*TWO PEOPLE* created (most of) this game?!?

[Kristoffer O]

Some of them. Not the sk�gu eat kirke one atm. But I suppose I could make it common, so that no one keeps them together.

Sk�gu got himself some more events. I think I'm biased towards him

Also made some events activated by Ceremonial masters and Ministers of rituals interpreting the calendars properly. More likely to appear.

[Archonsod]

CUnknown said:
I really think that "too many cooks spoil the broth" is dead accurate. If you have one or two guys with a clear picture of the game they would like to see and the desire to work like crazy to make it a reality, you end up with the best games.

Even in huge teams there's usually only one or two people in charge of the game design. Everyone else is employed in making all those detailed textures and spangly effects, or just code crunching.
The problem isn't overengineering, but mass marketing. The bigger developers aren't interested in making a game like Dominions which will sell to a select small audience, they'd rather sell to the mass market, which means appealing to the lowest common denominator, which means compromise and dilution of otherwise solid ideas in the hopes of drawing in a larger audience.

It seems to me that in the 70s and 80s you had the one or two guys in their basement making awesome games, then you had the 90s where the game industry "matured", people were working in small groups, and in the early part of that period is where you find like 90% of the creativity of all the mass-marketed games that have been produced ever since.

Not really, the situation was just as bad before the mid 80's crash. You had the giants like Taito and their peers in the 70's seeing huge success in the Arcade and then new home - computer market. Funnily enough, people got tired of bland, generic games with mass market appeal, stopped buying them and the whole house of cards came tumbling down. Then you got bedroom coders who gained success, formed companies, started looking for mass appeal ....

Just hope Illwinter survives the crash of 2010

Oh, I forgot Alone in the Dark which I believe inspired the Resident Evil series and the action/horror style genre.

Inspired Resi Evil, but wasn't the first action/survival horror game by a long shot.

Also Street Fighter which inspired basically all the fighting games, although that was a little earlier in the late 80s.

Street Fighter 1 was around 86 IIRC, and shamelessly ripped off a number of fighting games which had went before (Yie Ar Kung Fu being a notable example).
Taking a look at IGNs list of the top 100 computer games (the one made in 2005), I count 40 of them being from the period between 1989-1995, and that doesn't include Civilization II (1996). Civ I wasn't on the list. I suppose Civ II may have been a better game, but I still think the credit belongs to the trailblazer, not the sequal.

Also, that number would be a lot higher if we included any game defined mainly by a genre created by one of those 40. I think it would include just about all of them in that case.

I apparently have too much time on my hands today.

[/quote]

[Wahnsinniger]

Archonsod said:
Just hope Illwinter survives the crash of 2010

I'm not going to predicate that such a thing will happen, but there is some truth to that. This mostly applies to consoles, which hardware advancement has been slowing down over time (PS2's still sell better than PS3's. The PS3 is a fantastic piece of hardware, but relative to previous generations?...). Eventually, you can only make so-much improvement to 3D-prettiness. Plenty of genre's and themes are getting worn out: WWII has been beaten to death; Too many First-Person Shooters seem like every other FPS; etc. Couple those with the skyrocketing development costs for mass-market games, and one would suspect that something 'has to give' sooner or later.

Actually thats another reason the Nintendo Wii is so cool; by exploring such new-areas of gameplay, it could theoritically prevent such a "video game recession" cycle from happening. This doesn't really apply to computer gaming, which mass-market has been slowing going downhill compared to consoles(Though WoW sure has given it a shot in the arm).

Note: My mentions of PS2, PS3, and Wii are merely observations and not meant to spark any potential fanboy arguement.

*cough*Wii

[Archonsod]

Console wise I think the problem is the cost of the basic unit. As the prices for the console themselves rise, people's expectations go up, yet the games remain the same (once you get over the shiny graphics effect).

I don't think we'll ever see a crash to the same extent on the PC again though. Most people don't own a PC for gaming, they own it for the internet, work or similar. Gaming (for the majority anyway) is simply an added bonus.

[Lazy_Perfectionist]

Whatever other problems they may have, Nintendo's been rather smart about pricing. They didn't release the GBA, for instance, until they could get it out with an original retail price of $80.

I hear that on the wii manufacturing costs, they have a profit margin of around $40. That number's by autopsy, though, and doesn't consider overhead, just parts.

Edit:
As Archonsod said, I don't expect will see a big computer crash. At least in the gaming market. For instance, with ATI joining up with AMD, they're coming up with a new standard of integrated graphics - and even the intel its not quite the joke it used to be, not to mention what's been available on mobos (but often overlooked by manufacturers such as Dell).

That said, retail's on its way to a grisly demise. A CompUsa employee told me that they reshelve the PC games maybe once a month, or get in new stock they put up. I'm not sure how serious and how joking they are, but it actually feels plausible from my browsing experiences. And GameStops gobbling up stores and has managed to shrink its one shelf of PC games down even further. I'm not sure they're even trying to capture that part of the market. Those are also the only two concrete ('brick and mortar', but we're in florida, where everythings built from concrete) stores in my area. For crying out loud, Target competes with EBGames.