- Comrade!
-
- Group: Member
- Joined: Jan 30, 2004
- Posts: 278
nah. i don't think it is that these companies are overstretching their resources, i think that it is just they they choose to use the vast resources they've got to make some of the worst ideas for games. hundley said something i thought was pretty true - alot of the time these games are set up to be so fun, and really interesting, but a few terrible choices make the games terrible.
like final fantasy 13, the characters are all the most cynical stereotypes, and you play it hating it for a while then you realise that the characters actually develop as you go through the game. i remember when i realised that hope was actually being explored beyond being an angsty teen and pretty boy for serial moms i was really surprised, same with snow. and the two of them have this actually interesting conflict going on between them for the first half of the game. that's just one example of the interesting characters, but the thing i want to point out is how it totally dies off in the game. by the end of the game, there are no characters. you just have 6 battle figurines who throw out awful stock lines until you get to the ending, which i skipped because i was so sick of the game by that point i didn't even care how it ended. they had this little roster of characters who I assumed were going to be awful, then they managed to convince me they weren't and i cared about them for a while. then they stopped doing all that interesting stuff and started talking about saving coccoon and l'cie and fal'cie and who cares incessantly even though they had me friggin reeled in! like i was playing the game and i didn't expect to but i actually liked sazh and vanille together, and vanille and fang and snow and lightning and alot of the other dynamics that were going on and i was excited to see the whole thing go even further and then it just didn't and some 60 year old asshole kept showing up to talk about the end of the world and i switched off.
yeah man, i hear you. that's exactly what i'm talking about though. if they only focused on say, 3 characters, they'd have had an easier time developing them more thoroughly (and get rid of all the silliness).
the other problem may be that they dont have anyone on their team that is capable of good writing or good ideas (and thats a whole other discussion), but from what you and hundley are saying, it sounds like they do, but they didnt have the time (or ability) to flesh out everything.
