also I guess I jst got steamed at the first few pages of comments where the game inquestion in this topic is being referenced as a FPS from an FPS stdio and is 'based on CoH' in the fact that it has the ability of costume design. if you want to know why I object so heavily to this is because some FPSers might abandon CoH over this other game, and when CoH is reborn that will mean less players which will hurt our cause.
1. No one said that quote in this thread that I recall or can find. The closest thing stated was that elements of the game was "inspired by" CoH. The developers themselves stated in multiple interviews that it was the customization elements of the MMO genre they wanted to cross into their more first-person action space, and they specifically mentioned City of Heroes by name as an exemplar of that customization and as a specific source of inspiration. But neither they or anyone in this thread I can find suggested that Awakened would be explicitly like City of Heroes in a game-play sense.
2. At the moment there is no playable CoH for players to abandon. Its not reasonable to expect City of Heroes gamers to stop playing games while they wait for a successor project.
3. Any game design school that claims FPS games are the "easiest" games to make are probably not worth attending. Firstly because the statement has no meaning without context, and secondly is unlikely to be meaningfully true under any reasonable context. Farmville-like games are the easiest (computer) games to make. Excluding them, side-scrollers and top-down scrollers are much easier to make than FPS games. Its not even clear to me that FPS games are easier to make than MMOs. MMOs are potentially harder to *operate* but that's a completely different thing. Its relatively easy to make a bad FPS, but its also not that difficult to make a bad MMO. About the only thing that's true is that the average MMO is much more rapacious when it comes to consuming budgets than the average FPS. And separate from creating the game, MMOs have more complex publishing issues than single player games in general. But if you want to make a good, state of the art, well designed game, I do not believe that
in principle its harder to make an MMO than an FPS, or a first-person action game in general.
There's also the question of what is "easy." One of my favorite games, from the perspective of game design, is Ogre. You can make that game with some hex paper, some tic tacs, and a felt pen. On the other hand, it has a level of asymmetric balance I have almost never seen replicated. How hard would it be to create a similar game with similar playing balance? Really, really hard, I think. I sketched out the basics of the CoH custom critter point system in a weekend. I've been thinking about Ogre off and on for
thirty years, and I still don't know how I would go about replicating its asymmetric balance in a game of equal simplicity.
4. I'm not a big Metroid fan, but I do know that the three Metroid Prime games were not failures by any standard. All three were critically well reviewed, and all three made a ton of money. Also, Metroid Prime 3 was announced very early as being the last in the series, not only over a year before release but also while Metroid Prime 2 was still selling. So its impossible that the decision to end the Prime series was based on the popularity of the game. The controversy surrounding Metroid purists seems unlikely to me to have had any real impact on Nintendo's IP strategy. They generally consider games to be a success if they are popular, not if they are gameplay-pure.
Also, Retro is still making games, and as far as I know still has an exclusive deal with Nintendo, which means they are still making Nintendo games. And they are
hiring.
