 3 with dungeons that DON'T suck. A rom-hacking might be in order.

Also: Huhuhuh. Gay bar.

Anyway.

This is sort of appropriate for this thread, I guess. Okay. So, in older RPGs, I notice a lot of like, fatalism, maybe? I can't really describe it. It's a certain mood, that I think is shown sort of well by FFL1. You know that you're goal is at the top of the tower, and you're basically headed there from the beginning, and along the way you see people living miserable lives and dying pointless deaths, each life more miserable and each death more pointless/horrible than the last.

Sort of some march towards inevitability thing.

Oh, what else? You know how in Dragon Warrior 1, the final castle was like, right across the lake from the starting town? Things like that. The story in DW1 wasn't really anything major, but there was a certain mood there that was basically the same thing as in FFL1. You have a defined path to the enemy, with a lot of towns along the way in the immediate path of destruction. It does give a sense of... maybe urgency or impending doom.

It's not a distant evil. It's a very looming, clear and present threat.

I think this is also an important concept to dungeon crawlers. I mean good dungeon crawlers. The kind with puzzles and characters. Not the ones that are equivalents of mazes with lots of meaningless killing. The good ones use your progression downwards, to some inevitable evil, as a mirror of the progressing difficulty, strenth of characters, distance from safety, and... shift from the status quo, I guess.

Also, one plot mechanic I see used WAY too much -- So in so isn't really the true villain! I think too many games focus too much on shocking the player instead of, say, taking the FFVI route and just coming up with one well thought-out villain that's there the whole time.

Aaaalso the tendency for RPG stories to be macro-epics anymore. I think you CAN pan the story out to the point where it stops feeling important, even if it's not just filler you're putting in.