Alright, so I missed Nintendo's presentation this morning but caught most of Sony's. From what I've seen on the Nintendo side of things, some fairly good stuff was presented, two new Mario platformers, a new Metroid game set before the rest of the series, etc. I would say it was an average showing, nothing much caught my attention after Mario and Samus.
Sony had some neat things to show off, including a 256 man multiplayer Shooter called Mag. Nice to finally see a console developer realize that holding people to 10-16 man multiplayer matches in this day and age, when PC servers exist with hundreds of players and MMORPGs flourish, is aiming pretty low.
Watching Uncharted 2 made me wonder something that has occurred to me as I've watched E3. When did the shooter become the default genre for every game? Metroid? Shooter. Uncharted 2? Shooter. Alan Wake? It looks like a shooter.
When did every game suddenly require an automatic weapon?
2 comments:
Good question about the shooter default. I think that's really annoying--a lot of games have very good ideas that I think miss out on some great potential because it's much easier to essentially make an extensive mod of the Half-life or Unreal engine than to actually come up with something original.
But allowing 256 players--that's a good idea. See? The idea is to build on a concept--not just rehash the exact same thing over and over.
I'm still not particularly sold on MAG. 256 players would be great. Outstanding, even.... if and only if, all 256 players are organized and can stay organized, and seeing how hard it is to keep 8 players on a team in Halo organized, and how hard it is to keep 40 players on a raid in WoW organized, I anticipate the 128-player teams in MAG to be a giant charlie-foxtrot.
It certainly looked good on stage, 'cause it was all people on good connections and they were all organized because they got together, specifically, for the E3 onstage demo, and it looked fantastic. The thing is, then the game is actually out there and people are playing it, we're gonna see lag, 'cause people have differing internet connections, we're gonna see servers with less than 256 players, and most of all, we're gonna see people being disorganized, people going off, doing their own thing, and people neglecting essential roles just because being the sniper is so blasted cool or something like that.
MAG is a great concept, and I'll probably pick up the game, but I have little faith in what the online community for the game will be and, for a game that relies so much on its online community, if they're not immaculate, the game will be sub-optimal.
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