Disappointing pattern I see in gaming (long read)

Dead Space is meant to be played with a 360 controller, and on the PC it works quite well. If you're unwilling or unable to play it this way, well, there's not a whole lot to tell you.

 

That's my whole point. It's a console game period. No thought about it being a PC game. And I couldn't even play it with an Xbox 360 controller it was so clumsy. If I want to play with a controller I'll play on my Xbox 360 or PS3. If it was meant to be played with a 360 controller then why did they include keyboard/mouse keybindings? It's like having a game on the PS3 and/or Xbox 360 and saying it was meant to play with a keyboard and mouse.

It wouldn't have been that difficult to spend a little bit of time to develop it for keyboard and mouse. It's the fact that they didn't.

 

Yes, gloom is present in the thread, but i feel that PC games have been getting the shaft compared to console. I understand the reasons why it's been like that, but it's still sad.

On another note, great games have indeed been released, unfortunately, i have to say that a lot of those were console exclusives or console ports which i do own on console.

I agree, there is way too much hype these days and i'm scared for GW2 in that regard.

I agree with you on that, a lot of games were poorly ported to PC, i mean make at least a decent effort of it. GTA IV is one mess of an unoptimized port to give an example.

 

My two cents...

I was 9 years old when my brother and I got an Atari 2600 for Christmas. We missed the Intellivision and Colecovision because my family couldn't afford them. However, I played both those consoles extensively at friends' houses and in K-Mart. One friend even had a Vectrex. Our next console was an NES (we had jobs now to buy our own consoles...why buy a car and date when you can buy a console and have fun?) followed by a Sega Master System. And then a Genesis followed by an SNES and you get the picture...

My family did buy a C64 when I was 14, and even then, 'PC' gaming was a lot deeper (?) (not necessarily better) than what was available on a console (NES). You just couldn't do games like the Microprose stuff (F-15, F-19 Stealth Fighter, Airborne Ranger) very well on a two button joypad. The instruction manuals and cloth maps that came with computer (C64) games were amazing. Bathroom reading for hours. I may have missed the manual for Super Mario Bros on the NES while opening the console box...I probably thought it was an ad.

I won't say better because my friends and I had a lot of fun playing All-Star Wrestling, Rygar, Super Mario Bros, Mike Tyson's Punch-Out, Kid Icarus, Metal Gear, Bayou Billy, Contra, etc, on the NES. Those games lended themselves to lots of people sitting around because either a couple of people could play at the same time or there were definite 'turns.' (You died...my turn.)

But, by myself, I always fired up the C64, and lost hours in Ultima III or IV or Seven Cities of Gold or Adventure Construction Set or Racing Destruction Set or Silent Service or Raid Over Bungeling Bay. There were a few good 'party' games like Epyx's Summer Games/Winter Games or EA's M.U.L.E. and Archon.

But that's how I viewed consoles vs PCs all the way up until my Doom, Descent, Duke Nukem 3D and Warcraft 2 days. Now, as long as all players involved had a PC (expensive), you had a 'multiplayer' (that was a new word somewhere around the early 90's) experience that consoles couldn't touch. A little later, I bought a PS2 and you had games with a lot of depth (still no big manuals, but there were in-game tutorials). The landscape had changed, and the lines dividing PCs from consoles were a lot blurrier to me. Right now, I rarely do PC gaming, and most of my time is spent playing games (and yes, some M rated ones...Halo) with my 8 year old. However, he likes playing Battlefield 2 on the PC, too. He doesn't care whether his input device is a mouse or a joystick. He's fairly adept at both, but not as proficient as people who have spent a lot of time with either input device.

I really don't have a bias towards PC or consoles. I could care less. I play what I think is fun, and avoid drudgery. I'm very addicted to demos on XBLA right now. They're free and give you a good feel for the game. I've given money to both indie developers and large publishers through XBLA based on demo play. Some of those games are as fun as anything that I've ever played and the price is right. Right now, my son and I play a lot of Toy Soldiers: Cold War.

But, I think I've rambled...more to the point of the thread (I think) and an attempt at avoiding 'rosy retrospection' (and that's difficult for me...I'm very nostalgic).

First, I enjoy people touting Blizzard as the premiere PC developer. That may be true nowadays, but the first time that I remember seeing the Blizzard logo was a Blockbuster rental for the Genesis...Blackthorne. I also rented The Death of Superman on the Genesis which had that same Blizzard logo. And I'm sorry Starcraft fans, but Blizzard actually did port that to a console. I thought they did a decent job, too. Obviously the interface without a mouse and keyboard shortcuts wasn't as intuitive as a PC...but after you got done poo-pooing the game as compared to the PC, it wasn't too bad. It was fun.

Second, I do not think that electronic gaming had its roots in capitalism or profit. By the time I started playing, I believe that was occurring. But there were hobbyists developing games on mainframes without a single thought of profit in the beginning. They did it because they loved to code and wanted to show off to their friends. I could be wrong, but I just don't think a group of people sat down trying to figure out a new way to make money. I think a group of enthusiasts/hobbyists sat down and did something that they loved. After it took a lot of their time and they saw that people were interested, then, one of the more enterprising people involved decided that there was a profit to be made. (Before the internet made ALL music readily accessible to the masses, you could make very similar arguments about friends getting together to form a garage band and then finding out that some people actually enjoyed their music...enter A&R...enter recording contract...etc etc).

From an outsider's perspective (I have never been employed by a software developer or publisher), I think the issue is the demand for increasing complexity (and I don't necessarily mean complexity of gameplay...I mean paying a composer a large amount of money to write an imposing score for Halo).

In the C64 heyday, a development team was typically three or so individuals, and all of them had coding experience. You didn't need a graphical artist in those days because the hardware couldn't produce very detailed images anyway. The designer, artist and programmer were all the same person. As the games became more complex, the development teams became larger and they had to work on the development full time. This meant paying the team up front...this meant that whoever was paying the team felt like there would be some return on the investment. The longer the money sat in the 'hole', the larger the return had to be to compensate for lost potential earnings on other endeavors. As the complexity scaled up with the hardware, more money had to be provided. To reduce the risk, schedules had to be set up. At some point, the product had to go out the door.

Essentially, we (the end users) are victims of our own demands. We have created a multi-billion dollar marketplace and people who care more about money than gaming have been attracted to it. People who love creating games need their resources and thus begins 'development hell.'

Large publishers invest a lot of money into Halo 3 or Call of Duty:Modern Warfare 3 due to the large teams required to create a game that will be successful. You can't stray too far from the formula or you risk alienating a large majority of the purchasers. The development becomes too risky and there's too much money involved. The publishers play it safe. And we, the end users, are simply demanding that the next title have better graphics, more features and perks than the last installment. We (or in the words of another poster...our less keen and less informed gaming siblings) are responsible for the mess. The publishers will make the products that sell. That's why the rapid adoption of the Wii so completely appalled me. That console got a lot of people into gaming, but we dumbed gaming down for the masses. (And before someone gets upset, I now own a Wii and actually enjoyed playing Dead Space:Extraction on it.) Not an entirely different argument from 'That's so stupid that xyz athlete makes $12 million' when I watch every single football game on Sunday.

Lastly (if anyone is still reading), the two worst offenders, in my opinion, are Electronic Arts and Activision. And what's really sad about that is that those two companies were the innovators in the 80's. Nobody made better games for the Atari 2600 than Activision. Nobody made better games for the C64 than EA. Their titles were, arguably, the best titles on those platforms. Everyone talks about Ultima, but the watershed RPG experience for me was Bard's Tale published by EA.

 

From the playtesting I've heard about and words from hardcore MMO friends who went to the eurogamer expo, GW2 is something different. I wouldn't go to the extent of saying amazing but I hope it'll give the dated WoW a run for its money. Given that it's a true PC exclusive we don't have to worry about shoddy ports, the maps are also a breath of fresh air.

All in all I think GW2 looks like a really well polished game with lots of consideration. It seems like they are thinking about things like how valve thought about TF2 when they designed it (they made it easy to distinguish classes merely by outline, made maps with minimal visual noise etc.). Although it's a different genre to TF2 and has different requirements to make it tick, it does seem like they're putting in that level of thought.

I've never played an MMO myself but I am a little curious about trying GW2, though I probably won't be able to run it well.

 

Well, there is nothing stopping you from getting the game at release. They way i see it, since it is buy to play, even if you only get 60 hours out of it it was worth the $50 or so you paid for the game. I believe that GW2 will be a good game, it's just that i'm not certain it'll live up to the expectations created be Anet. At least, they are trying something different and they deserve credit for that much at least.

 

I think a point that has or has not been made is the gaming industry is doing just fine, its the individuals taste that is changing as they get older...and unfortunately it appears it's not changing for the good.

 

Well I think it's clearly just maximizing profits, which I can't fault companies for. But then that means the downfall of deep and engrossing computer games in the future. As brought up prior, games used to be a passion thing by the developers, a form of art if you will.

 

I think this speaks volumes about how games are developed now.

First thing I see when I start a game is the name of the PUBLISHER... Not the Developer, not even the title of the game...
- I think this epitomizes how games are developed.

Also observe another trend. I think game development has become the next internet craze.

There seems to be very few game developers who want to remain independent and successful. Red5Studio, Tripwire Interactive, Riot Games, S2Games, Hi-Rez Studios seem to be among the minority.

My point is, I think a lot of game developers try to make that one game that goes viral to be bought by EA, Valve, Epic Games, Ubisoft, Zenimax, 2K Games, Activision etc... It's like it's all setup to attract and investor and sell quick.

I can only really think of ONE huge developer that remained independent. CryTek.

So even independent games may suffer.

 

Depends on your perspective...

Is the industry generating more revenue than it ever has before? Yep.

Is human player interaction more robust than ever before? Yep. (Unfortunately, I'm a loner by nature so this trend has no appeal to me. This forum is about the extent of my electronic social outlet. I'm even allergic to Facebook.)

Is the industry generating better games than it ever has before?

I think that's the question that this thread is trying to answer. I loved Resident Evil 4 on the Gamecube. I really enjoyed God of War on the PS2. Some of the other triple AAA titles? I don't know. Oblivion (which I'm struggling through now...I have that Frost Crag Spire place, and I'm trying to earn enough money to buy a bed and carpet...I pick daisies and lots of other plants, and make tea and then sell it...maybe I'm missing the point of the game) is decent, but I liked Baldur's Gate and Fallout better. Halo:Reach was cool, but I thought Half-Life 2 was more atmospheric and Unreal Tournament 2004 had better vehicles and multi-player. Bioshock? I tried and couldn't finish. Meanwhile, I went back and had a blast playing No One Lives Forever. The levels are very linear, and vehicles (motorcycle/snowmobile) have very cheesy controls, but it's fun and funny. I think there are some great games out there now, and I think there were some great games in the 80's and 90's. Some have stood the test of time fairly well, too. They don't do tesselation (???), but the art direction was well-defined and well executed so they hold up well.

What concerns me the most is the trend set by EA Sports...you can crank out an iteration every year and charge full price for it. But who's to blame? The consumer. If we buy it, they will make it.

As for the last part of your phrase, please clarify.

Actually, I think my tastes haven't changed at all...and that could be the problem. The gaming industry has moved on and left me behind. (*snif snif* I can't tell you how neglected I feel. I can barely crawl out of bed in the morning. Zoloft, here I come.) I'm just one small voice with a few dollars, but if they (the industry) continue to cater only to my son and turn-based strategy completely disappears, they will find that my son has significantly less earning power and, therefore, disposable income than I do right now.

The only games that I've considered recently are Rage and Space Marine, and ended up buying neither. I finished Defense Grid instead.

 

Ahh I'm too lazy to quote each question sooooo

1. That part of Oblivion is just a house, nothing more; nothing less. It's for fun. The meat of the game is in the questing schema.

2. To clarify what I'm saying is this - gaming is bigger now than ever before and it isn't us old farts who are controlling the direction of the games. Sure we play a decent part but it's mainly our youth who are booming industry and they like FPS games. Granted, I do not enjoy them nearly as much (The last FPS game I liked was Goldeneye on N64) but I cannot deny the power the genre has on todays IPs.

3. As much as we hate to admit this, the gaming industry is like any other publicly owned company and has to answer to their share holders and not their fans, which is why more and more companies really don't care. Sure they read the feedback, etc but its extremely rare for a company to actually listen to this feedback if the person providing the feedback has a very minor influence over the sales of a game. So yes, the industry will cater towards their primary audience.

4. Money is hardly an issue with today's youth, parents will typically buy them whatever game they want or the kid will figure out a way to get it. Of course there is an age limit. For example, I don't have a single a kid over the age of 11. They can't buy their own crap but that doesn't mean I wont, as long as the game meets my extremely over protective standard. I'm sure I'm not the only parent who does this

 

I forgot about that trend...

Is the industry generating more adult material (nudity, profanity, violence, etc) than ever before? Yep.

Now, I'm probably not as protective as I should be...my son is 8 and Ratchet and Clank on the PS2 got him into gaming...he's migrated to all things Halo now...he finished Halo 2 (compatibility on the 360), Halo 3, Halo ODST, Halo Reach and now, he's tearing through Halo Wars...I think most of those, if not all, are M...but I write it off to sci-fi violence...there's mild profanity (no f-bomb)...and no nudity...

He loves zombies (???)...so I downloaded a demo for the sequel to Zombie Apocalypse on XBLA...oops...f-bomb right out of the gate...off the game went...

I won't let him watch me play Dead Rising 2...no real nudity, but there's some very suggestive stuff, an unreasonable amount of language, and even though they're zombies, they look enough like people that burying a nail bat in their heads isn't appropriate for an 8 year old...Crackdown 2 is off limits for language which is disappointing because he would love jumping from building to building and driving cars...

I remember when my dad bought a 300 baud modem for our C64 with a phone cradle...it wasn't three weeks later, that we (my brother and I...not my dad and I) found a bulletin board and downloaded our first nude image...you had to wait like 10 minutes and the door was under constant guard to prevent mother from walking in...and the resulting image was very pathetic by today's .h264 standards...

Imagine my surprise when I bought a PS2 just to play God of War (I had been out of gaming for a few years due to Navy deployments), and as soon as I beat the hydra, I was treated to a menage a trois in the ship's cabin with two topless females (is that still a spoiler?)...didn't see that one coming...and then I bought Twisted Metal: Black for the PS2, and for the first time, heard the f-bomb from my console...we've definitely come a long way from Mario kissing the princess at the top of a completed level...with Donkey Kong squawking (not swearing) at you...

 

Oh you mean stuff like this:

 

I never understood why it's acceptable to go around killing/blowing up things, but sexuality and nudity are so taboo in American culture.

 

I'm ok with nude women... nude men on the other hand...

 

That's perfect HTWingnut. Aaah...the memories. We had to be so patient for so little when we were teenagers. I laugh every time that I scroll past that picture. I would accuse you of saving it from way back when, but I can almost guarantee that you don't have a working 5 1/4" floppy drive.

I don't understand it either, but I don't mind my 8 year old killing fictional aliens. Shoot...I don't even mind him playing the bloodless combat of Battlefield: 1942 on XBox Live. I was a bit disturbed when he was force holding stormtroopers in the path of the Death Star's planet cracking primary weapon while it was test firing on the last mission on Force Unleashed...I had to explain that we don't torture/humiliate anybody not even stormtroopers.

I do mind having to explain why Kratos is near a bed with two partially clad women making funny sounds. The time for that explanation will come, but it isn't now.

I wasn't making a judgment call on American society, as much as a call on my parenting skills. Personally, I always thought the embarrassing thing about the Cinton-Lewinsky "scandal" wasn't the extramarital issue or the location of the event(s), but that the most powerful man in the world couldn't do any better than Monica Lewinsky.

This thread is completely derailed now.

 

Every culture has it's taboo, you want to know what has been taboo for a while in a culture, look at swear words. In Québec, it's mostly words related to religion in some way, for the rest of Canada, there are some words associated with religion, but more associated with than for French Canadians, it's a matter of culture and values that are present or were present for a long while.

In any case, i don't mind sexuality, alcohol, nudity in games as long as it has some sort of sense being in the game and wasn't just thrown there to make the game more "mature". Unfortunately, a lot of developers are doing that. Now, in god of War, given how the ancient Greeks were liberal about sexuality, it makes at least a little sens,e but still just very little and the game could have done away without it.

We might be going off topic a bit, but we are still going along the threads in gaming and it goes along the ways of developers adding things in the game that add nothing to the experience.

 

lol wut, gaming industry "public"? apparently too lazy for facts?

The "industry" is made up of companies (in gaming, mostly PRIVATE, some large ones public) which cater to whomever they see fit.

Pocket liners cater towards pocket stuffers; hackers cater towards gamers. There is a decline of the latter and an increase in the former due to erosion of intelligence, demand for quality, standards, informedness, and descretion of the baseline consumer (which is in turn due to an influx of the average "joe", the cretin into a previously niche industry). That is the problem as best as I can solidify it and it won't change while the consumer baseline continues to absorb mindless sheep.

Others had more poignant questions about whether its an erosion from subjective or objective quality, in those matters I usually defer to the same effect on other industries became mainstream: hollywood and music. Some will say the latest blockbusters keep getting better and the next craze in teen idols (and autotuning) improve the music industry. I say those people are idiots, yet their opinion of what constitutes enjoyment and quality shares a much larger one than any of ours and sadly so does the weight their wallets carry.

 

Oh I think I have one of those somewhere.

Yeah lol. I'm not there yet, kids too young. I actually wouldn't freak if there was a nude person, my kids would just giggle. But when it comes to sexuality that's something that you just have to wait until they're ready to explain.

And lol @ Force Unleashed scene, and double LOL @ Clinton comment. So true! Why Lewinsky? Gah. (although she kinda looks like one of my high school gf's, but I'm not the president)

 

A good example of gratuitous profanity is in BF3 MP. As any of you have played it may have noticed, the MP characters have pre-made scripted comments that they say all the time during certain circumstances, and 90% of these comments are completely unecessary profanity (one that made me do a double take the first time I heard it was a soldier yelling "I'm getting F%#$ed up the A** over here"). I don't really mind profanity in my daily life, but I find it kind of silly that they dumped this much profanity into BF3 just because they could. They did the same thing with BFBC2, but the comments in BF3 are just that one step further in terms of content that they get kind of ridiculous; its like the game was written by middle schoolers who have just discovered swears and are using them every single chance they get.

 

God forgive the people who made autotuning a part of the music industry.

 

I don't know if it has already been shared here but here you go :

If Quake was done today - YouTube

 

Pretty lame, honestly. It's not like Quake and Doom were AMAZING games.

 

I didn't play those games, so I have no idea if they were actually good or not. It's just the beginning of the video with the non skippable intro, and the menu with DLC and non existent graphic options which got my attention.

 

Well, I have to say that that stuff was pretty good but the gameplay section was kind of dumb. Quake and Doom and the other shooters of that generation were about as linear and basic as you can get.

 

Actually you're wrong. There are two types of companies, private and public; all of these companies that make games have stock, owners of that stock are called share holders. All public companies hold conferences every fiscal year to discuss earnings, if company X doesn't perform well because of game Y there will be hell to pay. Private companies are employee driven, those are becoming more and more rare as time goes on. So please, next time you intend to call someone out over the "facts" please learn a little more on how our economy works. That said, most - if not all big name companies who push out games (EA, 2K, Bioware, Bethesda/Take Two, Blizzard, etc) are public not private. I cannot even think of a significant gaming company that is private...can you? Also note - a developing company is nothing without their publisher, so where the developer company may be private the publisher is public and those are the guys who matter.

 

Valve is the only one that comes to mind.

 

I stand corrected....1 developer stands above the rest!

 

Even with valve the PS3 version of orange box is published by EA.

 

What happened to the thread's author? He's just kind of quietly left the thread it seems...

 

EA did the coding for the port as well, which explains why the PS3 version of the Orange Box was vastly inferior to the PC and 360.

 

Firstly publicly traded != publicly owned so please next time you feel the urge to jump in head-long without a clue, read the quoted post.

Secondly, in addition to Valve, there are hundreds of gaming companies, especially indie that are and will probably only ever be private. The fact that you think the publisher is the "company" in "gaming company" and are the "guys that matter" shows just how bad the state of the industry is.

 

TL;DR.
Joking, but you're right, most games these days are about the hype. And why didn't you mention Contra

Games are becoming more disappointing. I hope Mass Effect 3 doesn't let me down. Bioware made me lose some hope because (Good joke!) they developed a MMORPG.

 

You know they made a version of starcraft for the n64 back in the day ?

 

They did Diablo on PSX as well - not a very good experience.

 

Wrong again tiger, that's exactly what it means. Learn a little economics please

 

Publicly traded and publicly owned are the same thing.

 

No, the definition is several and while I may have misused the first, there's public ownership and then there's public ownership, in any case what I'm referring to is the "industry" is not publicly owned since a) there are many more private gaming companies b) that at least the majority of stock in all the publicly traded companies belongs to that company.

They don't receive a get-out-of-jail-free card because their decisions are made by public investors; the s/maddening trends introduced by EA and Activision, Ubi and friends, aren't some democratic decision by shareholders, they're by individuals who want privately to use the industry like a blank cheque for their own personal gain.

Bobby Kotick isn't "publicly owned".

 

No, they really are beholden to shareholders. An argument that actually makes sense is that quality games will drive more revenue than cheap cash-ins.

A public company is a public company, so your first sentence doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

 

Almost all the AAA games are beholden to the shareholders... And those are the games that majority of people care most about, not the hundreds of indie developers that no one knows.

 

I'm kind of done debating this issue with you until you educate yourself a little bit more on the topic ;/

 

Blizzard used to be cross-platform. Anyone else remember the AWESOME Blizzard puzzle game The Lost Vikings (not the minigame from SC2 of the same name)? The Lost Vikings was available for SNES, Genesis, GBA, PC, and Amiga. That's cross-platform if I've ever heard of it. Rock n' Roll Racing was also fun, and that was SNES, Genesis, GBA. I never played Blackthorne, but that was for SNES, PC, Sega 32X, Mac, GBA.

 

Best.
Game.
EVAR.

I really wish they would have evolved that series more...it was like Mario Kart on roids

 

The issue is really quite simple, profit maximization will lead to dilution of the sharp edges of game play. The hardcore players like myself (who compete in paid leagues for money) will be the victim of it.

CS:GO, the "evolution" of the game I play is noticeably dumbed down (at least from the beta play seen), with less recoil, more run-n-gun accuracy, more money to buy big guns right off the bat ect. The console madness is leading to a unwillingness to produce extremely graphic intensive games, and the tailoring of game play including mediocre or uncompetitive players being better is leading to a trend of catering towards the masses.

Is it bad? I don't think morals have anything to do with it, it's just business and life. Money talks more then a big nerd like me who has to practice T and CT side strats for hours just to hang in there competitively, I'm not where the real money lays.

 

What do you call a company that merged with Activision?