45 réponses à ce sujet

[Cultist]

Command and Conquer franchise. A decade-old RTS series with huge fanbase. C&C:Tiberian Dawn announced. Key features - no more base building no more "traditional" RTS mechanic. Make way for innovation! Community
outrages, pleading EA to stick with the "traditional" playstyle. Official response followed - fans and community can't understand the great idea, the new horizons. Don't stand on the way of innovation.Release time. Biggest disaster that finished the franchise, even bigger than Duke Nukem Forever. C&C degraded to the point where the only sequel in production is a flash-game for social networks. Starcraft 2, on the other hand, remained as a king of RTS by promoting "traditional" gameplay.
Master of Orion 3 - same story, "innovations" turned disastrous and killed the franchise.
Heroes of Might and Magic - too numerous no mention - fails when innovaions implemented, success when "traditional" gameplay got refined.
Civilization V - completely reworked mechanics, combat system and oversimplified mechanics. Complete disaster, depleted playerbase, even after expansion. 
See the pattern? Same stories can be repeated forever, yet...
Deus Ex: HR - developers repeated their previous game success by refining Deus Ex 2 and avoiding radical changes. Result - huge financial success.
Portal 2, Dead Space 2, New Vegas, Starcraft 2, Skyrim. All fared perfectly. And of course - Dragon Age: Origins, successing BG2.
The point of this is not to forbid or prevent innovation, but DO NOT FIX WHAT IS NOT BROKEN!
Refine it, remove worst aspects, empathise the best. And players will be happy. They'll buy and praise the game.

Modifié par Cultist, 06 juillet 2012 - 08:22 .

[Face of Evil]

Oh, thank the Maker you made this thread. Surely your empty platitudes will make Bioware see the error of their ways.

Modifié par Face of Evil, 06 juillet 2012 - 08:31 .

[Face of Evil]

Bah, double post.

Modifié par Face of Evil, 06 juillet 2012 - 08:33 .

[ianvillan]

Cultist wrote...

Command and Conquer franchise. A decade-old RTS series with huge fanbase. C&C:Tiberian Dawn announced. Key features - no more base building no more "traditional" RTS mechanic. Make way for innovation! Community
outrages, pleading EA to stick with the "traditional" playstyle. Official response followed - fans and community can't understand the great idea, the new horizons. Don't stand on the way of innovation.Release time. Biggest disaster that finished the franchise, even bigger than Duke Nukem Forever. C&C degraded to the point where the only sequel in production is a flash-game for social networks. Starcraft 2, on the other hand, remained as a king of RTS by promoting "traditional" gameplay.
Master of Orion 3 - same story, "innovations" turned disastrous and killed the franchise.
Heroes of Might and Magic - too numerous no mention - fails when innovaions implemented, success when "traditional" gameplay got refined.
Civilization V - completely reworked mechanics, combat system and oversimplified mechanics. Complete disaster, depleted playerbase, even after expansion. 
See the pattern? Same stories can be repeated forever, yet...
Deus Ex: HR - developers repeated their previous game success by refining Deus Ex 2 and avoiding radical changes. Result - huge financial success.
Portal 2, Dead Space 2, New Vegas, Starcraft 2, Skyrim. All fared perfectly. And of course - Dragon Age: Origins, successing BG2.
The point of this is not to forbid or prevent innovation, but DO NOT FIX WHAT IS NOT BROKEN!
Refine it, remove worst aspects, empathise the best. And players will be happy. They'll buy and praise the game.

I agree with what you said apart from Deus Ex: HR, because Deus Ex 2 changed almost every aspect that made Deus Ex great, and like your other examples fans complained about the changes before they happened, the forums were chaos back then, and when Deus Ex 2 was released it was a disaster and effectively distroyed the franchise.

It was a new development team that looked at and took from the original game and tried to keep it true to the spirit of the original Deus Ex that made it work.

[TonberryFeye]

This kind of thing is something so basic a primary school child can understand it.

This is why EA cannot.

[RinpocheSchnozberry]

DAO is garbage as a modern game. Great throwback to the past, great reminder of what I would spend entire afternoons playing as a kid. But I'm an adult now. I wouldn't buy DAO2 and neither would most people. I don't have the time to fight six werebums for ten minutes every half hours.

Also, Skyrim, the new Fallout games, DE:HR, SC2 and almost all of your example actually support the opposite of your stated idea. Those game are =very= different from their predecessors. Those games add modern ideas into the mix and chop out the old trope garbage of the first games, making them enjoyable to modern players.

[Cultist]

RinpocheSchnozberry wrote...

DAO is garbage as a modern game. Great throwback to the past, great reminder of what I would spend entire afternoons playing as a kid. But I'm an adult now. I wouldn't buy DAO2 and neither would most people. I don't have the time to fight six werebums for ten minutes every half hours.

Funny, but people keep telling BioWare for year and a half already that after DA2 they would be happy even with DAO2.

RinpocheSchnozberry wrote...
Also, Skyrim, the new Fallout games, DE:HR, SC2 and almost all of your example actually support the opposite of your stated idea. Those game are =very= different from their predecessors. Those games add modern ideas into the mix and chop out the old trope garbage of the first games, making them enjoyable to modern players.

What?

The point of this is not to forbid or prevent innovation, but DO NOT FIX WHAT IS NOT BROKEN!...
Refine it, remove worst aspects, empathise the best. And players will be happy.

I never ever said that they should just re-release old games with as few changes as possible. I said refine the game, fix the worst parts, but do not start a complete reconstruction.

[Urzon]

You can't have innovation without change. It's kinda in the very definition of the word. What you are talking about, as you said above, is refinement.

Refinement=/=Innovation

[Firky]

Cultist wrote...

Heroes of Might and Magic - too numerous no mention - fails when innovaions implemented, success when "traditional" gameplay got refined.
Civilization V - completely reworked mechanics, combat system and oversimplified mechanics. Complete disaster, depleted playerbase, even after expansion. 

Well, these are two franchises I know a fair bit about. As well as BioWare and the fantasy RPGs.

For HOMM, I think a common argument is that the series was gradually adding features until 3, which many consider the pinnacle (myslef included) and it had quite a long run with 2 eps and the chronicles. Then 4 changed the mechanics quite radically. The vocal fanbase wasn't cool. It could concurrently be argued that exploring the idea of hero as unit, as one example, was a worthy avenue for design. It may have addressed the "superhero strategy" thing that "broke" HOMM3, as one possibility (; just piling all your units onto one hero and expert earth magic teleporting around the map until you win = boring). HOMM5 returned to a model that was closer to 3, but it had the same issues 3 had, and (for me) 4 had then spoiled me and 5 was more like, "Well, good, but it's a backwards step." (Edit: Oh, and H6. Wow. So different. In my experience, on the surface, it was simpler, with the uniform hero progression and town portal etc. Looking deeper, however, a lot of the very radical changes allow for much greater flexibility of playstyle and balance - esp in multiplayer.)

As for Civ V. There were a lot of features "streamlined" in the base game and the AI had a few issues. But, if you consider one unit per tile, and how it killed the "stack 'o doom" thing that the AI was doing in Civ IV, hell, why not make the change? As a strategy feature, no stacking is freaking essential. Better use of terrain, ecomony, etc etc etc. It's an interrelated flow on effect. God and Kings, with faith and a tweaked (more aggro) AI is excellent (IMO) and I heartily recall putting *many* hours into the original Civ and the entire series. (2 is my favourite.)

Not all oldies (like me) shun innovation. I love the oldies. The amount of money I've spent in GoG games is slightly nuts. Not all innovation is bad. Oldies have fantastic features that we need to preserve. There are also opportunities with modern tech, budget, design which we can use to evolve.

As for Dragon Age 2, I'd personally say heaps of the innovation made for a better game, mostly combat related with the TB/action hybrid thing, even if it didn't totally nail it. Some things were lost, finnicky lore, crafting etc. But it's not either/or.

Modifié par Firky, 07 juillet 2012 - 11:06 .

[Arthur Cousland]

I greatly enjoyed Tales of Vesperia (xbox 360), which was nothing revolutionary, but it stuck to a formula and did it well. When I need my jrpg fix, I go back to that game. As long as a game is fun, it doesn't have to re-invent the genre and attempt to fix what isn't broken.

While I wouldn't have minded if DA2 was more of an "Origins 2", what I would have liked to have seen more was a game that wasn't rushed. If you're going to try new ideas and "innovate, keep in mind any deadlines and don't try to sell the fans on this new direction for Dragon Age, by releasing a rushed sequel to a beloved original.

[Fast Jimmy]

The question one should ask when implementing innovation for a franchise series is 'does this change improve the original gameplay, or does it remove/replace the original gameplay?'

If you still play the game the same overall manner, but with some tweaks and improvements, it's usually well received. If your change removes elements of how the previous game played altogether, or changes them so that they are not recognizable as being the same game, then you will have fans reject it.

If you change the art style, the combat style, the dialogue style, the travel style, the inventory style, the companion interaction style, the crafting style and the story/narration style, you are essentially creating an entirely new game. Which is what DA2 did. And why it was poorly received.

If there was less of these changes, or even the same amount by the degree of the changes muh less drastic, it would have been more likely to succeed.

In DA3's case, I can almost understand Bioware's stance on not changing much in overall design methods from DA2, simply because they were burned on doing a 180 from Origjns to DA2. BUT... I still think that if Bioware continues to make a DA2.1 instead of a DA:O2, it will be received poorly again. So they're durned it they do, durned if they don't.

[Pasquale1234]

Fast Jimmy wrote...

If you change the art style, the combat style, the dialogue style, the travel style, the inventory style, the companion interaction style, the crafting style and the story/narration style, you are essentially creating an entirely new game. Which is what DA2 did. And why it was poorly received.

Nah, it was a true sequel to the original.  You can tell by the ][ in the title.  :devil:

[Kidd]

Zelda: Link's Awakening -> Zelda: Ocarina of Time surely didn't bring anything good to the table by going 3D and inventing the Lock-On mechanic more or less all 3rd person games use nowadays. It was even dreadful enough to allow for an inventory screen where different items had different abilities instead of always having the new items take the old ones' place.

There's also that horrible part where you can bind more than one item to quick keys so you don't have to pause all the time and thus get to focus on the action and exploration.

All horrid ideas, I'm sure.

Seriously speaking though, did any one -not- like origin stories in DA:O? Those were innovations. As were the injuries, even though I think they're not as interesting as they could be. The dialogue wheel - as much crap it gets here - has allowed my Shepards to respond quickly for three games now. Morality bars that don't have to do with good/evil is also an innovation that DA and ME alike bring to the table, with different variations on the idea. Cross class combinations, spell combos, biotic explosions, dialogue interrupts...

There's tons of innovation and plenty of them are good. Sometimes an idea doesn't work out, yes. That's when you decide to go back to the drawing board for a future title. If you want to see what happens when a game series doesn't innovate, check out the sales number for Megaman 1-6. While Megaman 2 sold a lot better than Megaman 1 due to how polished it was, the sales for each subsequent game plummeted deep beneath the previous game.

[wsandista]

RinpocheSchnozberry wrote...

DAO is garbage as a modern game.

Excuse me why I ****** myself laughing at this nonsense.

I wouldn't buy DAO2 and neither would most people.  

Most people wouldn't buy ANY videogame(seeing as out of over 6 BILLION people, only millions buy any particular game). Quite a few people who would buy a party-based cRPG would(and did) buy a game like DAO. Quite a few of the same people didn't buy DA2. Also, DA2 also didn't attract enough new consumers to make up for the ones they lost.

Modifié par wsandista, 08 juillet 2012 - 02:25 .

[wowpwnslol]

Cultist wrote...

Command and Conquer franchise. A decade-old RTS series with huge fanbase. C&C:Tiberian Dawn announced. Key features - no more base building no more "traditional" RTS mechanic. Make way for innovation! Community
outrages, pleading EA to stick with the "traditional" playstyle. Official response followed - fans and community can't understand the great idea, the new horizons. Don't stand on the way of innovation.Release time. Biggest disaster that finished the franchise, even bigger than Duke Nukem Forever. C&C degraded to the point where the only sequel in production is a flash-game for social networks. Starcraft 2, on the other hand, remained as a king of RTS by promoting "traditional" gameplay.
Master of Orion 3 - same story, "innovations" turned disastrous and killed the franchise.
Heroes of Might and Magic - too numerous no mention - fails when innovaions implemented, success when "traditional" gameplay got refined.
Civilization V - completely reworked mechanics, combat system and oversimplified mechanics. Complete disaster, depleted playerbase, even after expansion. 
See the pattern? Same stories can be repeated forever, yet...
Deus Ex: HR - developers repeated their previous game success by refining Deus Ex 2 and avoiding radical changes. Result - huge financial success.
Portal 2, Dead Space 2, New Vegas, Starcraft 2, Skyrim. All fared perfectly. And of course - Dragon Age: Origins, successing BG2.
The point of this is not to forbid or prevent innovation, but DO NOT FIX WHAT IS NOT BROKEN!
Refine it, remove worst aspects, empathise the best. And players will be happy. They'll buy and praise the game.

I agree. I wish Bioware sorted out a deal with WoTC to make an epic RPG game with 2E rules. Won't be happening with EA pulling the strings, but still..

[Plaintiff]

The transition from Origins to DA2 changed almost nothing. Battle functions almost exactly the same, levelling up functions almost exactly the same. Dialogue and party management function almost exactly the same. World map travel functions almost exactly the same.

The only "innovation" DA2 featured was genuine branching relationship paths for party members, and if anyone thinks that was bad or "too much", then they're just wrong.

Modifié par Plaintiff, 08 juillet 2012 - 03:10 .

[Shadow of Light Dragon]

The Ultima series was notable for using a new engine for each game, IIRC. Origin Systems was all about innovation.

Some of the changes were awesome. During the series it changed from a map world where you 'E'nter each location to a continuous map, it introduced day and night, moon phases, NPC schedules, food, sleep, spyglasses, from inventory lists to a fully customisable inventory of more than mere weapons and armour where you could interact with many of the items (even your money, by flipping a coin!), it brought in character portraits, then went to animated faces, introduced jumping and swimming, an isometic world to a 3D world where you can watch the sun set and the stars come out.

While I didn't like all the innovations, it wasn't innovation that turned the end of the series into a train wreck. Ultima 7 is widely regarded as the peak of the series, and it wouldn't have been what it was without each predecessor building on the previous ones.

Ultima 1:


Ultima 7:


Sorry, can't agree with you, OP. Ultima 1 wasn't broken, but Ultima 7 was better.

[Cultist]

Plaintiff wrote...

The transition from Origins to DA2 changed almost nothing. Battle functions almost exactly the same, levelling up functions almost exactly the same. Dialogue and party management function almost exactly the same. World map travel functions almost exactly the same.

The only "innovation" DA2 featured was genuine branching relationship paths for party members, and if anyone thinks that was bad or "too much", then they're just wrong.

It's funny how it is possible for you to be wrong in every sentence.

[Kidd]

Cultist wrote...

Plaintiff wrote...

The transition from Origins to DA2 changed almost nothing. Battle functions almost exactly the same, levelling up functions almost exactly the same. Dialogue and party management function almost exactly the same. World map travel functions almost exactly the same.

The only "innovation" DA2 featured was genuine branching relationship paths for party members, and if anyone thinks that was bad or "too much", then they're just wrong.

It's funny how it is possible for you to be wrong in every sentence.

It's actually quite true. The difference is mostly in "feel" from many small parts adding up to a greater whole - the systems themselves are almost exactly the same.

Differences in battle:
- Glancing blows instead of misses
- Faster walk speed
- Faster attack animations
- Added closing attacks

Differences in level up:
- Lists became trees
- Powers got upgrades
- Skills were cut

Differences in dialogue:
- Dialogue wheel instead of dialogue list
- Voiced protagonist instead of silent

Differences in party management:
- Helm/Torso/Legs parts of the inventory locked for companions

Differences in world map travel:
- Day/night cycle
- Uh... and the image in the background is of a city instead of a landscape? This is the exact same

So yeah, not a ton of differences in either of these to be honest. The similarities are vastly more numerous than the differences.

Modifié par KiddDaBeauty, 08 juillet 2012 - 10:24 .

[A Crusty Knight Of Colour]

Hope this thread makes BioWare and DA 2 fans/detractors stop describing the game as "innovative". One of my biggest pet peeves about the entire pro/anti DA 2 hubbub. Different, yes, but not innovative.

Modifié par CrustyBot, 08 juillet 2012 - 10:47 .

[Jerrybnsn]

I think that the new lead designers of the DA2 game wanted to set the game so far apart from Origins that they started making changes for change sake, and totally disregarded whether a new idea was an improvement or not. For example, instead of Love/Hate relationship, you get Friendship/Rivarly. To me these really didn't do anything change wise other than switch the two views from left to right on the menu.

[Wulfram]

I don't think the changes were huge, I think there was a lack of time to implement some of them properly

edit: Friendship/Rivalry was different from Approval/Disapproval, and an improvement.  Though confused implementation was a problem, since sometimes it was used as effectively Approval/Disapproval.

Modifié par Wulfram, 08 juillet 2012 - 10:58 .

[Jerrybnsn]

KiddDaBeauty wrote...

Differences in battle:
.................- Added closing attacks

You mean the cinematic cutscene to a boss battle?  Sometimes this wasn't a good thing if you were dead and someone else killed the boss, but lo' and behold, its Hawke putting the final death blow to the advesary just as it was scripted to!

What they got rid of from Origins was the cool finishing moves on any enemy, not just the bosses.

Modifié par Jerrybnsn, 08 juillet 2012 - 11:00 .