Any new spacesims

"Thrasher" <spectre911.RemoveThis@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:rdftl0thju043ka01331ncb2ssrfp6s2aa@4ax.com...
> On Mon, 20 Sep 2004 22:17:57 -0700, "milo" <milo.RemoveThis@starshatter.com>
> wrote:
>
> >These kinds of games are still getting made, just not
> >by the bigger development and publishing houses. The
> >market has just gotten too small to support big-budget
> >releases like Wing Commander and Freespace.
>
> Huh? I'm surprised there's anybody who actually still believes that it
> can be the fault of "the market" when garbage titles fail to sell
> well. How many times have we seen that excuse? And then seen it
> thoroughly trashed when a quality title in the "dead" genre became a
> blockbuster?

Well, you can phrase it however you like. When publishers
are looking at dropping a couple of million dollars in development
money, they look at the potential for sales based on market
trends. The trend for the past seven years has been that each
new sim has sold worse than the last. Developers have tried
Wing Commander clones, realistic physics, arcade physics,
RTS hybrids, MMO hybrids, RPG hybrids, trading games,
military games, you name it. If it didn't have "Star Wars" in
the title, it didn't sell.

You claim that all dozen of these games were "garbage", but
some of them were very well made, high-quality games. Free-
space 2 and the I-War games in particular stand out as being
very high quality. EVE is also a very well made game, although
I'm sure it doesn't appeal to many people who grew up on Wing
Commander and X-Wing.

> Anyway, I've been a big Wing Commander fan since the first WC came out
> in 1989. The *last* Wing Commander game I enjoyed was Privateer in
> 1994. They just lost touch with what it was about their games that
> people enjoyed, and kept cranking out tweaked versions of their old
> games with a halfassed storyline and called it a new game. I stopped
> buying them.

And what quality was it that you think people enjoyed about
these games that the developers have "lost touch with"?
What did you enjoy about them, and why did you stop
enjoying them?

> Do I no longer exist?

That's right: you no longer exist. You stopped buying space
sims, even the ones in your own favorite franchise, so you don't
count anymore.

--milo
http://www.starshatter.com