Developers make games for the fans -- or at least they say they do. A lot of times I think it's for the money, but in the case of Insomniac we'll give them the benefit of the doubt. Since they make games because they want people to enjoy them when people don't enjoy them it must be depressing as all hell, especially when that game already has an established audience thanks to the fact that it is a sequel. This is the case with Resistance 2, which scored better than Resistance: The Fall of Man when it comes to reviews, but evidently not when it came to fans. In an interview with Videogamer community manager James Stevenson said that long term fan feedback on the game "weighed" on him.
"The hardcore fans of Resistance 1 were maybe a little bit disappointed. Those folks consistently expressing that - especially GAF - it was like your dog turned on you," Stevenson explained.
"That's the feeling of it. You had this dog that loved you. You loved the dog, too, but they expressed all this affection for you. And then suddenly the dog bites your hand and it's that feeling of, ooh, ow, that really hurts.
"...But the people who put their money down on our game, want to see our game be good and want to invest months of their time into our game, spend months of their time leading up to our game watching videos, reading about it, sending us questions, listening to our podcasts, investing hours and hours and being excited for our game, if they're disappointed then it hurts more than some reviewer being pissy about a game and giving it a seven, well, okay, whatever. I can move on from that. I can ignore that. But fans that are genuinely disappointed are a lot harder to cope with."
I'm not sure if referring to your fans as dogs is the best approach here, but I get what he's saying and he sounds genuinely upset over this. The full quote is even more depressing. Don't worry James, we liked Resistance 2 and we aren't journalists at all.
Contest:
4:00 PM on 10.25.2009
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It also forced you to hold on to only two weapons - which was also a big mistake. You'd like to use all of these cool, experimental weapons, but in the end you just gotta hold on to the stuff that is more conventional for when you need shots to go where they are supposed to, or just need weapons that will have plenty of ammo around.
As f'en awesome as that Homing Buzz-saw gun was (and oh man, it was awesome), it would have been a lot better if I didn't have to give up another more stable weapon to use it.
That's not to say that the game was all bad though. The franchise has (had?) a lot of potential. Maybe, hopefully, R3 can redeem the series.
It is odd that Insomniac would choose this route, given how they love to cram a bajillion weapons in the Ratchet and Clank games & how popular they are because of it.
I have to agree that R2 was simply not as good as R1. With R1, the story was simply better and even the washed out visual effects seemed better than the "ratchet and clank" bright colors that seemed so out of place in R2. The multiplayer was where the biggest difference was though - R2's competitive mode was an out and out failure. They tried to do the "objective" based gameplay, but it simply failed and was too confusing. The weapons restrictions were also a shock to those of us that loved the flexibility of R1 where you could have sniper only games or Laark only games... or just enable all the weapons and have fun with them.
I must say that Resistance 2's co-op mode was a big hit with fans and the co-op servers are still busy... but even with the hard core mode, it gets repetitious after awhile.
R1 was simple gameplay with the usual modes... CTF, DM, TDM - what made it endless amounts of fun was the weapons and the flexibility of enabling/disabling weapons for the games. Insomniac needs to forget about making a "super-serious" shooter and get back to what they do best - creating a game that is fun with inventive, unique weapons! (I'd LOVE to have a sapper in online play!)
It's never as good as your first time.
And although I am a bit disappointed in the removal of the weapon wheel, I understand why it was done and it created a MUCH more intense experience in the second. As much as I liked having all the weapons at my disposal in R1, the game was simply a TON easier because you had so many badass weapons on hand.
As a compromise, maybe they could allow you to carry three weapons instead of two. That way, I can keep a long range, a short range, and a simply fun weapon all on my person.
Just give up on the series and just make a new platformer IP.
The ending of Resistance 2 was kind of ridiculous as well. Hale was a silent man, making him speak all of a sudden kind of takes you out of his character.
You guys suck. One day you're moaning about all games being the same thing, and then Insomniac give you monsters the size of buildings, a Co-Op to rival L4D, and 60 player onine fuckfest. All of a sudden, you take offence at them trying something different.
When they removed the weapon wheel and reduced the overall amount of guns R2 just had less of what made resistance good in the first place (the boss fights were kickass though).
Just bring back the weapon wheel, make more R2 like boss fights and resistance will be golden again.
But then they released R2 and all of that went away. The one man army become every other FPS released since Halo. You could only carry two weapons (oh joy) instead of the full armory. Then they decided to make Hale speak and he turned out to be... really annoying. I don't know why but he never grew on me at all. The story was also more involved but still managed to feel just as shallow as the first game. That takes some work. And by work I mean bad scriptwriting.
While they did cool things with the online co-op where's my couch co-op from the first game? Why take something out like that?! The online matches are cool too, and huge, but you're asking a lot of players from the first game. That's like saying "yeah I know we took out most of the stuff you liked, but we made the online really badass!" Which is... really dumb. Really dumb.
I'd say it was on par with Resistance 1
About split-screen co-op campaigns, I liked R2's better. Instead of rehashing the single-player campaign (or bits of it, like in Modern Warfare 2's Spec Ops mode), they gave you something fresher, and with its own backstory and a new set of locales.