Enjoy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yKv45X_OIo

Rebel Assault II already had speeder-bikes!

Endor speeder bike chases with realistic tree density? Yes, please.

In Rebel Assault II, the speeder bike level is on a planet called Imdaar.

What's with these behind-the-scenes clips. They could have show these any other time than E3.

It'll be pooped out onto the market eight months early and unfinished in order to satisfy an insecure empire-building junior executive's arbitrary schedule. Between Origin and incompetently budgeted infrastructure build-out you won't be able to play it at all for the first week, and after four months nobody will be playing it at all. The servers will get shut down after a year and it'll sit there in your library for eternity, a big useless wart, because if there's any amount of singleplayer it won't be worth talking about.

But if they hadn't shipped a debug build it would have looked gorgeous.

And before anybody complains about me being negative about First Actual Star Wars Game This Decade, half of ^ is the last DICE game and the other half is the last Battlefront game.

BF4 was unfinished?

[I never even gave it the time of day.]

Battlefield 1942 was an interesting (and often amusing) game. Kind of glitchy, though.

Never played BF2, though.

Unfinished = buggy as hell. The release was a train wreck, like a lot of big budget games these days.
I played 1942, but most of my MP time ws spent in Vietnam, BF2 and BF3. BF3 was a sign of the direction they were taking with Origin and the stupid as **** web-based launcher.

Origin? No thanks...

Are you listening, EA? I'll buy it if you release a DRM-free version of the game. Not otherwise.


Actually, what am I thinking? It'll be a cold day in hell before I buy an EA game. The only thing that could make me possibly consider it is a true sequel to TIE Fighter. And let's face it — EA does not command the competence to make a game as cerebral as TIE Fighter.

The people who played TIE Fighter when it was new (and appreciate its level of immersion, polish, and attention to detail) now make a tiny fraction of the gaming market. This July, TIE Fighter will be exactly 20 years old. I doubt most of the people who played TIE Fighter even play games anymore. I should know, being one of them.

To make a big budget game, you have to have a big audience. The average gamer doesn't care about the things we care about.

I can't speak from personal experience (I only played Morrowind), but TES series just might be a case study in the ways a game is inevitably dumbed down in order to reach a larger audience.

You simply cannot appeal to a wide audience if your game requires too much thought.

TIE Fighter is about the last phrase that comes to mind in association with the word EA. When I think of EA I imagine things like Madden football and Need for Speed.

Skyrim is a better game than Oblivion.

The only way they've meaningfully dumbed down that series was making the world scale with you. The main consequence of which is that you can't cheese the game by stealing the sword of plus infinity radness ten minutes in, which actually in a lot of ways makes the game less dumbed down.

There's just as much of a market for cerebral games as there ever has been. That market is still there, and you'll net a lot of people who missed it all the first time around. What there isn't a market for is cerebral businessmen.

Edit: Dark Souls sold 2.4 million copies, firmly in the upper end of the long tail. Believe me, the consumers aren't the problem here.

Thanks, Jon. I'm happy to be wrong (and I was only speculating).

Perhaps sometime you might oblige and offer suggestions of games that exist today that a disillusioned Morrowind / TIE Fighter / etc. fan might enjoy?

Of all the games that have come out since I generally stopped playing circa 2004, one game I've heard that's worth playing is Portal. I'm told it's innovative and unique, and is over quickly (in other words, worth the trouble).

I'd heard that the series was dumbed down in a Youtube video. The guy did like Skyrim better than Oblivion.

One thing he seems to hate a lot in the last two games is 'quest markers'. The claim here is that the game journal doesn't tell you enough about your next goal, so that you are dependent on just following arrows that tell you where to go (as opposed to exploring on your own). Maybe this related to what you referred to as "making the world scale with you".

The video for reference. (Probably not very relevant or worth watching, though.)

2004? That's going to be quite a list. I don't really play games that much anymore either, but there have been a bunch of AAA games since then that weren't tremendously stupid.

- Portal, definitely. It's very short and somewhat actiony, but it's a full-fledged puzzle game. Portal 2 also has co-op puzzle solving, the main challenge of which is getting the other person to do what you want.
- The original Katamari Damacy. Fun, light puzzle game. Lots of people (including me) thought it was gonna turn out to be the Tetris of our generation, but that... er, didn't happen. If you can find the original, get it. Can't speak for the sequels.
- Skyrim, too, despite the raeg. Lots of love for continuous, open-world games that reward memorization, patience, and a good sense of direction: Dark Souls, Borderlands series, the Metroid Prime series.
- Final Fantasy XII. Whole lotta people hate this game, but you know what? Continuous, open-world, and you control your AI companions by programming them with a simple scripting language.
- Tales of the Abyss (PS2) has the trappings of a cliched JRPG, but it has a deep real-time combat system and supports four players with a multitap.
- Shadow of the Colossus is art. I couldn't really get into it, but it's definitely art.
- X3: Reunion. Space combat simulator, open-world. This was way, way, way too grognard even for me to get into. Apparently you can build an interstellar trade empire and script your freighters and factories to ferry goods between planets, or just play through the game all pew-pew, but I never had the patience to learn how to do either. Other features include: time dilation.
- Minecraft. Basically low fantasy lego, and you play a lego man.
- Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light. Pure co-op game. The puzzles would be a lot less difficult if it weren't co-op, but it is.

These are just the ones I really played. Looking back at my collection is sort of terrifying, since I spent an awful lot of money on games over the past 10 years I never had the time to play. Agh.

Yeah not watching it. The lack of quest markers in Morrowind was one of the most deeply frustrating experiences I've ever had while playing a game. NPCs sometimes gave you good directions, but often didn't, and never included a distance. By the time you've played for 15-20 hours you're running and jumping so fast that it's very easy to overlook dungeons, often resorting to doing full-on search grids with the minimap looking for the little yellow box that marks your destination on the zoomed-in map.

By "making the world scale with you" I'm talking about the levels of enemies and items. The difficulties of areas change periodically as you play through the game: in Oblivion when you levelled up, the entire world became one level higher too, while in Skyrim the world's progression feels a little more natural. This feels amazingly stupid most of the time, since the bandits in loincloths you fight at the beginning of the game somehow get their hands on magical demonic armor from another universe, and yet still feel compelled to rob people despite wearing suits of armor worth more than the entire country.

Ah. Well, little surprise that I never finished the main quest in Morrowind. When I didn't feel like finishing a quest, I would just go to another town, visit the NPCs, and see where it took me. I didn't mind being lost a lot of the time for this reason.

That said, the last time I played Morrowind was the day I gave up in frustration after looking for some blasted sword in a cave somewhere in the North of the island.

Thanks for distilling a decade of games for me. I truly appreciate it. I still have to find the time to play, though.

I had a look at Katamari Damacy on youtube, and it looks amusing. I am wondering, though, how does one lose?

Crashing into things breaks things off, reducing its size. Sometimes those things can be picked up again, but often they can't. You can also lose by picking up big things too early, which makes you "level up" too fast and then you can't pick up smaller objects anymore.

Edit: You can also run out of time.

Woo, a new Star Wars g-

Oh, it's one of those Call of Warehouse Battlefront ARMA Duty Shooter Warmachine Cover Mechanism Madden XXIIVVIVIVVMMXCXCI type of games?

Hmm, I guess I'm glad that I don't really play games anymore. Good riddance.

There really isn't much to expect from a battlefield type game, it's mostly about multiplayer, gameplay, vehicles, and now graphics. I'm not expecting a decent or important singleplayer.

Pretty much. I still think that 1313 had a possibility of going into places (and if only it had been full of DF1 Nar Shaddaa type stuff... oh man!). But eh.

Also, (some of) my highlights from the past decade (2004-2014) in gaming:
* Mass Effect series (2007, 2010, 2012) - Yes, even the third one. I do prefer ME1 to the rest but ME2 is still a bloody amazing game. Oh, and despite starting ME1 twice in 2008 and once in 2010, I only ended up playing through it in 2013, followed by ME2 in later 2013 and ME3 by April 2014.
* Crysis and Crysis: Warhead (2007, 2008) - Not gonna lie, these two (but mostly the main game itself) are one of the best FPS games I ever played and each time I play anything made after, I just keep on comparing it to Crysis and IMO, Crysis just wins. Shame 'bout Crysis 2 (never tried the third one).
* Bioshock 1 (2007) - Haven't played Bioshock Infinite which is apparently the best game ever, but man was the first game quite delicious. Shame 'bout Bioshock 2 (and the escort mission at the end of 1).
* Deus Ex: Human Revolution (2011) - Even though many DX fans have seemed to turn against this one in the past year or two, I still think it's a damn fine installation in the DX series. A lot of people compared it to ME2 when it came out, and after playing through ME2 in late 2013 I've got to confess that I did end up liking ME2 more. But still, this game's awesome to the max.

Honorable mentions (games that I liked quite a bit but haven't really touched or even thought about much after playing through them (some even twice!!).. they're still pretty good, tho'):
GTA: San Andreas (2005 PC), Half-Life 2 (inc. all episodes, 2004-2007), Portal (2007), Prey (2006)... some others

(Of course, these lists are missing the FGR game from 2004- but of course it was released already in 2000 so)

AND YOU DID IT WRONG! YOU DID IT ALL WRONG!

FGR hates characters, you guys.

Eh, the first one's better anyway.

My personal highlights; Portal 1 & 2, Mass Effect series, Deus Ex: HR, GTA: San Andreas, Borderlands 1 & 2, Batman: Arkham Asylum and Arkham City.

Games i've played and finished and would play again: Mass Effect 1, Portal 1 & 2, Batman Arkham Asylum/City, Tomb Raider (2013)

Tomb Raider was way more fun than it should have been. IMO one of the best games of the last 5 years.

"call of warehouse" sounds like a good old time

Yes, I recommend the Mass Effect trilogy.

To add to Jon's list:

Mirror's Edge, for really opening up first-person gameplay without a focus on shooting everything.
Left 4 Dead, for making a fairly difficult co-op shooter that people actually wanted to play again and again.
Bioshock + Bioshock Infinite, for having a really awesome story. BS:Infinite's gameplay was a little too easy, but BS:1 really made you take a slow pace and explore. Plus, BS:Infinite had one of the best NPCs ever designed in a game.

Right? I would play the **** out of Call of Warehouse.

Also, only today did I finally realize that Star Wars: Battlecry for CryEngine is actually supposed to be a new Battlefront-type game. Well, there goes my interest! :outrage:

At any rate, apparently making levels for white places (Hoth, Bespin) means you don't have to get a texture artist. Heyooo!

THERE ARE NO HUMVEES IN STAR WARS

mod is fail