"There's no reason why DRM is not acceptable, but Steam is." Reason 1. I know what I'm getting into ahead of time when I purchase from Steam. Reason 1a. It's not a punishment when I legally purchase my game. That is Steam's delivery system. Reason 2. Steam almost always works (offline even). Reason 3. Ridiculous deals.
The "music for music's sake--insert your own as you wish" statement brought me back to when my friend and I used to mute the tv and pop in a cassette while playing the Lotus games for the Sega Genesis. Good times.
Just finished Deus Ex. Bob Page is a really good villian, controlling the world for his own means. A good villian (or at least a strong and compelling struggle) goes a long way in an overall arch of a game if a story is involved. The North Koreans seem to be the new facist Nazis and Communist Russians. I don't think Andrew Ryan is even the best villian of Bioshock. (Spoiler) I didn't even want to kill him. But it did work in the logic and story advancement. Just an all around great emotional scene.
I'm usually a little more forgiving when the AI isn't just right (a little less so for friendly AI) and tend be impressed when it's obvious some thought and care went to the NPC behavior. I believe it will continue to improve as better techniques emerge and better hardware is available to throw at the problem. Some of the better AI behavior I've seen though have been in older games such as close combat 2. I'm interested in Killzone 2 now if only I had a PS3.
I've never bought any add-on DLC so don't have much to say there, but the indie developer DLC I think is one of the greatest things to arise in gaming in the past 5 years. It is a win for both sides.
I think there is confusion between being able to tell a story effectively, versus telling a story efficiently. Lots of games to date, especially your adventure games, have been very effective in telling an engaging story. However it is the efficiency of that story telling which might not be present. The most efficient way of telling a story would be to extrapolate what the Metal Gear Solid games have accomplished till you're back to be merely watching a movie, not exactly what the gamer has in mind. I do agree with Yamagishi that interactivity is the biggest hurdle in telling a story, and it will be interesting to see how interactively can play a role in future games, but it should not be thought of as destroying the story process itself.
ogara0c9's comments