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[Virtz]

A large number of people liking something will not make its flaws go away. The same applies to any other market.

This statment makes obvious you have no idea about economics. The market is ruled by popluar demand. Make things the people want and you will become rich. Just making whatever you what is a quick way to die in the market.

Uh-huh. I wasn't saying anything about success in that quote. Unless you think popular products are flawless, you've apparently missed the point.

[Garden Gnome]

There was a talk given by Sid Meier at GDC 2010, entitled "Everything You Know is Wrong", that explains why games have gone down hill so much in my opinion.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bY7aRJE-oOY

Basically he says gamers are stupid lazy people that can't even understand basic mathematics such as a one in three chance of winning or losing and like to feel special and smart. The stupid lazy people who like to feel special are of course who he caters his games to.

[nenjin]

In the 80s, when the hottest games were cranked out by 5 guys in a garage somewhere, it was easier to produce cohesive games. They may not have had all the depth and prettiness, but they were internally consistent across most aspects. When your main programmer only has one dude to talk to when he wants to talk about art assets, I think you get more alignment between the two.

Today, dev teams can be hundreds of people large. You have leads, assistant producers, lead designers, and all this middle management and bureaucracy designed to expedite the work flow. Not to mention truckloads of new hires to support and implement all the stuff your veterans cook up.

And pure quality gets lost somewhere in that tangle of passing around ideas, assessing quality, meeting deadlines and all that BS. Games may be bigger in scope, but just as it opens doors of gameplay and depth, it opens pitfalls for quality to get shunted to the side, or for having more game than you can produce ideas for.

I think that's why Blizzard is generally respect as one of the best game developers. (According to taste, anyways.) I think they take the time to seek that cohesion even though their dev teams are enormous.

As opposed to say....Elemental, War of Magic, where it seems like everything was handed down from a design doc and Brad's fiction, and there was little connection between goals and the final product.

---

Having watched Sid's talk....man, he really seems like he's deving to younger gamers. Yes, people want to succeed, be gratified, blah blah blah....once people get older, they want many things. Including failure in their games. He keeps trying to generalize to all gamers with the way he designs games, but I see half of what he's saying is not applying to everyone.

[Muz]

My response to your points...

1. The storyline is limited and/or nonexistant.
True. Though IMO, the best games develop a storyline based on your actions. Story's actually gotten a lot better these days, though. Compare Max Payne or Bioshock to Doom. Compare WoW to Wizardry.

2. The game assumes that I have the I.Q of a particularly dense jar of pickels.
Also true. I normally bring up Jeff's point too. It's often better to make a game too easy (with challenges for expert players) than to make it too hard to continue.

3. The game assumes that I am a 13 year old male.
Eh, this one is mostly because the business guys agreed that the 13 year old male market is the biggest and easiest to tap into. That's been my defense of the female market; The Sims doesn't appeal so much to most boys, but it's the best game for a huge untapped market. It's a poor business choice, but oh well, I don't know a multimillion dollar game company.

4. The games today share an odd number of common elements.
Yeah, I'd agree on this too - most gaming companies involve massive costs. You can toss all your money in an strange concept like Spore, and it might not cash in well. Chris Crawford used to play with innovative concepts and none of them worked out. It's just not in their best interest to try something new. The most innovative concepts so far may have been DoTA and Guitar Hero, and even DoTA started off indie with no budget.

5. Sequels will often degrade into "The search for more money."
Well, yeah. The whole point of game companies is to make money Sequels are a really tricky thing too. X-Com 2 changed almost nothing, except graphics, and many people consider it the best of the series. Fallout 3 however, changed almost everything in terms of gameplay. It was a good game, some loved it, many hated it just because it wasn't the old Fallout.

6. Graphics have seniority to polish, characters, storyline, and pretty much everything else.
The advantage of being a big company making a big game is graphics. They can't stand out to indie games in terms of storyline or innovation or certain types of gameplay. Story, everything is cheap, it's the graphics that cost a lot. So, they capitalize on graphics. Also, like you said, graphics is a major marketing thing too. I know friends who simply can't play a game with poor graphics. To them, it's like reading a book in a tiny font or watching movies in black and white. DF players are probably the last people to have trouble with graphics


Yeah, pretty much all in agreement, but I want to rant too

Also, I noticed that almost every complaint is solved if you turn to indie games.

[Sowelu]

Not sure how you can complain about sequels when most of the time, I really wish they MORE sequels to the stuff I like...

[KCFOS]

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.

Hey.... wait a minute... 

[Sordid]

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.

Not my problem. As a gamer, all that I care about is whether or not the story is good. Just like as a driver, all I care about is whether the car drives well and has good fuel economy. The challenges the people who created the product had to go through are not my concern. And I don't buy cars saying to myself "well, it's a shitty car, but the people who made it tried their best, so I'm going to buy it instead of the good car". No, I'll go and buy the good car because it's good. Same with games.

I would even argue that it's not the fact that stories are underdeveloped that's the problem, it's that they're badly executed. You don't need a long or complex story in a game, there are plenty of games that have little or no story and it's perfectly fine. Duke Nukem, anyone? "Aliens are here to steal our booze and strippers, Imma go kick their asses" sure ain't Shakespeare, but it's okay, because the cheesiness is deliberate. On the other end of the scale you have Shadow of the Colossus. That game has a grand total of what, ten lines of plot-related dialog? And yet it's one of the most riveting, powerful, emotionally ravaging experiences you can have as a gamer. None of the questions you claim 'have to' be answered are answered in that game, on purpose. A short or minimalistic story is perfectly okay if that's what you want to do and you do it well. The problem isn't that game developers make short or minimalistic stories, it's that they try to make long and complex ones and fail.

[Sowelu]

Nobody's arguing that you should buy bad games.  It's just that game creators aren't gods, and therefore the number of games that you find satisfactory won't be infinite.  "THEIR BEST ISN'T GOOD ENOUGH" is just a pointless thing to say.  It's not good enough for you?  Fine, deal with it, buy less games.

[poca]

A manufacturer has to make a game that caters to MILLIONS of people.

Manufacturers only have a very minor role in games.

Games are made by game studios. The studios are the ones who take buggy game engines and keep adding their own custom bugs to the game and then see how many bugs get caught by the alpha and beta complainers. Once they have worn out the beta complainers they call it quits. The studios also put in textures, animations, sound effects, levels, Easter Eggs, etc. Once they fill up a DVD they send it to the publisher.

The publishers are the ones who add DRM because they want to break your computer before the buggy game; this is how branding works and you know it is working because everybody hates EA. They also hire ad companies to make ads promoting a game their account minds cannot grasp. They turn to manufacturers who then churn these DVDs in the millions and they then send them to distributors like Buy More.

Of course, the games are sent to first sent to the ESRB. They employ all the Victorian time travellers by paying them to play the games to ensuring that the games will be well recieved by the very important Victorian target demographic.

[Sowelu]

I lol'd

[Draignean]

A manufacturer has to make a game that caters to MILLIONS of people.

Manufacturers only have a very minor role in games.

Games are made by game studios. The studios are the ones who take buggy game engines and keep adding their own custom bugs to the game and then see how many bugs get caught by the alpha and beta complainers. Once they have worn out the beta complainers they call it quits. The studios also put in textures, animations, sound effects, levels, Easter Eggs, etc. Once they fill up a DVD they send it to the publisher.

The publishers are the ones who add DRM because they want to break your computer before the buggy game; this is how branding works and you know it is working because everybody hates EA. They also hire ad companies to make ads promoting a game their account minds cannot grasp. They turn to manufacturers who then churn these DVDs in the millions and they then send them to distributors like Buy More.

Of course, the games are sent to first sent to the ESRB. They employ all the Victorian time travellers by paying them to play the games to ensuring that the games will be well recieved by the very important Victorian target demographic.

I bow to a cynicism far greater than my own, you humble me.

[Hiiri]

... and now to wait for "Part 2: Rant about why you shouldn't hate greedy corporate bitches and stupid consumer masses."

In short the text was: "Man, people are dumb..  like..  real dumb, you know?" and "Dude, they're trying to maximize profit!"
Yes, and...?

[Desdichado]

In short the text was: "Man, people are dumb..  like..  real dumb, you know?" and "Dude, they're trying to maximize profit!"
Yes, and...?

Lol. This. I've rarely seen such worship of corporations and "greed is good" Geckoism here, but if that's the way you really feel about the issue, then yes, the game companies are doing the "right" thing. There's no argument left if you really think dollars crassly surpass creativity in importance, or if you truly measure the quality of the games that you buy in terms of revenue generated for CEOs rather than how much fun it gave you. The only thing left to do then is to go vote Republican, I guess.

A large number of people liking something will not make its flaws go away. The same applies to any other market.

This statment makes obvious you have no idea about economics. The market is ruled by popluar demand. Make things the people want and you will become rich. Just making whatever you what is a quick way to die in the market.

Anyway, I agree with you, Draignean. The bad points in modern games are justified, and while it still dosen't make the games good, there is at least a reason for why they are awful in the minds of some.

That statement makes obvious that you have no idea about refinement or living well.

>popularity equals quality
>Twilight just became better literature than Shakespeare
>mfw

[Shadowlord]

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.

Problem with this argument: It assumes that folks who want an engaging storyline in their games are writers equally as skilled as professional game plot/story writers, or should be expected to be in order to be able to complain. (That link goes to wikipedia's "Ecological fallacy" page, which is making the error of presuming that members of a population are representative of the average, which is what you did here - assuming that both game storyline writers and game players are at an equal skill level with writing, creative thinking, tying story into gameplay, etc)

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.

It's been done. Fallout: New Vegas had factions changing their like and dislike of you based on which missions you did for which factions, who you chose to fight and who you didn't, and so on. The Holy Grail wasn't reached, of course, but they did pretty damn good in New Vegas. Fallout 3, on the other hand, had a railroad main plot unless you went rogue in Broken Steel, and assorted unrelated sidequests. Invisible War had a railroad main plot with decision points that affected the plot slightly, until near the end where you were given the choice of which faction to support, with the option of double-crossing that faction at the end to give control of the world to a different one instead, or even killing everyone from every faction so nobody took over the world (This turned out... badly, unless your goal really was to Kill All Humans after all).

Of course there are also games in which the plot is player-created by player interactions.
Crikey. It cycles between day and night fast on this planet.

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.   

Some games are something like 6 hours in the singleplayer - I'm looking at you, Force Unleashed, and at you, Black Ops. Black Ops' primary draw is intentionally the multiplayer, not the singleplayer. There are games that story doesn't apply at all, of course, to because they are entirely multiplayer, but they may still have a background for players to read about if they're interested - TF2 is an example, and Black Ops again as well, although the nova gas in the multiplayer behaves nothing like it does in singleplayer (nowhere near as deadly, but that has to be for game balance reasons).

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

Ming? Ming the Merciless? There are a lot of game companies putting out terrible stories, but that's probably because of (a) the "My story is awesome" factor (people frequently don't realize they're writing shit, their friends won't tell them, etc), (b) Elemental ought to give us a clue that perhaps actual writers, if this isn't already happening somewhere, should be doing the entirety of the plot and world background if the game designers can't come up with something good themselves.

People with a par or above I.Q are often incapable of understanding how stupid people can be.

I would have to disagree. Picard's face can testify to it.

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.

"A lot of humans believe they are intelligent, but it's more of a mainstream notion of what intelligence is. 'Intelligence' on this planet is usually made up of 10% actual intelligence, 40% self-importance, 30% arrogance, and 20% finger-pointing at those who are less intelligent and talented as if they could somehow fight genetics and burst forth into brilliant glowing beings of light and wisdom if they would only try hard enough." - According to http://www.randomterrain.com/favorite-quotes-talent-and-genius.html, that quote is by Duane Alan Hahn.

Looks like we just described Rodney McKay. Actually, this is a description of a TV Genius in general, except that "genius" will be enhanced too.

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".

How do you know he wasn't trolling you?

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.

... I don't really think games are where that target audience would go for any "needs" they had...

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.

Now, see, I can agree with you on some of this, but some of it I just don't get. Busty babes aren't inherently fun. Killing isn't inherently fun. Challenge, and overcoming it, is fun. Being stomped isn't inherently fun, however. Solving problems, saving people/cities/the world, that is inherently fun. That's all my opinion, what it seems to me, though.

I tried Prototype on the 360 a couple months ago for a couple hours, and found it dreadfully boring. "Hey look, I pretty much have ... no challenge here. Huh." It's funny, all the chaos and yet still being in no real danger just drained away any fun in the game. Sure, it had a plot, but boring gameplay made it, for me, not worth exploring. For instance, there was a place where a building was under heavy guard, and it told me that I should sneak in. Instead I said "Why, exactly? Thus far nothing has been able to do anything besides toss me into the air, and there is nothing here remotely capable of that..." Two minutes later, the guards were all dead, I was practically unharmed, and I thought "Too difficult to control, yet not taking damage." and then I quit the game.

For comparison, I'm liking Fable II. Except that pretty much every woman in the world is in love with me, with the exception of lesbians, whose numbers are presumably counterbalanced by the men who are in love with me. 10-15% of those women walk up whenever they see me, and ask why I haven't married them yet. What is this I don't even! (I think it's because I bought the best clothes I could find in the large tailor shop in ... Bowerstone?)

On the plus side, I get a nice 16% or so shop discount pretty much everywhere, and now a bunch of them have started giving me additional 25% shop discounts on top of it as gifts.

[Cajoes]

The FPS market I feel is in kind of a rut, what isn't brown is bogged down with "realism" and SPHESS MEHREENS.

Which is saddening because if you boil down the formula to those three items the genre hasn't really stepped forward ever since the original Doom in anything but the realism departement.