How could Kenji Inafune go from directing classics like Mega

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>>14313416

He's a businessman, not a visionary.

>>14313428
You'd think a businessman would have a better idea how to budget and how to market.

>>14313416
>How could Kenji Inafune go from directing classics like Mega Man X, and Mega Man 9

Never directed any of those games.

>>14313440
He never said he was a good businessman.

>>14313463
Yeah, that's the catch.

>>14313440
he already got their money
that's good business

/v/ is that way ->

>>14313536

4 mil seems like a lot to us, but it's chump change for a gaming company. Even one as small as Comcept and Ini Creates. They spent it on game development. They NEED MN9 and later Red Ashe to be big sellers.

>>14313550
Yeah, I honestly don't think that's gonna happen. MN9 is a running joke now, and Red Ash never made its original kickstarter goal, but got funded elsewhere instead.

>>14313550
>They spent it on game development
[citation needed]

>>14313597

Game development is costly. They blew it mostly on the ports, and getting extra things like the animated tv series going (which went nowhere). All that money is GONE.

>>14313573
>MN9 is a running joke now,

Even worse when you realize that to make any profit, they need to reach completely new people. Everyone who was likely going to be interested in the project already donated and got a copy. But who else would be interested in this other than Mega Man fans? Can this reach out to a broader audience?

>>14313635
>All that money is GONE

into Inafune's pocket.

>>14313646

Do you think that Kenji cut himself a 3 million dollar check? Games are MAD EXPENSIVE to make.

No, Inafune saw how MM was a cash cow that had a loyal fanbase. So he wanted to re-create that, but with characters that were fully owned by himself and his company. That's where he was planning on making the money. They get a good cut of all the revenues from merchandise, tv shows, film, etc. A a Mega Man producer he just got a boring producer salary. As the rights holder to a hot new IP, he could be the new George Lucas.

>>14313550
>They spent it on game development.
For like 9 fucking consoles. Promising to deliver it on every piece of hardware under the sun (including even the DOA Vita) was a massive blunder.

Should've been PC/PS4/XONE and 3DS for the kids they want to (but won't) attract. Last gen systems shouldn't have been on the table, nor the mega bombs known as the Wii U and Vita.

>>14313659
tl;dr - This wasn't a grift - Inafune's mouth just wrote a check his ass couldn't cash.

>>14313676

He's a terrible businessman. He tried to get a multi-media empire for MN9 going BEFORE the game came out. It could have worked, but first release the game, make sequels, build up loyalty, then try to branch out. And you need a good game first. An Astro-boy like game with cartoonish graphics is pretty original in 1985. Not so original in 2016. And the game has to be fun, with good level design. MN9 looks like a student project and plays like one. It's very sloppy. The actual GAME was made as a total after thought.

>>14313673

Take out 3DS. The 3DS version is the one that is acting like a bottle-neck for the graphics.

>>14313416

Feminism.

>>14313659
>Games are MAD EXPENSIVE to make.
No they're not. They're only expensive because most AAA studios build custom engines and spend literal millions on advertising and licensing pop music or hiring celebrity VAs.

That furry sidescroller game was made mostly by one guy (I think he commissioned music or something) over the course of 7 years, including the time he took to learn programming. It's one of the more beautiful games you'll see, furry thing aside. One guy who never made a game before. MN9 was developed by two fucking professional studio and led by the "creator" of Megaman with a multi-million dollar budget.

He never directed those.

There's a ton of problems behind the project though, like Inafune trying to go full multimedia before the game was even out, his employees being more familiar with RPG development than action platformers, making the 3DS version which bottlenecked the graphics, the awful PR and general marketing, Inti of late being pretty mediocre, could probably go on.

>>14313730
>Inti of late being pretty mediocre,

Has Ini ever made anything good?

MM9-1- were great, but I think they got Capcom guys to direct them.

>>14313704
>An Astro-boy like game with cartoonish graphics is pretty original in 1985. Not so original in 2016.

Well, that was kind of the problem here.
For as much as Inafune bitched about lack of creativity from Capcom, he wasn't looking for original here. He was basically looking to have his own Megaman series without being beholden to his former employers.

>>14313748
They're usually good on a technical point, but recent games from them make me feel that they really need someone else to give them direction. All their Mega Man games with Capcom were great, but Gunvolt is just alright, MN9 we all know is poor, and they haven't really done much else of any real note.

Also I hear GalGun 2 is actually worse than the first one, both of which they did.

>>14313704
>Take out 3DS. The 3DS version is the one that is acting like a bottle-neck for the graphics.
It would be incredibly foolish to not launch on the highest selling current generation hardware which also happens to be the one which attracts the youngest audiences outside of mobile phones. That would be like Sega putting the Sonic Boom games exclusively on the PC. Sega is all about godawful decision making but even they wouldn't do something so retarded.

Also the 3DS port is outsourced, which is a blunder in itself considering Inti is pretty much at home on Nintendo handhelds. Instead, as per Inafune's fetish, they put the 3DS/Vita versions into some no-name western devs hands.

>>14313778
>crook funnels money to his croneys
yeah that's not surprising

>The worst PR since DmC
>Multiple delays
>Dated graphics
>Boring gameplay
>Poor handling of budget
>Physical releases despite it being more-or-less a XBLA/PSN/Eshop title
Do you think Kenji will retire after this flops hard?

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>>14314230
There's a good chance he'll do pic related.

>Kenji Inafune
>Kenji
*Keiji

>>14313775
At least WayForward will presumably keep them on a leash for Shantae: Half-Genie Hero (on a side note, XSEED will publish physical releases for some versions of that game).

Because he's a lying dick.
He flaunts himself off as the "creator of MegaMan" and rode the bad pr that Capcom generated for a bit to swipe support for his kickstarter promising a fantastic megaman game.

>>14314230
>>The worst PR since DmC

Id argue worse.

>>14313715
That's not a fair comparison at all. That was a personal passion project. He wasn't EMPLOYED by the game. He wasn't being actively paid to work on it.

That said, Dragon's Crown was 1 mil, so MN9 can go fuck itself.

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I've never understood the intense love for megaman, every game in the series is just another boring platformer. Why is there so much nostalgia for it?

>>14313536
This. The worst thing about this is that people keep falling for crowdfunding.

>>14313707
That issue is long over anon.
At this point I sort of wish feminism was the biggest problem of this game.

>>14313715
>That furry sidescroller game was made mostly by one guy
which one?

>>14315464
>I've never understood the intense love for megaman, every game in the series is just another boring platformer.
Two branches of the series(MMBN and MMSF) arent side scroller at all(except for one game), and Legends isnt either.
And if you've actually played the games you'd know they arent boring at all, and tend to add new mechanics to make it interesting while still mantaining the side-scrolling formula.

Also, great designs and OST help a lot. I started playing MegaMan games at 13 years old so there's no nostalgia here.

>>14315894
Freedom Planet?

>>14315464
For me it isn't nostalgia. The Classic MM series has a bunch of genuinely fun games which don't get old even on "xth" replay. If you haven't played them already, give MM4 NES or MM4 / 5 Gameboy a spin. They're high quality simple yet enjoyable games to play.

>>14315894
Dust an Elysian Tail
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wO4xS2GTujA

>>14315940
I was close.

>>14315929
looks nice, has good music, gameplay itself is terribly unfun. level design is ass. people liken the game to classic sonic but no, with the emphasis on combat its closer to sonic heroes/rush games.

>>14314230
>Do you think Kenji will retire after this flops hard?

He still has Red Ash coming out. And he has Chinese money keeping Comcept alive.

>>14315464

there is nothing better than a MM game that works. Great tense level design, great music. A sense that you're a hero out to save the world. A feeling of accomplishment after beating each level. See MM2, 3, 9.

There's nothing worse than a MM game that doesn't come together. They rehash this series HARD. So there's too many games, and more bad or mediocre ones than good ones.

>>14315948
You're right, it doesn't play like a Sonic game. It plays like something decent.

It's fine to shit on the face of a project/company but don't throw the whole thing under the bus.

>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comcept
I enjoy Sweet Fuse, Soul Sacrifice, and Guild 02. And the Red Ash anime is looking to turn out bigger & better than first glance. It's potentially turning into a full series/movie rather than a 10 second commercial for the failed game. Also, Inafune was credited in Gunvolt as an advisor iirc(?) and that game was a good solid start to a new series, with its sequel looking even better.

Inafune/Comcept just need to stray from the crowdfunding and nostalgia stuff and get back to doing what they were doing before all of that.

>>14316028
The first thing they should do is get rid of the white people they work with

>>14316028
That's all fine and good, but it's too bad that Three Kingdoms with animals 3DS game never got off the ground. I was looking forward to that.

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>>14315413
>That said, Dragon's Crown was 1 mil
Dragon's Crown kinda has the whole "personal passion project" thing going on too, not at the same extreme though.

Also it was only for PS3 and Vita IIRC, Inafune just keep promising MN9 for every existing platform and some fictionary ones

Wasn't the whole fucking reason that the development cost ballooned out of control because they decided to go full 3D, and use Unreal 3 engine?

I mean, besides the entire squandering of the budget trying to create a multimedia empire before the first game even makes it out the door.

>>14316117

That and the ports. There's fees just to get your games on those platforms. Plus the time and cost in actually porting.

And here's the kicker: the main game has been done for over a year. The last delay is mostly just so it's a launch title for a Chinese Android console. Inafune wants everything to be a simultanious release.

>>14316117
3D is cheaper than 2D. If Mighty looked like MM Powered Up or even Maverick Hunter X there would be far less complaints. Instead they went with a generic Nick Jr. character design template.

>>14316130
>3D is cheaper than 2D.

I've never bought that. Bet you anything the budgets for Powered up and Maverick Hunter for were as much or more than the originals.

Every tmie there's 3D, the costs seem to baloon into the millions and millions. And it costs more the more detailed the graphics are.

Oh, and that's another thing. Powered Up and Maverick Hunter were ugly ass games. The PSP just can't do 3D that looks as good or detailed as 2D. Only the current gen of consoles can pull off the 3D looks like 2D look. But that limits protability and adds costs. Just making a simple detailed 2D game is the best option. Least cost, best portability.

>>14316130
That's backwards.

With a limited set of animations to produce 3D is going to be more expensive. The animation is virtually just as tedious but 3D requires several extra steps: modeling, skinning, texturing, etc.. And of course you need a 3D rendering engine and shaders that can achieve the look you want whereas a 2D engine can be as simple as possible. They avoided building the rendering engine by using UE3 and they avoided writing good custom shaders by deciding their game can look like literal garbage.

But the point is a shit ton more technical work goes into 3D than 2D AND the same amount of artistic work. Even with with the 0 effort they put into MN9 I doubt it was cheaper this way.

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>>14316218
>and they avoided writing good custom shaders by deciding their game can look like literal garbage.

Bloodstained is using UE4, and they're using shaders. I don't think MN9 even has any. Shaders make a big impact on graphics.

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>>14316230
>Effort and talent make a big impact on graphics.

>>14316218
Then why did SFIV go 3D? It's cheaper and more efficient than pumping out highly detailed and animated 2D sprites. Even early in the PS2 era you had 2D games like Contra SS and Gradius V using 3D polygonal models rather than sprites.

Big blockbuster 3D world games are expensive because they're blockbusters. 2D equivalents would be what... DQVI, FF6, Chrono Trigger? Games with 2D gameplay and 3D models are inherently cheaper than going the true 2D route. 3D spritework never really became a thing for a reason, anon.

>>14316288
>2D equivalents would be what... DQVI, FF6, Chrono Trigger?

The biggest budget snes era games cost a few million tops.

>>14315924
Either youre too fucking retarded to know what nostalgia means or you were 13 only a couple years ago. So which is it?

>>14316288
>2D equivalents would be what... DQVI, FF6, Chrono Trigger?
Street Fighter 3. The game that spent so much on its sprites that it never made back its budget.

>>14316288
>Then why did SFIV go 3D?
Because 3D is consistent and predictable. It becomes easier to tie hitboxes to models because you have data on the exact shape and coordinates of a 3D model, whereas with 2D sprites you have to just do it manually to try an match the animation.

Not sure what you point you're trying to make on early PS2 games. 2D games are outright less technically complex. You're trying to argue against reality. I can probably whip up a super basic 2D engine in C# or C++ in a few days with a few references. It'd take me a few weeks to get just the most basic D3D renderer working in C++. Before you even consider the art there's a huge difference in the technical aspect and programmers are more expensive than artists unless you're some sort of lead concept artist.

if you want to continue there are tons of reasons why 2D is cheaper. When you go from concept to a 2D sprite you can draw a simplified version for a single frame of an animation and you'll know what it looks like in-game. If you want to go from concept to 3D you have to model most of it and it's going to take significantly longer to get to a point where you can say "Yeah this looks good". Development has tons of hits and misses, it's well established that games go through tons of different iterations in prototype stages, 3D art is ultimately less efficient to prototype. Already at an early stage we're talking about a big hurdle, both 2D and 3D have it, but 3D's is bigger.

Let me put it this way. Could the guy who made Dust: An Elysian Tail have made the same game in 3D in 7 years on his own? Probably not. The technical aspect aside, the pipeline for 3D art is long and complicated. Obviously you need to have a solid 2D concept, this is true of both 2D and 3D. But from there you need to realize the concept into a game-ready state. Let's skip the iteration since we already talked about it.

>>14316288


With 2D you can go from concept to sprite and see how it looks like it'll be in the game and continue creating sprites with the same style. Is it easy to draw these animations? No, neither 2D nor 3D are easy. But with 2D you're producing the model and the animation and the textures and so forth at the same time. That's the beauty of 2D, you're putting down everything at once, or at least you CAN.

With 3D, in order to go from concept to game you not only have to produce the model (probably in a sculpting program like Zbrush), this model is going to have so many polys (hundreds of thousands, probably millions) that you cannot use it. You might have the artist do the texturing on this hi-res model, but you NEED to produce a low-poly model. This is a requirement because of how performance intensive it is to render 3D. You can piggyback off the hi-res model and create a new model (simpler nowadays thanks to retopology tools, but still tedious work) and bake the information from the hi-res model (produce shading, smoothing, apply previously created textures, etc) on the new model. Keep in mind texturing, basically painting the model, had to have been done at some point, which is more work (2D work).

Once you have this new low poly model you can finally rig it so you can animate it. Rigging is yet another tedious task that will take more time the more complex the model is. Games don't need the same rigging as Dreamworks charactesr but that's because the animation tends to be simpler, even then it can take a ton of time.

Finally, you animate. And while rich studios can do this with mocap small guys are probably going to do a lot of manually. That means position limbs and extremities by hand for each key frame. It's no more time consuming than 2D animation. But if you haven't noticed yet, 3D demands several distinct stages in the pipeline that you cannot do in a single go like you can with animation.

>>14316475

And again, if you want your game to look any good you need to write appropriate shaders that will create the lighting and colors that you want.

Why do studios keep going with 3D? They probably think it has some advantage (maybe technical like hitboxes) or couldn't shop for talent. Fact is 3D has become the status quo and it is ubiquitous, so are artists. There are even hobby artists who have amazing 3D art, but that doesn't make it any cheaper. The west barely has any animation talent left because it's underpaid skilled labor, but I bet any anime studio could pump out good looking sprites for a full side scroller in a few weeks. Or maybe they thought they could make it look good and then later realized that their programmers don't know how to do it, or they couldn't afford the experts that do know.

>>14316288
I would imagine Fighters would be easier in the long run for 3D for patching and balancing, but not for a "2D" platformer.

>>14313428

And not even a good one.

>>14316366
Technically you're right, but when people like things for the nostalgia factor is usually of childhood, not after you started fapping. It's obviously what I meant.

>>14316230

Wait sorry which is the one they're going to use, the one on the left or the one on the right?

>>14321151

It's the one on the right

>>14316193
Hey fuck you, asshole. MHX and Powered Up look fine.
Better than MNo9, ironically.

>>14322096
>MHX and Powered Up look fine.

Not as good as the originals though. MMX is a very fine looking game. Just SD.

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Why the fuck was this thread posted to /m/

>>14322224
>

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One hundred million and two thousand years from now when people look up businessman in the dictionary they'll see a picture of Inafune and an excerpt on the follies of cult of personality.

>>14322233

That looks like such shit.

>Why the fuck was this thread posted to /m/

Robots you dumb nigger.

>>14322368

Is the thing on Beck's head supposed to be googles?

>>14322378

Yes, there was a detective mode gimmick planned but it was cut due to a tight budget

>>14322400

are you memeing?

I want everyone to look at that pic. look how much better it is. I think that;s the zx artist

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Reminder than a semi-small team in Croatia with a much smaller budget managed to make a game more graphically impressive in 2011 than Inafune and his crew has managed with 4 million in 2015.

>>14324908
You forgot they are literally wizards

>>14324924
Somewhere between the Eurozone and the Russian Federation lies an elite cadre of wizard programmers who can make miracles happen on toaster hardware.

So anyone know how trinity acts when shes out of her crazy state? god dr. white looks better in makoto yabe's style.

Screenshots of the leaked debug build. the powers.
http://imgur.com/a/oYTp9

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>>14325230
this look terrible
>angry flame war!

>>14313659
>Do you think that Kenji cut himself a 3 million dollar check?
He cut himself 4 years worth of CEO paychecks, surely.

>>14325046
The phenomenon is known as "Slav magic".

>>14316482
>There are even hobby artists who have amazing 3D art, but that doesn't make it any cheaper.
It actually does. The market is well saturated and it's not that hard to hire somebody competent and in need. Especially if you are willing to shop in eastern europe or mayb even make an entire studio there. (Ubisoft and a few other publishers are)
2D has been dead for decades. It's not going to suddenly be cheap when 90% of people proficient in it have retired or shifted to 3D long time ago.

I just got a look at RIVE, the last game made by Two Tribes.

MN9 better get out before it does.

>>14325460
I agree but

>2D has been dead for decades
2-D design still has a position or two in most games. I'm assuming you mean projects teams making actual 3D games, but 2D assets are a major part of almost any game. When pouring more manhours into polygon count hits a wall, 2D design kept growing along side high end effects and lighting. Granted the few names needed for great 2D assets in even the largest titles can go catalog shopping.

>>14325393

he probably cuts himself a very small check and just expenses everything

>>14325230
Does he literally only have those two facial expressions? I thought the point of going 3D was so that you could expand the range of emotional display possible on a face.

>>14313416
Highest profile Kickstarter is now the biggest laughing stock.

>>14328386

For gaming, one of the highest. But Shenmue and Bloodstained got more money.

https://www.kickstarter.com/discover/most-funded

Let me ask you a question, do you like awful games that are awful?

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>>14328509
Yes

>>14327517
>http://imgur.com/a/oYTp9
Hard to do when that Ray character is allegedly the only model with a posable mouth.
Legends managed more expressive characters.

>>14328509
Ehh....

>>14313416
Inafune is not and never was a director. He was an artist and a producer.