Agree with most of that.

There's a pretty good paralell here though - The Authority Vs The Combine.

A ton of thought goes into Valve's games as Kinn says, and its this love of their craft that is making them money hand over fist.

The mark of a good game is when you can tell the developers had fun making it. 

Maybe its that they used to be young guns full of passion and now they're middle aged men who have to worry about market penetration and 9 figure development costs. 

Those images have nothing to do with what you're gonna see in Doom4. When we officially show things you'll see awesome 

Reviewed Quantum of Solace (2008)http://www.etherealhell.com/etherealhell/reviews/2012/quantum_of_solace.php

6.5/10 typical average-ness. Next. 

I thought they were going to release downloadable content for the game. Or was that just the boring sewer monsters thingy ?

Good post, Starbuck #5599. 

"Maybe They Know Names Don't Actually Matter Much."

It's indicative of the care and skill of the designers. If they can't (or won't) come up with creative names for the factions in their games, how deeply thought out is the rest of it?

It's one of the tools you can use to measure how much the designers actually cared.

Gears has the Locust. Half-Life has the Combine. Good names help to cement your world and get the player to buy into it.

You can't argue that id didn't try because every dev video they released had at least 2 people telling the camera how awesome the story was and how deep the world went. They cared. They just couldn't do it. 

For the reasons Willem states.

Why bother thinking up cool enemies or balancing them properly if you can't be bothered to name them.

Naming things gives them a narrative. Without that they're cardboard cutouts.

I'd say the individually they definitely could do it, but as a corporate entity they couldn't.

Seems to sumup what everyone thinks of id nowadays. 

Have you played Doom or Quake by any chance? 

Meaning what, Spirit? You point is either that the names were bad then too (which I don't agree with) or that a 15+ year old game is a good benchmark of how a modern game should behave (which I also don't agree with).

Or something else? 

I'm going to suggest that coming up with interesting/evocative/unique names for things in a video game is not rocket science. I'm sure a QA intern could generate a page full of names more interesting than "The Authority" if they were asked.

So what's my point? My point is that if you've got the nouse to bang out a half-decent game (which id have) then I'm pretty sure they're capable of coming up with a semi-interesting name for a baddie if they wanted to.

Ergo, the assumption that the blandness of the names somehow reflects upon the quality of the gameplay design, is a flawed one.

There must be some deliberate reason for the bland names. Perhaps a nod to a sort of schlocky good guy/bad guy Wild West sort of vibe? Where keeping labels simple is part of the charm? Why call someone "The Bollock Mulcher" when you can call him "Bob" and let his bollock-mulching actions speak for him? 

Convened the 'naming of things and places' meeting.

This is comitee design at its worst - I bet the design team had tons of backstory, names and so on that was never approved.

It was left effectively blank because production don't care about story (in an FPS at least), they care about milestones.

It'd be nice / generous to believe it was a sly poke at video games conventions, but given the context of the game... nah.

Spirit, try and think before posting your retarded flamebait. Are you suggesting that Quake and Doom weren't evocative narratives?

I don't mean text printed on a screen (even though they had that as well) but interesting stories, starting with the names.

As simple as some of it was, I don't think anyone on this board didn't have their imagination captured by what was presented in Q1 at the very least. 

I don't know, maybe I am too detached from how the industry works. But I do not see how the story/setting relates too much to the gameplay.

ijed: I was suggesting that id games are not necessarily too focused on the story or names. On the other hand Doom 3 and Quake 4 their last games so I might have been a bit blind.

I absolutely agree that Rage was hurt by the bad narrative. But there are many games where the gameplay is shit but the story nice and vice-versa so I think any "if that one aspect was terrible then you can see how the rest must be shit" is just wrong. 

"I don't know, maybe I am too detached from how the industry works. But I do not see how the story/setting relates too much to the gameplay."

Immersion in the game world? That directly affects my enjoyment of a game. Rage doesn't draw me in because I'm confronted with "The Authority" and "The Resistance", and I'm immediately reminded that, "Oh, right, nobody gave a shit about the world". 

You guys should get this game, it's great and it doesn't have any stupid names in it!
Awesome little puzzle-platformer, one of the best I've played in a while. 

Guess I should link to the game...
http://store.steampowered.com/app/205690/ 

All this chat reminded me of this semi-controversial Gamasutra interview with Todd H. and Andy Chang, titled "Creative Intent"
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/6500/the_creative_intent_of_rage.php

Controversial because many people thought the interviewer was being rude and asking questions he shouldn't. Obviously that's bollocks and the interview is really quite tame. At least he holds the guys lightly to some of the shit they say, and tries to find out if there was any thought behind their creative decisions.

Re: the world: no, it doesn't look like they really thought about that. In fact, while i think they answered the broader gameplay questions okay, Todd and Andy didn't really represent a game with a real artistic direction or intent. It's apocalyptic because the tech can do it. It's orange because pop culture / why not. The bandits make sculptures and art because I don't know. These baddies have a British accent because gosh that's cool. 

Because I feel bad about sounding so negative, just it's a shame because there's some really awesome creative work in the game, for example some of the character designs are fantastic imo. Clearly there were people working on Rage who were passionate and hold degrees in kicking ass, but overall the end result didn't reflect that. 

Dead City in RAGE was more immersive than anything in any previous ID game. 

It sounds like I'm advocating RPG features in all games, or dialog trees or whatever - not at all.

All devs care about their work, even when in a company that doesn't, and there's always a ton of backstories and thought that goes into each game, just almost none of it that those in charge want to let out of the door.

As the big companies turn their focus from AAA to smaller games, episodic content and so on it'd be nice if the creative stranglehold was loosened a bit as well. 

Telling the story through the game is what I was driving at before - immersion.

'Collect 10 goblin pelts' tells me a story about dev laziness / managerial dictatorship, not the world.

Just playing through Bioshock for the first time now, and the theme is precise and well conceived. Everything in the world feels like it belongs there. 

"Dead City in RAGE was more immersive than anything in any previous ID game."

Dead City was definitely cool! It also has a proper name and was built up as a scary place in the game before you went. Immersion doesn't just happen, people. :) 

Dead City is a proper name? :P 

City 17! Gordon! Dog! With names so bland, it's obvious that Valve didn't give a shit about Half Life 2! 

Never mind. I forgot how obstinate this board can be. Fuck.

I apologize for questioning the almighty id. 

Gordon!

It's definitely a lot less bland than, say, Jack, though. When I see that name pop up too often as the main protagonist's name in games (or even film), I just feel sad that they couldn't just flip through a baby name book or do a simple google search to find a more interesting alternative.