Silicon Knights, Nintendo Cease Exclusivity Deal 70
Divine Shadow writes "IGN Cube is reporting that Silicon Knights (developer of Eternal Darkness and Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes) is no longer an exclusive second-party developer for Nintendo. This is really surprising given that interviews with Nintendo and Denis Dyack (SK's leader) always seemed to suggest a bond and shared philosophy between the companies. Have to admit too, that this makes me less excited about Ninty's E3 lineup." Elsewhere in the article, Denis Dyack claims: "It's possible that we may do another game with Nintendo, actually. It just means that we've decided to break our exclusivity with Nintendo."
Re:Uhh... (Score:2)
No Mature Zelda (Score:3, Interesting)
Dennis made a comment about how he'd like to make a mature zelda similar to how he said he wanted to make a Metal Gear game prior to the annoucement of MGS:TTS
Re:No Mature Zelda (Score:3, Insightful)
hed.
Re:No Mature Zelda (Score:5, Insightful)
I wouldn't necessarily say that. Star Fox Adventures was developed by Rare, and wasn't even originally a Star Fox game. Nintendo saw it and thought Star Fox would fit, so they had Rare use the license. Rare also has done most Donkey Kong games since the mid 90's. Namco recently did Donkey Konga.
Sega did the most recent F-Zero game.
Capcom made 2 new Zelda games for GameBoy Color, and did the remake of A Link to the Past for GBA.
I think the split (and the reason Silicon Knights never had a chance to do a Zelda game) was due to the philosophy differences between Silicon Knights. Nintendo makes gameplay the top priority, and molds the rest around it. Silicon Knights makes the story the top priority, and seems to leave the gameplay practically as an afterthought. Silicon Knights making a Zelda game would've resulted in a realistic (but not that impressive) looking game full of blood and dark colors, but completely missing any interesting gameplay.
Re:No Mature Zelda (Score:2)
Re:No Mature Zelda (Score:1)
Re:No Mature Zelda (Score:2)
Re:No Mature Zelda (Score:2)
My main gripe with them is their dedication to make "mature" games. Who cares about how serious your game is, just make it
Re:No Mature Zelda (Score:2)
I want that...
I like the new Zelda look, I think it fits fairly well, but I would love a Zelda that looked like that.
exclusivity == bad (Score:2, Insightful)
I see this as a victory for the consumer and gamers worldwide!
Re:exclusivity == bad (Score:4, Insightful)
Sony and Xbox do the same thing. GTA3/VC took years to come out on the PC and all it got was better graphics (not saying much), mouse look (not saying much), and the ability to play your own mp3s in the game (nice but wheres the multiplayer?). It took 2 years for Halo to be ported to the PC after the Xbox and it wasn't even done well. *cough*bugs*cough*
Its a little different from software on the PC. Most of the time software is made for only one OS (or similar) for the sake of saving money/time. When you release an independent game with no major publisher backing you with a very smalled fixed budget, you're not gonna spend an extra 9 months working on making it Linux compatible for the 15 Linux users who are remotely intestered in the game.
Huh? (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, Exclusivity does hurt the hell out of the Industry. No one wants a return the 1988 when Ma-Nintendo controlled 90% of all things released in the United states. That was a bad thing.
However, no one wants to buy a game and have another version appear on another console marketted as better. As much as I hate it, everytime I'm in an EB or a Software ECT I hear the counter monkey berating people for buying a specific
Re:My apologies to the Specials (Score:5, Insightful)
Left Field made terrible games anyway. How many great games have they made since the end of their relationship. None. So who's the chump again? Not Nintendo.
Silicon Knights have made two good games, but they haven't sold very well. Not really a wise investment to keep them exclusive, when the money could be better spent elsewhere. Looking at the track record, i'm willing to bet Nintendo won't be the chump on this one either.
"Mike Hawk" your anti-Nintendo trolling is getting old. Get a job.
FireHazard ahoy (Score:1)
However, I think the original point was that Nintendo is neither better NOR worse off for shedding it's exclusivity with those 3 publishers, not becuase they may/maynot have sucked, but becuase they produced next to nothing over the past 2 years.
Unfortunatly, I have to agree. It looks alarming that this is happening, but in reality the world goes on, and no one really cares.
Re:My apologies to the Specials (Score:2)
not quite true. Rare has put out 2 games since being acquired by Microsoft. Bizarrely, the first was a gameboy title.
Rare leaving the Nintendo family was a bit of a bummer for me, because I felt Diddy Kong Racing was a superior title to Mario Kart and was looking forward to the sequel...
Re:My apologies to the Specials (Score:1)
Nintendo have stated [ign.com] (quite recently) that they're not getting out of the hardware business.
Madness is all in the mind (Score:2)
And Rare? I think "Grabbed by the Ghoulies" says all that needs to be said about Rare:
Re:Madness is all in the mind (Score:2)
So when will Free Radical actually release a game that justifies a statement like that? Two failed attempts and counting...
(And something like three Rare members started Free Radical - don't buy into the false hype, please.)
Re:Madness is all in the mind (Score:1)
Meh, Rare wasn't going anywhere anyway, just look at SFA. The best thing about it was the quaterstaff twirling.
Re:Madness is all in the mind (Score:2)
To be fair, I do think Grabbed by the Ghoulies is awfully underrated. Not a AAA Goldeneye-level game by any means, but it features some great puzzle design in the later parts of the game, some funny writing, wonderful music, and a great art style. More of a Blast Corp level game.
SFA did not interest me in the slightest. The demo alone was enough to deter me.
Re:Madness is all in the mind (Score:2)
Time Splitters 2
Game spy [gamerankings.com]
Game Spot [gamerankings.com]
Computer and Video games review> [gamerankings.com]
Game Pro [gamerankings.com]
Grabbed by the Ghoulies
Game Spy [gamerankings.com]
Game Spot [gamerankings.com]
Game Zone [gamerankings.com]
Team XBox [gamerankings.com]
So what do we see here? "Time Splitters 2" has glowing reviews, "Grabbed by the Ghoulies" is at best considered average, and below average by most. I am not sure what all this means, oh right your next line is likely something about how "reviews are crap" or something like that.
I'm not too worried (Score:2)
This is a symptom (Score:1)
Re:This is a symptom (Score:4, Informative)
Rare had become a money sink. They've released very little in the past few years, all of which has been significantly lower quality than their older stuff. The owners wanted to cash out, and asked Nintendo for a very large sum of money. There's a limit to how much money is worth sinking into a company, and Nintendo decided they'd be better off selling the company than buying it out. So they let Rare sell themselves to the highest bidder, and sold their own stock in the same deal.
Who knows what went on with Silicon Knights. Give it time and maybe we'll hear more. But they really weren't a good match together. Nintendo focuses on gameplay above all else, whereas Silicon Knights focuses on story above all else.
Re:This is a symptom (Score:1)
I'd just like to point out... (Score:1)
Re:This is a symptom (Score:1)
It's a shame... (Score:3, Insightful)
3rd Party (Score:5, Insightful)
I would hope this may signal an effort from Nintendo to garner better relationships with third party companies.
Re:3rd Party (Score:1)
Re:3rd Party (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:3rd Party (Score:3, Interesting)
The concern is that at a certain point it ceases to be quality controls and becomes censorship. And how many good games have Nintendo rejected because they were afraid their "family-friendly" image was going to be tarnished? Now if that's
Really? Awesome. (Score:2)
Eternal Darkness, I simply hated. The graphics looked ugly, the gameplay felt sloppy, and the story didn't get me involved at all. If I wanted to play a good, polished horror game I'd pick either of the new/updated Resident Evil games on the Ga
Re:Really? Awesome. (Score:2)
Re:Really? Awesome. (Score:1)
Re:Really? Awesome. (Score:2)
Blood Omen is really the only other game that doesn't belong in a museum, though.
SK has been working on Too Human since before Blood Omen was finished (IE somewhere around 1996). I was hoping N
Re:Really? Awesome. (Score:2)
You've apparently never worshipped the crawling chaos.
Nyarlathotep r0x3rZ.
Mantarok you (Score:1)
Re:Really? Awesome. (Score:3, Interesting)
I personally really, really can't stand the controls for RE, and even though the characters have a completely ridiculous number of polygons in their models, they felt really stiff to me in their animation and how they moved around. Of course, there
Re:Really? Awesome. (Score:2)
I think you are right.
I loved ED. About six months ago I saw a sealed copy of the Gamecube RE on eBay for $20, so I thought I'd take a chance. It's awful. The graphics are obviously excellent, but the controls are completely stupid (Capcom, you got it right with Devil May Cry. Why won't you make the RE team use a control system that makes sense for
Re:Really? Awesome. (Score:1)
Re:Really? Awesome. (Score:2)
I only paid 8GBP for it though (clearance sale), so I never bothered trying to get any further.
Re:Really? Awesome. (Score:2)
Some people seem to hate the camera angles too, but I think they're completely necessary for the environment the game creates. It's far more ci
Trimming (Score:2)
What I think this t
Won't hurt now, but later (Score:4, Insightful)
If SK makes any more games for this generation of consoles, it will be for Game Cube or be technically less polished ports of Eternal Darkness.
Long term though, I think this will hurt Nintendo. Silicon Knights made the type of games that Nintendo itself won't. More complicated, darker games with more attention paid to presentation (story and flash). This will just further reinforce peoples' view that Nintendo systems are for kids. I love playing Nintendo's games, but it does get boring not having something darker to play, and makes it that much harder to convince friends to play on a Nintendo console.
Silicon Knights had talent and were a good complement to Nintendo's usual style. Unless Nintendo manages something better with 3rd parties than it has (simply allowing Japanese companies to make Nintendo-published games isn't enough), things are only going to get worse. A good thing would be to seriously pursue Square-Enix to make games for their next system, even if only by telling them that they can't afford to allow Sony or Microsoft to go unopposed by Nintendo. After all, if Nintendo stops making consoles, then there'll be less competition amongst the hardware companies and they'll have to start competing with Nintendo games on PS4 or Xbox3. Not good for any 3rd party company.
Saddened yes, but.... (Score:2, Informative)
Conflict of ideas (Score:2)
Re:Conflict of ideas (Score:2)
1) Dennis Dyack has stated the relationship between Nintendo and SK is very, very strong. Numerous times, he has talked about how similar Nintendo and SK are: How they have the same philosophies, how they get along so much, how much they enjoy working together. Whe
I'm all for no exclusivity, but... (Score:1)
Factor 5 jumps ship as well (Score:1)