This just in: Syndicate sucks

[Medic]

Syndicate might suck but one level which journalists got to play shouldn't be ANY indication. Pretty often marketing departments choose the exact opposite of what would properly showcase the game. They often use simple levels, that are easy to explain, are short so it's easy to organise hands on events and so on... I'd wait for someone to play a bigger portion of the game before judging.

 

[Spectacle]

Atlantic Accelerator was a massacre, I never managed finishing it, even after reading strategy guides in magazines for it. Did finish the rest of the game without "help", had a couple of hard missions but American Revolt was just...

What kind of strategy guides did you read? Atlantic accelerator is easy once you know to use shields at the start. Lasers+panic mode is also a no-skill solution.
Agree about American revolt, never managed to finish that. Some of the missions just have too many enemies coming from too many directions at once...

 

[Haba]

And it had oodles and oodles and oodles of sheer iron-clad grim nihilistic style. I cannot think of any games that have matched Syndicate's frankly icy atmosphere of total indifference to human suffering, even in the current era of faux plastic grimdark.

Not to mention the agents themselves. Simple tools that you discard when they've served their purpose. Want them faster? Saw off the legs and replace them with mechanical ones.

Now compare this to the 2012 "Syndicate".

 

[Spectacle]

"I want to be an agent, they get to sex all the hot women"

 

[DwarvenFood]

Spectacle
I think I read something in the PCFormat. Shield use was indeed recommended and going to the corner northeast if I recall, but mind you this was years and years ago. I remember staying alive was not the hardest with the shields, but running out of ammo was more of a problem. Also - no civilians to do the persuadertron trick. Hardest mission of the original Syndicate, I think we can agree on that ?

 

[Spectacle]

Definitely, I doubt there is a single syndicate player who won that mission on their first try, unless they had read a guide in advance.

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

Eurofag DART 6 chip Infomercial



Press button to win. Thank you for your cooperation, Agent Kilo!


Meanwhile, Starbreeze is "in constant fear" that Syndicate might be too hard.

 

[MetalCraze]

So the Win button we joked about 4-5 years ago is for real now?

 

[zerotol]

I got so angry reading the thread title because I thought it was about someone dissing the old Syndicate.

 

[mikaelis]

So, it is the second time I hear that the Riddick guys are long gone from Starbreeze. Where are they? Was the second iteration of Riddick (Dark Athena) made by them or different squad? Because I sort of liked both of them to be honest (and I do remember the criticism of Dark Arhena by old Riddick fans).
If Syndicate is done by completely other guys, and from the look of it, it is pretty much oriented towards co-op, and SP is just an addition, I won't give a shit.

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

So, it is the second time I hear that the Riddick guys are long gone from Starbreeze. Where are they? Was the second iteration of Riddick (Dark Athena) made by them or different squad? Because I sort of liked both of them to be honest (and I do remember the criticism of Dark Arhena by old Riddick fans).
If Syndicate is done by completely other guys, and from the look of it, it is pretty much oriented towards co-op, and SP is just an addition, I won't give a shit.

Key people of Starbreeze formed Massive Entertainment, which was bought by Bethesda. They're currently working on some undisclosed FPS utilizing idTech5.

 

[MetalCraze]

Isn't Massive Entertainment = Ground Control? Which is like 1999 game?

 

[Cassidy]

What? Isn't Ground Control done by Massive Entertainment older than Riddick? Or is this a case of two companies same name?

 

[Trash]

Don't have any hope for this. Not as a fps since the gameplay vids shown look to be the exact tiresome corridor shooter we have all seen and played at least a dozen times over. Defenitely not as a worthy successor to the Syndicate franchise since the game misses out exactly on the whole effortless moral ambiguity and consumer mentality that made the original so chilling. Everything a resource, humans are drones or machines to upgrade or toss aside, the whole total disregard to human life and emotions. No, the game wasn't in your face evil. It wasn't some laughing maniac who executed people gleefully. It was an inhuman hybrid that showed no feeling what so ever as it hosed down a parade with a flamethrower. Now we get agents spewing tough guy banter and 'witty' one-liners as they execute security personel. Colour me unimpressed.

The only jab at corporatism this one will give is that it will serve as another example of how the suits ruined gaming.

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

Isn't Massive Entertainment = Ground Control? Which is like 1999 game?

Ah shit, I really get confused with all these dumb names lately. I meant Machine Games: http://www.machinegames.com/pub/index.php5

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

First 10 minutes of the Solo campaign (in German)

http://www.gamestar.de/index.cfm?pid=1589&pk=64835

Press button for win!

 

[Jasede]

Decline of subtitles, as if "Agenten" sounded less cool than "agents".

Edit: haha, watch this. It couldn't be any more popamole if they tried.

 

[Peter]

First 10 minutes of the Solo campaign (in German)

http://www.gamestar.de/index.cfm?pid=1589&pk=64835

Press button for win!

That's just depressing. Doesn't get much more popamole than that. And look at those majestic QTEs.

The sad thing about this is that, some of you will call this blasphemy, Syndicate could have been translated into an FPS if it were a Rainbow Six/Swat 4 squad-based type of thing, imo. I mean, let's not kid ourselves, Syndicate was much more of an action game than it was a strategy game, so the change would not have been as jarring as with Fallout 3 or the X-Com FPS.

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

Syndicate Launch trailer

*Waup Waup Waup*

I hate trailers where they only show cinematics and one-liners but no substance. What a shame there's no singleplayer demo....well, at least not an official one.

 

[kazgar]

Supposedly the game has been banned in Australia.

?

 

[sea]

Who hires these people? We should be writing about old games, not them. We actually played them, for one.

Because being a fat, crass asshole who incites flame wars gets more page hits than genuinely good content, and that's about all the gaming press cares about (at least the big ones). It should be telling enough that Gawker, for example, pays its editors based not on the quality of coverage, but on hits alone - to the point where they'll purposely split stories up into two or three parts, jump on anything no matter how sketchy the source, hype up rumours and other crap, and then post new stories to update that it was bullshit all along. Apparently, nobody sees anything wrong with this. As much as I hate Jim, though, I can't tell if he's a dumbass or a genius - sure, he says stupid trollish shit and little else, but on the other hand he's making a living being a gigantic cock and getting away with it.

Of course, doesn't help that fair and quality stories also tend to get in the way of the whole advertising-driven model, and publishers are simultaneously mature and immature enough to disrespect critics (all the right and wrong ones) because they'd rather just buy their way forward than actually foster good development practices and produce quality software that stands up on its own merits. The film industry is mature enough, generally, to respect critics (mostly because film study and critique is an established discipline), because a) sales depend less on them and b) they know people will hear about it very quickly if they start doing payola and other crap, but that isn't going to happen in the games industry as long as the big games journalism sites are content with being an unofficial marketing front, and fans are content to take shitty flamebait and grade-school-quality editorials.

 

[Stinger]

Syndicate Launch trailer

I never asked for this

I never wanted this

Subtle.

 

[sea]

You know, I just don't get EA. For a triple-A publisher it's amazing how much they are concerned with playing catch-up. Whereas the other big publishers more or less innovate at their own speed and put out original games that set trends for the entire industry, EA is content to simply churn out cheap ripoffs of those same games in a hope of snatching away the market (but never do because the products they release are rarely as good as the competition). It's really puzzling to me why, when they have so many developers, and so much money, they are ultimately still slaves to the standards everyone else sets. If they would actually take some time to carve out a niche and some unique brand rather than appropriating and destroying original IP, they could actually gain the respect of gamers and do a lot better for themselves in the end.

tl;dr fucking hackjobs

 

[Peter]

To be fair, sea, I don't think that's entirely the case. Sure, this has Human Revolution vibes, but remember that in the last couple of years EA has released Dead Space, Crysis 2, the Dragon Age games, the recent NFS games (Shift and Hot Pursuit both going in their own direction), Alice: Madness Returns, The Saboteur and many others. Are these games in the least bit innovative, or even particularly good? No, not really (most of them, at least). But they're not direct clones of anything either.

 

[sea]

Dead Space is Resident Evil 4 in Space! and was basically their attempt to revive System Shock without the brand name being available.

Crysis basically lived on the reputation of Far Cry and was more or less the official sequel without the IP.

Dragon Age is BioWare, the one tiny bit of originality left.

Need for Speed was expanded in order to hit a wider variety of markets - sim and arcade alike. In fact, Burnout, the one original arcade racer EA had, was basically retired in favour of Need for Speed.

The Saboteur was an original IP but was more or less capitalizing on the post-Grand Theft Auto craze that spawned games like Crackdown; gameplay-wise it was same old, same-old.

Alice: Madness Returns, fair enough, but they just published that rather than developed it. Same for something like Kingdoms of Amalur.

I don't know, I just don't see it. EA's portfolio in recent years has been much more about responding either to very specific popular games (Call of Duty, God of War, Skyrim, etc.) or filling niches in their own product line-up, and not really about putting out original content for its own sake. The only real exception I can think of is Mirror's Edge, and of course that only taught them that gamers weren't interested in platforming games with ethnic female protagonists (a lesson they sadly could have learned from Ubisoft nearly a decade ago). I'm not saying EA don't take any risks whatsoever, but for a big publisher it's a bit shocking how unwilling they are to foster new gameplay ideas, at least compared to the likes of Ubisoft, THQ, Square Enix, Activision, etc. Sure, those guys rely on big brands too, but at least they are for the most part setting trends and not following them.