Dominions II - Low Budget and Overpriced? I think not.

Gandalf Parker · #1 January 11th, 2004, 12:15 AM

Be nice people. We ARE going to get folks who will be surprised by this forum.
We might get people who are used to forums that are a younger playing base.
We might get people who are used to forums where "talking ****" is expected.
We might get people who are used to forums where slamming the devs and publishers is considered standard.
We have already gotten some who felt that asking for things like warez and CD-keys was no big deal.

The fact they this forum has active presences by the developers, and the publishers, will be a shock. The fact that its full of people who really LIKE the game and will fly into its defense will be a surprise. Lets be gentle in our instruction of new people.

Sammual · #2 January 11th, 2004, 12:56 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by ceremony:

quote:
Originally posted by onomastikon:
I blame no one for their lack of funds.

It seems like this sentence: "it appears they did not want to invest in a finished product for a larger target group" blames the developers- that they didn't want to invest, as though they had the money, but said, nah, just screw it. Claiming they had no dedication sounds like placing blame, too. I'm not surprised they got miffed.

onomastikon's first language is not English. It sounds likw what we read and what he ment are two different things.

Sammual

ceremony · #3 January 11th, 2004, 01:22 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by Sammual:

quote:
Originally posted by ceremony:

quote:
Originally posted by onomastikon:
I blame no one for their lack of funds.

It seems like this sentence: "it appears they did not want to invest in a finished product for a larger target group" blames the developers- that they didn't want to invest, as though they had the money, but said, nah, just screw it. Claiming they had no dedication sounds like placing blame, too. I'm not surprised they got miffed.
onomastikon's first language is not English. It sounds likw what we read and what he ment are two different things.

Sammual

Fair enough.

UNIVAC · #4 January 11th, 2004, 01:38 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by PvK:
Deus Ex? Warcraft? Those games had art budgets measured in hundreds of thousands (or millions) of dollars! The people who did the art were professional game artists. None of the folks at Illwinter are professional game artists, nor did they have a megacorporate (or perhaps any) budget.

PvK

The house that WarCraft, StarCraft, and Diablo built got their start in the early 1990s as Silicon & Synapse, a developer of small games, all of which were highly underrated. Prior to the release of Warcraft, Blizzard was a third-party developer creating entertainment software for a variety of platforms including DOS, Macintosh, Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo. Some of the company's best-known titles include Rock 'n Roll Racing, The Lost Vikings, Blackthorne and The Death and Return of Superman. Most of its early classics for the PC were published by Interplay.

Text extracted from home of the underdogs.Blizzard started like a small company programming games for other companies.They started with low budget games.So when we are talking about warcraft 1, dont think about today's Blizzard, think about early 90's Blizzard. Low budget and small team is a poor argument for bad multimedia (gui, graphics, sound). If you cant do it better, look for someone that can help you. I can understand all the work this can suppose, and i consider the fact that the devs have "real" jobs and family...so do i.And if i was in his place, i would try to find some help. This project grows every day, with new user requirements and whislists...IMHO the devs team shold grow, with people like them, free time devs, Dom lovers that could help with actual flaws

Quote:

forums where slamming the devs and publishers is considered standard

-Slam devs and publishers is a bad thing
-Being critic with devs/publishers WORK is free speech, and can contribute to improve future performance

Unwise · #5 January 11th, 2004, 03:34 AM

Just a data point:

I think I am typical of the new crop of Dom2 players. Having never heard of Dominions or Shrapnel games, I read the glowing review in CGW this month... and still wouldn't have bought it, not with Civ3: Conquests still warm in my hard drive. I read the cool three-page battle report in the back of that same magazine and that convinced me to download the demo.

I played the hell out of the demo for a couple days and decided that I would buy the game. Sure, the graphics and sound were terrible, but the game-play more than makes up for it, I figured. So after searching the major on-line retailers to no avail, I finally went to Shrapnel's site and followed the link to the purchase page. Then I nearly choked.

$50 for game with nowhere near the production values as its contemporaries? Ok, it's got top-notch game-play that will no doubt keep me entertained for hours, but so does Civ3 ($40), BF1942 ($30 for the basic game) or KOTOR ($50). Forget it, I said, and shut off the browser in disgust. If I were still young and poor, I probably would have tried to find a "warez" Version somewhere, but I'm too old and rich for that nowadays - it's not as if I couldn't afford the game, it was the principle of the purchase.

I dithered over the decision for a few more days - effectively exhausting the demo - and eventually sucked it up and bought the game. My gaming buddies are still in the "that's CANADIAN dollars, right?" sticker-shock phase. If the game were priced at $40, it'd be a no-brainer for them, but there is something about paying half a C-note that gives people pause.

Anyway, one man's opinion. I paid for it, so how smart can I be?

PvK · #6 January 11th, 2004, 05:04 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by UNIVAC:
... Blizzard started like a small company programming games for other companies.They started with low budget games.So when we are talking about warcraft 1, dont think about today's Blizzard, think about early 90's Blizzard. Low budget and small team is a poor argument for bad multimedia (gui, graphics, sound). If you cant do it better, look for someone that can help you.

When I wrote "Warcraft", I was responding to your "Warcraft III":

Quote:

Originally posted by onomastikon:
... Think of Deus Ex I (the attention to detail) or Warcraft III (the cute voices, excellent graphics, extreme customer support (battle.net).) ...

Warcraft III is definitely an expensive project. (And incidentally, its value to me is less than 1/10th that of Dominions 1 - in fact, I have no desire to play Warcraft III at all, because of the yawn-inspiring formulaic and artificial game "design".)

As for Warcraft I, yeah it had a smaller budget than Warcraft III, but I'm sure it also had a reasonable actual amount of money spent developing it, and graphically, I'd say it's rather less appealing than Dominions II. Meanwhile, Warcraft's gameplay is just typical RTS fare (perhaps well-done RTS fare, but personally, bleh to simplistic fakey RTS).

However, I don't have any problem with the Dominions II graphics myself, as my imagination is way better than any computer graphics anyway. The only downside I experience is that it is depressing seeing some others feel the game isn't valuable because it doesn't have better superficial artwork.

Furthermore, notice that it is a lot easier to make pretty graphics for a game with a piddly number of unit types. Even the games with million-dollar art budgets tend to have to limit the number of kinds of character and objects you can meet, because it's very expensive to make each one super-detailed. I'd rather keep the hundreds and hundreds of unit types, with easily-made graphics, than have really pretty graphics of only a few dozen unit types.

I'm sure that if/when Illwinter continues, they'll continue to improve the visuals and so on. The modding tools due out with the first public patch should let Users start helping with modified graphics, if they want to. Meanwhile, I'm quite happy that Illwinter are still more interested in providing the best gameplay rather than trying to improve the graphics.

PvK

[ January 11, 2004, 03:08: Message edited by: PvK ]

MythicalMino · #7 January 11th, 2004, 10:11 AM

Personally, I don't think it is over-priced. Graphics to me is just....something to look at. Many of the graphically superior games that I have played (and wasted my money on) didn't Last 1 week on my pc.

This game, and Space Empires 4 will be on my pc probably till I grow too old to think and just simply fall over and die. Gameplay to me is more important than graphics. I have not had any trouble with Dom2 playing on my pc either, which i cannot say for many other games.

Civ3 costs only 40 bucks, BUT, that is for civ3 and it's first "expansion"....to get what Civ3 should have been at the beginning, you are going to be shelling out another 30 bucks for the Conquest Expansion. Battlefield 1942, i just never liked that one. I do like those types of games (playing Call of Duty like crazy). Call of Duty, I payed 45 dollars for....but even that, i think Dom2 is the better game (if you can compare the two). Warcraft....eh, been there, done that...time to move on. Knights of the Old Republic, i hate rpg's....so....10 dollars would be too high really.

I pre-ordered Dom2, and I have yet to regret it. I pre-ordered Civ3....regretted that until they finally put out the Conquest expansion.