f13.net

Another game follow's X-Com's lead - Syndicate gets rebooted as a "Visceral First Person Shooter Experience".

http://kotaku.com/5839046/the-syndicate-reboot-is-real-first-details-leak-out-of-ea?popular=true

Because the best thing to do with a somewhat unique and fondly-looked-upon IP is to remake it as one of the roughly 327 "visceral first-person shooters" that each year churns out, (with only a few remembered a few years later.)
 :ye_gods:  :heartbreak:

Fuck

This sounds like the bastard child of a watered down Deus Ex and Call of Duty.

Fuck

I feel like game devs both share my love of some old IPs.. and at the same time completely don't understand why they're beloved old IPs.

 :crying_panda:

That's all I have to say about this.

:sigh:

What's next, Alpha Centauri the third-person cover-based shooter?

PRESS X TO CROUCH BEHIND THE WAIST-HIGH WALL AND SHOOT SOME MINDWORMS

Civilization as a console-based FPS.

Ultima 11: Defend Yon Tower

Don't give them ideas. Some retarded game company might use those. I'm sure Syndicate: The Shooter started as a joke as well...

What System Shock needs is a reboot as a browser based social game!

"Look at you, hacker. You will never be able to send out the 5 invitations to your friend list that it would take to defeat my glorious plans. You may as well accept your inferiority as a mere human and transfer 10 Dollars into the coffers of the Virtual Church of Almighty Shodan."

It'll be just like with X-Com remakes. The best thing that made the game will be left out. None of the successors had the blaster cannon. This Syndicate FPS won't have the gauss gun, and thus not be worthy.

:sad_red_panda:

I bitched about Deus Ex 3 being a prequel, but apparently I was wrong then.

If you can do some interesting things - like flip to spy cams that show you a bigger view - plus have multiple ways of finishing missions, it could work.

We'll see.

Needs an Atlantic Accelerator though.

Call me when they make Gazillionaire the FPS.   :awesome_for_real:

Ooh ooh ooh I know! Sim Ant must be awesome as an FPS!

Would now be a bad time to say that they already made Evil Genius into a poor Facebook game? (http://apps.facebook.com/evil_genius/)

I wouldn't put anything past them nowadays...although a FPS that lets me fight mindworms and The Human Hive's police state does sounds kinda fun.

Kinda...

I like how paint the setting of syndicate as something positive, worth looking forward too.  :why_so_serious:

This makes me think they really believe it's the proper way to do a remake.   It's not like Syndicate is popular enough to have cash in potential.

To be fair, I would probably play this.

If I can play as Yang I'll take it.

Syndicate was pretty shooty any how.  Long as you can brainwash a horde of civilians into following you, pile them all into a space car then crash it in a horrible fireball it's all good.

Would be worth a look just for the first person vomit feeding

I kinda wish there was a way to actually play a "Modern Gaming" drinking game.

1 Drink:
-Classic game series or IP "re-imagined" as a shooter
-Nintendo announces new Gameboy variation at exactly the moment you'll be most annoyed you bought the previous one.
-Any game company describes their release date as "When it's done", then releases at crucial time in the market.
-Every time you open a game review website where anything under 8.5/10 means "Complete dogshit".

etc etc

Well, it's either be grumpy or accept it and roll with the times.

I eaglery await Leisure Suit Larry as visceral first person experience!  :grin:

Third person cover based shooter, imo.

Sure there is.  Any time one of these conditions is fulfilled, down a bottle of your favorite liquor.

That's not a drinking game, that's a suicide pact.

Up next, EA announces the return of our favorite crimson crusader:
Crusader: No Return

 :why_so_serious:

Yeah, what's gonna happen next?  Is somebody going to turn Fallout into an FPS-style game or something?

In all seriousness though, it's not like anybody was ever going to make proper X-Com or Syndicate sequels with the same kinda gameplay they had 10-20 years ago.  For all intents and purposes, these franchises were dead.  Syndicate being re-imagined by the guys who made the Riddick game (although not much since then), as a Cyberpunk FPS with a 4 player co-op mode doesn't sound like anything to get up in arms over.

Ahem.

http://ufo.ufo-extraterrestrials.com/

Maybe I should rephrase that to "anybody hoping to make money".  But hey, those guys are making another one (http://www.ufo2extraterrestrials.com/) so at least you've got that going for you.

I guess this also proves that "future" is the new trappings for FPSs in 2011/2012.

Yeah, I was mostly bummed by this. Making it a FPS kind of defeats the whole concept of "corporate exec controlling four psychopaths with implants and guns" feel. It's likely to be just another goddamn shooter.

ITT: Twatty assumptions about announcement of reboot of beloved game no one here has played in at least 15 years. I fucking love f13. IT'S SHIT BEFORE IT EXISTS!

How about 'oh wow! Someone's remembered Syndicate! I loved that game, it's really nice they want to bring it back in some way that's likely to guarantee sales instead of dying in isometric obscurity. Perhaps the new generation of gamers will learn where things like Deus Ex etc originated from." Any takers? Didn't think so...

I don't want SyndiQuake, I want Syndicate with modern graphics.

And that's never going to happen. Syndicate is a product of its time. It's nearly 20 years old now, shockingly. I know the leap from isometric RTS to FPS is a broad one but it's so churlish to dismiss the game outright before it even has a chance to show its credentials. One of the first things that made me think it had something going for it was the fact that it's being written by Richard Morgan. Corporate Bastard Cyber-dystopia is his bag, baby.

I'm fully aware it could just be another shithouse shooter. I loved Syndicate though, and I am willing to put down the four miniguns and wait to see the result.

You know what I liked about Syndicate? The Game. The background/world/ethos was secondary.

You know what I liked about Quake? The Game. Luckily, game developers have served me well in this particular genre since it came out.


Rebooting Syndicate as a(nother) faceless cyberpunk shooter might work, but more likely it'll just be another average-to-good faceless sci-fi/cyberpunk shooter that will be forgotten again 2 years after it's released.

Well, have you seen what they did with the XCOM "re-imagination" that is in the works?

Also I don't accept the "the gameplay is too old" argument. True for isometric turned based combat, yes.
But Syndicate always was real time and could be ported sucessfully to 3D (as "Syndicate Wars" proved).

I'm not even convinced that overhead/isometric turn-based combat is that dead of a gameplay convention either. The Final Fantasy Tactics series continues to sell pretty well, Disgaea and its ilk still have their grindy niches, and even dogshit games like Grotesque Tactics on Steam still sell well enough to warrant a sequel because there's just so few games like them out there. I believe it's still possible to make an old X-Com like TBS or a Syndicate-style real-time game, make it well, market the shit out of it, and have it be a hit.

But FPSes are the safe option despite costing vastly larger sums of money to make, and I must admit there are far worse developers out there than Starbreeze.

So it stands to reason that this new Syndicate should be judged based on The Game, and so far all anybody can really say about that is that it's coming from fairly good development team, it's got Cyberpunk trappings in the setting and gameplay, and there's a four player co-op mode (which is uncommon enough in FPS games to get my interest).

The Syndicate name already served it's purpose here.  It got this press release noticed in a way that "Starbreeze announces new FPS" wouldn't have been.  Also, if Syndicate's setting is so unimportant, than realistically, there's nothing stopping any developer from creating a new IP with Syndicate's gameplay.  Nobody is doing it though.

So we've got X-COM remade into some sort of FPS, and now Syndicate, also remade into some sort of FPS. I can just imagine how the reaction would be if Deus Ex had been remade as a strategy game or as a platformer. :why_so_serious:

No.

You're exactly right - it could be a good game. It could be a new Deus Ex. But as you said, the name is just being used to draw attention to the title - which has nothing really to do with Syndicate.

You know what could have worked and been in-line with the Syndicate history? Making the goddamn game a DOTA game. Or something vaguely RTS. It's the same with the X-Com remake. If the gameplay bears so little resemblance to the original that you could re-brand it as a new IP and no one would fucking notice, then why bother buying the IP in the first place? It's not like either X-Com or Syndicate has any meaning to most of the 20-something crowd whose first PC was Windows XP.

Of course, having Starbreeze make the game could potentially be a bit of a thing, seeing as Starbreeze today is nothing (http://www.1up.com/features/starbreeze-secret-history) like the Starbreeze that made Riddick and The Darkness.

Damn. Good article. Thanks for the linky.

Interesting article from RPS, with a choice quote from a Starbreeze Dev


http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/09/13/agents-of-change-starbreeze-talk-syndicate/

In all seriousness though, what I don't understand is the FPS>all mentality that so many of these guys have. And I say this as a fan of FPS. it's like they all seem to think that they're going to pull COD-level sales and reviews, and when they fail (Homefront) they get Effed in the Ay. I mean, how many totally forgettable (for forgotten) FPS games are out there after all? Same deal (almost) with the 3rd-person genre, where they seemingly all want to be "like Gears, but with ____".

Did Homefront fail because it was just another FPS, or did it fail because it was a mediocre game by most accounts?  Also, Syndicate was a game that pretty heavily involved shooting stuff.  Change the camera angle and for all intents and purposes, it's a squad-based shooter, with some RPGish research/upgrade stuff for your squad in between missions.  Really, the main complaint I can come up with here is that it seems like you're only controlling one person instead of a squad of four.  Aside from that, the core gameplay is switching from "click on enemy in isometric view to shoot" to "Click on enemy in first person view to shoot".

The people who don't understand there is a difference between Isometric squadbased gameplay and third person gameplay with a single playable character are part of the problem, though.

This is all made more amazing with the resurgence of the rts and moba genres. A good fps can be made, but not by wilfully ignorant and cynical IP exploiters.

This pretty much describes 99% of my impression of an increasing amount of publishers these days. Combine that with gamers demanding more and more graphics geewiz instead of just solid and fun gameplay, budgets that are spiralling out of control, yearly remakes, an ever-increasing supply and prices that are ever-increasing, and you end up getting these (http://www.develop-online.net/news/38614/We-lost-10m-from-pre-owned-Heavy-Rain-Quantic-Dream) kinds of articles at least once a year as well.

True, but on the plus side, between Steam, PSN, and XBL I think there's also more well-made, lower budget indie stuff available this gen than at any time in the past.

Yeah, there's no need to go beyond shaking our heads when it comes to these things. There are so many excellent games out there that nobody can hope to play them all.

Ok then, does anyone know any really good isometric squad-based tactical combat games that are out at the moment? I can't remember anything decent since Silent Storm and that was 8 years ago! Oh, and I suppose Valkyria Chronicles, although that was kind of an odd (but good) beast.

Well, you do have the Alien Swarm, Alien Shooter and Alien Breed series.

League of Legends?  :why_so_serious:

Immacutu

I understand that the main difference between Call of Duty and Company of Heroes is the perspective. Same deal with Space Marine and Dawn of War II.

 :facepalm:

Bolded part is the pertinent bit - not sure what makes them think that slapping a franchise name on a shooter is going to make something a smash hit. I'm not sure how well X-Com is going to sell, and I'll say the same for Syndicate. Why they expect either to do better than Homefront or even the new(ish) Wolfenstein, or Section 8, or Quake Wars, or AVP, or Duke is the other curious bit. AFAIK all those games "did okay" and were mostly considered "okay games" or better. None of them did gangbusters numbers or set the world on fire though. Seems like the strategy is make a new FPS and hope/pray it's the next CoD/Battlefield/TF2/CS. If possible slap an existing franchise name on it in lieu of a licence. (See also: Prey)

I do wonder how well Far Cry 2 and Crysis/2 did, though. I know Crysis got mauled by teh piratez, though I'm sure the usual hyperbolic over-estimations were present there as well.

Kaos Studios (behind Homefront) allegedly had a horrendous crunch period (6 months of 10 hours a day for six days a week (http://www.develop-online.net/features/1089/Kaos-crunch-An-insiders-account)) before that title released, then the entire studio was shut down by THQ (?). Complaints of Homefront being short and mediocre didn't help, and the expensive TV ad campaign certainly didn't keep costs down.

Here's the thing: this isn't about being a PC title, it's about being a Starbreeze multiplatform title. Starbreeze do FPSs. FPS are easy enough to convert across PCs and consoles - certainly easier than RTSs.

I'm happy to wait and see what happens. Given Deus Ex 3's pedigree I was sure that was going to be awful but by all accounts I was wrong.


OMG they turned Alien Breed isometric when the originals were overhead view they've ruined the series forevah!  :grin:

CoH and DoW are both about a thousand times more complex gameplay-wise than Syndicate, which was fairly shallow.  Had they done the new Syndicate like Rainbow Six Vegas, that could have been something pretty close to the original games. Instead they decided to make the squad-based stuff part of the mutiplayer (with the missions apparently modeled after ones from the original game).  Would have liked to see it done RSV style, but what's done is done.  Like I said, the game will succeed or fail based on it's own merits.

As to your constant comments about how mediocre FPS's have mediocre sales, well yeah, no shit.  It's not like mediocre isometric squad based games (like the Freedom Force sequel) have lit up sales charts.

I know FarCry 2 did okay, though I don't think it had any legs at retail. Crysis 2 was apparently a huge smash from what I've seen, despite the game being pretty much a step down in every possible way from the original.

Crysis the First's "mauling" by pirates is about as accurate as the "lost sales from the second-hand market" whinging by the Heavy Rain devs in that article up there.

Do they need stellar sales to break even or turn a profit, though?

It depends I guess.  Having heard Ken Levine talk about Freedom Force vs. the Third Reich on a podcast years back, it didn't sound like he considered the game a success and the franchise pretty much died there.  Even beyond the fact of whether or not it was profitable, you have to look at whether or not a development team could be better used elsewhere.  In the case of Irrational/2k, the could probably have a small group of talented people work on a low budget Freedom Force game and make a small amount of money, or they could put those people on the Bioshock Infinite team.  I think it's pretty telling that the closest major modern (well 2002-2005) equivalent to Syndicate, which got a lot of positive critical response, and was fairly popular with the PC gamers on message boards died off fairly quickly.

AFAIK, Freedom Force is a dead franchise precisely because FFvs3R sold so poorly. Then BioShock did very well and that's where the studio now focuses most of its attention.

What a lot of people miss in the Heavy Rain secondary sales issue (which is another topic I can go on about, but one derail at a time) is that it is basically pointed out that 1 game sold equals about $10 back to the studio. So if you ask, "do they need stellar sales?" and between the retailer (who takes 40% to 50% of the box sale) and the publisher (who can take another 25% to 45% of the box sale, plus collects the revenue AND can hold off paying until certain sales conditions are met) then yes, for a studio to remain viable they need decent sales.

Especially if a studio sinks (say) $5m of their own money in and then takes $25m from the publisher for the game. That's 500k sales for the studio to break even on their investment.

Also FFvs3R had starforce if I recall, aka computer AIDS.

If a retailer takes 40-50% of a box sale, then where does all the bitching about razor-thin profit margins for sales of new games from Gamestop come from?

Rent, salaries, corporate overhead, franchise fees, advertising / those catalogues, storage somewhere for all the second hand games no-one buys,  etc. Their profit might really only be a few bucks on every new box sale, but the margins are much higher on second hand sales. Someone has probably broken it down for GameStop on an SKU basis, but the information probably isn't publicly available.

Looking around, there's a GamaSutra article (http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/27879/InDepth_Inside_The_Business_Of_GameStop_Part_One.php) that breaks down GameStop's financials. A quick calculation of gross profit over gross sales revenue suggests that new software sales have a margin of about 21%, while used products (software and hardware) have a margin of about 47%.

It doesn't actually matter if it's shit or amazing.   Even if it tops deus ex in every way it still won't have anything to do with Syndicate.

Someone should remake freedom force as a dota thing and bring it forward a few decades.

Biggest problem that franchise has is the era it is set in and overdoing the homage to comics of the era. The style issues it has make it entirely unmarketable without a refresh, but are all eminently fixable without spoiling the feel of the game.

Freedom force would even have been a better mmo property than for example champions.

I think Commander Keen needs to be remade as an MMO or a "Visceral First Person Shooter Experience".

Freedom Force's next game was meant to be set in the 1970s / 80s, I believe. They did the Golden Age with the first one, the Sliver Age with the Second and the next was meant to be the Dark(er) Age.

But I've got to disagree: FF's lore sucked. It's on the same level as Champions' is - a reflection / parody of comic book trends.

Superheroes could be an interesting FPS (:awesome_for_real:) though, as evidenced by the leaked trailer for the now cancelled Avengers game.

I think if someone wanted to make a true sequel to Freedom Force or Syndicate, the best bet would be to do it on the iPhone.  The gameplay lends itself fairly well to a touchscreen and it wouldn't take a big budget to make.  I don't remember all the details of FF's gameplay, but the original Syndicate could probably be ported over without having to really change anything.

This sounds a lot better than the visceral shooter. (http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/09/21/paradox-announce-cartel-interview/)

Make that a 3rd person action adventure with some sandbox elements and I'm sold, sold, sold.

Morgan's writing this one too ?

New Syndicate game gets announced.  Within five minutes of the thread being created people start complaining about how they'd rather have a modern version of the original.

Another developer announces they're doing what's essentially a new Syndicate game just with a different name, but which plays pretty similar to the original Syndicate.  This announcement is followed by dead silence.

If you've ever been a sysadmin, then you know that if the customers are silent, you're doing it right. If they're complaining, you're doing it wrong. I assume this is mostly the same with games development. Syndicate being an FPS is a huge initial WTF to syndicate fans, so you get bitching. Syndicate being redeveloped more like the original, but expanded, sounds more inline with what we expect, so we're not going "what the christ, dawg".

vOv

I'm fairly sure being a sysadmin and marketing a game are in fact not similar.

I'm fairly sure you missed the point. People like to complain when there's something to complain about, however small a thing. If they're not complaining, you're doing it right, regardless of what "it" is.

There's no point getting excited about the blocks of text in that interview. Devtalk is cheap.

I agree with half of your point.  People like to complain.  In fact that was more or less the point I was making.  I don't think that most of the people who have been complaining in this topic actually give a shit when it comes down to it.  Developer's turning old franchises into FPS games is an easy target, but I don't actually think too many people where were just dying for a true sequel to Syndicate.

The part I don't agree with is that silence means you're doing something right.  Sometimes it just means nobody gives a shit what you're doing.  The timing of Cartel's announcement was clearly a way of getting some of the attention that's currently focused on the Syndicate reboot, but it doesn't really look like they're getting all that much out of it.

Obviously it would've been better if they'd had an actual demo, or could put out an actual demo fairly soon. As it is, it sounds more like they're in the starting phases.

If you're hungering for syndicate, however, http://freesynd.sourceforge.net/

If DE:HR could be labelled 'Syndicate' and that would be a reasonable sequel.

Almost all the important mechanics in Syndicate could be carried over to a game where the camera follows one guy.

I would love a modern remake of Syndicate, not a genre-switch re-imagining. If the dev I've never heard of can create a good modern successor to Syndicate, I'll buy it.

Kinda OT, and I didn't see it in the D3 thread:

GameSpy Editor-in-Chief Bennett Ring wonders why Diablo 3 isn't going to be an FPS (http://au.pc.gamespy.com/pc/diablo-iii/1195932p1.html)


 :awesome_for_real:

(Saw this through Game Journo's, who also link one of Ring's responses to the criticism about his article and then a rebuttal from Jeff Green (http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=31201529&postcount=310).)

God bless you, Jeff Green.

Oh god, that article.

Also, Jeff Green :Love_Letters:

yeah, I haven't been on for a couple of days. Busy with that RL stuff that sometimes intrudes on my ability to POST ABOUT IMPORTANT GAMES.

ahem.

So yeah, I'm both keen on and up for this.

Also, who is Jeff Green?

Clearly I can see from your posts over the last few days in the Cat Thread, Miniatures, and Warco the War Porn game, that you've only been able to follow threads of the utmost importance with your limited browsing time.

Jeff Green was EIC of Computer Gaming World/Games for Windows magazine and also ran the GFW radio podcast (since leaving games journalism he went to work for EA and now Popcap).  He was one of the only people in games journalism who was actually worth a damn.

Former writer, then editor, then EIC for Computer Gaming World, which morphed into Games for Windows Magazine when Ziff-Davis ate the bullshit Microsoft shoveled at them. He was one of the fixtures on the CGW podcast, and had a short stint working at EA on some Sims projects after he saw the writing on the wall at Ziff and left. Also a somewhat prolific GAF poster. He's a pretty cool dude, and tried to fight against the tide of idiotic "games journalism", to little success.

Also what Velorath said. Most of the 2007ish CGW crew were pretty good at being actual objective writers, even if you didn't necessarily agree with them.

Yeah, I was skipping this thread and doing other things since I got bored with the circular argument with you on whether or not a FPS was the weapon of choice. With my limited time I was skipping threads that had become somewhat pointless, like this one. I only came back to the thread again today after 4-5 days and found out about "Cartel" today, only to scroll down and see you declaring VICTOLY.

Much in the same way I haven't bothered with reading the last several pages of the Space Marine thread when it became a boring circular argument about why girls can't be Space Marines (except for one post I made yesterday or today bitching that my copy still isn't here).

Still though, you're welcome to PM me when something important comes up that I may not have seen but I absolutely must respond to immediately or sooner.  :why_so_serious:

Also, ta on Jeff Green. So he's working in another field now, I take it?

At Popcap.

Ah okay. They just got bought out by EA, didn't they?

Yeah why don't you just preorder it and tell us how it plays mang, we're dying for another shooter game, seriously. This has a making to be a classic. Much like Bioshock was the spiritual successor to System Shock. One look at the name and they got it half right, 2K is OK! With Syndicate not even changing their name, it's going to be a spiritual rebirth of optimus prime scale of awesome.

Yes.

I look forward to Bookworm Adventures and Peggle shooters.

Lost in all of this hair-tearing and clothing-rending over changing things into FPSes is of course the fact that this is as old as the FPS itself.

I can only assume that users on all the big 2400 baud BBSes were wailing and decrying the conversion of this:


into this:

You fubared the images.

They show up for me, but I will find alternates.

EDIT: better?

Yes

Nukem was an action game that got turned into a FPS action game.

Syndicate was a tactical squad based RTS that's getting turned into an FPS action game.  I wonder if Relic knows tactical squad based RTS games aren't profitable now.   Someone should inform them quick.

It was also done at the dawn of FPS games. As opposed to now, when we're in the midst of a massive glut of them.

I actually don't mind franchises doing genre-jumps, (Red Faction comes to mind). What I do mind is the apparent contempt displayed by the quote I linked before:

But hey, it's out of my hands, and I exhausted most of how much of a fuck I gave halfway through the last page. I think it may well have the lasting impact of something like Chrome or Timeshift or Haze, when Syndicate should be so much more, but you know, whatever.

I think Syndicate could work WITH a first-person shooting perspective, perhaps as part of a "jump into dude's cranium for the full-on" type of conceit while the main interface is a squad-based RTS. But to just chuck the whole strategic layer in favor of "BOOM HEADSHOT!" seems to be ignoring what made the franchise's gameplay so special in the first place.

I think there's even more of that going on with X-Com, but yeah.

I don't 'get' the X-Com reboot either.

Well, shit.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewwtznVkSxA

My feelings are mixed. It's not Syndicate as I remember it, but it's damn sexy what they are showcasing in that trailer.

Wait. So they're thinking they'll release that in febuary next year?

That does look cool though. Love the look.

And probably infested to the gills with console-style snap-to-structures bullshit etc.

The first rumors of Starbreeze developing a Syndicate game were 3 years ago so presumably they've been working on it a long time.

Makes sense. There was too much polish for just a makeshift "this is what we're thinking of making" demo.

Meh. Looks like a couple novel twists, but mostly a lot of generic shooter. So tired of that genre.

Oh look, Deus Ex, now in grays and fluorescent blues!

Looked more fun than the footage I have seen of Deus Ex.

I always thought some kind of Syndicate MMO would be cool. Form giant corps and do missions against other squads for territory/research/money/whatever. Wouldn't know if your current mission was going to be PVE, or PVP (Always have a one minute load time regardless as it waits for another Squad to queue up)...Until the shit jumps off that is!

Have 5 v 5 squad battles you could queue up for like a battleground...

2 v 1  (attackers v defenders) - where the defenders all get Gauss guns and the attackers mediocre weapons...

etc etc

WoW didn't have players controlling squads so it is impossible for another mmog publisher to do that.

Anyway if they make Syndicate into DR:HE without boss fights then that sounds good enough for me. A DoW2 style thing would naturally be better, but meh consoles. You people buying xboxes are literally funding terrorism.

Very nice trailer showing something a little more deep than your standard gun and cover FPS play. I think it still has an atmosphere of Syndicate about it, though obviously the trailer concentrated on some smart action rather than showing menus and loadouts so I'm still interested to see if or how they bring that aspect into the game. The crying shame is the idiot comparisons to Deus Ex that are already inevitably starting up. Game's been in development for 4 years, for a start. How ready it is at this point is up in the air but they must be pretty confident if they're gunning for a february release. I'm still hopeful.

Careful - Velorath will come and get you!


So anyway, looks okay, but generic. If it gets good reviews, I'll bargain bin it.

What can I say.  One thing I find more repetitive and generic than shooters is jaded, cynical game commentary.  I'm not sure when it became a sin to not want to dismiss a game completely just based on the announcement.

Top left, Bro!  :grin:

Comparisons to another game in a corporation dominated future, where you develop characters by buying augmentations then enter flexible shooty missions that can be completed in a variety of ways wouldn't be out of order even if they were remaking the original game.

Unfortunately some people always seem to miss the first word there.

Of course it's valid to dismiss the game based on an announcement or trailer. What I wanted is a sequel to Syndicate not another FPS.

If you are a chess player and dearly hoping for Chess 2, only to find out it a twitchy first person action shooter for console only you'd be upset too!

Syndicate was p twitchy for a squad rts. More so than say, dow2.

You all just don't remember it that way because you were on a sugar high at the time.

Coming soon :  PAWN.  A lone man, working in a gritty, dirty grid of squares.  Some are white.  Some are....black.  Starring Bishop and Horsie.*


*Screenshots not representative of gameplay or graphics.

:Love_Letters:

Velorath, I'm always happy to be wrong about these things.

I know.  It was more a response to Azazel.

Look like I'll buy it on Steam for 5 bucks some day if it gets good reviews.   Single player FPS isn't something I have time for anymore usually.

I get the feeling I could just watch playthroughs of most single player games these days on youtube and feel like I got just as much out of the experience as actually playing them.

Yup.

Probably more, as you wouldn't feel the jarring control system.

There's even another depressing news, just watched Aliens: Colonial Marines (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EOlzCrVFvs), another upcoming FPS...Gawd, it's terribad. Why is there such a FPS demand like this? If this is what Sega is thinking about after ditching Obsidian's proposal for an Aliens RPG, I guess I'm done with FPS for a while.

What? looks fun to me. Is it the directed experience you dont like? More of a deathmatch fan I guess?

Watching an FPS game obviously being played with a pad is seriously depressing.

Why?

Why? Because it just is. It looks clumsy as all fucking hell, it is inaccurate, it's inefficient and it represents literally everything I perceive as wrong with FPS gaming today. The only thing missing from that video was snapping to structures, and it would be the complete anti-tgr experience.

I think tgr tells it best. The guy wasn't even in any sort of danger from the aliens...the same aliens that would fuck marines in the first level of the original AvP. Hello? It's a face raping aliens, if you blow it up with a shotgun when it's RIGHT ON TOP OF YOU, YOUR FACE WOULD MELT FROM ACID.

The pacing is all sorts of bad, and it's going to be another Call of Duty: Colonial Marines formula. Aside from the tribute to the movie, I really can't get excited over this. The aliens had almost 5 seconds of rape time on the players and all they did is fumble about after popping from their hiding hole...enough time for the player to use his D-Pad to .....slowlllllly move his X axis ..........riiiiiiiiiight on top of the alien face......and.....bam. YAY! Nice shot.....man?

That was awful.  I'm not just being 'Ironwood'.

That was truly, truly bad.

Dear God, don't release this game.

Oh hey it's 2003 again.

It is ?

Does that mean I have my shitty overpaid job again ?

As I said, I stopped giving a fuck awhile back now. I'm just  :popcorn: and laughing now.

PAWN: A world of black and white will now run red.

PAWN: Queen's Knight to Shotgun.

PAWN: Loyal to the King. In love with the Queen. It used to be just a game, but now it is ... personal.

I would totally watch that movie.  :awesome_for_real:

Don't forget the Bishop and Rook DLC.

You'd wait until it entered the discount bin though.  :grin:

 :heart:

And I'd avoid it because it would invariably have DRM on it. :why_so_serious:

Watching Obliv....Skyrim gave me the same feeling. It's almost like the in-game character has some sort of retardation.

Fucking awesome. Just what I wanted.

Excuse me while I play a session of Shadowrun on my Xbox, so I can be prepared for more of this quality entertainment. I can barely contain myself.

Surprisingly long Single Player preview. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJY58Kq1UJg)

I haven't checked out the link; I do not like having solutions spoiled for me or to get a preview of games I figure I will check out anyway.

Don't want to beat the horse about watching FPS played with a controller, but  :uhrr:

It's SO BAD.

Game looks interesting, if a bit brutal.

I have to agree, the (ab)use of the syndicate name aside, it does look surprisingly interesting. I don't like the snapping to structures, shooting around corners etc, autoaim etc, and the fact it's going to be published by EA automatically disqualifies it for me, but I have to admit the world looks (at least superficially, it depends whether or not it actually holds up over an extended play) interesting enough. And the pistol sounds meaty.

Wow, I haven't played Deus Ex for almost a week !  Looking forward to this.

 :oh_i_see:

There is hardly anything to spoil. Its all very, very telegraphed. Looks to be a pretty, but rather dull rail-shooter. Which is a pity because with EA's resources they can afford to do things like have Michael Wincott voicing a character.

4-Player Co-Op - Syndicate Gameplay Trailer (http://youtu.be/7zg_bLQBqzQ?hd=1)

Now that's interesting.

Oh look, Deus Ex has co-op now.  :grin:

Interesting. A throwback in a way to the 4-player teams of the original game, I guess...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=T81MjzuEkdc


That looks, Rather awesome.

I remain unconvinced.

A bit busy on the screen, plus looks consoly asa crap.

I'll wait and see...
At this point (and for awhile now) I'm treating it as a divergent game based on the same IP.

Demo for this (on Xbox and PSN) comes out today... and of course there's a problem with EA's servers.

VideoGameWriters article about EA Maintenance (http://videogamewriters.com/syndicate-demo-out-today-37663/)

I cannot confirm this, because I'm only gaming on PC ATM, and the PC version isn't due until the end of the month.

edit... err came out yesterday?

There seems to be a number of sci-fi shooters coming out, maybe they think the realistic, present day, shooter category is full and are looking for something different. Which will make it interesting when CCP eventually release Dust since they all look sort of similar.

The free remix of the Syndicate theme was worth getting, enough echoes of the original (which wasn't all that great) to hit the nostalgia nerve. Possibly more interesting than the actual trailer.

Played the PS3 coop demo.  Took me a bit to figure out the directional pad selects powers and L2 will trigger them and I was frequently unintentionally healing instead of triggering a power.  

There will be no multiplayer registration codes so that's good.  I think I'm getting this on release in order to fully binge on the co-op.

I'd like to pick this up for the co-op, but no local multiplayer on consoles, and presumably no Steam on PC's makes it a bit of a no-go for me right now.

Played a bunch on PC.  The single-player campaign needs to win several awards.  One for managing to have worse boss fights than Deus Ex HR.  Another for having a technological breakthrough for bloom effects to not only be blinding but also be painful to look at.  And a third for strengthening fingers by having every vent requiring repeated button presses to open, although Syndicate isn't alone in this category.   

The multiplayer is fun similarish to Left 4 Dead as shown in the demo.  One of the ways you can upgrade your multiplayer character is to get upgrade tokens by extracting a chip from a miniboss in the level.  What this means is when the miniboss is low on health, everyone swarms it trying to be the one who gets the chip.  More often than not people are swarming in too early and dying.  Waltzing up to get the chip before reviving 3 dead teammates surrounding the miniboss still looks funny the tenth time.

So not very worthwhile, then?

I'm a huge cyberpunk whore and I'm in the Gerstmann camp, ie. I love the game. I've only played the single player so far (almost to the end now), it's not groundbreaking but it's rather entertaining for the 7-8 hours it'll take. The bloom is sometimes a bit much, but it's offset by use of the DICE sound engine. This game also has the best minigun ever.

I had no problems with bossfights, they're the conventional puzzle type where you will have to find the appropriate "rotation" and after that it becomes really easy. I've heard some people cursing the final boss though, but I'm not there yet. 

Regarding chip extraction in multiplayer, everyone gets the upgrade so there's no need to ninja loot.

Looks like sale fodder to me. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

The coop can be argued to be the real meat of the game, and it probably won't last past a couple of months. So I'd wait for a big sale because you'll be getting a vastly inferior product if the multiplayer is a ghost town.

I enjoy the coop because when I'm going through a level with 3 others I have a glimpse of what it would be like to be one of the 4 little guys I controlled in the original Syndicate.  There are 9 multiplayer maps in total and I am on the 8th.  Looking at my completion times they took me anywhere between 12 to 27 minutes a piece to complete on normal.  The reason I bought it now was so I could find multiplayer games.  And thanks for clearing up the bit about chip extraction, I guess people descend like vultures on the miniboss just to get measly kill points?    

In contrast to the multiplayer, the single player campaign does not have that Syndicate feel.  Obviously having just one person in the campaign sets a different tone but even with that said it just feels like corridor shooter #45 with bullet sponge enemies which get upgraded from sponges to ShamWows for the mini/bosses.  I thought having powers in a cyberpunk setting would vary the formula.   Nope.  All of the research for powers and weapons is in multiplayer, not in single player.  And neat powers like rebooting yourself after death or deploying a virus on a shielded enemy are also only in multiplayer.  I would have been happier if the single player campaign was a series of missions (go get a hard drive, go assassinate someone, go escort someone) with choices in between to shape the story.  I'm pretty sure I'm next to the final boss in the campaign and I can't bring myself to finish.  

Multiplayer is fun.  Single player is sadface.