Bobbyaro wrote:
@ MetalAngel.
1) A number of PCgames come with design your own level stuff, look at the huge amount of HL2 stuff on Steam for example, Civ3, Oblivion, I think they have just becaome a bit harder to use, you almost need to be a games coder to use some of them.
That's perhaps the point - compare the HL2 editor and the amount of effort that you need to put into that (or my last effort of map editing which was Sudden Strike which took days and days and days) and the amount of effort it took to make a new level in, say, Repton.
Obviously the complexity of the games and the graphical environments is a huge factor in this - I suspect it would take far more effort to make a completely user-friendly drag and drop "done in 30 minutes" map editor for COD4 than it did to make the game.
Anyone remember Stunt Island though? A whole game based around spending ages desiging your own "levels" and then flying your plane through it and recording your stunt. Absolute awesomery.
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2) I think that we have just become used to the level of detail as standard. I am not sure about CoD weaponry, but any of the Rainbow Six games will be accurate, Clancy would ensure that is the case. And also, look at the Cars in Forza and GT, and the scenery in Call of Duty 4 is an almost perfect replica of
Prypiat.
However, look at a lot of the current flight "sims" and they're nothing of the sort. I can't think of a single accurate flight sim on a console, and the PC ones have been diverging rapidly between the completely spoddy and unusable (Falcon 4) and the "simplify it so much it may as well be an arcade game" (Comanche 4). And
that was 5 years ago.
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3) How much of this is to do with the longevity of the game, and how much is due to the concentration span of the average person. How many of the games in your collection have actually completed? I am pretty poor, at completing games, but on the other hand I have played CoD4 online for over 6* days, I played Morrowind for ages, and Oblivion also, and I still am. Although I haven't played it, I imagine GTA4 must be pretty large.
I completed so many of my old PC games - X-Wing and the expansions mentioned above being good examples. Also Theme Hospital, Ultima 7 Part 1 and Part 2, The Monkey Islands, Beneath A Steel Sky, Gunship 2000, System Shock, and so on. There were very few games I gave up on. Maybe that was because they were (relatively speaking) more expensive and so you'd be more inclined to get your money's worth. I remember paying £20 for B-17 Flying Fortress 15 years ago, for fuck's sake. That's, what, £50-£60 in today's money? I must have been minted.
I also played most of my BBC Micro games to death too - but with the massive availability of pirate copies I didn't feel
quite such a need to finish everything.