Hey, look at this tiresome bullshit! Even BHC is already bored.

BabyHeadCrab said:
Keeping in mind, DotA 2 hasn't launched yet, but it won't instantly get people past the volatile community, chunkiness of Source and ridiculous amount of competition in battle arenas.
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You sure know a lot about a game you've barely played. The community is no more volatile than any other competitive scene. I'm not sure what you mean by chunkiness, because the game is very smooth and doesn't even feel like a source game. And by 'competition in battle arenas' do you mean other MOBAs? Dota 2 is going to maintain its position in the top or near-top of popularity simply because it's free and has arguably the best meta, and it's development is run by Valve who are arguably one of the greatest game devs, who also own the biggest game platform.
 
Top or near-top of popularity
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Dota 2 peak concurrent player count record: 297k, as of March 4th 2013
LoL peak concurrent player count record: 5m, as of March 16th 2013
 
Alright I stretched it on the DotA shit because I heard from some MOBA obsessed friends in real life that the game isn't being received well by the pro circuit. Maybe I was wrong, sorry folks!
 
BabyHeadCrab said:
Ubisoft has more original IPs, functional ports
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1255154806980.gif



I've never had more trouble with ports than from Ubisoft games. Maybe its changed recently, but the horrors of Blazing Angles is still burned into my brain. I have tried to avoid Ubi ports since.

Far Cry 3 was okay in terms of functionality, still felt consoly though.
 
For me its that Ubisoft always seem to release games that could so easily be awesome if not for one small thing that completely ruins it. It's like buying a gigantic delicious cake only to have a bird swoop down and drop a dead rat onto it. They have the potential to be great yet insist on shooting themselves in the foot each and every time.

As for Valve. Right now the only projects that we can really base any opinion off of are DOTA 2 and the hardware experiments. So its pretty hard to make any real predictions about the distant future until we see where they go next.

What baffles me about the top end industry as a whole is where the money goes and what the staff do all day. There was a rumour this week that the latest Assassin's Creed has a team of 1000 people working on it. What could any game developer possibly be doing with all those man hours? How is it that a team of 1-10 people manage to release something fresh and engaging while a team of 1000 basically create an expansion to an existing idea.

Sometimes I wonder what a company like ID Software does all day. They somehow remain in business despite releasing one fairly forgettable game each decade (recently anyway). The only answer I can think of is that they became so successful back in the 90s that they can basically afford to sit around amusing themselves year after year without ever having to worry about the stress of maintaining their image.

The same applies to Valve's internal development. They simply have no pressure to release finished products as often as a publisher owned company. Which leaves a catch-22 situation from the customer perspective. Either a company releases something cheap and unsatisfying every year and we complain about the sausage factory, or we get one game every 6 years and complain about the glacial boredom of it all.
 
Lobster said:
What baffles me about the top end industry as a whole is where the money goes and what the staff do all day. There was a rumour this week that the latest Assassin's Creed has a team of 1000 people working on it. What could any game developer possibly be doing with all those man hours? How is it that a team of 1-10 people manage to release something fresh and engaging while a team of 1000 basically create an expansion to an existing idea.
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You must have no concept of how complex of a game Assassin's Creed is and how much content is in there. A thousand people is perfectly believable to me. However, you should know that that number isn't going to be full time employees working. There's a lot, A LOT of freelancing done in this industry, and partnerships between studios all working on the same project. There are companies that only employ artists for instance, and they are simply given contract work. They may have 20 people working on one project for a week, then next week they're working on another project for another company, but they'll all be credited (as either individuals or under the company name). The amount of art needed in a game like AssCreed is astronomical, so there was probably a metric shit ton of this sort of work going on in order to get it done in a reasonable timeframe.
 
Krynn72 said:
You must have no concept of how complex of a game Assassin's Creed is and how much content is in there. A thousand people is perfectly believable to me. However, you should know that that number isn't going to be full time employees working. There's a lot, A LOT of freelancing done in this industry, and partnerships between studios all working on the same project. There are companies that only employ artists for instance, and they are simply given contract work. They may have 20 people working on one project for a week, then next week they're working on another project for another company, but they'll all be credited (as either individuals or under the company name). The amount of art needed in a game like AssCreed is astronomical, so there was probably a metric shit ton of this sort of work going on in order to get it done in a reasonable timeframe.
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I'm sure you're right. It just seems crazy to me sometimes that so much work goes into something that (from the perspective of the company) only needs to see them through the next twelve months. Where as a tiny fraction of the people can create something far smaller that can receive praise and attention for years.

Obviously the same thing is true of the movie industry. The big budget summer blockbuster is fairly disposable compared to the independent artistic darling.

I guess its hard to figure out in my head where the real power of success springs from in game development. A new idea can become a massive hit with a single programmer behind it. Where as a fairly old idea does just as well with enough cash thrown at it.

EDIT: Meh. Maybe I am just sick of Assassin's Creed.
 
You should go watch the developers commentary for Portal 2 if you haven't. I found it astounding the amount of time and effort that went into the first five minutes of that game, when at the end of the day, it was for a moment that lasted five minutes.
 
Krynn72 said:
*snip, Krynn's sassy insufferable tumblr style gif*


I've never had more trouble with ports than from Ubisoft games. Maybe its changed recently, but the horrors of Blazing Angles is still burned into my brain. I have tried to avoid Ubi ports since.

Far Cry 3 was okay in terms of functionality, still felt consoly though.
Click to expand...

They really have mended things quite well. uPlay has an offline mode, the AC / Farcry / Clancy games operate well on almost all of my friend's machines. I'm not talking historically here. In fact, my agenda in the article quite clearly states I'm reflecting on the present and more importantly, the future.
 
MFL said:
Dota 2 peak concurrent player count record: 297k, as of March 4th 2013
LoL peak concurrent player count record: 5m, as of March 16th 2013
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Right, because that's a fair comparison. Dota 2 is much newer and isn't even finished. Besides, how is being #2 not 'near top'? And do you really think Valve considers LoL to be a huge threat? They're already raking in the cash from the game through cosmetic purchases and it's not even out yet. It's the most played game on Steam by miles. BHC stating Dota 2 has "ridiculous amounts of competition" is just false, the game has already shown it's not going to drown.
 
Holy defensive, Marie, I like the game too.
 
We weren't arguing about whether either of us like the game but ok.
 
We were arguing about Dota 2 as regards its popularity. That's the only aspect we were arguing. Whether or not Dota 2 is top or "near top". It isn't. What isn't fair in an argument on popularity is saying that a relative position of a game in a ladder of like games is important, supposing that the distance between those two slots is separated by a factor of twenty or so.
 
It kind of is important. That's how competition works. The MOBA scene is not crowded, and that means a lot. If there are no games in between #1 and #2, then people are going to at least know about both games regardless of how small a fraction #2 is. Dota 2 has 6% of the number of players LoL has according to the stats. But is 6% really an accurate fraction to compare the games by? Nobody who has heard of LoL, or any MOBA, hasn't heard of Dota 2. Hell, I'm sure when LoL first started, people were making the same comparisons to Dota 1 (though they probably didn't have stats to back it up). Valve trying to launch Dota 2 into the MOBA scene which has only a few games in it, by using the most popular PC gaming distribution platform, is a very safe move and they're going to be successful with it.

This is why I refuted what BHC said. Anything beyond that is a strawman from you, because obviously if you just look at the hard numbers Dota 2 is quite small in comparison to a game that has had years to grow.

Edit: To further explain my point about relative popularity in a very small selection of choices, look at OSes. Macs have a VERY small portion of the pie vs. Windows OSs, but would you call Macs unpopular? Hell no. They do not hurt each-other's popularity, they can both thrive on their own. And so it is with LoL and Dota 2. Linux is even more microscopic compared to Windows, but that still only puts it at #3, and nobody would call Linux a failed OS. It's as popular as it needs to be for everyone to know about it, despite having a ridiculously small percentage when compared to the whole market.
 
I'm willing to give Dota 2 a few years to try and catch up.
 
Keep in mind, this debate began and will never leave the realm of speculation until the time comes and this thread is long forgotten. Only time will tell if DotA 2 becomes a big name in what we now call E-Sports.

DotA 2 could remain moderately popular, or, it could become a big name in E-sports hell, it could even transcend chess and football and organized religion. There isn't enough data - and yes, I've read all of your posts.

...and no I don't expect you to have read mine.
 
MASSIVE SUBJECTIVITY ALERT: As someone who watches pro Dota matches daily, I am confident that the scene is going nowhere but up. It's been slowly exploding ever since The International 2. I think the finals for the G-League, the most recent "big" tournament, drew nearly 80,000 spectators across English livestreams - and this is with the tournament being held in China, and the finals themselves happening over two months after the semi-finals. Time will tell if it ever surpasses League, but it will certainly be competitive, and I can see it being even bigger than Starcraft once it's truly accessible to the public.
 
BabyHeadCrab said:
Keep in mind, this debate began and will never leave the realm of speculation until the time comes and this thread is long forgotten. Only time will tell if DotA 2 becomes a big name in what we now call E-Sports.
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The biggest multi-game events generally have, what? 6-10 games at most? Dota 2 has been included in Dreamhack, WCG and ESWC in 2012.
The only reason was not part of MLG is because of an exclusivity contract with LoL thus far (rumored to be ended and Dota 2 included in 2013)

Dota 2 already a big name in E-Sports. You're simply wrong when you say we'll "never know" until we've forgotten about you talking nonsense in this thread.
 
I don't think it's fair to say that Dota 2 will be "drowned" but I also don't think it's fair to even put it in the same league as LoL (no pun intended). As soon as it is finished it will be fair to assume that Dota 2 will become as popular as LoL but until then it is a bit of a "never know" situation. Of course it will be "popular," it says Valve on it, but whether or not it is mainstream is a gamble. Yeah it is already getting huge but LoL is just getting bigger and better too.

I have high hopes that they will add almost double the content they have now before they release it. In that case it will be hard for any gamer to not at least give it a try. I really do have my fingers crossed that more people start to switch from LoL. Not only because of the quality of game but the ethics that Valve holds as a company in comparison to the Tencent owned Riot.
 
So what I gleaned from skimming the massive text walls in this thread: FPS as a genre is dying of lack of imagination. Good to know.
 
<RJMC> said:
I remenber when people was so excited about battlefield 3.....
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Isn't it funny here in 2011 so many then hl2.netter's said it was the most exciting point since the release of HL2 in 2004. The amount of hype EA put into it as the true sucessor to BF2 then last few months it was "COD killer" then it was "Michael Bay lens flare teal and orange eye cancer" during the final release.

God damnit I feel ****ing naucious and light headed every time I look at that BF4 art work, and it's just because of the colors.
 
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