ever heard of chrono cross?
__

maybe Im finding mindles shooting games boring cause I play dm online often and when it comes to slaying monster hords its just totally bleh - they dont even move much, dont have tactics, minimal use of environment cover required ..
just strafe-aim and no change of the pattern
its not that shooting is bad, just there needs to be something else

in PK atleast some foes needed different approach and the levels were not only open arenas. Still, not much variation or any involvment and 'bocked-out areas pregression' that makes halflife or quake look like nonlinear game 

Quake is a pretty non-linear game. A choice of 4 episodes that can be tackled in any order, and then within most maps there are often route choices and plenty of areas to explore. I'm still impressed when I got back and play the levels and see how many options you have as a player, compared to the games of these days. 

Yeah about that, I think what with how maps are becoming so much longer to create, most level designers just don't dare make too much content that many players might possibly just pass by without noticing (as in, areas to explores, proper secret areas, etc), cause it's not cost effective enough. And yeah, that is quite unfortunate... =(
I'd be curious in knowing if there is any precise design decision about what to do/not do with these kinds of things in popular FPS companies. 

esp notice romero maps (most of the ep2) 

One of the bosses at Rebellion (well, probably both to be fair) said that he didn't like the idea of extra routes because he thought players would just play through the games once, so any extra content would be wasted - and to him, money would be wasted.

To be fair, I doubt that many players would play through the likes of Dredd vs. Death even once - proably deciding they had purchased a stinker by the training level or thereabouts.

Anyway, when you are spending millions of dollars on making a game (slightly less at Rebellion, since they were able to save a lot of money on salaries) you don't really want to create content that isn't going to get seen. You want to make the bare minimum that will get the game reasonable reviews, pay magazines if they won't otherwise grade it well, and then market it a bit to get people to buy it. Then profit! (fingers crossed).

That's if you are a game company or publisher that sucks anyway. By that I mean strictly in a producing good games sense, not in the sense of making money for the bosses/shareholders, which is exactly the goal of any business.

With Quake, I think there were plenty of route choices and hidden rooms, but not that much where you can just skip massive chunks of the level (without trick-jumpery). Back then, it was easy to produce a fairly large amount of content for a game quickly, because there were less assets to create. These days it requires a lot more work to make secrets and extra routes, and hence a lot more money.

Look at HL2. 4 years in the making, and with a massive budget (I can only imagine) and the only secrets I remember were areas where you had to stack some crates to find an ammo clip*. Fucking awesome. Completely linear too. Still, that's hardly a reason not to buy it.

Imagine if Mario Sunshine had a pipe early on that took you to nearly the end of the game**... you don't see that sort of secret much anymore. These days games are judged heavily on how long they are, which I suppose is fair enough considering the cost of the average game. Some people will go on about how "Max Payne only took me 8 hours to finish. That was fucking lame!" and others will say "Shit, Final Fantasty 23 lasted for 56 hours before it was over." Really it is the quality of the experience that matters, not how long it was (within reasonable limits at least) but describing the quality is more difficult than stating the average length, so some games appear to make everything overly drawn out to keep players bashing away for hours upon hours until the game is finally finished - kind of like when you have to write an essay about something you know nothing about and it has to be 5,000 words long. You just pad it out with waffle.

*or lift some boxes over a gate with the grav gun.

**Actually, you could finish the game without seeing a lot of it. I think you just needed to finish 7/8 of the levels on each chapter, rather than complete each level. 

Just completed Doom 3. Thoughts:

Not even worth $20. Overrated. I knew not to expect much more than run and gun gameplay, but other such games haev stuck with me. Doom 3 just doesn't have that "keep" factor for me. I thought as a whole, it was a good game, but got boring too soon. I found myself going all out towards the later half because I just wanted to be done. The boss battles weren't so challenging either, at least once you figured out the trick to them.

Hell - bleh. It could have been done much more disturbingly (i.e. better). I did like some of the enemy animation. Running up to imp's and blasting them with the shotgun was fun. Trites were annoying. Cacodemons should've been much bigger. Hell Knight was fun to dodge and fight with. PDA scouring became annoying.

On top of that I don't really see any interesting mods out, either. I'd be interested in something that strays away from the base. Or if it retains the base, somewhere other than Mars. But whatever really, Doom 3 just isn't worth keeping. 

Anyway, when you are spending millions of dollars on making a game (slightly less at Rebellion, since they were able to save a lot of money on salaries)

LOL, you managed to get that very cutting without actually being rude... 

similar to cave story or the 2d metroids, in other words a game that can be completed in a few hours but has a lot of stuff adding replay value and since it doesn't require a lot of time to replay the player is more likely to do it.

I guess it might also be interesting to discuss the way developers spend their ever increasing budgets where the general tendecy seems to be to add people dedicated to making great gameplay enhancements such as burger and trashcan/bags props for that extra realism everyone wants... 

I thought it was good, but can't help but feel annoyed that it was far from as good as it could have been had id done a few things a little differently. My suggestions:

1. ditch the stupid mad scientist bullshit. Research going on, portal opens, satans minions start coming through and killing stuff. Why do you need more than that? The stupid betruger stuff just made the story feel b-movie and cheesy.
2. If you are going to make a horror game, try not to throw in too many stupid looking skeletons moving for no obvious reason followed by cheesy evil laughter. It isn't scary. Also, Hell was rather dissapointing, as it was pretty much exactly what everyone expects hell to look like. No original take on it or anything. Some cool visual touches in there, but nothing too special.
3. Don't save all the fun monsters right until the last 6 or so levels and leave all the boring imp/marine fighting for the levels beforehand.
4. More large monsters would have been nice.
5. The spider queen monster was shit.
6. The final boss was SO SHIT. Come the fuck on. They could have done so much more with that boss encounter. Why did they have to give THE Cyberdemon a gay looking tail?
7. I would have liked to have some more marines to fight alongside during the game, the same guys for a few levels, just so it feels like you are bonding with them, rather than them being faceless cannon fodder (with annoying floaty nametags) like in CoD. Fighting alongside the security bots was awesome whilst it lasted. Trying to escort the scientist was not awesome.
8. A bit more environment variety wouldn't have gone amiss.
9. Those crap invisible monsters could have been somthing more interesting.
10. I loved the end of the old e3 shakey cam footage when the hell knight eats the marines head. Why couldn't we have had that and more?
11. Then we have all the obvious gameplay improvements that people have beaten to death already.

It was fairly enjoyable, but I think I'm in the majority when I say it could have been so much better. 

9. Those crap invisible monsters could have been somthing more interesting.

Where? (Seriously :P) 

just make smaller 'sideways' or some alternate paths in parts of the map, it shouldnt drastically increase dev time but will enhance game experience

make it quake-non-linear, not real non-linear (like fallout or mororwind)

and don�t push player with those pesky npcs
that only pretend to be interactive
And don�t make unreachable areas that look like you could go there (HL2 had many of that, how many times had you stacked crates only to find there is clip all over the place?)

Or kind of HUB non-linear, where you need to complete all the parts, but have a choice what to do first. And hub being not just like start.bsp, but actually big map where you could do stuff (like a city in RPGs)

the bottom line: good game should have (some) freedom of choice and exploration (with reward) cause one of the reasons ppl play games is for 'being in another world' or as a sort of journey.
And it is worth spending dev money on, much more than modelling realistic trashcans.

Creating 'sense of place' and illusion of freedom of choice is worth much more than a futile attempts and mimicking reality

speaking of time - I dont want a game that takes long time to play (like some bloody RPGs) I have no time for those!
And I dont rush the games, I tend to look around alot and try to do different things

cybera: there is no way to beat supermetroid in 2hrs on the 1st try 

Speeds wrote: "speaking of time - I dont want a game that takes long time to play (like some bloody RPGs) I have no time for those!
And I dont rush the games, I tend to look around alot and try to do different things"

Couldn't agree more. Some games are just too hard-core time wise. A lot of Nintendo's major titles (Mario and Zelda games at least) take too long for me these days. I still play them, but I get a bit fed up with how much time they consume. At least the general experience in these games is good, and not some stupid random battle 500 times over 60 hours CRAP with fancy cg cutscenes and beautiful backdrops that probably consumed about 500 times more production time than the rest of the game added together. Basically, I hate most japanese rpgs...

Deus Ex... that's an RPG (role playing game - not stat building game).

Sometimes I find it amazing that people play WoW so much, but I guess that with online games there are other people to talk to, so it's ok. SP rpgs though... ffs. Can all this repetetive shit and let me feel like I have some part in the story, rather than just feeling like I am advancing a pre-determined story by completing tedious menu driven magic based random battles. 

On the subject of game length, I couldn't possibly disagree more. Games are becoming shorter and shorter whilst their price remains the same. Most new PC/console games cost 50-60 euro around here. If I am getting less than 20 hours of gameplay for that amount of money, I feel completely ripped off.

Many of these games are suffering the "Max Payne syndroma" (which I beat in less than 8 hours, loving every minute of it, never to touch it again). HL2 was another such case, was it a great game? Hell yeah. Was it worth 50 euro? FUCK NO. Pretty short, completely linear gameplay, zero replayability value and STEAM annoys the fuck out of me. I do admit that custom content and mods make HL2 worth the money, but "on it's own" it definately is not, hell it didn't even ship with a multiplayer mode.

I have this theory on why this is happening. Publishers want to increase sales, revenues and profits (like any normal business would). The problem is that the amount of people who buy computer games doesn't grow as fast as they'd like to. So in order to sustain continuous growth, they have to change the games to make them appeal to a broader casual gamer audience who want the games to be short (because many of them dont have a big attention span) and easy to get into (require little to no time to learn).

I am all for there being more PC and console gamers on this planet, but if that comes at the cost of game length and depth with the price remaining the same, I am pissed off big time.

Than:

Sometimes I find it amazing that people play WoW so much, but I guess that with online games there are other people to talk to, so it's ok. SP rpgs though... ffs. Can all this repetetive shit and let me feel like I have some part in the story, rather than just feeling like I am advancing a pre-determined story by completing tedious menu driven magic based random battles.

I am guessing you haven't played Morrowind? 

...I agree with, good ideas there. Not much to add except some approving nodding.

Jago....firstly if you are spending 50-60 E on a game you need to discover the joys of internet mail order. I don't think I've spent more than 40 E on a game in the last 3 years (and often a lot less when they aren't latest release games) - and the UK ain't exactly bargain bin. Secondly, you really think you are getting short changed if a game is under 20 hours? Say I spend �25 on a game and it lasts 15 hours, that's �1.60 per hour for what is likely to be jolly good entertainment. Cheaper than a lot of things. And many games offer more than that in terms of longetivity. 

Obviously �1.60 per hour is a decent deal, but it's not as good as I am used to. Why should I be queitly accepting the "inflation" of game hours per money unit? 

no inflation. about 10 hours is a standard for pc fps. rpg s are much longer of cource . dont compare them. hl 2 was proper length , it had CS included too :) 

no inflation. about 10 hours is a standard for pc fps. rpg s are much longer of cource . dont compare them. hl 2 was proper length , it had CS included too :) 

I don't think I ever wrote anything about super metroid being beatable in two hours on the first run but in any case it's shorter than your average sp game and at least metroid zero mission was really short. My point was that this doesn't have to be bad as long as it's good enough and have new challenges to offer like improving your time or finding all items. When you can play through a game in one evening you're far more likely to replay at least a couple of times and then ending up with a total playing time of a longer game you can't be bothered to replay a second time. 

I don't think I ever wrote anything about super metroid being beatable in two hours on the first run but in any case it's shorter than your average sp game

I don't think you and I have played the same Super Metroid. Metroid Zero Mission was kinda short, but Super Metroid was BIG. 

than: yeah, I dont dig j-rpgs for similar reasons. In chorno trigger it was done much better but it didnt get nearly as popular as FF, surprisingly ;/

bear: I would say, its better to have a (rather) short but quality game that has some depth and thus replayable,

rather than lengthy good game that just drags on, using repetitive sections, random-generated missions, locking player and swarming him (hi ssam) and other low-cost methods of prolonging the play time (that just make a game dull).

If the game is good and I like it - I dont mind it being short, I will replay it (on harder mode, in somewhat different way). And if the game is not my bag of shit, I jsut dont care if its long or not. I flush it after few playing sessions

But one evening (like 2-3 hrs?) I dont know, that sounds like a speedrun to me. For example you could beat fallout really fast, but that's skipping even large chunk of the main quest.

What I like, is when you can play any level of a game on its own if you just want a quick blast (loading map from a console for example, and getting all the needed items there) 

Like speeds says, the length of a game is not really relevant, it's how much you play it that counts, and that includes replayability, multiplayer etc. I also think that the right price is important. All games aren't equal. I don't think charging 30 quid for an old snes game converted to GBA is fair, and if I had know how much I would get from Quake, I would probably have been prepared to pay a LOT more for it.

I seriously didn't mind how short MP2 was. I replayed it on all the skill levels (but gave up on new york minute because by that time I was a bit bored). Then again, I'll admit that I just played a copy at work, rather than buying it myself. 

and if I had know how much I would get from Quake, I would probably have been prepared to pay a LOT more for it

If I had known how much fun I would be getting from Quake and the metric shitload of custom content made for it, I would've probably been ready to pay 200 euro for the game, if not more. 

At the rate of �1.50 p / hour as we mentioned before, say 2 E p / hour.....I'd be looking at paying 5000 E ? Or more? 

If I was being charged by the hour for quake, I probably wouldn't have played as much. Thank god id isn't Microsoft, who seem to want to move all the Office apps to an online subscription model, where you don't ever own the software and have to keep paying to keep using. 

NFS most wanted

Man, this game looks great. Awesome detailed cars (and not just asian ricers, you get real supercars now)
Very impressive seamless large city that runs without lags. Many destroyable objects and shortcuts/different routes.
The post processing is rather nice (excessive bloom but you can turn it down) Motion blur is a bit too strong (and you cant switch it!)

Cop mode is well done and reminds carmageddon, rather than racing game. And you have the whole city to fight the cops in!

But the normal racing is rather boring due to easy rubberband ai - computer cars slow down to let you catchup or run as fast as you if you are doing great (stil too easy).
You can even use slowest car in career mode and win no problem beating much better cars
(well, about 10th spot on the list you would have to use better car, cause some tasks, like speedcheck and racing against time become more demanding).

I dont like rubberband ai\dynamic difficulty change for apparent reasons, esp done so blantantly and being so easy like in this game. Caring for the console 'casuals' eh?
nfs underground 1 ai was done better (and more challanging too).
Too bad there is no difficulty settings in NFS MW and 'catchup' is switchable only in custom races :(