Steam has a preorder deal whereby if you preorder Max Payne 3, you get Max Payne 1 and 2 now as well. The cost is $89.99 and I’m tempted, but I’m just not sure what I can look forward to for Max Payne 3. I’ve seen the promo videos and it looks fun, but not $90 fun - even with the first two games for free - without seeing some reviews.
Anyone else got any thoughts on the upcoming game? I know Rockstar is behind it so the story should be pretty good, but the gameplay videos don’t seem substantially different, at least mechanically, from the original game.
It is just way too long since the second one came out. Tying the story in MP2 to MP1 was tenuous at best, and I have doubts about how the story in MP3 will carry it on.
Well, here’s one opinion: Max Payne 3 has been in development hell, now finally scheduled to come out nearly 9 years since the last game in the franchise. It’s been developed by a different studio, and written by a different writer. (It’s also apparently not the same Rockstar that made the GTA games) The original games were fairly over the top in riffing off the “noir” style and off films and stereotypes surrounding New York City. The style of the originals was entirely based on nighttime and NYC.
So of course, the new studio puts the game in daytime São Paulo and features a redesigned protagonist. There’s no clear continuity with the originals, at least in the material I’ve looked at. So I just wonder what the point of the game is: the original fans are likely to have moved on in the past 9 years, or are expecting a do-over of Duke Nukem Forever. People who started gaming in the last decade most likely didn’t play the originals (Max Payne 2 apparently sold poorly, although a good game – short, but very well-made), and might be put off by this sequel by not having played the originals/not knowing the backstory/not being impressed by seeing a “3” in front of a franchise name they don’t recognise. The change of style and setting doesn’t make sense to me – if they must place it in a sunny favela instead of nighttime New York, then as a resident of Brazil, I wonder why São Paulo of all things (a dull, charm-free sea of concrete on a featureless plain)? Why not Rio de Janeiro, so the backgrounds at least would have more style and be more recognisable?
I’m thinking it might very well be a good game – if they simply copied the predecessors’ gameplay it would be quite solid. I just don’t feel the least desire to pay much more than a fiver for it because the whole presentation and history looks to me like Dr. Frankenstein standing over a dead franchise with a supercharged defibrillator after grafting on multiplayer and half of Kane and Lynch’s face.
You lost me with this.
Not that I don’t think Rockstar is incapable of telling good stories, but they certainly haven’t managed to marry their open world games with a cohesive narrative or character development.
'course this is going by GTA IV, and I hear they did a much better job with Red Dead.
I’ll probably be picking it up, but not for $80, and I’ve already played 1 and 2, so I have no interest in the promo. I’ll probably wait for 10% discounted sale.
90$? Seems to expensive. In my Steam location the price is 50 euros which is about 65$. The value of the bundle for 1 & 2 is 15 eruos (20$), so one could argue that the real price of MP3 preorder is 45$, which is a more reasonable price for a new game. Usually Steam has this rather unfair policy of 1USD = 1Euro, so I’d be surprised if the 90$ price quoted by the OP is the correct price.
As for wheter I’d buy it - nope. Waiting for reviews before I plonk down cash on this - but then again I bought the 1&2 bundle a while ago, so that isn’t an incentive.
That’s what I was thinking too - the protaganist looks more like Heisenberg from Breaking Bad in a Hawaiian shirt (that’s not necessarily a bad thing, considering Heisenberg is actually pretty badass) than the Max Payne, hard-boiled cop.
I really enjoyed the story in the original game, but looking at the game play videos for Max Payne 3 I’m seeing a lot of bullet time (fundamentally unchanged from the first game) and not a lot of info on the story surrounding said slow-motion gunplay balletics.
And yes, I’m in Australia, where the quoted price is USD$89.99. Fortunately, the AUD$ and $USD are about at parity, but I’m just not seeing $90 worth of game there at the moment and I’m not hearing much to convince me to the contrary, alas - which is a shame, because it could be a while before it comes down in price to something more reasonable.
I’m looking forward to it, both as a fan of the original two games as well as Rockstar. While it is being designed using the RAGE engine, it is not an open-world game; it’s more linear than that. I’m especially looking forward to how Rockstar moves their multiplayer designs forward - I expect that a lot of innovations from this will make it into GTA V eventually.
The mo-cap especiallly looks pretty awesome; the way Max reacts in the gameplay videos is impressive. It’s also interesting that they are modelling the paths and actions of individual bullets… not sure that’s ever been done before.
From a story standpoint, I can understand worrying about the continuity between the first two games and this, but I can accept the idea that Max felt the need to get out of NYC; I’m not a fan of games that have sequels that emulate the initial game over and over, and Rockstar has rarely done that - none of the GTA games has reused protagonists, for example. So I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt on that. They are bringing back the same actor who did Max’s voice in the first two games.
I am a little concerned about the lack of buzz. I hope it’s a good game, and I hope it does well.
$90 AUD is $93 USD, so it’s worse. I can’t find it on US Steam yet, and I can’t justify the cost. Even if they’re selling 3 for the now-normal price of $60 instead of $50, then that still leaves $15 apiece for the other games. They can’t normally go for more than $5 or even $2.50 on Steam. I might get it some day, but not full price, especially since I’m still working on a backlog of games.
I agree if does seem pretty impressive, but I’m not sure you can build a game around it. It worked the first time because A) Bullet Time was a new thing and B) There was actually a reasonable noir story attached to all that bullet time. A decade later and Bullet Time is in heaps of games, so the story is going to have to be really strong here. And it may be. I hope it is. I just think $90 is a bit steep for a game with almost no buzz and no early reviews from any of the major reputable sources I usually rely on.
As do I - but like we’re both saying, there should be a lot more buzz about this, and there isn’t. Which is sad, because I do want to play it - but so far their marketing people haven’t done a good job of convincing me (or any of my other gaming friends that I’ve spoken to) that this game is awesome enough to justify a $80-$100 investment at this stage.
Max Payne 2 was a fantastic game, as was Max Payne 1. The extra $30 is way too much for 2 games that over 10 years old and where never that popular to begin with (although like I said, they were excellent in my opinion). I’m optimistically skeptical about Max Payne 3. Being a Rockstar game I can’t imagine it being bad, but I just really hope they can replicate that same film noir feeling in an environment as vivid as Sao Paulo. Still very much looking forward to it though.
The going rate on new release games here is about $80 so really it’s an extra $10 for the two games, which isn’t a bad deal. The issue I’m still working with is if MP3 is worth taking a punt on without some reviews, and at the moment my gut feeling is “No,” unfortunately.
I don’t really know - they’ve said that the head-shaving thing is a plot point, and that he starts off more like the Max we know from previous games. It’s hard to say for sure if that is completely planned out before hand, or if it was in response to audience feedback. I’m pretty sure he still ends up in the wife-beater at some point, and I seem to recall most of the gameplay videos I’ve seen show him that way.