@B0ne3ater @chronocommander I write about other issues facing the industry pretty frequently. Here are some recent ones. Check them out; I'm curious if you'll be surprised at what you find:
@markypants @Polybren Sure. I never said it was irrelevant, just less relevant. I'd love to see more indies get some time in the spotlight because of big-name devs deciding E3 isn't worth their time.
@Kingjames11 Obviously games are a product as well as art. I'm not interested as much in games as product though. If I did, I may as well be writing for the Farming Machinery Journal or Soulless Widgets Monthly. I'm here because this is a burgeoning art form and I want to play my part, however small, in seeing it realize its creative potential, not its financial potential. Every artist must deal with the tension between commerce and art, realizing creative goals (what they want to do) against financial ones (giving people what they want), and they all handle that issue differently.
It's a good point about whether or not the original version of Doom 3 is still included here. If that is still the "canon" version of the game, this is slightly less of a concern. However, if the new version doesn't include the original or if any future release is going to be the tweaked version (as has happened with the original Star Wars movies), then we've got a problem.
@B0ne3ater Of course art is fair game for criticism. I complain about games CONSTANTLY. There's nothing wrong with hating the ending of ME3 or going out and telling BioWare that it sucks and you hate it. But if you think games are art (I think you should, but if you don't, that's fine), you should have enough respect for the creative process to know that artists sometimes make bad decisions because they're trying to realize their own creative vision. And they need to be free to follow crazy creative visions instead of returning to past efforts and fixing them until people are happy with it. They need to be free to fail and not worry that if they try something outside of the box, they'll wind up having to go back and redo it in the more straight forward way that everybody wants. They don't learn anything in that case that wasn't learned from the initial feedback. They just waste their time undoing their own creative decisions.
@lsdbaby Listening to what gamers want is important. But developers should take the lessons and apply them to future projects instead of wasting their time undoing all the brave and/or wrong-headed failures that got people angry in the first place. That's a punishment. That's being made to rewrite your term paper from scratch because the teacher thought your original was crap. That's the sort of thing that will keep you from trying anything unorthodox or interesting with your term papers in the future.
@Dudeinator There are shades of gray, certainly. I have no problem with balance tweaks in fighting games or added modes, etc. But the flashlight mechanic and the ending of your trilogy's story are pretty big parts of the creative package. I give the devs the benefit of the doubt in both cases that they put some thought into those decisions and that they weren't accidental oversights.
@Glaxton Actually, I do think that's a cop-out for Doyle. Ideally, writers should be sure of what they're writing in the first place, and not cave in to outside pressure because it undermines what they did originally.
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