rpanons | Okay

Rundown:

rpanons is an anonymous community for role-play related topics. This place serves as a forum for game discussions, canon discussions, RP solicitations (ATP, game ads, open memes), and advice. The occasional off topic comment is inevitable, but please keep heated social and political topics to their respective communities. Posting them here will only get them frozen. Subsequent threads made to bypass a freeze will then be deleted.

Rules:

Do not post pornographic or shocking images.
Do not share private entries, plurks, chat logs, etc.
Do not use this community as your social/political/hatespeech soapbox.
Do not be redundant. One page does not need three or more threads on one topic/theme.
Do not treat this comm like your personal Plurk or Twitter. Off-topic happens, but it should be open for discussion and not just a play-by-play of your life. No one cares.

CONCERNS | RESOURCES

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I think you've gotten it partly right, but a big thing is that they simply couldn't make a game "like the old ones".

Changing your game to appeal to the mass market is one part of it, but the fact is that the development environment of 2014 is very different from that of 1998. Modern games have to be streamlined and accessible or they'll be rejected by the market. Gone are the days where key information was in the instruction manual: now in-game tutorials and hand-holding is the standard. Games in 1998 were more concerned about creating worlds (and all of the annoying realism that goes with them); 2014 games are more about being forms of entertainment.

It is entirely possible to update a game to modern standards while also keeping the original appeal. Dishonored arguably made for a better Thief reboot than the actual Thief reboot. Deus Ex: Human Revolution was also an amazing example of creating a modern instalment of a stealth game that is true to the original while blowing out all of the cobwebs.

tl;dr don't say "they shouldn't have tried to update it", say "they should have tried to update it well".

It's also a high-profile reboot of a classic title, so executive meddling and development hell was almost certainly involved at points. That, more than anything else, is probably what's responsible for Garrett's muddled personality. Far be it for me to start listing all of the things that they could have or should have done without knowing the details and circumstances of the development process. Personally I would have made it more like an open-world game ala Assassin's Creed and allowed you to break into as many NPC homes as possible, but who knows how much that would have cost in money and manpower.

Okay

no subject