PlayStation Community Thread

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Started by Dr. Pezus, May 03, 2014, 03:25 PM

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Raven


I've read that often about RAD and can't say I agree with that line of thought. Gaming history is full of examples of

a) people who took someone else's work and botched it up
b) ruined (or very inferior) sequels, spiritual sequels and spin offs made by the original creators

So if even the creators can mess up their own foundations, i'd say it's not fair to dismiss merit from what RAD did on the PSP.
Just as an example, many would say their GOWs were better than Ascension. And while it's true Ascension had some different key people, it was still Santa Monica.
Devs can't just take the base system (like a combat system) and leave it at that, there's pacing, there's level design, there's writing, there's boss encounters, puzzle design, so many things...




I'm sure you could also find examples of studios who did well with someone else's creation and failed at their own throughout history. Until a studio achieves it there is no reason to just simply accept they will succeed with it because of past success doing something else. Studios even fail with their own established franchises, as you've pointed out. Which doesn't actually help your case but rather further illustrates that blindly accepting it will be good because of past success isn't rational. Sometimes with the very first sequel a studio will fail with an IP that was initially successful.

The God of War games had been established in their formula for awhile. Todd Papy's team at Santa Monica broke the formula and it seemed pretty clear the game was more of a cash-in and experiment in mutliplayer than an honest attempt at creating a good God of War title. They tried to force in mutliplayer, tell an unnecessary prequel story, and it didn't help that by that time people just weren't ready for yet another God of War game. There is actually a ton they can do wrong by moving away from IPs with an established blueprint. You can actually mirror a lot of the previous work and find just enough ways to tweak it to make it different but largely the same.

I'm not saying that Ready at Dawn deserves no merit. I am however saying that automatically accepting The Order will be great because they succeeded in making PSP games based on someone else's franchises is setting yourself up for disappointment. The fact remains that this is new territory for them. The same way that The Old Republic, an MMORPG, was relatively new territory for Bioware but they screwed it up despite having been well known for their big, successful RPGs. Look at what just happened to Bungie with Destiny. A far cry from the universal acclaim the Halo franchise received. Both of those companies got free hype passes because of their past and those games were elevated to near godlike status. When studios like Bioware and Bungie can essentially fail it's a very stupid idea to give mindless praise to Ready at Dawn who has only done three games and none of which were their own creation.