Insomniac Games Selects EA Partners for New Publishing Agreement

Going to quote the blog post from Ted Price rather than the PR:
http://www.insomniacgames.com/blogcast/blog/from_ted/1529690

Bungie and Activision, now Insomniac and EA. Some interesting moves recently.

Along with the multiplatform news, also pretty excited about their longer development cycles. Even though they were doing an OK job at putting out some good games every year (few developers could have matched their output IMO), I think it could help if they spent some extra time on their games. Resistance 2 was a bit of a disappointment to me, so hopefully they spend more time on Resistance 3 to make sure they get it right. Was actually wondering why we haven't heard anything about it yet, but guess this explains that (although I could still see it being at E3).

(BTW, Ratchet & Clank and Resistance are IPs owned by Sony, so those games will remain exclusive to PS. The multiplatform game will be whatever new IP Insomniac has created and now owns).

 

Never was a big R&C fan before this generation, and I only played the first PS3 game (the other one is in my backlog). So can't really say if it has hurt the quality there. Some gamers complain about it being more of the same, but that hasn't bothered me. Might be that they're better at making platformers, especially since they don't have to worry about coop or online play so much (though I'm sure it gets considered...maybe with more time, they can work out some online play with future R&C games). I'll ignore R1 in this case since it was a launch game (hard not to rush a launch game), but R2 definitely seemed like it could have used some more development time. Some sections of the game seem like they weren't even played. Surely someone would have said something during development, and certain issues would have been fixed/improved?

Now it might be debatable that even with that, the core of the game didn't really lead itself to a great FPS. Though I wonder if they would have made some of the more drastic changes (some of which were IMO bad) had they had more time to think things through. Maybe, maybe not. But I'm curious to see how this extra time might affect Resistance 3.

We'll have to agree to disagree about Resistance's quality though. Or somewhat disagree. I actually don't disagree that it is a notch below Halo (at least the first game, which I enjoyed). Don't know about KZ2 (also in backlog), but could possibly see it not quite matching it. Most of my interest in Resistance came from the original, in which I saw a lot of potential. Great weapons & combat (IMO), lengthy campaign, good enemy design (well...more so R1 IMO), good story (or backstory anyway), etc. Even had some horror elements to the gameplay, which is a bit unique I think (Chimera are great for this). Wish they'd continue to build on those things that made the game unique instead of trying to make it more like other games. Maybe limiting the users weapon selection to just 2 guns works fine in other games, but it pretty much takes away a strong point for Resistance IMO (part of the fun in R1 was thinking, on-the-fly, which weapon would work best in specific situations). I will admit that they definitely flexed more of their technical muscle with R2 though. R1 was good for a launch game, but R2 (along with R&C) showed how talented Insomniac is in that area.

Of course, I'm pretty much the exact opposite with my FPS preference too.