I thought I would find myself in agreement but I see a whole bunch of grumpy old men who gets it just almost right.
I said in the Jagged Alliance 2 thread that I think 1997-2002 was the latest golden era where game developers were allowed to take risks and explore entirely new kinds of games. 2003 onward has been EA/Ubisoft territory, ie publishers invest in safe ideas and tie up intelligent and talented developers in money grubbing projects like yet another Harry Potter game or yet another WWII shooter or strategy game. Many publishers also form their own development studios to produce their cowardly "safe investments". Up until 2003 it was pretty much the other way around, it was the developers that formed publishing houses, and since games were much cheaper to make back then they could get financing from other sources than media entertainment publishers. Remember Gathering of Developers (GoD Games)? They are the reason we got games like Max Payne, Mafia and Vietcong and many more classics from the early 00's.
I said I saw a lot of old man grumpiness that I don't entirely agree with in this thread. I'll try and adress as much of it as possible.
- Linear gameplay has ALWAYS been the norm. Few and rare gems are the GOOD free-form games. Recent games are not more linear than older games, but rather they are mostly the same as the golden oldies except with more visuals. "Press X to watch you avatar do awesome stuff" is an addition to the old formula, not a distillation of it. Take the latest CoD and strip out the single button interactions and what do you have? A late 90's shooter.
(quick note on OP's Mass Effect 2 example: That tiny cinematic is way more rewarding than the game's normal gunplay. If you haven't finished it, you are only missing out on hours upon hours of sitting perched behind cover waiting for your shields to come back online so you can kill one more enemy before they go down again)
- Co-op is this often spoken of feature that barely existed in any game in any meaningful way to warrant the hype. It is highly overrated, I lump it into the same territory with zombies, ie it is something people go "If we throw in Coop/zombies into the game, it automatically becomes awesome" about. Ever since 2006 every other game review has had the phrase "It is an excellent game, but it's a shame there is no cooperative gameplay mode" in it somewhere. What is this excellent precedent that proves that every game needs coop? From the top of my head the only coop I thought was implemented in a meaningful way was Gears of War.
- Content is certainly shallow in most games released these days. This is because AAA standard titles today are MUCH more expensive to develop than they were 10-15 years ago. We could accept hammy no-name acting and rough visuals with sound effects pulled straight from an audio library back in the late 90's, but now we want feature film production values and guess what, that's 100's of millions of dollars these days. Without it, games don't sell any longer. Case and point from my rough memory of a lecture given to us by a former DICE studio manager: Battlefield 1942 cost about 10 million dollars to make, Battlefield 2 has a classified budget but it was "many 100's of million dollars". Production cycles are as short as they always were for mainstream titles, ie 2-3 years, but the quality of content is ten-fold or even a hundred times more time intensive than they were 10 years ago.
- Consoles are not to blame for the decline of gaming. Well, not outright. It is everyone and everything's fault.
- - PC gamers are not big spenders. They get grumpy if they have to pay more than $10, whereas console gamers often feel like they have no choice but to pay $60 for a new game because pirating for consoles is more tedious and comes with more downsides where as PC pirating is completely safe and without sacrifice.
- - The late 90's saw the end of a 3D accelerator war, but after the dust settled hardware did not advance too fast nor too differently. Ever since however, hardware evolution has gotten incrementally faster and so PC gamers have wildly different computers. People with state-of-the-art consumer PCs are a minority, yet they are held up to be an example of what gaming would be like if it weren't for consoles. That is simply not true. Most PC gamers only upgrade every 3-5 years, so games have to be developed against console class hardware specs anyhow.
- - Publishers are looking for profit only. That means cutting costs and only investing in ideas that reliably sell. That means sequels of popular franchises that only refine what made the original game sell. Zombies, modern military themes, cover mechanics, street racing, cop killing, stuff that non-critical consumers eat right up because they feel obliged to. Studio executives laughed at George Lucas when he presented Star Wars, and they turned down Counter-Strike kind of game ideas in the late 90's because "no one wants a game like that". If it is not something that has sold in the past, it won't get AAA funding and you won't see it on shelves or digital distributors.
- - Publishers again: Part of what made the 1997-2002 era AMAZING was the mod scene. While certainly not the first, Half-Life made user made content accessible and mainstream. Many fantastic game concepts spawned from the mod era started with Half-Life that only lost steam around 2006 (no pun intended, really). SDK tools and support however is rare now that so many games are produced in-house by publisher owned studios. Ubisoft is a perfect example of this evil: They ship attractive looking games and then just dump them. No SDK, no nothing. Why invest time and money in developing mod tools and libraries? The consumer already bought the game, now let's make him want to buy the sequel as well.
- - Lack of dedicated server support is a similar issue thanks to publishers. Why invest in this when having one of the participating players host the game obviously "works". Giving tools to modders and server admins is costly and it isn't readily apparent to the suits why this is important. The average gamer/consumer does NOT care about these things, they will buy the game even if it is just 10 maps and one game mode because when they get bored they BUY A NEW GAME. This is what most consumers in ANY market is like, even established media like films and music. Us gamers who care about this are as rare as the audiophiles who want LPs over CDs, rarely are we lucky enough to have a game publisher decide to humour us.
- On game marketing: understand the difference between a game developer and a game publisher. Normally it is not paid for by the developer, nor is the staff or resources of the developer used (except maybe for staging some in-game footage for a trailer). Marketing campaigns are almost always outsourced to studios that work with advertising, paid for by the publisher. One could argue that the publisher would be better off spending the advertising money on the game itself instead, but obviously marketing is what makes a game sell two million copies in one week and that is THE BOTTOM LINE. Anyways, marketing does not directly hurt the game in that it does not come at the game's expense. The money set aside for marketing is probably not something the publisher wants to spend on the game anyhow because the quality of longevity of the game is unimportant so long as it is good enough to sell in the first place,
- I'm getting a little winded typing all this up, but one last note: Guitar Hero is NOT a guitar simulator. It is not a poor replacement for actual musical talent, it is a game. I've played guitar for most of my life and I still write new stuff. Guess what? I still love guitar hero because it's a game. To tell a guitarist to go "play a real guitar instead" is like telling a soldier to go "fight a real war instead". Likewise, Second Life is not literally an alternative to "real life". It is a computerised playground for men who like to roleplay as women, boys who like to roleplay as men and FBI agents who pretend to be little girls. It is facebook for the above average technically inclined perv or furry.
CLOSING WORDS: We're in the downslope of an ever rising and falling curve that is the state of gaming. The last high peak was about 10 years ago, but my instincts tell me we're going to enter a new era of fantastic new games within 5 years. We survived the onslaught of bland WWII shooters in the mid 00's, we're going to survive the onslaught of 3rd person chest-high-wall-cover-shooters as well.
I said in the Jagged Alliance 2 thread that I think 1997-2002 was the latest golden era where game developers were allowed to take risks and explore entirely new kinds of games. 2003 onward has been EA/Ubisoft territory, ie publishers invest in safe ideas and tie up intelligent and talented developers in money grubbing projects like yet another Harry Potter game or yet another WWII shooter or strategy game. Many publishers also form their own development studios to produce their cowardly "safe investments". Up until 2003 it was pretty much the other way around, it was the developers that formed publishing houses, and since games were much cheaper to make back then they could get financing from other sources than media entertainment publishers. Remember Gathering of Developers (GoD Games)? They are the reason we got games like Max Payne, Mafia and Vietcong and many more classics from the early 00's.
I said I saw a lot of old man grumpiness that I don't entirely agree with in this thread. I'll try and adress as much of it as possible.
- Linear gameplay has ALWAYS been the norm. Few and rare gems are the GOOD free-form games. Recent games are not more linear than older games, but rather they are mostly the same as the golden oldies except with more visuals. "Press X to watch you avatar do awesome stuff" is an addition to the old formula, not a distillation of it. Take the latest CoD and strip out the single button interactions and what do you have? A late 90's shooter.
(quick note on OP's Mass Effect 2 example: That tiny cinematic is way more rewarding than the game's normal gunplay. If you haven't finished it, you are only missing out on hours upon hours of sitting perched behind cover waiting for your shields to come back online so you can kill one more enemy before they go down again)
- Co-op is this often spoken of feature that barely existed in any game in any meaningful way to warrant the hype. It is highly overrated, I lump it into the same territory with zombies, ie it is something people go "If we throw in Coop/zombies into the game, it automatically becomes awesome" about. Ever since 2006 every other game review has had the phrase "It is an excellent game, but it's a shame there is no cooperative gameplay mode" in it somewhere. What is this excellent precedent that proves that every game needs coop? From the top of my head the only coop I thought was implemented in a meaningful way was Gears of War.
- Content is certainly shallow in most games released these days. This is because AAA standard titles today are MUCH more expensive to develop than they were 10-15 years ago. We could accept hammy no-name acting and rough visuals with sound effects pulled straight from an audio library back in the late 90's, but now we want feature film production values and guess what, that's 100's of millions of dollars these days. Without it, games don't sell any longer. Case and point from my rough memory of a lecture given to us by a former DICE studio manager: Battlefield 1942 cost about 10 million dollars to make, Battlefield 2 has a classified budget but it was "many 100's of million dollars". Production cycles are as short as they always were for mainstream titles, ie 2-3 years, but the quality of content is ten-fold or even a hundred times more time intensive than they were 10 years ago.
- Consoles are not to blame for the decline of gaming. Well, not outright. It is everyone and everything's fault.
- - PC gamers are not big spenders. They get grumpy if they have to pay more than $10, whereas console gamers often feel like they have no choice but to pay $60 for a new game because pirating for consoles is more tedious and comes with more downsides where as PC pirating is completely safe and without sacrifice.
- - The late 90's saw the end of a 3D accelerator war, but after the dust settled hardware did not advance too fast nor too differently. Ever since however, hardware evolution has gotten incrementally faster and so PC gamers have wildly different computers. People with state-of-the-art consumer PCs are a minority, yet they are held up to be an example of what gaming would be like if it weren't for consoles. That is simply not true. Most PC gamers only upgrade every 3-5 years, so games have to be developed against console class hardware specs anyhow.
- - Publishers are looking for profit only. That means cutting costs and only investing in ideas that reliably sell. That means sequels of popular franchises that only refine what made the original game sell. Zombies, modern military themes, cover mechanics, street racing, cop killing, stuff that non-critical consumers eat right up because they feel obliged to. Studio executives laughed at George Lucas when he presented Star Wars, and they turned down Counter-Strike kind of game ideas in the late 90's because "no one wants a game like that". If it is not something that has sold in the past, it won't get AAA funding and you won't see it on shelves or digital distributors.
- - Publishers again: Part of what made the 1997-2002 era AMAZING was the mod scene. While certainly not the first, Half-Life made user made content accessible and mainstream. Many fantastic game concepts spawned from the mod era started with Half-Life that only lost steam around 2006 (no pun intended, really). SDK tools and support however is rare now that so many games are produced in-house by publisher owned studios. Ubisoft is a perfect example of this evil: They ship attractive looking games and then just dump them. No SDK, no nothing. Why invest time and money in developing mod tools and libraries? The consumer already bought the game, now let's make him want to buy the sequel as well.
- - Lack of dedicated server support is a similar issue thanks to publishers. Why invest in this when having one of the participating players host the game obviously "works". Giving tools to modders and server admins is costly and it isn't readily apparent to the suits why this is important. The average gamer/consumer does NOT care about these things, they will buy the game even if it is just 10 maps and one game mode because when they get bored they BUY A NEW GAME. This is what most consumers in ANY market is like, even established media like films and music. Us gamers who care about this are as rare as the audiophiles who want LPs over CDs, rarely are we lucky enough to have a game publisher decide to humour us.
- On game marketing: understand the difference between a game developer and a game publisher. Normally it is not paid for by the developer, nor is the staff or resources of the developer used (except maybe for staging some in-game footage for a trailer). Marketing campaigns are almost always outsourced to studios that work with advertising, paid for by the publisher. One could argue that the publisher would be better off spending the advertising money on the game itself instead, but obviously marketing is what makes a game sell two million copies in one week and that is THE BOTTOM LINE. Anyways, marketing does not directly hurt the game in that it does not come at the game's expense. The money set aside for marketing is probably not something the publisher wants to spend on the game anyhow because the quality of longevity of the game is unimportant so long as it is good enough to sell in the first place,
- I'm getting a little winded typing all this up, but one last note: Guitar Hero is NOT a guitar simulator. It is not a poor replacement for actual musical talent, it is a game. I've played guitar for most of my life and I still write new stuff. Guess what? I still love guitar hero because it's a game. To tell a guitarist to go "play a real guitar instead" is like telling a soldier to go "fight a real war instead". Likewise, Second Life is not literally an alternative to "real life". It is a computerised playground for men who like to roleplay as women, boys who like to roleplay as men and FBI agents who pretend to be little girls. It is facebook for the above average technically inclined perv or furry.
CLOSING WORDS: We're in the downslope of an ever rising and falling curve that is the state of gaming. The last high peak was about 10 years ago, but my instincts tell me we're going to enter a new era of fantastic new games within 5 years. We survived the onslaught of bland WWII shooters in the mid 00's, we're going to survive the onslaught of 3rd person chest-high-wall-cover-shooters as well.
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