• 3Aug 08

  Deus Ex 3: Enjoy the Silence

  Really didn't want to leave the official EIDOS forums, but when folks are crabby for crabby sake, I don't have time for the petty bickering - JC went Home.

  Why the bickering?

  Nothing really new to talk about. DX fans have been posting about everything under the Sun and beyond for months, and efforts to plead to the EIDOS devs to have something to talk about, just didn't work. So now it's resorting to thread bumping and trying to forum seed to keep interest alive -- something I warned simply won't work in itself, as a forum is about content, not personalities (as any forum admin and/or designer understands).

  Now have to wait another month or so for the dev blog (won't doubt it'll be open in October, as that's the time frame for such notices). And I hope it's more about DX the game, than the Eidos Montreal studio, as fans want some indication DX3 is more than a concept on the drawing board.

  Meanwhile, Enjoy the Silence...

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXaZBdCfrRI

  • Posted Aug 3, 2008 6:30 pm PT
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• 24Nov 07

  Project Origin: Why Don't Devs Learn?

  Upon learning that TimeGate Studios was releasing F.E.A.R.: Perseus Mandate, I was thinking, "Oh, brother, they did the same o' same o' again", and sure enough I wasn't the only one who thought so. It's showing this franchise is on the wrong track, as it's gameplay formula and graphics are both getting dated.

  What makes the franchise worse is learning about Project Origin -- the much awaited Monolith Productions sequel to the original F.E.A.R. game -- only to discover that the same "fans" are still pulling the ears of Monolith to make the game just another MP slaughterhouse. Now Monolith claims it's going to fill in some of the storyline gaps in Project Origin and the main entity will remain Alma, but I'm wondering, how can they when the "fans" want just more MP action and no more than 10hr playtime with SP? SP is where the storyline will take place, and if it's going to be full of throwing grenades and shooting clones for 10hrs, how will the Pointman will know anything if the whole game is going to be but 20 minutes of story, with about 10 minutes of spooks?

  So what do they do? They remove the Pointman, kill off the whole team, and start with another group. So, we get a new guy but never know who the Pointman really was (with the convulted idea that a generic protagonist is better since anyone can be him). Meanwhile, being humans humans want to know of their origins and why the hell they're even there, let alone why everyone around you is dead or going to die.

  The main problem with the F.E.A.R. franchise (sorry Monolith renaming it won't remove it's heritage from the original, as it'll still be referenced by that acronym forever), is that they try to have their cake and eat it too. But it can't work if the main fan base isn't into storytelling and SP, when the game is marketed based on the SP -- as there's no spooks in MP, it's just a FPS shoot up. Either concentrate on a good plot, or just make it into a FPS gorefest, but don't market the game as a kewl SP thriller when it never was.

  And before I end this rant, I want Monolith and all the F.E.A.R. MP fanbois to remember another game that was named a "project". It was a spin off of the Deus Ex franchise by the name of Project: Snowblind.

  Anyone remember that game?

  ...Hearing not even a pin drop...

  Project Origin, is indeed a snowblinded attempt at game design if it remains a MP heavy game. It'll miss it's mark again, with a fan base that's anything but 17+ to appreciate a good immersive storyline. Heck parents are letting their 11 year-olds play it, and MP reflects it.

  • Posted Nov 24, 2007 6:44 am PT
  • Category: Rant
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• 12Feb 07

  Spoilers: F.E.A.R. Extraction Point a Fan's Opinion

  Yes, I hit the F.E.A.R. Extraction Point forum like a storm, because it needed it.

  Why the 3.0 rating? Because the game plot sucks - truly, truly TRULY sucks. It also didn't help that the animations were mostly the same (except for a couple new entities), nor the textures/materials. Expansion packs are an extension of a previous game, but some change in the theme and variation would've help a heck of a lot.

  What else sucks about F.E.A.R. XP? Voice acting. Rumbling through the .arch00 files I see why Harlan Wade was just sitting in that cell, as the voice files weren't made by Grant Goodeve, and sound terrible. Also heard the voice of Bishop with the crane operator. Can understand the need to spread a few voice actors around, but Warren Specter was right about the quality of voice acting in games - either it's overly dynamic (not real), or monologue style to the point you want to RUN from the character to save your sanity!

  What gets me about F.E.A.R. XP is how all that is right and just is destroyed. You watch helplessly as friend upon friend is murdered. So now the point man is totally alone, except for Betters (who may be a double agent working as part of the point man's "evaluation", which folks forget is still ongoing).

  If I had Monolith's ear, I would say this about F.E.A.R. 2: don't mess up the plot by taking all those tips from MPers! Go back and fix the holes, not just release more fragging madness, as folks need to understand why the hell they even bought the game, let alone play it. It's those who want to play SP, and it's those who's interested in the "world" that pay for the game (Sierra/VU/and/or you gummed it up with the release of F.E.A.R. Combat, since now folks have no need to pay for the game - why not just give XP and F.E.A.R. 2 away for free, too?). If a new revision is more soap operas twists that are crazier than "As the World Turns", then the F.E.A.R. franchise is DOA. The XP sales and ratings should be a clue how bad it can be when you're trying to mix two game genres into one and concentrating on the MP side, it doesn't work. The game needs a story, we need to know why Alice, Jin and Jankowski were supposely killed (if anything why Alice, since her crime was what - and in XP, why her eyes are they way they are? She didn't die that way). Bring F.E.A.R. 2 back into some order, so folks will want to play the game, not move onto greener pastures (Bioshock, for example is coming out soon enough). Oh, one more thing: give us more modding tools! At least a model converter so we don't have to use hacked and cracked Maya and 3DSMax to even edit a model.

  • Posted Feb 12, 2007 4:15 am PT
  • Category: Opinion
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