Because Halo: CE was a damn good game with a great single player and fantastic local multiplayer. Halo 2 destroyed that by focusing on the online MP and Halo 3, well, I played it just long enough to see the ending. SP gameplay fell to the wayside to make room for MP gameplay.

Fable.

Why make a game for non gamers? THEY DON'T PLAY GAMES.

Are you talking about the same game with repetitive combat and level design that I played back then? Which was worse than many shooters even at its Box only release year of 2001, let alone two years later?

i am a part of the masses so no this has not happened to me

Halo: CE? Ya I don't see repetitive level design in any of that. Id also like to see a FPS that doesn't have repetitive combat. As for being worse than others out there, well thats a matter of opinion.

Halo 2 was just a bad title. It spread itself too thin in terms of single player and multiplayer. Halo 3 brought the series back, ODST destroyed it, and Reach brought it back again.

Halo still has the exact same multiplayer aspects offline as it does online. Just because your friends would rather play on their own screens in the comfort of their own homes rather than all on one screen, jammed onto one couch doesn't make it any less of a good multiplayer experience.

Its stayed relatively consistent from the first title, appealing to the mass market from the get go. I've been with it , since its first release.

I cannot say, I only played a weeks worth of Halo 2 MP and haven't done any others. And wouldnt we expect some improvement on the MP after all this time, not the exact same thing over and over. I think what you are trying to say is that the MP for specific game is the same online and off line, but the MP form Halo: CE to Halo 2, 3, ODST whatever has changed dramatically, and not in a direction that I like.

Closest i could think of is Doom3. But i like Doom3, i just would've liked it more if it had been more like the classics. But, as always, "there's a mod for that"^tm :hehe:

Really, no game, movie or anything has ever pissed off by how it is made. I either like it or don't, no point wasting perfectly good rage on it ^_^

This.

Exactly. But the main underlying point (also the subject to this thread) is the fact that somewhere down the line, Halo 1, a game that was made to appeal to the mass audience, lost its cool vibe and suddenly..what.. decided to appeal to the mass audiences?

That doesn't make sense because it was designed to appeal to the mass audience. Ever wonder why Masterchief was green? :wink_smile:

Its been doing it since day 1. Its Mario, its sonic the hedgehog, its God of War.

Isn't just about every release aimed at the masses though. No one sits there and says " I hope to sell 500 copies and that's it"

Nothing really :shrug:

I think it kinda sets ones self up for dissapointment to think things will stay the same forever.
it will either change or die, theres not much room for stagnation in business or creativity.

The difference is generally between whether the focus is on the game or the sales. A company might say "I'm going to make the best FPS ever!", and then sit down and focus on making a great FPS. But then they might think "I should appeal to RPG fans for more sales", and they start wedging in some RPG features, which are likely to dilute the FPS experience. They might decide to make the original enemies look more like demons, so that it's more "recognizable" and appeals to more people. Nobody is trying to sell badly, the problem is when the game becomes less than it could have been for the sake of those sales.

I remember eagerly awaiting the new Metallica album. My friend and I were tired of hearing Enter Sandman, Unforgiven, etc all the time and were ready for the new one. We went to the store on release day, bought Load, got back in the car and quickly put the tape (yes, tape) in the stereo, and were immediately "WTF?" It was so far removed from the Metallica we had been listening to since the '80's. Reload wasn't any better. St. Anger was ok, and I haven't even heard Death Magnetic.

at the same time, things are changed like adding RPG elements in order to enrich the game experience.. no one adds elements they think are going to detract from the experience on purpose. sometimes tehre are growing pains along the way.

Your missing my point. Halo specifically was designed as the Golden Eye for Nintendo 64. It was made to bring in the money and prove to a market owned by Nintendo and Sony, that a third console could be supported and sold.

That being said, it was made to drive sales...and is expected to whenever a Halo game is released.

I understand what your getting at but take your list, both Pirates and Transformers were made to appeal to the masses, the sequels took the series in a direction you didn't like, making parallels to my own arguments for the Halo series

Compare the amount and quality of content from a Sims 2 expansion pack to a Sims 3 expansion pack...

Well, there is Oblivion, Fallout 3, Deux Ex: HR on the horizon. Deus Ex: Invisible War is probably one of the biggest offenders. That's coming from someone who played IW before the original, so I don't think there can be any claim of rose-tinted glasses.

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I don't understand including Dragon Age 2 here. It was clearly rushed, and it suffered from that, but everything else seemed to be very much an improvement. The ability trees were far better than those in Origins, your companions were much more involved in the actual plot, you weren't forced to sift through line after line of boring dialogue just to maybe get a companion to tell you something about them, and the story was immensely better than the generic one in Origins. There were a lot of roblems with Dragon Age 2, but overall there were a lot of okay ideas.

Well, obviously. Changes can be made to try and improve it, which may or may not work out. Mass appeal is not done to intentionally ruin a game, but it IS done to intentionally make a product more like Game B than Game A, because B sells better. Fans get so angry because the minority gets shafted, every single time. Companies like the largest demographic the best, but they still want money from the smaller ones, and will often make a new franchise that seems be catering to them, then makes a sequel that goes right back to the masses so they can get both the majority cash and some new brand loyalty cash. People whose preferences are in the majority rarely see a problem, because they're always catered to and to them the games just improve. Others are pissed off by constant baiting and disappointment.

There's also the fact that in its earlier days, gaming was a niche thing. There was barely any "mainstream" to aim for, and you could afford to make a game that was awesome to a few people and not appealing to many others, because "a few" was already the expected player base. Between the industry's current popularity and costs now in the millions of dollars, they won't take that risk. Products in any medium being diluted toward mass appeal is inevitable, but gets especially annoying for people who remember an alternative.

thats another thing.. does something you dig on changing mean it is made to appeal (moreso) to the masses, or could it be that it just changed in a way you didnt like?

We all want to think when we find something that we like that it is ours. that its a part of our unique ans special selves.. and when it changes to something we dont like as much, we feel hurt about it.
So we slap a "this is dumbed down" tag on it for doing so. This allows us to keep pur fond memeories of the former itteration in tact without having to come to terms with the fact that we are indeed a part of "the masses" from the start.

It was streamlined, not many people like a streamlined RPG, especially PC players and especially when the first one was pretty much made specifically for the PC gamer

At first instinct I would have said the Assassin's franchise but then I realised the mechanics of the game got more hardcoe as the series progressed, new rpg elements like Inventory, Property management, Assassin Recruitment and an economy, so I can rule that out , I dunno maybe CoD? At around 3 and 4 Activision brought it all downhill

I was talking about from 2 to 3.



Exactly.

(Except I have moved on to Sims 3 full time. Not that bad really, I still love it, but I much preferred 2 when it first came out.)