EA Talks Franchise Reboots (June 14, 2012)

But it does beg the question - Why was it called X-Com at all?

X-Com wasn't a game that was based around story. It was based around gameplay, atmosphere and strategy. IMHO - there wasn't enough story in X-Com to justify a spin off set in the same universe. If you wanted to do a UFO shooter, they could have called it anything. Carrying the name X-Com doesn't really do anything more than cynically exploit your fanbase. The same can be argued about Syndicate. The story was always secondary to the gameplay. It provided an excuse to have the action, as apposed to being a rich world to engross the player in. I loved X-Com, but its "story" was pretty well "aliens have been kidnapping people, the governments of the world form an international military force to stop them" And... That's about it, really. There's some cool info about the aliens and it all pulls very nicely from UFO popular culture (crop circles, greys, UFOs, abductions, cattle mutilation etc) but you'd be hard pressed to call it a "universe" in the same manner as something like Fallout, Mass Effect, Wing Commander, Star Wars etc...

Wing Commander and Mass Effect, however, are very much story driven. They have a diversity of characters, established history, locations, organisations and groups, cultures etc.

You could even argue that Wing Commander had gameplay to provide an excuse for the story - An exaggeration, to be sure, but what I remember most about Wing Commander 3 was Hobbes betraying Blair, Thrakkath killing Angel, the Behemoth being destroyed (and that bastard Tolywn blaming the Victory for it, heh) etc. The space combat was great but the focus - the parts of Wing Commander that I remember decades after I stopped playing it - was the story. That's why I agree with some of the sentiment here - that ME could be turned into a flight sim or that WC could be turned into an RPG. I'd pay to play either, providing they were done well.

And the X-Com flight sim goes back to what I was saying earlier - if you're going to throw out a continuation to the universe that is so far from your fans' expectations that it's in a different genre, you'd better make sure it's a damned good game. If it isn't, you can end up damaging the value of your franchise.
 
I'd say the problem with modern gaming is formulas. Every stupid genre has a predetermined formula and they're all old and boring. Let's face it, wing commander the MMO would play like Earth and beyond or god forbid EVE online. EA would make it all about leveling upgrades and using the mouse to click the living shit out of everything. Rather than making it a you know FUN space flight experience with massively expanded multiplayer, and a limited, small economy system. EA would be like MMOS ARE ECONOMY AND ITEM SYSTEMS!!!!11111 and that's what they'd make the game into. A giant cash whore for item sale dollars. Rather than a game people actually want to play. Blizzard only got away with doing it because they did it so much better than everyone else. It won't work in space games and that's probably why EA haven't touched a space MMO since E&B someone at least had the sense to realise that an Ultima/World of Warcraft style MMO would play like shit in a WC universe. They totally missed the point of syndicate and that's why it bombed. Syndicate is a very specific game, trying to make it into "not Deus Ex" was never going to work. They needed to make it into a 3d isometric strategy game sort of like jagged alliance, on a small conservative budget (high-end Indie) and go for that niche market. But you know.. that takes brains and ideas so EA fail at it in 2012.
 
EDIT -
I agree with all of that. But I don't think anyone suggested an MMO, did they? Certainly when I said RPG, I meant a single player RPG like Mass Effect, The Witcher etc...

Sorry, there was an MMO discussion earlier in the thread that I lost track of.

It highlights an issue though - "MMO" has become synonymous with "RPG" these days and there's no good reason why. Modern technology is capable of so much more.

Give me a Wing Commander game that is Privateer, with people. That's it. Keep it in the cockpit. Keep your cargo hauling. Keep your combat. Keep the trade. Keep the formula. It doesn't have to be a 3rd person click fest. Bolt your "massively multiplayer" components onto the existing formula - don't bend the gameplay around what is essentially a "reskin" of every other MMO that has come before you.

I don't think, as you referred to earlier, LOAF, that the MMO is dead. I just think the WoW-esque MMO (ie, almost all of them so far...) is dead. But MMO simply means massively multiplayer online. We'll eventually move beyond WoW, it will just require a studio with some serious courage (not to mention, financial backing) to move beyond where we are, currently.

Also, it seems that most MMOs currently operate on an extremely unrealistic expectation of player numbers. You shouldn't need to have 5-10 million active subscribers to break even. Wing Commander could possibly be a successful MMO, but it would never become "the next WoW". It would never make that sort of obscene money as it would never have the widespread appeal of a fantasy setting. As long as EA acknowledge that and don't bet the house on it - virtually guaranteeing it won't be able to survive - it could be amazing.
 
Darkmage said:
I'd say the problem with modern gaming is formulas. Every stupid genre has a predetermined formula and they're all old and boring.
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Yes, this is the problem. I would welcome a Wing Commander FPS, if it acknowledged a unique aspect of the Wing Commander space simulators: the wingmen. It is right there in the game title, after all. Don't make me a one-man army, and don't make me part of an infinite army of tough-guy clones. Give me one or two squad members per mission. Have the squad selected from a small pool with unique names and personalities. Develop those personalities in cutscenes. FMV and Mark Hamill are optional, whatever the trolls on Kotaku may think.

Choose movement and damage mechanics that reward coordination, without forcing the player to micromanage the squad AI. Have some resources that regenerate (like Wing Commander shields and guns) while some resources are limited per mission (like afterburner fuel and missiles). Make these choices through testing early and often, not by fiat and not by copying the current bestseller.

Follow the lead of 'Strike Commander' by calling the game 'Marine Commander', no matter how much the marketing people say the 'Wing Commander' name tests better in key demographics.
 
Dondragmer said:
Choose movement and damage mechanics that reward coordination, without forcing the player to micromanage the squad AI.
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You could take a leaf from modern FPS' for this in a multiplayer context - eg, promotion points are gained much faster by following the objectives as set by your wing commander. So, one of the pilots is designated the WC, the others as wingmen. The WC can prioritise threats - take out the bombers, take out the carrier's engines etc. These objectives give large bonuses for those who carry them out. And, if the WC is good, he will give you objectives that get you all through the mission. If not, you run the risk of failing. And to prevent wing commanders going off the reservation and giving suicidal orders, he in turn is rewarded for protecting his pilots and efficiency in achieving the mission objectives. I think shooters like Battlefield 3 prove that, with good mechanics, you can achieve teamwork organically, even in a server where everyone is strangers - by individually rewarding everyone for working as a team.
 
c0mc0 said:
I think shooters like Battlefield 3 prove that, with good mechanics, you can achieve teamwork organically, even in a server where everyone is strangers - by individually rewarding everyone for working as a team.
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Very true. It says a lot about us that Doom gave us multiplayer deathmatches almost 20 years ago. Many games in that era also offered cooperative multiplayer, but it just wasn't fun. While the technology was one limiting factor (you really want voice chat), game mechanics didn't adapt. Even after the rise of the MMORPG, and their efforts to encourage ever larger groups of adventurers, those innovations didn't leak back into smaller-scale multiplayer games.

With the Battlefield series, Left 4 Dead and Portal 2, we've finally seen cooperative multiplayer done right - and I would be eager to see a flight sim steal the best features of those games.

c0mc0 said:
The WC can prioritise threats - take out the bombers, take out the carrier's engines etc.
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The change to 3D capital ships with individual subsystems was great, but I've yet to see an AI that paid any attention to turret arcs or shield quadrants. It would be great to have a wing of humans coordinate attacks to overwhelm a turret, or to have a team of fighters destroy engines so the bombers following have an easier target. To keep things fair you'd have to increase the turret fire in proportion to the number of players, so a large cooperative game would face a truly withering barrage.
 
I think you guys are missing the scale involved with these 'reboots.' The point isn't to make the same game for the same audience. If the ~70,000 people who bought Syndicate in 1994 are the people who buy Syndicate in 2012 then... the 2012 version is a horrible, horrible failure. No matter what people are being loud about on the internet, they didn't enter into that project to attract the same audience and the project's success was never based on achieving that. From a marketing perspective, the reason for reusing the IP is simply that it gives you an edge over the ten similar projects released that quarter.

And no, the lesson EA is taking from the 2012 Syndicate isn't that they made the wrong kind of game. Remember, 2012 Syndicate owes its existence to Bethesda's massive success with another game that made the same group of cranky internet doofuses sad: the 2008 Fallout reboot. Using a classic IP to attract attention for a modern game is one part of the process... the other part is having a game that will interest people when it gets their attention. And so what EA is going to look at is whether people care about Syndicate as a property in the first place (I'm betting they don't) and whether or not the game was good enough to keep any attention it might have received (... maybe?)

My guess is that the big problem with Syndicate was the lack of an interesting hook, both in terms of the IP and in terms of the gameplay. "Oh, hey, what's FALLOUT?" Why it's a post-apocalyptic version of the real world with some humor and a 1950s aesthetic. Huh, interesting, I'll look at the new one. What's Syndicate? It's a gritty near-future world where corporations fight each other with ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ. And once/if you do get that attention you need a game that's going be interesting enough for a sale. Fallout 3 managed that despite NOT BEING A TOP DOWN WHATEVER WHATEVER... Syndicate just doesn't seem interesting. What made it special compared to the six other gritty near-future FPSes that shipped that week?

(Heck, a similar FPS-ified reboot of a classic franchise, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, sold well a few months before Syndicate. The Syndicate post mortem is probably going to spend a heck of a lot more time thinking about THAT than they did how sad SynFan81 was that the game wasn't an isometric tactical whatever.)

I'd say the problem with modern gaming is formulas. Every stupid genre has a predetermined formula and they're all old and boring. Let's face it, wing commander the MMO would play like Earth and beyond or god forbid EVE online. EA would make it all about leveling upgrades and using the mouse to click the living shit out of everything. Rather than making it a you know FUN space flight experience with massively expanded multiplayer, and a limited, small economy system. EA would be like MMOS ARE ECONOMY AND ITEM SYSTEMS!!!!11111 and that's what they'd make the game into. A giant cash whore for item sale dollars. Rather than a game people actually want to play. Blizzard only got away with doing it because they did it so much better than everyone else. It won't work in space games and that's probably why EA haven't touched a space MMO since E&B someone at least had the sense to realise that an Ultima/World of Warcraft style MMO would play like shit in a WC universe. They totally missed the point of syndicate and that's why it bombed. Syndicate is a very specific game, trying to make it into "not Deus Ex" was never going to work. They needed to make it into a 3d isometric strategy game sort of like jagged alliance, on a small conservative budget (high-end Indie) and go for that niche market. But you know.. that takes brains and ideas so EA fail at it in 2012.
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Yup, the problem is formulas and the solution is making games the same as the ones you like used to be.

I'm pretty sure item sales translate pretty directly into Privateer: ships, weapons, upgrades, cargo, etc.
 
I agree with most of that, LOAF, except for one of your points - Deus Ex: Human Revolution was not a "FPS-ified reboot" - it always was an FPS/RPG. That didn't change. It was simply a modernisation of a popular franchise.

And the comment about Syndicate not having a hook, being about future corporations fighting each other...zzzzzZZZ. I agree. Like I said, I believe they made the mistake of thinking that the setting of the Syndicate games was what people loved about them. It wasn't. It never was. It was the gameplay.

I'm not marketing expert, but there has to be a point where the old adage "any advertising is good advertising" doesn't ring true any more. I think the new XCOM is a good example of a game that, were it not XCOM, a lot of people would be really looking forward to. But it has been pushed back to the point where I'm not sure it will ever see the light of day, presumably due to intense backlash over what the game is not. Because it is carrying a name that it does not seem to bare any resemblance to at all. By giving it a name, considered by many to be legendary in gaming circles (including the gaming media), they have set themselves a benchmark that everyone will measure them against, and that's a tough position to be in.
 
I'm not marketing expert, but there has to be a point where the old adage "any advertising is good advertising" doesn't ring true any more. I think the new XCOM is a good example of a game that, were it not XCOM, a lot of people would be really looking forward to. But it has been pushed back to the point where I'm not sure it will ever see the light of day, presumably due to intense backlash over what the game is not. Because it is carrying a name that it does not seem to bare any resemblance to at all. By giving it a name, considered by many to be legendary in gaming circles (including the gaming media), they have set themselves a benchmark that everyone will measure them against, and that's a tough position to be in.
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XCOM is a weird game, but more than anything I think it's probably just your average game with a disasterous development cycle; I know they have a good quote out there about how they're adding strategy elements or something, but I think it's probably just mired in the same kind of development trouble as Strike Commander, Duke Nukem Forever, etc.

... and honestly, I believe their first instinct on XCOM was absolutely right: an FPS that takes its queue from Bioshock's success and has a really unique setting instead of grey/brown near-future grit. I *want* to play the bright and colorful 1960s alien shooter. Like a Men in Black game! That's a pretty neat idea.

But you're right about the property not being that interesting on its own... but I think generating that controversy and then putting out a neat different FPS would have been a positive from a marketing standpoint... if they'd actually managed to get the game out the door. (I do also think that X-COM, like Syndicate, is also hopelessly stuck in the 1990s... the whole aliens/government conspiracies/etc. feels out of place and unloved today.)

(Also: if you want to play an actual X-COM game, the Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon for the Nintendo 3DS launch lineup was done by the same guy and it's oddly close. Which is actually something to remember when we're complaining about all modern games being identical. There are PLENTY of crazy weird games out there... people just don't /care/.)

Almost completely unrelated aside about the new Deus Ex: it came out at exactly the time Richard Garriott was telling interviewers that only he could create a "real Ultima." I remember that very clearly because the day Human Revolution came out Warren Spector had a Facebook status update about how grateful he was that the'd bothered to send him a copy and how excited he was to play the new game even though he wasn't involved.
 
Bandit LOAF said:
... and honestly, I believe their first instinct on XCOM was absolutely right: an FPS that takes its queue from Bioshock's success and has a really unique setting instead of grey/brown near-future grit. I *want* to play the bright and colorful 1960s alien shooter. Like a Men in Black game! That's a pretty neat idea.
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Yes, the existing X-COM timeline is too far into the future. The world of X-COM: Apocalypse was wonderfully creative - but first you had to understand the superscience future, and then you had to understand the aliens on top of that. Then Interceptor moves even further forward. Having every X-COM game in the same timeline implies that the future is full of complete morons, who repeatedly defeat alien invasions and then throw away the tools before the next invasion happens.

I'm fine with X-COM being like the Final Fantasy series, where the common ground between games is in the atmosphere and themes, without having a persistent world between games. Placing the X-COM themes in the 1960s is an excellent choice. Having a surprising new type of alien presence, with nothing in common with the existing games, makes good sense. If it has good sales despite the haters, I would welcome sequels that place the X-COM themes in other times and places, like X-COM: Prohibition (1930s feds get in slightly over their heads) and X-COM: Inquisition (mediaeval witchhunters get in way over their heads).

The 2011 E3 playthrough appears to contain an ominous quantity of scripted events, but I'll wait for the complete game to arrive before declaring it broken on that front.
 
c0mc0 said:
It highlights an issue though - "MMO" has become synonymous with "RPG" these days and there's no good reason why. Modern technology is capable of so much more.
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IMO, the whole "grind for gear" paradigm for MMOs survives because that is what induces players to buy lots of virtual items, which are much cheaper for the game company to create than story content.
 
LOAF, if a new WC game was announced in the near future, what genre do you think it would be? what scale? AAA big budget classic space sim or perhaps a free to play online game?
 
MartySheen said:
LOAF, if a new WC game was announced in the near future, what genre do you think it would be? what scale? AAA big budget classic space sim or perhaps a free to play online game?
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It'd probably be a top down scroller. With system requirements so insane that nobody would ever be able to play it. #withmyluck
 
LOAF, if a new WC game was announced in the near future, what genre do you think it would be? what scale? AAA big budget classic space sim or perhaps a free to play online game?
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Honestly, I think either or both are distinct possibilities.

If Chris Roberts gets his funding in order, then there will be a AAA classic space sim, likely a "reboot." It won't please everyone (for example, it'd have a significant FPS element) but it'll do a lot of things wags insist a Wing Commander game needs (involve Chris, star Mark Hamill, be a PC game, etc.)

... but I can also imagine that at this moment there's some EA mobile division slaving away at a Privateer Facebook game. In fact, this happened a few years back and they went with Ultima Forever instead. But the odds of this really happening go way up depending on the success of that project... (which... where is it, anyway?)
 
Well, I'm using that to mean a general social network game. But they're advancing in leaps and bounds. Ultima Forever sounds like it's going to be a pretty neat game, for instance.
 
Yeah, but... social networks. blech. I don't want to make another account just to play a game. Maybe I'm oldschool and/or paranoid but I miss the times when I could just install a game and play. No Internet except for MP, no need to tell anyone anything about me, no social whatever, no DLC, just a game.
I don't want to be generally negative about it. There are some cool things with it. I just happen to not like it overall.
 
Yeah, but... social networks. blech. I don't want to make another account just to play a game. Maybe I'm oldschool and/or paranoid but I miss the times when I could just install a game and play. No Internet except for MP, no need to tell anyone anything about me, no social whatever, no DLC, just a game.
I don't want to be generally negative about it. There are some cool things with it. I just happen to not like it overall.
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On a personal level I feel the same way about Facebook and company as gaming platforms... but I also recognize that I just don't 'get' it and that a lot of younger people do. You know, we're the 1950s kids Marty's playing the 1980s rock and roll for at the dance.

... and hey, I'm sure my grandfather would be similarly flummoxed by the idea that I spend thousands of dollars on BOXES to play games on in the first place. So I have to step outside myself and say that yeah, maybe I don't get it but that doesn't matter and this simply is how it works today. Because all the angry internet posts in the world will mean absolutely nothing.

(And heck, when they write the history of 'DLC' you know Wing Commander is going to be right there at the start... Secret Missions was the hit that popularized mission disks, after all! And later games experimented with downloads well before anyone else... the Kilrathi Saga addons and then Secret Ops...)

(Frankly, the thing that bothers me the most about these games is that there's no archiving going on. Someone is going to want to tell the /story/ of social gaming in the 21st century someday and we're not going to have the games themselves to look back on.)
 
I'll chime in here, since the original Syndicate (and to a lesser extent, Syndicate Wars) was one of my favorite games ever. I spent some time with the 2012 release and... its actually quite wonderful. The one issue I could make for it is that the gameplay aspect seems to be a little too Call Of Duty - grab a gun, run, shoot - but the breaching abilities add a little something and sliding into cover is a lot of fun too.

The entire game is a love letter to the original games and no one seems to notice. The first MP map is actually the first level from the original game ramped up, other levels are also from the original game (Atlantic Accelerator, for instance). There are a bunch of little nods and hidden winks and unfortunately, unless you played the originals obsessively, you're not going to get them. I actually got to play with the people who made the game during a weekend event some months ago, they were all nice and polite fellows but when I tried to express how impressed I was and thanked them for making a game "for me" (and by ME, I meant the people who remembered the originals) they really didn't seem all that impressed that I was happy with the fanservice.

The game as a whole is a lot of fun. I'd say its an 8 out of 10 myself. But if you're not in on the joke, its sadly a run-and-gun with little other distinction.
 
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