You guys need to go to the GDC in San Jose and see just how corporate these guys think at times. I actualy sat in on Warren Spector's talk 2 years ago with his team members and I was expecting to hear someone who saw things from a gamers perspective, but it was all bussiness (I was never a DX fan but I respected it). Things like him saying concerning Thief 3 "Well our first 2 games involved 2 of these 3 factions so we're limited in our ability to design Thief 3 because our fans will expect the involvement of the third faction." (this of course coming from memory isn't an exact quote but it's pretty close). His talk continued on how as a game gets popular you gain fans, and this is both a good sales point but it limits your design choices, etc, etc. His talk basicly boiled down to how the fan base is both a blessing in terms of garunteed sales and a hinderance to opening up to a wider market.

Yes good bussiness sense is a must but there should be passion behind the world your making. Computer games are in a lot of ways an art form. To their credit after the talk I went up to one of the other team members and told him I appreciated that they made it a point to hire the same voice actor for Garret and he was pretty cool in acknowledging that a level of continuity is important. I'm sure most if not all of the rest of the team IS passionate about what they're creating.

A game company does have to think in terms of making money, there's nothing wrong in that, but a game is made inifinitly better when it's has a focus on world building and imagination over "what feature's should we have so as to appeal to a wide audiance?".

As an example Half-Life does a great job at this. If you play it and the expansion packs you'll see there's an emphasis on continuity. In fact Blue-Shift helps explain why some of the characters end up in Half-Life 2. Even the PS-2 mini-game Decay holds up well in this area.

Sorry to see this batch of games go south, but I'm not too surprised.

[edit] Let me just add...
What happens to directors who make great movies?
They get rich.

What happens to musicians who sell alot of records.
They get rich.

What happens to game developers who sell tons of their games...
It's not hard to see why movies, music and games kinda suck these days (with some exceptions).
This comment was edited on Aug 28, 04:09.