@majesticmc God of War owes rather more of its heritage to Devil May Cry, as does Ninja Gaiden. GoW was well into development by the time NG was released where as DMC is probably the progenitor of the "extreme action" genre. Still DMC, NG and GoW all feel quite distinct. Look at games in the genre and *most* borrow and feel rather more like GoW than DMC or NG. Probably because it's an easier formula to imitate.
Also there is a Castlevania which covers Dracula's origin, Lament of Innocence but that's not why the mythology is wrong. Its that the mythology is rather more based on a Celtic style which is grossly out of place in a Castlevania game.
Can't say I'm thrilled about this. First game was bad. The gameplay felt like a shameless GoW knock off right down to the move set. The first game could have been improved by being 60%-80% shorter. That would have been an improvement even ignoring quality bump that would come from making less but better content as opposed to hours of drivel. Secondly it didn't feel like Castlevania. Mythology was wrong, setting was wrong, gameplay was wrong for this to feel like Castlevania. As a Castlevania fan Lord of Shadows is a massive disruption and while Konami flogs the dead horse of a completely wrong headed reboot of what should be among it's most important franchises the series can't move on.
Are journalist still defending ME3? That ending was awful. Just awful. What were people to do? Politely say nothing? The additions being made (which we have yet to see) were a response to the complaints but the complaints were the natural and inevitable response to the awful ending that Bioware made in the first place.
As for the flash light in Doom 3 it was a carefully considered design decision but that doesn't change that it was the wrong decision. Adding the flash light as constant rather than a trade off is a gameplay change but if you remove sentimentality whether the previous version worked that way is an arbitrary criteria. Does it make the game better.
The argument here isn't really "The customer is not always right" it's more that creators in any medium should not change a work based on feedback. If they ignored feedback in general where would that leave us? Uskipable cut-scenes in games which look like a history of flavour of the month game design faux-pas. Ignoring feedback when creating the next iteration is clearly absurd, so when something is clearly ill conceived (ME3's ending and Doom 3's flashlight both being prime examples) and the opportunity is there to revisit that it why shouldn't it be fixed?
The biggest problem this game has now is low server populations. It really needs server merges... soon. The number of servers made sense with the huge number of first month box sales and play times but with the ongoing subscriber base massively reduced and playing less there are clearly too many servers. Other than that SWTOR is the best MMO since WoW. If it fills out the end game it's one expansion away from removing "since WoW" from that last sentence. The live team has done a great deal to improve the game since launch. Not least of all the combat responsiveness issue, gameplay is now nice and crisp.
Welcome to the death of the AAA RPG. They are expensive to make and you can still flop after selling over a million copies. Very few companies can that risk. In the west Bioware, Bethesda and Lionhead are the only studios that regularly shoot for AAA RPGs. In Japan it's questionable that anything outside of the FF main series counts as AAA. Just look at FF13 and how much of a step backwards that is in so many ways to keep budgets in check. Squenix don't remake FF7 because they don't think it will make money. Quite possibly the most requested game in history with an instant fanbase and even then they believe it would be too expensive.
Amalur is a pretty good game and 1.2M is a solid number for an original IP. It's not just RPGs, team Bondi with LA Noir, for me one the greatest games of the year, it had a lot of publicity and sold well. Publishers will retreat to a safer set of genres and IPs when it comes to AAA. Until/unless cost saving technologies (such as procedural graphics generation) starts to catch up AAA games will become less varied.
I think SWTOR is a great game but I don't see it's subscriber base growing. You don't need other people when levelling up but as soon as you hit 50 there is very little you can do on your own. The problem is that a lot of people haven't made the social connections to make that work so they will just quit. The end game content was badly paced, you progress past flashpoints (the bulk of the content) being useful as soon as you do operations. There was only one op on day 1 and one added before most people would have progressed to them, both were fairly easy on normal. BW answer to content retention was to release an op that seems to be much to hard with no real progress track to it.
As for 50 PvP, the abject failure of open world PvP has allowed Huttball to choke PvP to death for most of the player base. While changes in 1.2 mean that matches which aren't huttball are now much less of a rarity the gear changes are completely wrong headed. To stamp out high end PvE gear being used in PvP the importance of PvP gear was increased. The problem is that gear is perhaps even more so now the main factor that decides matches. Almost all the PvP gear pre 1.2 which anyone grinded for was rendered instantly obsolete. While since the various improvements to the responsiveness of the combat mechanics the core gameplay of PvP is pretty solid all these issues stack up to be too bitter a cocktail to swallow for most players.
The class story and story telling in general is way ahead of any other MMO on the market. It's easy to dismiss that because that's not what MMOs are about but it does add to the game. The problem is much more resources and thought should have gone into the end game. MMOs live and die not just on box sales but retaining subscribers and as it stands SWTOR will do a great job of that for a couple of months but most players will find nothing for them when they reach the level cap. There will be a hardcore of us that enjoy it so I don't see it going F2P soon but I don't see it building up subscribers unless the lack of end game is addressed astoundingly well and sooner rather than later with a full expansion.
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