Okay, yeah I know people will be offended by a defense of modern games. They see contradictive postin' they hatin'. If you are offended by the material contained within this thread then go nuzzle a kitten for a few minutes, if you still find yourself possessed of vitriolic hatred then by all means let it free at me and then go nuzzle more kittens. (Unless you're allergic to cats, in which case it may be safer to look at lolcats for ten minutes than nuzzle a real kitten.)
Main causes of modern video game hate,1. The storyline is limited and/or nonexistant.
2. The game assumes that I have the I.Q of a particularly dense jar of pickels.
3. The game assumes that I am a 13 year old male.
4. The games today share an odd number of common elements.
5. Sequels will often degrade into "The search for more money."
6. Graphics have seniority to polish, characters, storyline, and pretty much everything else.
Okay, break it down now, point by point.
1. The storyline is limited and/or nonexistant.Write one.
Honestly I'm not kidding, hit your word processor of choice and slam out a coherant storyline. It is beyond hard to make a good, original, fun, and above all playable story. There are a zillion questions that have to be answered, the big ones are like, Who is the Protagonist? Why is he the Protagonist? What motivates him? What is fighting against? Where is he struggling? What is he struggling against? How did the struggle start? Why hasn't somone started struggling sooner? Those are just the ridiculously simple ones, then you get into history, geography, lore, and the background for every character in the game and zillion and three other things.
Now, that story could be a put on paper, but how the hell is it going to be played for chrissake? Open worlds are hard, accomodating for the player's roving shenanigans is next to impossible if you want a sensible game. So most games go pretty linear, which is okay, it just has move forwards right? Well no not really. Read a good book, doesn't matter who you are just find something you like. Odds are they don't spend more than 50% of their time blowing shit up, killing people, and generally being in mortal peril.
"Well that's okay right? You need open spots in a good game right?"Yeah, you do. They break up the action and let you have some time to talk to people, get to know the world. Games have ridiculous variance in how long they last, but for right now let's assume 40 hours of game for simplicity. If you don't want to spend 75% of the game in combat then you have to spend the other 25% doing something else. (Brilliant right?) The question is what the hell is going on for 10 hours? If that ten hours ends up being 2 hours worth of shops, items, and adventure, that the player slogs through time and time again they will hate you and your stupid story.
Not saying that there shoudn't be more, I'm saying that people don't give enough credit to what is there and how hard it is to actually make a story.
Simply put, story is hard. A lot of games incorporate some elements but they usually fall back on "World in peril. Stop. Save world, kill Ming. Stop. If it's not too much trouble, be a badass as well so we can sell the rights. Stop. This does bring me to point No.2
2. The game assumes that I have the I.Q of a particularly dense jar of pickels.First things first, most people on these forums play an obscure little game called Dwarf Fortress. Said game is generally not seriously played by people with an I.Q of less than par. People with a par or above I.Q are often incapable of understanding how stupid people can be.
A manufacturer has to make a game that caters to MILLIONS of people. Of those people the vast majority do not have the brainpower to safely operate their own lives, let alone figure out puzzles, clues, and -heaven forbid- plot material. They often play it safe and give games elements that could be solved by speedball tripping toddlers. Jeff Vogel (Spiderweb software, Avernum, Geneforge, Exile) says it very well, and I quote him.
Everyone has bad days. Everyone has blind spots. Some people who reach your tough fight will have used up all their healing potions, or refuse to use the healing potions, or forget that they have healing potions, or never have realized that healing potions are potions you can drink that heal you. Because of this, whenever people reach a tough fight, there will be a few of them who just can't beat it. They just can't. You can adjust the percentage of people who lose, but it will never be zero.
For indie games this isn't so bad, because the people who are tuned to indie games are generally vaguely more self-aware (Also stuck-up and arrogant, but that's beside the point.) than the gaming market in general.
"People are smart enough to handle more than they gave me in [Inserts Company name]'s most recent crapfest!"Consider this, I have a friend who gets straight A's, is fairly popular, and yet insisted that 'Circa' was a disease because a lot of people in ancient times "died circa X". People are morons. Complete and total morons. To make money to keep a company aloft, competitive, and growing, necessitates that a game is able to be played by complete morons. It it wasn't then your playerbase of cool, intelligent, and intuitive would be too small to support the company.
Companies tend not to innovate. Innovation is scary as hell, difficult, and often throws players off. So the stick to a fairly narrow spectrum of events, foremost are Tits, gore, pyrotechnics, and shiny. This brings us to,
3. The game assumes that I am a 13 year old male.Not everyone is thirteen and male, but 50% of the human race is male, and as a male I can say that there is a part of me that never grew up. That immaturity can be played to in the form of copious well endowed females, brilliant explosions, exploding heads, and a bigger more impossibly badass weapon.
Women I'm afraid don't get a lot of influence in the new action games. We're sorry for being sexist neanderthals, and we're really sor- Hey breasts!
Wait where was I? Oh yes, market imbalance.
Past a certain age the player base drops off, this will change with time, but the deciding factor in the player market right now is male, under 30, overweight (And thus not getting laid), and stupid.
Like I said, companies have to pay their people. People get payed by making a product that sells. What sells right now isn't really out there, it isn't breaking amazing new ground. It's an entire new step forward in the generical. Which is point 4.
4. The games today share an odd number of common elements.Yeah, been over it gently on pretty much every point thus far.
It sells. period.
There are cool games that cater to the innovative and strange, but they aren't big name, mainstream games. Guns, legs, and blasting through crowds of mooks while setting them on fire with boiling acid may not be new, but it can be a lot of fun. It can also be boring as hell. Shattered Suns was a space RTS game that broke a couple of rules, first it innovated by having fully 3-D space with orbiting planets, and then it followed up with 20 minute dialogue scenes without them featuring busty babes.
It failed so hard it isn't even funny. I bought it played for a bit and then resigned in digust. They tried, they really did, but they bit off too much and their bottom line probably tried to commit hara-kiri to save its honor.
Starcraft when it came out was the best RTS there was, it still ranks far, far up there. It featured massive explosions, battlecruisers, gratuitous innuendo, badass women, and a slew of other common elements. It moved forward in slight, deliberate, and spectacular ways. The balance of units was incredible, the balance of races, even more so. It was a great game and it never tried for anything that broke new ground.
Fate is a game that shamelessly copied Diablo, made it more accessible to more people and then cut it loose. It enjoyed modest success, a storyline that could fit on three pages, and absolutely nothing new.
Companies have employees, employees are people, people have families, families are people, people need to eat and live indoors, and to eat and live indoors people need money. Companies have to sell games, a middling company may sell nothing but mindlessly rehashed plotlines for years before they get breathing room to do something new. And hence, point 5.
5. Sequels will often degrade into "The search for more money."Money is the root of all progress and lack thereof.
Money motivates pretty much anything, but when dealing with corporations you can practically see the entire board of executives get down on their knees and milk the giant cow when they make a game that is set up for sequels and it enjoys success.
When making sequels people are afraid to innovate, lest they ruin the perfection that made the last game so like able, such as when Bethesda slammed out oblivion. Morrowind was a game that managed to pull off an alien environment and not coat the entire thing in cheese. Oblivion screamed mundane at you. Loudly and irritatingly. Constantly. Yes there were common elements, yes they were both elder scrolls games, but they completely missed the point of the fans who loved morrowind.
Oblivion enjoyed great commercial success despite elderscrolls fans crying over the fact they turned cyrodil into generic countryside smattered with evil. This tells you something.
Companies like money to a very nearly reverent extent. If they think they can get another ounce of blood out of the dead horse they'll have a dozen people armed with flails beat the shit out of it for hours.
Innovation will happen when the money in the current set of "Amazing, dynamic [insert additional hyperbolic loquaciousness] new discoveries" dries up.
6. Graphics have seniority to polish, characters, storyline, and pretty much everything else.Product of the age. Sad but true.
Which if these costs more for more turnout,
A. Build a better story?
B. Run a thorough performace optimazations and bugfixes?
C. Create a better caste of supporting people?
D. Give it better graphics?
Games sell to the masses on screenies (and bought off reviews, but that's another rant.), and no matter how much you tell the players about these incredible characters, this amazing story, or how smooth it plays -which invites suspicion-, the only thing of the game they get to really see is the screen shots and video clips. Those sell games along with marketing hype. Graphics also limit the rest of the game, imagine games like aurora and dwarf fortress rendered in new-tech graphics.
Your computer would explode and skullfuck itself for an encore.
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Corporations make a lot of games, and corporations are slow to move, and slow to break new ground. People just don't realize how hard it is to get the kind of amazing cool like they want, every gamer has a perfect game in their head and no game they ever play will measure up to it.
Forgive the corporations, being in the money shower is hard.
End of pointless and flawed monologue.
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Topic: My rant on modern video game rants (Read 9738 times)