"Glorified tech demo"

SubJeff on 26/8/2009 at 00:00

Quote Posted by EvaUnit02

Half-Life 2 and Max Payne 2 were just glorified Havok physics tech demos.

Just?

And nothing more?

You're quickly becoming the twit of the forums Unit. Seriously, what is this crap? They may not be to your taste but to say they are just tech demos is gratuitous nonsense.

Doom 3 isn't just a tech demo either, its just a fairly hollow, if flashy game. I enjoyed it for what it was, and it did what it set out to do very well.

Fringe on 26/8/2009 at 00:04

I've always been blindsided by Doom 3's negative press (well--negative TTLG press anyway). It didn't stand up to the originals, but I had more fun with it than, say, Oblivion, which has its own forum. I've replayed Doom 3 a few times and could see myself replaying it again. What's that phrase? Good, dumb fun?

Aside from a few neat touches like the Painter's World, Oblivion felt much more repetitive with and committed many more crimes against game design than Doom 3's monster closets.

Chade on 26/8/2009 at 00:25

Doom 3 is the only game itt I would consider calling a tech demo.

It just depends what you mean by the term.

If you mean that a game has no redeeming features beyond it's tech, then Doom 3 is clearly not a tech demo. It is a well designed shooter, and while I find it uninspired and boring, I can see why you might enjoy it.

If you mean that the only innovations in the game were technological, then I think it's pretty clear that Doom 3 is a tech demo.

If you mean that the technological innovations in the game were included for their own sake, then I think you could make a decent argument either way. Doom 3 did use it's lighting engine to scare the player, but not really in a way which depended on the new-fangled dynamic stuff.

june gloom on 26/8/2009 at 00:32

Ultimately I think the biggest problem with the game was that it just wasn't half as scary as people made it out to be. And a big part of that was there were too many monsters. To illustrate, there's a section in the first half of the game where you have to escort a scientist through an area that has frequent EMPs. He carries a large electric lantern, but the EMPs will often kill the light (as well as your flashlight) for a few seconds. In the game, whenever this happens you're ambushed by monsters. It's trite, predictable, and carries no suspense whatsoever. By the time you manage to protect him long enough to get him past that section, he's ambushed and killed in a scripted sequence anyway. If the initial ambushes had been taken out, leaving you to wonder what was going to happen next, that section would have been much scarier.

ANTSHODAN on 26/8/2009 at 01:22

I wouldn't call Crysis a tech demo. I finished my first playthrough only the other day, and I had all the graphical settings on low, no AA, 1024x786 resolution. And even then (after turning off as many background programs as i could) it stuttered a wee bit. But bloody hell, I havn't enjoyed an FPS like it in a long, long time. My preconceptions of what the game was going to be like were shattered - and I was more than happy just to enjoy the gameplay without any flashy volumetric pixel post shading processing.

Also a huge 'Amen' to Delta difficulty. After reading this thread I just played the first two missions again on Delta and found myself really thinking out elaborate strategies and taking things on from a very different perspective than I had first time around. (Of course that could also be due to actually being slightly better at the game from completing it!)

I think to get the best enjoyment out of it you have to ~~buy a new graphics card~~ create some of the challenge yourself. I found it was quite easy to get stuck in a pattern - you could cloak-shoot-hide your way through the game - but I found it a lot more interesting if you made full use of the suit. Once you find yourself jumping to rooftops, knocking enemies around in speed mode, throwing explosive barrels and shooting them just as they approach an enemy, it's a wonderful sandbox experience.

Cracking game! I personally think it's a shame if it gets written off as a tech demo.

Doom on the other hand. Well, it looked pretty at the time (Still does I guess) but I didn't really get into it until a couple of years after I'd bought it. I was impressed at the visuals the first time around, but I never got beyond a couple of hours of gameplay in any playthrough - it just never gripped me.

Ultimately there will always be good games and bad games - and I think its a shame if a good game is labelled unfairly just because it is also a showcase for new technology.

Taffer36 on 26/8/2009 at 03:34

Quote Posted by Subjective Effect

Did you even bother reading the sentence of his directly after the one you quoted?

Quote Posted by DaBeast

Wrong

The AI will shoot in your general direction if they see you go stealth, also when stealthed you are not 100% invisible, its like predator, once they know you are there they can sort of track you a bit, but its very inaccurate. And if you move slowly they may not see you at all, unless alerted. They will not see at all if you are hidden in foliage. I've crawled up to/past/behind many enemy soldiers while hidden isn the jungle.

This is true.

june gloom on 26/8/2009 at 03:45

To be fair, I've never called Crysis a tech demo. It's just a very pretty, very mediocre game.

My real problem with the game is that dipshits seem to think that Crysis' futuristic requirements are somehow the norm, and use that to claim that PC gaming is a waste of time.

EvaUnit02 on 26/8/2009 at 04:44

Quote Posted by Subjective Effect

Just?

And nothing more?

You're quickly becoming the twit of the forums Unit. Seriously, what is this crap? They may not be to your taste but to say they are just tech demos is gratuitous nonsense.

Apparently you're the twit, you dullard. Congratulations on missing the point of not just that post, but the entire fucking thread.

All this time I have been saying that calling something a G.T.D. is a stupid cop out of a non-argument, you can't arbitrarily write off commercial games like that.

Then all of sudden a couple of people come in and spew garbage like, "Doom 3 wasn't very good in my opinion, therefore it's an exception." Dumb shit like that makes me want to pull out dethtoll's DURRR HURRR graph.

"Hurr, hurr, Half-Life 2 is a glorified physics tech demo!!!!!1111", it's supposed to sound like a dumb argument, because frankly it is. It's type of shit that Koki would come up with, "Hurr hurr, all JRPGs are shit because they're made in Japan." I wasn't actually saying that, SubDeaf. Really, do you people need this shit spelt out for you? Do I need to put a series of internet sarcasm exclamation points and 1 numerals afterwards before it becomes fucking obvious?

Thirith on 26/8/2009 at 07:58

Quote Posted by dethtoll

My real problem with the game is that dipshits seem to think that Crysis' futuristic requirements are somehow the norm, and use that to claim that PC gaming is a waste of time.

Crysis at the second-highest detail level still looked much, much better than most games at the time. Much of that "Crysis requires a computer powered by a nuclear reactor!!!!1!1" stuff came from people not being able to run the highest detail level, which was basically there for future computers. IMO if Crytek had taken out that detail level, they would have got far less crap than they did.

EvaUnit02: Doom 3 being called a glorified tech demo isn't all as stupid as you think it is, at least IMO. Compared to Far Cry, Half-Life 2 or Crysis, there was simply much less game there. The main reason why (IMO) it's still not really fair to call it a G.T.D. is that, while the design is lazy and repetitive, it's not perfunctory. There was a lot of detail put in the game (you wouldn't need all those audio logs just to show off the engine), even if the detail fell flat for me. Also, if the game had just been there to show off the new ID engine, they wouldn't have put the coolest level at the very end.

mothra on 26/8/2009 at 12:42

i didn't like crysis for its dead serious world-in-peril story and cardboard-like portrayal of koreans. BUT - I loved the gameplay that did carry over from FarCry, even got enhanced. It ran decent on my dual-core/8800 rig and it ran on the P4 single-core without any problems.