The boys over at Gamaustra has a nice article featuring Cliff Bleszinski of Gears of War fame. In the article he talks about his opinion of the Japanese market, considers Vanquish the Gears of War of Japan, but stated that the game would have been more appealing to gamers if it offered multiplayer.
Hit the jump to read his quote.
“And if you’re going to make a third-person shooter… the fact that Vanquish didn’t have a multiplayer suite was a crime. That IP, it was pretty good as far as being Western, the gameplay was great, and the vibe… I’ve often said on record that if Gears is the kind of Wild, Wild West coal train chugging along, then Vanquish is the Japanese bullet train, with style and everything. There is absolutely no reason I shouldn’t have been zipping around, doing the mega slides, diving up in the air in an arena with other players.
And whatever reason they had… The road to hell is paved with good intentions. I’m sure the development team got together and was like, “Well, we probably shouldn’t do multiplayer because of the budget,” or the time, but at the end of the day you have an amazing product that was [handicapped] by the fact that it was seen by many gamers as a campaign rental or a used game, and not the $60, day one, gotta have it game.” – Cliff Bleszinski
Alright, so gamers ignored Vanquish due to multiplayer. What about Binary Domain? That was better than Gears of War and only sold 20,000 units in the United States.
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I would’ve like to have seen multiplayer in Vanquish as well, but it would’ve been tricky. I know with the Max Payne 3 mutliplayer, if you’re within the player that has activated bullet time’s line of sight you slow down as well, but that would completely break the flow in Vanquish.
It could have been done. Just remove AR mode in multi-player and just leave it at that.
His comments in this article are spot on.
Multiplayer + a single TV commercial would have done wonders for this game’s launch sales.
Binary Domain is not the same. Doesn’t play anywhere near as fresh as Vanquish does (despite still being a great game).
Although, all of these sins can be corrected by releasing Vanquish 2.
Modern day TPS still haven’t caught up to the original just yet, so recycling the gameplay and adding multiplayer would still work in this market.
Make it a $40 game, instead of $60, and it will work.
“What about Binary Domain? That was better than Gears of War and only sold 20,000 units in the United States.”
Binary Domain looks bland. Most, if not all, BD trailers released in the US were pretty bad, too. So we have generic humanoid robots that you shoot at using generic, no-name guns. You also have a typical white male protagonist, a skinny Filipino woman with an annoying voice and a black guy on roids, all of whom are wearing generic uniforms. There’s your problem with Binary Domain. Also, the graphics are quite average and trailers showed some frame rate issues in multiplayer.
I honestly wouldn’t expect anybody to go and download the demo/pre-order the game after having watched any of the trailers.
The only reason why I played Binary Domain is because it’s Nagoshi’s work.
He is not wrong, but I doubt SEGA would have pushed it enough regardless of it’s features.
Binary Domain is easily better than Vanquish, it has more to do with SEGA not knowing how to support online-focused games at all. When most online games get their own separate communities and PR people just to help move them forward, Binary Domain had nothing, just the exact same people who push all of their other games. Anarchy Reigns has an even greater online focus, but I would not be shocked if it did worse than Binary Domain – In fact, I am expecting it to sell worse.
I do not have Gears of War 3, but I am greatly looking forward to it because I am going to play through the campaign and several different multiplayer modes with a group of my friends. Based on just this, it is an extremely attractive package, one that SEGA is going to have an incredibly hard time competing with. This is the one thing SEGA just has not understood as far as their history of game design has gone, whereas they were almost always the first at everything else.
Dude is right, Vanquish with multiplayer would be the bomb.
Binary Domain was doomed from the start. I’m a huge Sega-fan and barely know about the game.
Why would most people that don’t even go online for gaming news care?
I’m glad to see him praising Vanquish but I really don’t agree with his comments on multiplayer….why throw in a multiplayer mode if you don’t think it can be done well?
Platinum Games wanted to focus on creating a compelling single-player experience. Multiplayer may have been nice but I don’t think it made THAT much of a difference…all of Sega’s games practically flop in the West, and Vanquish was no different. Multiplayer would not have helped it much sales-wise. Marketing would have…and what’s wrong with single-player games?
Cliff Bleszinski is lucky that he gets the backing of huge publishers like EA and Microsoft, who have the money to market his games.
Now all he has to do is learn how to make a good game and we will be good.
By the way Gears of War doesn’t even feature 4-player splitscreen, so to me that alone kinda sucks, lol. What’s multiplayer without 4 players?