I dont like that you call me dumb, I really always appreciated your postings and this is the first time I see you falling into such cheap behaviour.
It's okay, no one called you dumb.
You said oldschool gameplay died for good reasons. Yes, you are right, it died because it does not fit well to the consoles. I know from DNF interviews that they integrated auto-healing and restricted number of weapons only because it works better on consoles. Todays linear level design is another result of it, especially in shooters. Games like Stalker show that open level design can still work, but linear and simplified rail shooters just sell better. So in the end it is just a decision to make more money, it does not mean that it is plain better, it just feels better for the standard consoles player.
Sure, they have reasons behind their making the game wussier (regen health, 2 weapons at a time), but that doesn't make those good decisions.
Serious Sam for XBox and
Serious Sam 2 on XBox were well-received, ridiculous amounts of fun, and offered no such thing as health-regen and weapon limitations. I agree that one can argue in favour of reduced weapons because of the button layout on a controller (and argue against it citing the likes of Serious Sam and other games that didn't make such compromises), but certainly not regenerating health. Console gamers (with the exception of Wii) consider themselves as hardcore as PC gamers (those consoles aren't cheap, and their games cost a small fortune).
You have to understand that a consoles player is sitting in his living room on a chair with a small controller in his hand. A fast paced action gameplay is not perfect for this scenario. But a rather slow gameplay with autohealing and a cover system is more relaxing in this case. Actually the Duke was not like that, Unreal was not like that, Doom, Quake, Wolfenstein, they all were not like that, but these games were PC games. That is the difference.
This is speculative at best. I think you're thinking about the Wii. Here's some speculation of my own: regenerating health came as a means to prevent that a player is forced to continue without enough health to have a reasonable chance at survival; cover systems came about not as a means to sit back and relax, but to simulate real life gun-fights where participants do not run around a corridor dodging projectiles. I know console gamers -- PS3 and 360 gamers -- and they are generally nothing like Wii gamers in terms of tastes and expectations for games.
Crysis2 vs. DNF. Well, almost all people in these forums talked bad about Crysis2, it was too narrow, bad AI, too linear, almost no driving, too much simplified, a consoles game. All people who liked the Duke found Crysis 2 boring and many of them even did not finish it. This tells me something about it.
Really? I got the impression that most of those comments were simply the expectations of users who never played it, with the only exception being alpha strike who bought it and disliked it -- and we all know how specific his shooter tastes are. I'm not saying he has poor taste, but that's hardly a consensus. Alibaba liked it a lot.
Basically, I think the poor reception of DNF is more than just its 12-year-old humour -- it's that it made compromises that cost it some of its all-important fun factor, as well as design choices that made it less fun. There are those who hate it more as a reaction to it being worse than it should have been, but I think your like for it and forgiveness of its (apparently glaring) flaws is a reaction to the extreme haters. There are plenty of us who don't like it because it met our expectations that it was always going to be rubbish.
I think Indie developers normally make games with a much better focus, and their games are more fun for it. I don't think you have to worry about indie FPSs because of a dodgy game that bit off way more than its development team could chew.
Jibb
