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Comment I feel the same way (Score 1) 422

by solidex (#33023376) Attached to: Frustration and Unhappiness In the Games Industry

I agree with the article. I've felt this way for about the last 3-4 years. When Team Fortress 2 came out, and it ended up being just a remake of TFC after so long in development, I finally had enough. Valve should have been *owned* by journalists for taking so long to produce what was basically a remake. But no, all of the reviews praised it and Valve. The same thing happened with the last two Mega Man games. They were the *exact* same thing as all the other core Mega Man games - no one really pointed this out as far as I could tell and both of them got good reviews. To be honest, people should be ashamed of themselves for failing to innovate, even if the end product is less than stellar. Hell, even Fiddler's Green had a good multiplayer game.
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Jumpgate Evolution Dev Talks Class Balance 86

Posted by Soulskill from the check-out-my-+1-laser dept.
Hermann Peterscheck recently made a post on the Jumpgate Evolution developer blog about NetDevil's strategy for balancing the various classes of ships in the game. They seem to be taking a different approach from most MMOs in letting the PvP side of the gameplay set the baseline, rather than allowing PvE concerns to override that. From the section titled Combating Combat: "Early on our lead systems designer, Jay Ambrosini, came to the correct conclusion that all of the preliminary balancing was best done in a PvP context. The reasoning is that in PvE, the player needs to feel powerful, but in PvP the fight needs to feel balanced. Once ship classes are balanced in PvP, its not as hard to make the player feel powerful in PvE, but the opposite is not true. We spent many weeks playing just the first class of ship, the light fighter, in teams of 5 or 6 in order to evaluate what it was that made those ships fun to fly and fight. After daily battles, you begin to see what makes those ships work. We also started with the mid level ships as opposed to the low or high level ships. This is primarily because you can find the center point and then work upwards and downwards from there. ... It's very tempting to just throw a bunch of classes of ships together in order to say things like "our game has 15 classes of ships!" but this, we believe, is the wrong direction. People want meaningful and strong choices and not lots of meaningless, empty choices. Currently we plan to have 4-6 classes, but they will each have nearly endless possible configurations within those groups."

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