Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Sordid]

Because it's stupidly overpriced? They take the standard price in $ and just change the sign to € without adjusting for the exchange rate, thus making the game 50% more expensive for the European buyer. Fuck that!

[Myroc]

And yet mainstream games tend to be much better made and polished than indie niche titles.

Excuse me for a minute, I'm just trying to avoid choking to death on my own laughter. Seriously, I think I just woke up half the town reading that.

"Well made and polished" can mean a ton of different things, but in regards to mainstream games this rarely seem to extend beyond shiny graphics.

There are certainly exceptions, I'm not saying that mainstream games are inherently worse to indie games, but comparing the average mainstream game to the average indie game I see a lot more thought and care put into the latter than the former. The best of the indie industry has impressed me far, far more than the best of the mainstream, and at the same time, the worst of the indie industry is still in my opinion far better than the worst of mainstream games.

[Sordid]

You do realize that without actually providing some examples or some other objective data, your post is basically nothing more than a statement of opinion? I could respond to it simply by posting the same thing with "indie" and "mainstream" swapped to give the opposite view.

I think your perception is skewed because indie games tend to be smaller and simpler than mainstream games, so there are fewer things to go wrong and it's easier to make the game work properly. But every time an indie developer tries to make something big, I see the same result - a buggy, shoddy game. You need not look further than our own beloved DF. Or, in case you would object to that on the grounds that DF is still in alpha stage (a valid point), Mount&Blade.

[Gantolandon]

What part of "happy medium" did you not understand?

My bad then. I attributed those words to someone else.

Still more than you. But you're absolutely right, because the quality of living had instantly jumped to western standard the moment the Communist government toppled. And I'm being ridiculous? Pfft.

No. Your argument was ridiculous because it was absurdly out of topic.

Correlation does not imply causation.

You didn't ask about the cause.

And yet mainstream games tend to be much better made and polished than indie niche titles.

No, they don't. You can find a lot titles which were poorly ported (Invisible War), unfinished (KOTOR 2) was really bugged prior to launch (Fallout: New Vegas, Empire: Total War) or were just plain terrible (Daikatana). The mainstream games have their advantages over indie titles, but polish isn't one of them.

I guess that would depend on the structure of the company, who owns it, and what kind of contract the people have with it. As with many other points, I don't see how that's relevant.

Frankly, many gamers actually care about the developers but don't extend this to their companies. I can sympathize with a programmer who works on "Mutant Space Zombies 11" because he needs money to live. Still I don't know why should I feel the same sympathy or even understanding for his employer who pushes this crap to the market. And you just seem to use this poor developer and his employer in the same role alternately, depending of which currently fits you more.

[SalmonGod]

Frankly, many gamers actually care about the developers but don't extend this to their companies. I can sympathize with a programmer who works on "Mutant Space Zombies 11" because he needs money to live. Still I don't know why should I feel the same sympathy or even understanding for his employer who pushes this crap to the market. And you just seem to use this poor developer and his employer in the same role alternately, depending of which currently fits you more.

Thanks for saying this.  I was kind of kicking myself for not making the distinction earlier.  I don't blame developers for accepting money to work on crappy mainstream games.  I do reserve some hatred for the business executives making the big decisions to force rushed and uninspired crap to market out of a lack of knowledge or respect for their products. 

The best mainstream exception to this would be Valve, who is one of few major game companies who maintain ownership and operation by the founders of a studio who are passionate about what they do.  As a result, they make great decisions in both business and game production.  Though I have to admit, they've been losing some of their integrity over the last couple years, in my opinion.

Most of my favorite games are produced by small studios who suffer very little meddling from larger business concerns.  I think this usually results in greater polish.  Games put out by the larger corporate presences are usually made on unrealistic development schedules by abused and underpaid employees.

The larger scope games you mention tend to have very few parallels in the mainstream, and often do great with polish relative to scope.

A good example would be Stalker (which I spent over a year dumping most of my free time into) vs Fallout 3.  I beat Shadows of Chernobyl vanilla, and then moved on to Fallout 3.  Stalker had its quirks and plenty of bugs and such.  I fully expected Fallout 3 to destroy it in terms of quality, especially given how much a fan I was of the original games and the sheer difference in resources and credibility between this small Ukrainian studio and Bethesda.  I couldn't have been more wrong.  Fallout 3's setting (which is really really fucking important to the franchise) felt uninspired.  I got bored with it quickly.  The polish of the graphics meant nothing because they weren't showing me anything interesting.  The gameplay was less buggy, but really poorly designed.  It felt so damn clumsy to me.  I couldn't stand it.  I couldn't even get halfway through the game before I gave up and went back to Stalker to try some mods.

[Sordid]

My bad then. I attributed those words to someone else.

Fair enough.

No. Your argument was ridiculous because it was absurdly out of topic.

You're attributed those words to somebody else as well. Desdichado was the one who brought up the communism thing.

You didn't ask about the cause.

Because I know it.

No, they don't. You can find a lot titles which were poorly ported (Invisible War), unfinished (KOTOR 2) was really bugged prior to launch (Fallout: New Vegas, Empire: Total War) or were just plain terrible (Daikatana). The mainstream games have their advantages over indie titles, but polish isn't one of them.

Of course you can find examples from anywhere on the spectrum, but in my experience mainstream games are, on average, better polished than indie games. See previous post for the qualifier to that, ie. this only applies to proper, 'big' games. Smaller, less complex games are much easier to make.

Frankly, many gamers actually care about the developers but don't extend this to their companies. I can sympathize with a programmer who works on "Mutant Space Zombies 11" because he needs money to live. Still I don't know why should I feel the same sympathy or even understanding for his employer who pushes this crap to the market. And you just seem to use this poor developer and his employer in the same role alternately, depending of which currently fits you more.

That's because there is none, as far as I can tell, at least in terms of motivation. Yes, the programmer works on it for the money, but why do you think the company is making it? For the money. People need money, but companies do too.

[Gantolandon]

You're attributed those words to somebody else as well. Desdichado was the one who brought up the communism thing.

Everything you said is made null by your false insistence that "loving craftsmanship == communism" when in fact the real communist economy caused notoriously shoddy products.

That's what he said. You reacted as if he dressed up like Stalin and tried to force you to sing "Communist International". Communism had practically died  more than twenty years ago, you don't have to fight it every time it's mentioned.

Of course you can find examples from anywhere on the spectrum, but in my experience mainstream games are, on average, better polished than indie games. See previous post for the qualifier to that, ie. this only applies to proper, 'big' games.

I can't discuss with this because I don't even know what do you consider a "proper, big game". Frankly, many mainstream games are pretty simple when you look beyond their graphics and voice acting. Many of them are actually scriptfests and the gameplay is linear and simplistic. "Mount and Blade" which you brought as an example of a "big" indie game is much more complicated than many of the mainstream titles I know.

That's because there is none, as far as I can tell, at least in terms of motivation. Yes, the programmer works on it for the money, but why do you think the company is making it? For the money. People need money, but companies do too.

There are plenty.

First, the programmer doesn't decide what game is he going to make. The company management does.

Second, a lot of the problems inside the game development industry actually come from shoddy practices of the companies and their management. The games could be less buggy, for example - as SalmonGod mentioned, a lot of them is the result of forcing unrealistic deadlines and forcing developers to work overtime to meet them. I would add constantly changing requirements to the list. Overblown marketing is also a huge issue, especially in cases where the game is advertised as something entirely else to get more customers (Spore). Not to mention DLC being made before the game even hits the market.

What would you think about an employee who uses most of his work time to browse Facebook and chatting with other people in the break room? Or the one who reports doing more overtime than he actually made? Would you be OK with that, especially if you were the one paying for their "work"? Well, they both seek to increase their profit.

[Flying Carcass]

Rather than join in the discussion on what motivates developers/people/nations, I'm gonna' type my thoughts in regards to the OP's points.

The OP's points:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

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.

1. Instead of the word "limited", I would describe many video game stories as "focused". Video games are an interactive medium and many gamers prefer to spend their game time engaging in game play rather than have unnecessary nuances of a situation explained to them, lest a player get bored. A storyline isn't constrained by the difficulty of writing or implementing that story in a game setting, but rather by the necessity of keeping the story concise so as not to overload the player with exposition. A good game story is one that provides only what is needed to understand the action and introduce the conflict without bogging the player down with fluff.

Rainbow Six: New Vegas is a fun game about a special ops team battling Mexican terrorists and mercenaries that have taken over some Vegas casinos. Why are the terrorists there? That question is answered quickly towards the end of the game. The player's motivation? The player is a special forces guy! Is any more exposition needed? No. Terrorists bad; Rainbow Team good; now where's the next objective?
Would Rainbow Six: New Vegas have been improved with intensive character development... maybe a little brooding or flashbacks of the player character's life? No; the player just wants to shoot virtual terrorists.

But what about RPGs? RPGs thrive on building plot! First thing to note in my response is that good RPGs focus on immersing a player in the game's setting and the plot is a necessary component of that immersion.
There are two types of RPG plots; plots where the players have some control over the direction it takes (Dragon Age Origins and Mass Effect come to mind) and plots where the player watches a long epic story unfold (like in Final Fantasy games). In the former, plot is not only needed for immersion, but to help players make informed decisions that affect game play. In the latter, good RPGs tell a compelling plot and do so concisely without ruining the flow of the game. Bad RPGs dwell on brooding n' stuff.


Speaking of concise, gonna' try to cut down on the words, 'cause I'm getting sleepy...

2. It isn't a matter of intelligence; some players just aren't experienced with games, don't have the muscle memory for games, or don't have quick reaction times. I remember once playing Halo: Reach with my father and having to patiently explain the button mapping on the controller which had become second nature to me over years of playing FPSes while he struggled to move and look at the same time. While things like tutorial levels/"the easy first level" and in-game tips may seem patronizing to experienced gamers, they are needed to help newbies get their feet wet and enjoy the game.
Of course, difficulty settings should be able to be adjusted so the user can set an appropriate difficulty for his or her abilities.

3. Nothing wrong with appealing to male gamers with eye candy.   

4. Common elements become common because people enjoy them. Also, when it comes to features a game better be able to match its competitor's features, otherwise folks will choose to buy the competitor's product.

5. Consumers want more of what they enjoyed in the original in the sequel and complain when a sequel deviates too far from the original. When a game is very popular it is only natural for a producer to want to capitalize on that popularity.

6. It isn't so much graphics as it is presentation (which includes textures, shading, sound, music, user interface, ect.).
-------------------------------

Lastly, I recall reading somewhere in the thread someone mentioning "Rosebud" in the context of the search for money leading to misery. Citizen Kane was not a story of a man's desire to acquire more money (all the money Kane could ever want was given to him at the beginning of the movie), but rather a story of a man desperately seeking affection, but whose insecurity drove those close to him away. Money was not his motivation, rather affection was and his desperate desire drove him to ruin.


--------------------------------
Edit:
Yo, check this out!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBb9wFP7uZM&feature=topvideos

[Garden Gnome]

There's a difference between need and want. These companies aren't satisfied with a steady positive revenue stream capable of handling costs, emergency funds, and future projects. Instead they continue to make more money every year at any cost; Whether it's the employees or the quality of the product that suffers. All that matters is that they make more money than last year. The only thing they "need" money for at this point is to please shareholders, assuming there a public company. This is not "need" this is "want".

[Sordid]

You reacted as if he dressed up like Stalin and tried to force you to sing "Communist International". Communism had practically died  more than twenty years ago, you don't have to fight it every time it's mentioned.

I don't, and I didn't. All I did was say that I have no need of being lectured about the effects of Communism since I've had the opportunity to see what it'd done to my country.
You really do seem to have a serious problem remembering who said what, btw.

I can't discuss with this because I don't even know what do you consider a "proper, big game". Frankly, many mainstream games are pretty simple when you look beyond their graphics and voice acting. Many of them are actually scriptfests and the gameplay is linear and simplistic. "Mount and Blade" which you brought as an example of a "big" indie game is much more complicated than many of the mainstream titles I know.

What I mean by a proper big game is a game with production values on par with those of the mainstream. Making a 2D platformer or a top-down, 2D RPG, for example, is super easy. Something like GTA or Assassin's Creed, with big, open 3D environments and lots of characters... not so much.
I don't think being a 'script fest' is necessarily a bad thing, depends on the genre of the game. M&B in particular is way overdesigned, IMO. When you turn on debugging info, you see that there are tons of stuff going on in the background that don't really impact anything and didn't need to be there. And it also suffers from a serious focus issue. But that's a discussion for another topic, my point is that it's a 'big game' made by an indie company, and boy does it show! It's been, what, three years and one updated re-release since the game supposedly went 'final', and it's still bugged to all hell. That's what I mean when I say that indie games lack polish.

First, the programmer doesn't decide what game is he going to make. The company management does.

From what I've heard, development teams actually discuss what their next project is going to be. If we're talking about the balance between being creative and just doing it for the money, working in a company that just dictates to you what you're going to do without taking any of your input would definitely qualify as the latter. And in a way it is a choice. Nobody's forcing the programmer to remain in such a company.

Second, a lot of the problems inside the game development industry actually come from shoddy practices of the companies and their management. The games could be less buggy, for example - as SalmonGod mentioned, a lot of them is the result of forcing unrealistic deadlines and forcing developers to work overtime to meet them. I would add constantly changing requirements to the list. Overblown marketing is also a huge issue, especially in cases where the game is advertised as something entirely else to get more customers (Spore). Not to mention DLC being made before the game even hits the market.

Yep, those are all serious problems. I don't really see what these have to do with the distinction between company and developer in terms of their motivations and the distinction between artist and employee.

What would you think about an employee who uses most of his work time to browse Facebook and chatting with other people in the break room? Or the one who reports doing more overtime than he actually made? Would you be OK with that, especially if you were the one paying for their "work"? Well, they both seek to increase their profit.

I don't think violating the company's by-laws and getting sacked is a terribly brilliant way of making more money.

[SalmonGod]

M&B in particular is way overdesigned, IMO. When you turn on debugging info, you see that there are tons of stuff going on in the background that don't really impact anything and didn't need to be there. And it also suffers from a serious focus issue. But that's a discussion for another topic, my point is that it's a 'big game' made by an indie company, and boy does it show! It's been, what, three years and one updated re-release since the game supposedly went 'final', and it's still bugged to all hell. That's what I mean when I say that indie games lack polish.

I'm not really sure what you mean by this.  I don't encounter any bugs when I play, and certainly no game breakers.  I think I've had one CTD.  The game in general has a certain raw feel as compared to big budget titles, but this doesn't bother me at all.  The polish is in other places, as in all that 'unnecessary' background stuff that makes for a functioning world.  That's really the whole draw of the game for me.  I love to play through an epic story, but it's also great just to be a character in a world.  All that superfluous background stuff is what makes that style of non-story-focused gameplay possible, and the depth of it is something I consider polish... a sort of polish that commercial titles very rarely have. 

You mentioned GTA.  There's one.  Though the range of activity available to your character outside of the story gets pretty monotonous.  Assassin's Creed gives a great superficial impression of open-world gameplay, but as soon as you deviate from the story, you realize there's very little to do.  Both games revolve around static NPCs or objects as launching points for neatly itemized gameplay features.

Then we have indie games like Stalker or M&B where behavior of NPCs is completely dynamic, to the point that with enough time in-game different factions of NPCs can have completely migrated their operations to different parts of the map, and almost all of the canon characters can and will die off.

[Sordid]

If you want to see just how many bugs M&B has, check the bugtracker: http://bugs.taleworlds.com/bugs.aspx Use your TW forum login. And don't even get me started on the interface, what utter imbecile thought it would be a good idea to force the player to go through the party screen and the dialog screen to get to a companion's inventory? That's what I mean by polish, or in this case lack thereof. Having to access companions' inventory and character screens via dialog, the broken pathfinding, the fact that your troops are set on 'charge' at the start of battle and push on ahead of you and cause your horse to rear every single time, the fact that when you and one of your troops try to occupy the same spot the troop automatically wins and pushes you off the ladder or wall, the horrible inventory screen with humongous item icons, the missing 'loot all' button forcing you to click every single item you want to take, the obscure keyboard shortcuts, etc. Every single thing in the game is just a little more annoying than it needs to be.

You do have a point about the dynamic nature of the game, but I'm still not convinced every single thing in it is necessary. Like the dynamic economy. The idea is that prices are determined by supply and demand, but it never really seems to work properly, very often I see a town loaded with a particular trade item but the price still set high or vice versa. Maybe there is some logic to it, but after years and years of playing the game I haven't found it. The whole point of putting patterns and rules into a game is to enable the player to learn them and take advantage of them. If your patterns and rules are so incomprehensible that they seem completely random, you might as well make them completely random in the first place.

[SalmonGod]

I think that the items you see offered by merchants aren't completely representative of the stocks or production potential of that item for that city.  I've got in the habit of keeping a list of the lowest buying and highest selling prices I see for each commodity and which town it's in.  They remain pretty consistent.  It might be that on the odd occassion when you see a town with a lot of something but it's still overpriced, that a caravan had just dropped that stuff off for them or something and it's not a normal thing for them to have.

I haven't done real !science! on these issues though.  These are just guesses based on my observations.  As for the interface, none of those complaints really stood out to me before.  I noticed them... but not on a level that screamed at me or got in the way of fun.

[Sordid]

I guess you have better tolerance for this kind of stuff. The interface issues are a huge problem for me, especially because there's no good reason for them to exist. They could all be fixed very easily and some of them actually have been by mods.

As for the economy, I honestly don't understand it. You're right, the prices are generally quite stable. But then what's the dynamic economy for? If you're going to get stable prices anyway, you might as well just make them fixed with a bit of random variation. Overall I think the developers have focused way too much attention on things that don't matter and neglected those that actually impact gameplay.

[Frumple]

I don't normally indulge in short posts completely unrelated to the thread's topic, but I have to say I'm vaguely amazed to read that on Dwarf Fortress's forum

Usually folks disliking that sort of thing keep quite the distance from DF, heh.