TheDorkProject on 24/11/2003 at 19:32

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When I first heard that DX2 and T3 were going to be XBox games, I was damn furious. I remember at one point, it sounded like they would be X-CLUSIVE! that was when I was most mad.

When it was announced that they would still come out on PC (I still think that may not have been the plan prior to the outrage from us, the fans) this made me feel better, but I was still rather apprehensive about the whole dual-development concept, because I feared it would inevitably lead to dumbing down and the games falling short of what they could, and should rightfully be.

Well, I got the DX2 demo like, the day before yesterday and have gone through it a few times now. I regret to say that my fears have been confirmed to a great degree.

But I don't want to be all apocolyptic or anything. I just got done watching the Thief 3 gameplay videos for the first time, and I came away quite impressed indeed. I even thought the gear menu was kinda cool. Only thing I didn't like was the super glowing doors and stuff. I wish they'd implement Garrett's hand coming out and opening doors, and/or grabbing loot. That would be cool. In a fast paced game, that might be annoying but Thief is slow enough and sneaky enough I think people would tolerate waiting an extra milasecond for the hand animation to complete or whatever. It'd be cool.

I mean, the guards did seem to be having a lot of trouble seeing him, and the sword or blade or whatever, didn't really seem to be there... but I chalked these things up to what must be just, an early build type syndrome.

I think Thief 3 looks like it's going to be very cool.

But in the end, I think both of these games are going to hit the PC feeling distinctly like ports from XBox. They kept telling us they would be giving equal focus to us, and making sure the PC versions were great in their own right. Well, it just doesn't really feel like that's what they've done, it feels like their primary (and nearly ONLY) concern was making it work for the XBox, and we really became sloppy seconds.

Which is rather puzzling seeing as how the sales generated on Deus Ex 1, and Thief 1 and 2, the very sales that justified these new entries in the series to begin with... were NOT sales generated on console platforms. Yea I know the first Deus Ex was released on PlayStation 2, right? But I certainly did not get the impression that it sold very much on there, did it?

It was we, the PC gamers... WE who generated the sales to justify these new entries in the series.

But perhaps the dynamic between Ion Storm and Eidos is such that, Eidos was very disappointed in the sales of both previous Thief games, AND in the first Deus Ex, both on PC and PS2. Maybe it was this huge ordeal for Ion Storm to even convince them to let them try these series one more time, telling Eidos "please, these are good intellectual properties... we can get good sales out of them, just give us one more chance"

and maybe the only way these games were going to get made at all, was for a scenario to play out like that which has, Eidos saying "Okay fine, but they're going to be on XBox" - maybe the guys at Ion Storm have fought tooth and nail every step of the way to give us as much as they could.

Maybe even getting Eidos to allow there to BE a PC version AT ALL was a huge battle, maybe another huge battle after that was getting permission to develope that PC version along side, rather than just port it after.

Maybe Ion Storm has been a brave and noble aspect to this, doing everything they could to give us as much as they could, and keep the two games as much like the previous ones as possible, all the while forced to pretend like they like these dumbing-down changes, because their jobs depend on it.

If that's the case, I salute them and I'll be the first to say that the games we're getting, are FAR better than not getting a Deus Ex 2 or Thief 3 at all. And I even think they look like they're going to be pretty damn good honestly!

But if that is the case, does that mean we should shut up and quit whining? I think not, because secretly I bet you the guys at Ion Storm use our whining as a tool, as leverage (to whatever small degree it functions as such) in debates with Eidos. It may be the fact that they could point at these boards, and the outrage contained within back when it sounded like the two games were X-Clusive, that allowed them to get PC versions going at all! Who knows?

So let's keep the whining rolling. I do feel bad to be brow-beating guys we love so much who are doing such great work. But, I think it's in their best interest, and in ours.

I hope they never lose sight of how much we do indeed appreciate them and their efforts.

And in the alternate scenario where maybe they have been totally complicit and just as guilty of greedy selling-out as Eidos or Microsoft themselves, then they suck! :)

TheDorkProject on 24/11/2003 at 20:31

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A better comparison would be the current petition about Saruman's scenes being extracted from Return of the King.

JonahFalcon on 24/11/2003 at 22:09

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OH! So you've seen a real mechanical nanite? They're not talking about a biological organism -- and by the way, nice try, but nanites refer to nanometer machines.

By the way, ask Futurama fans how well the online petition works.

PS. I'm not adding my email to something that will be used for marketing purposes -- or did you read the disclaimers of onlinepetition?

Gingerbread Man on 24/11/2003 at 22:43

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Dude, do you not understand what nanotech is? Nice try on you. At a molecular level there is absolutely no difference between a "machine" and a "biological organism"

None.

deranger on 25/11/2003 at 03:08

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This game is a console port. If it came out for the PC 6 months prior to the Xbox version, it wouldnt change the fact that this game is a console port. Here is a relavent quote taken from the board at bluesnews.

"Matt Baer: Well, Deus Ex was conceived as a PC game with no intention of heading to a console. But we decided to do a PS2 version of the game, and it was obvious that this was going to be no small task. For one thing, PCs generally have much more memory than consoles. So, we had to optimize our systems and content to fit in a very small memory footprint. Then, we had performance problems. We had to do a lot of custom coding in order to really tap into the power of the console. And finally, the interface was a huge issue. Consoles really force you to think about your interface and make it as streamlined as possible, otherwise your game suffers dramatically. We pretty much had to throw out the PC interface and come up with something entirely new.

So, when we started working on Invisible War, we targeted the console from day one. This time it wasn't an afterthought. Every decision we made along the way considered that we would be running on a console. And I think you'll notice the difference."


source (http://rpgvault.ign.com/articles/440/440693p1.html)