General Godus discussion

Oh god... not this again...

I've not had an easy time of it what with that, Nosgoth and now Godus. Even the True Crime crowd were eager to lay into Sleeping Dogs at every available opportunity.

Just once I'd like to work on a game that wasn't quite so... "controversial".

Seriously. That's all I remember hearing in the little I did hear before release, and I was surprised there were people that were so into True Crime. Not that it was a bad game, I don't know much of it, but it always sounded like it was too much in the vein of the copdramas that were (are?) plaguing tv in the States. Much happier I listened to the word of mouth and tried the demo, felt like a really solid game I'd like to pick up at some point.
Oh man, this is really funny, not that I've played enough of Sleeping Dogs to say otherwise, but that's exactly how I feel about GTA IV! I started it up and the story's such a bore, feels like your typical American action-drama, and I imagine Sleeping Dogs might feel similarly after awhile, but I dunno. Games set in the modern day, trying to emulate action-dramas or even some grounded reality feel really off to me. Only exception I've found for that would be Heavy Rain, but I think it's because it felt more like a mystery-thriller to me.
...I'm confused as to who thought, in both Nosgoth's and Godus' case, that their audience would be okay with the directions taken. Like...No one I know of asked for what Godus is now and neither did I hear much of anyone yearning for Kain and Raziel's legacy to go multiplayer...It really does feel like the respective companies were just chasing trends the properties don't really fit all that well with. Like Capcom trying to make Megaman X into a RPG or Resident Evil into a rail-shooter, except I'm not sure what trends they were going after with those games...

Don't get me wrong, trying new things is a positive, but you've gotta know when it's best to make an entirely new property for it and sell it on its own grounds or dive into the attempt completely. Otherwise you're gonna half-ass it and fuck it up, making the cashgrab entirely transparent. 

...Just a suggestion, but perhaps you could hook up with someone like the makers of Stonehearth next time around. 

Okay, so you didn't enjoy the game as much as a different one... that's absolutely fine and there were/are plenty of people on the Sleeping Dogs forum/Facebook or NeoGAF OT that would disagree with you. That doesn't make them right and you wrong, or vice-versa. Opinion is subjective after all and people's tastes differ. Even so, I wouldn't say the marketing around Sleeping Dogs was misleading or overblown. Everything that appeared in a trailer or press release, you could do in the game. We didn't promise features/functions that didn't make the final cut. Plus, IMHO, I think we still left a few surprises in there for players to enjoy.

Well, I also didn't feel mislead at all, compared to that certain non-game you are talking about. If I was allowed to talk about misleading, it would be this:

But they were punished at least. And 2k did get away with their scam.

I enjoyed the game - however I objectively observe that the game contains far less content than it was made out to have.

You seem to measure the state of a game by the enjoyment of a specific group of people. I measure the quality of the game by what features it was promising and what it came with. And if there is one thing that Sleeping Dogs was very much compared to it was the GTA series - claims that it would be very similar in content and gameplay.
However Sleeping Dogs (much like for example Maffia II) is very much story/mission driven. Yet outside of the story, outside of the set-pieces and prepared content. There is pretty much nothing going on in the world.

It may aswell be empty for what the world matters outside of the missions and side-missions.
Contrary to say GTA, where you actually have a chance of coming across a random event or action happening when you're not in a scripted mission.
That made the world feel rather dead. Now maybe you "technically" fullfilled all the features you promised. That doesn't mean the game feels any more alive.
Or that the game does justice to what it was hyped up to be / compared with.


To me, its one of the key things that made me turn my back on a lot of developers. The fact that games are being nickel and dimed - put as little amount of content in the game, then go overboard on the DLC and post-release content that you charge for.
Half of the DLC for sleeping dogs isn't even consequential, its skins and cosmetics. Ofcourse the release of the "Definitive Edition" doesn't help with that.
Lets stab out existing customers in the back by offering a complete edition to new customers that bundles all DLC together and sell it for a discount.
Cause nothing shows appreciation to your existing customers as offering those who did NOT buy your game a discounted deal!


Now you're right in saying that personal opinion has a part to play. And that clearly there are a lot of people that are adequately entertained with this kind of shortchanging.
Measuring their game against say a movie visit and going "Well, at $x per hour, this was a good deal!"
I feel that that is shortchanging the quality of the industry as a whole though. But hey, if we're all going to settle for mediocre, who am I to disagree right?


Its basicly the same discussion that often is had with people who are invested in World of Warcraft.
Somewhere, "enjoying the game" and "investing time in a game" get mixed up. And *BECAUSE* you invested a lot of time, you clearly *MUST* enjoy the game.
And since you enjoy the game, you can't have criticism on the game right? Cause you can only criticize that which you hate with a passion!

See this is where I disagree. I enjoyed Sleeping Dogs, it was a decent enough game. Perhaps a little on the short side (21 hours worth of scripted content, relying on very generic side-missions), overpriced and very much overdone on the DLC content.
My main gripe with Sleeping Dogs is that it massively falls short on the world design. Its effectively an empty world, a bland stage in which scripted sequences occur during missions.
Most of its missions are practically copy-pastes of eachother. Repeating a limited set of objectives for each "theme".
And thats one of the things they happily omitted during the pre-release hype when they were more than satisfied comparing the game to the likes of GTA.
A series that very much has a lot more going on outside of missions. Now perhaps this is budget restraints - but to me, being honest about what your game does and does not do is essential.

This honestly sounds like every open world game ever to me. I think we have semi-similar standards, but frankly when all the content in an open world game is mostly copy/paste with minor reskins and the occasional cyclical spats, it becomes pretty transparent to me how much of a complex mechanical stage open world games are. They're impressive, but the programming underneath is blindingly obvious to anyone with experience or a trained eye.

I imagine having more of that is what you go after to find more value in your open-world games, however to me it's about as interesting as fetch quests or level grinding. I mean, I'd have the illusions they try to go after over the setpiece crap of games like Call of Duty or Bioshock Infinite, but knowing that there's little else to come of the illusions gets pretty disappointing after awhile.

It's like Guild Wars 2's event system. Sounds nice on paper, until you realize it's a chain of quests put on a timer (for the most part) that goes off every so often. Almost all of them also have a terminating point to wait till players come along to reset them too, meaning they never exceed the range of their designated area, making them even less interesting. Now if you were to carefully interweave these and let them exceed their originating area, that could be interesting, but no game (that I'm aware of) has attempted anything like that to my knowledge.

Best we get are open worlds with instanced missions that keep all the effects safely contained in the instance and hardly change the world itself. Basically playing around a movie set going from scene location to scene location.

Danjal, strikes me you've shifted the topic somwhat and now you're talking about subjective appreciation. However, you accused Sleeping Dogs of misleading you and/or giving you a false impression prior to it's launch when you stated, "I objectively observe that the game contains far less content than it was made out to have."

IMHO, that's not a statement that can be backed up with factual examples.