Sine, Seraph: time to buy Burnout Paradise

[Zeus]

The major complaint you guys had is being fixed on Feb 5 with the Party Pack update: you will now have the option to restart a race you just failed instead of having to go back to that intersection. Criterion finally bent to people's wishes

http://ps3.ign.com/articles/945/945755p1.html

[SineSwiper]

Heh, nice try. Only took them a year to make this patch? I bet you they were trying to figure out which button to make the restart button. Meetings, conference calls, surveys, and six months of beta testing.

[Tessian]

Wtf? All this over their decision to not give you the ability to restart a race? Am I missing something here cause that sounds much more retarded than Sony's "the rumble pack is an obsolete feature" argument. What possible reason is there to NOT let a player restart a race?

[Zeus]

Heh, nice try. Only took them a year to make this patch? I bet you they were trying to figure out which button to make the restart button. Meetings, conference calls, surveys, and six months of beta testing.

Regardless of what it took, you now have lost the source to your main complaint. If you loved Burnout before and they fixed this "huge" problem, wouldn't you want to try Paradise?

[Zeus]

Wtf? All this over their decision to not give you the ability to restart a race? Am I missing something here cause that sounds much more retarded than Sony's "the rumble pack is an obsolete feature" argument. What possible reason is there to NOT let a player restart a race?

Their reasoning is that there's so much to do and the way the game is set up there's no reason to just restart a race. Just go to the next one. And if you really do wanna try it again, it takes relatively small time to get there.

I think that the option is a much better idea but it certainly didn't preclude me from enjoyin' the shit out of it.

[SineSwiper]

Their reasoning is that there's so much to do and the way the game is set up there's no reason to just restart a race. Just go to the next one. And if you really do wanna try it again, it takes relatively small time to get there.

I think that's a complete misunderstanding of how people generally play games like this. In order to get good at something, you do it over and over again. If you want to get good at free throws, you shoot at the basket a bunch of times. If you want to get good at skeet shooting, you keep launch skeet until you're good at shooting them. If you want to get good at a car race, you race over and over again until you get good at it.

You do not play one race, give up, and then go out and find something else to do. Then the race is no longer fresh in your mind, and you have to learn something else.

The fact that a bunch of intelligent programmers actually believe that this basic tenant is not true, and then bitches at their own audience because they DO believe it, just completely blows my mind. It took them a year to fix something that discouraged hundreds of thousands of people from buying the game. At this point, just the arrogant air of incompetence would detract me from buying the game. Maybe if I find it at a cheap price, I might consider it, but you'll have to give me some time, as this recent news just reminds me how fucking moronic and stupid the whole situation is.

[bovine]

I like how instead of pumping out a bunch of slight alterations and calling them sequels, they keep releasing that content onto this game. It is this kind of long term content addition that I would like to see more of (and perferably in a game that I actually enjoy..... Mass Effect, Farcry 2, Deadspace, etc.)

[Don]

This is why having some kind of 'losing' path in any kind of game almost never works. People are not going to just lose something and then move past it. It's just not human nature unless you manage to make the game so bad that people just want to get past it. When you play Mario Kart I bet you didn't just skip to 100 CC Star Cup after getting a bronze in 50 CC Star Cup.

The only exception I can think of is that it's actually kind of cool to lose to Lavos at least once to see that the world indeed does get destroyed in Chrono Trigger, and it even reveals something you wouldn't know otherwise: that somebody somewhere already knows this is going to happen.

[Zeus]

Their reasoning is that there's so much to do and the way the game is set up there's no reason to just restart a race. Just go to the next one. And if you really do wanna try it again, it takes relatively small time to get there.

I think that's a complete misunderstanding of how people generally play games like this. In order to get good at something, you do it over and over again. If you want to get good at free throws, you shoot at the basket a bunch of times. If you want to get good at skeet shooting, you keep launch skeet until you're good at shooting them. If you want to get good at a car race, you race over and over again until you get good at it.

You do not play one race, give up, and then go out and find something else to do. Then the race is no longer fresh in your mind, and you have to learn something else.

The fact that a bunch of intelligent programmers actually believe that this basic tenant is not true, and then bitches at their own audience because they DO believe it, just completely blows my mind. It took them a year to fix something that discouraged hundreds of thousands of people from buying the game. At this point, just the arrogant air of incompetence would detract me from buying the game. Maybe if I find it at a cheap price, I might consider it, but you'll have to give me some time, as this recent news just reminds me how fucking moronic and stupid the whole situation is.

Again, you're missing the point.

The idea is that Paradise is a different type of racing game, one that is not to be played by doing the same task over and over again. That's why they were so resistant, they had designed a game to break out of that mold. By having that mentality you're not playing the game that's designed, not trying to experience the game that's been created. What you're trying to do is fit the game with your pre-conceived notion of what a game of this type SHOULD be rather than trying to enjoy the game for what it is. So even though Paradise looks like a racing game it's designed completely differently. Playing it like a regular racing game defeats the purpose of its design.

The closest analogy I can think of is Left 4 Dead. It looks like an FPS but if you play it like Halo, you one dead motherfucker. And you would also miss the point of the game being a true co-op. Valve designed the game to be played differently than a regular FPS and they basically forced you to play it together with the incapacitation idea and blindness from the Boomers. Paradise is actually trying to do the same thing by not allowing you to restart a race. It's not designed for extreme repetition of the same task with SO much to do in the island. And it doesn't take too long to get back there anyways if you want to. And who knows, maybe you'll even find some cool stuff along the way.

When games try to change what is already pre-conceived, they often run into resistance. Paradise and Left 4 Dead are actually perfect examples of that. Both are highly successful games that a good chunk of people just utterly despise, usually because they can't do something they want. I had a couple of cousins over here and showed them Left 4 Dead co-op with another cousin of mine who loves it. They both hated it 'cause they just couldn't wrap their heads around the fact that you had to watch out for each other and just couldn't go running around doing what you wanted like you do in every other FPS (Gears is half and half in co-op mode since you could conceivably survive if you play like Halo).

[Zeus]

I like how instead of pumping out a bunch of slight alterations and calling them sequels, they keep releasing that content onto this game. It is this kind of long term content addition that I would like to see more of (and perferably in a game that I actually enjoy..... Mass Effect, Farcry 2, Deadspace, etc.)

I agree completely. I think a lot of companies could take some lessons from Criterion, Epic, and Valve. These companies have a philosophy where if they update their games for free with new content, it'll increase the value of it and help them sell it over the long term. Paradise sold relatively well for nearly a year 'cause of it.

It's completely against the idea of charging for everything (hello Horse Armor) or for something already on the disc or done before the game is released (I'm lookin' at you, Need for Speed and Mega Man 9). Their philosophy is that the increased sales of the game to a new market is their revenue stream to offset the costs of development of this new stuff. And if you think about it, if the salaries of your employees is fixed, it's something to actually fill their time between projects so the incremental costs aren't really that bad.

[SineSwiper]

Again, you're missing the point.

The idea is that Paradise is a different type of racing game, one that is not to be played by doing the same task over and over again. That's why they were so resistant, they had designed a game to break out of that mold. By having that mentality you're not playing the game that's designed, not trying to experience the game that's been created. What you're trying to do is fit the game with your pre-conceived notion of what a game of this type SHOULD be rather than trying to enjoy the game for what it is. So even though Paradise looks like a racing game it's designed completely differently. Playing it like a regular racing game defeats the purpose of its design.

And you're missing my point. You act like Paradise completely redesigned everything about the game. All they did was redesign the "menu system". The races are still fairly hard, and that is no change from the old game. So, if I'm going to play these races over and over again, why not play them in the same order, instead of going from race to race, not remembering why I fucked up in the first race?

It's a completely illogical design to go by, and it was only put in place because of GTA. But, what they didn't realize with GTA is that people would play missions over and over again, anyway. It was fucking annoying to drive over to do that, so I got tired of it, and just fucked around. After a while, I got tired of fucking around and turned off the game, since I wasn't actually making progress.

The only GTA game I've actually completed was Vice City, and that was after I got annoyed enough to just turn on cheat codes. If GTA had a restart feature, I think I would actually play them more often, but given that millions of people buy the game to fuck around, and not actually complete the damn thing, that sort of thing isn't going to change.

[bovine]

If GTA had a restart feature, I think I would actually play them more often, but given that millions of people buy the game to fuck around, and not actually complete the damn thing, that sort of thing isn't going to change.

You're not talking about 4, right?

[Tessian]

If GTA had a restart feature, I think I would actually play them more often, but given that millions of people buy the game to fuck around, and not actually complete the damn thing, that sort of thing isn't going to change.

You're not talking about 4, right?

Actually I have to agree with Sine on that... GTA never has, and desperately needs, a Retry button. I HATE that if I lose a mission I have to start back over anywhere from 10-30 minutes ago. It's probably the main reason I haven't finished GTA4; too harsh a time penalty for failing a mission. AT LEAST let me go back to where the mission started!

[bovine]

wait..... so what about the text message you get on your phone in GTA4 when you fail a mission? It lets you retry the mission from where it started. Usually there's some tedious driving involved, like getting from where the mission starts, to the mission area, but it is essentially a retry button.

[SineSwiper]

wait..... so what about the text message you get on your phone in GTA4 when you fail a mission? It lets you retry the mission from where it started. Usually there's some tedious driving involved, like getting from where the mission starts, to the mission area, but it is essentially a retry button.

Interesting. Shellie was mostly playing GTA4, so I didn't really catch on to that.

[Zeus]

Again, you're missing the point.

The idea is that Paradise is a different type of racing game, one that is not to be played by doing the same task over and over again. That's why they were so resistant, they had designed a game to break out of that mold. By having that mentality you're not playing the game that's designed, not trying to experience the game that's been created. What you're trying to do is fit the game with your pre-conceived notion of what a game of this type SHOULD be rather than trying to enjoy the game for what it is. So even though Paradise looks like a racing game it's designed completely differently. Playing it like a regular racing game defeats the purpose of its design.

And you're missing my point. You act like Paradise completely redesigned everything about the game. All they did was redesign the "menu system". The races are still fairly hard, and that is no change from the old game. So, if I'm going to play these races over and over again, why not play them in the same order, instead of going from race to race, not remembering why I fucked up in the first race?

It's a completely illogical design to go by, and it was only put in place because of GTA. But, what they didn't realize with GTA is that people would play missions over and over again, anyway. It was fucking annoying to drive over to do that, so I got tired of it, and just fucked around. After a while, I got tired of fucking around and turned off the game, since I wasn't actually making progress.

The only GTA game I've actually completed was Vice City, and that was after I got annoyed enough to just turn on cheat codes. If GTA had a restart feature, I think I would actually play them more often, but given that millions of people buy the game to fuck around, and not actually complete the damn thing, that sort of thing isn't going to change.

Never mind