Malstrom comments on Conduit and Gamepro review

[WereKitten]

famousringo said:

Avinash_Tyagi said:

The big story about the Conduit is the company behind it. High Voltage Software is a very young company that apparently has more enthusiasm than capital. The guys there are young, excited, and quite ambitious. They remind me of how game companies used to be back in the day. They don’t whine and say, “We can’t compete against Nintendo games.” They say, “We are going to make the most awesome of games!” Whether they achieve it or not is up to the customers. They noticed a huge hole on the Wii that the Western Companies were ignoring concerning FPS games and are filling it themselves.

This is my favourite part right here.

HVS is hungry, independant, and very social with their fanbase. They remind me of pre-acquisition Bungie. Except in those days, you didn't need to either have the backing of a major publisher or take on a bunch of licensed work to pay the bills.

And yet, the very paragraph right after what you quoted is utter rubbish:

"If Wii had been a Gamecube HD machine where everything could easily be ported, there would have been no window for small companies like HVS to rise through. This industry desperately needs new companies and new ideas. If Microsoft and Sony go the full motion control route, HVS could end up becoming the premier FPS shooting company due to their skills, not in high end graphics like how id or Epic did, but in high end controls. Viva la disruption."

Except that HVS did not bring new ideas to the table, and is trying to be the Id or Epic of the Wii: the graphic engine comes first, the first game is almost an afterthought and a showcase for the engine.

For all the talking about how good it is to have completely customizable controls -the only aspect in which one could say they've done anything different from say MP:C- that also sounds to me as a lack of proper game design. To all the people that think that being able to customize how fast you turn or how wide your bounding box in an FPS is a step forward, ask yourself when is the last time you played a platform and wished for a way to customize how much inertia your character had when turning around.

My answer is that it should be a choice of the game designers, and that the limitations imposed upon me, the player, by the controls are part of a game's identity.

The fact that we're used to customize controls in FPSs is only a legacy of the origins of the genre on the PC, where there's no standardized controllers and different mice/trackballs respond differently. On consoles, that doesn't need to happen and excessive customization can devolve into the game not having a proper feel to it.

Small companies can still rise on HD consoles if they're given the means to reach the public with their peculiar offer. Think Braid, World of Goo, Castle Crashers, so many quirky PSN and XBL games. Now that's where I see ideas, and I can't see why it would have not worked if the Wii had been a "Gamecube HD machine".