Bethseda I can't really comment on, since I never played any of the Elder Scroll series, but if I compare their latest Fallout 3 to the previous Fallouts, guess what, not even close again. Games now are just simplified rehash of previous releases for the most part.
I mostly agree with your comments on the two other companies.
However, I would have to say I see this comment as a leap...
Compared to which previous fallout?
Tactics or fallout 2...
And regardless Fallout 2 in comparison to Fallout 1 was not even close.
In fact I personally really liked Fallout 3 and I didn't expect to.
I'll agree in general with MMO's the term simplification comes to mind...
I have to wonder every time I see a new game that offers even less.. of everything. Than previous games did. Is it because they can't even hire people anymore capable of doing anything.. or is it simply investors don't want to take any chances. Their thought process being that rehasing anything that seemed to work is the way to go... while not realizing this is what also leads to failure.
I think EQ1 and EQ2 would be the perfect example.. not really to crap on SOE.. its just a good example.
EQ1 had so much more of EVERYthing compared to EQ2.. and when asked about it.. the answer always came back to "too complex".
So with all the advanced tools etc that weren't even dreamed of when games like UO and EQ1 were developed... its now to complex to do the things they did back then.
That's my major problem with the industry atm... Their entire idea of "core design" is so messed up I have to believe the people "working" shouldn't be.
I've noticed this over the past year, ALL games are getting worse. Not just the MMO's but console games are getting pretty pathetic too. I've wondered why this is and this is the only thing I have come up with. The developers just don't care about making good games anymore. Everything is turning into money. "Let's make a game that brings in a lot of money!" What happened to "Let's make a cool game" Been going through MMO's for 6-7 years now and they are getting worse. I'm upset and I'm sad. Why can't they go back to making good games which will just bring them money instead of focusing completely on money. What happened to make all this happen? Agree/Disagree? Why or why not?
I wouldnt say its the developers that dont care, more like the investors who are a bit more skeptical of the market. Most investors want to see a return of X on their investment, and when they look at some designs they will compare it to whats currently out and the state of those games. Add to that the ramblings of some people in the gaming industry claiming that it will take almost a billion dollars to make a game that competes with WoW and you have more investors shying away.
You also have to take into consideration that the bigger gaming gets, the more tastes developers have to deal with. Back in the day when gaming was not so mainstream it could be compared to a Coke vs Pepsi taste test. Now that it has become a major entertainment industry its no longer just Coke vs Pepsi; Its Coke vs Pepsi vs Coffee vs Beer vs [Insert many other beverage options here].
The industry is trying to appeal to the masses now so developers can either pick from a specific crowd (say the Pepsi drinkers) or the crowd that appeals to the majority (water)
There are 3 types of people in the world. 1.) Those who make things happen 2.) Those who watch things happen 3.) And those who wonder "What the %#*& just happened?!"
Games becoming a mainstream is a big factor, game developers now have to appeal to a bigger audience of people which is a bummer. Every corporation has its profit as their number one priority so instead of making a game that really appeals to a hardcore stream of people they rather blend in as much crap to draw in more people and in the end you end up with a game that is everything but nothing at the same time plus games cost alot more to produce now then before, that causes game developers to rush their games.
I mostly agree with your comments on the two other companies.
However, I would have to say I see this comment as a leap...
Compared to which previous fallout?
Tactics or fallout 2...
And regardless Fallout 2 in comparison to Fallout 1 was not even close.
In fact I personally really liked Fallout 3 and I didn't expect to.
Compared to F1 and F2 of course, tactics was just spinoff. Speaking of which, we can see how robust the original Fallout was, when it was possible to make a successful game based on 1 aspect of it, the combat system alone. I played through F1 and F2 at least 4-5 times each and the experience was always different. Will I play through F3 again? I very much doubt it.
Subscribtions: EVE, SWTOR WOW, WAR, DDO, VG, AOC, COV, FFXI, GW, RFO, Aion +plenty of F2P, betas, trials
Female Dwarf player: WOW, VG, WAR, DDO . Due to the recent economic crisis and spending cuts the light at the end of the tunnel was turned off. Sincerely, God.
I've been sifting through this thread and it's quite clear that most of the people on this site have very little knowledge of the game development industry. If you think that every single developer ever drafted into the business is to blame for drab games made for the sole purpose of money, you are sadly deluded. I would honestly love to see some of you walk up to a professional game developer and tell some of this slander to their face. I bet you anything, that they would have soemthing to say about it.
Games have become chopped up for the same reason hollywood continues to make the same medicore movie time and time again. One wrong move can cause hell for a company and next thing you know, their bankrupt. Most MMOs cost several million dollars to make, in some cases, it's a lot more. When your spending that much money, you have a time limit. You CAN'T keep spending tens of thousands of dollars a month, acting like you have all the time in the world. The game needs to be done so the company doesn't go over budget.
Yes, it is money that drives them because they need to make money to survive as a company. It's a business and there's nothing you can do to change that. There's no simple answer to making a better game. As much as all of you like to think your so much smarter than the millions of professionals that work 80-hour weeks, your not. I'd like to see you work under the conditions they do. Grant it, they make good money, but for good reason. Game development is not easy, let alone managing the funding and project managment. On top of all this, the economy is tumbling. I can't even begin to explain all the complications of running a professional studio.
SIDE NOTE:
I saw someone post about how it's "too easy" to get into developing MMOs. They "only" have to go through four years of college to get a job. What an ignorant statement. It's not like they're immediately thrown into a managment position when they graduate. There are people who dream of being able to work on MMOs. And they are dedicated enough to spend at least 80,000 dollars, work two full time jobs (one your not paid for) AND try to balance a social life. Because they love making games. Those are the kind of people I WANT working on games. Do you think they should draft you in? Someone who isn't even dedicated enough to move out of their parents house? Try thinking for a change.
Its the price of success. Once WoW showed the world how much money could be made, the shareholders took over. I doubt developers have much control or say over the final product anymore. See, it used to be developers developed, publishers would buy and publish. Now publishers hire/buy developers.
This is one of the most valid statements I've seen in this thread so far.
I agree the quality of games have been droping for some time now. I have three verry good reason why this has been happing.
1 The cost of gaming has sky rocketed way up. In the old day it would take like four guys to make a game ten if you where making a rpg or a pc game. Now you have to have a huge teams of diffrent sizes working on diffrent parts of your game to make your game function.
2 Marketing has been telling developers and the true creative mines of gaming what to do. This means oyu have the bean counter who only care about money not caring about making a good game only a game they think will sale to a demigraphic they want to sale to. Once the game industry stops fallowign the orders of the Marketing department you could see some realy great games come out.
3 Us the consumer. With games costing now $50 -$60. We demand games that don't make us think we want a game thats like Halo, GTA, EQ2, WOW, Final Fantasy, and Mario. No one wants to try something new. Why do you think most of the game that are coming out are remakes or Sequals to games that came out 20 years ago. Becouse we the consumer suck. If people would try a demo or use Game Fly and try and maybe even buy new and diffrent games with new ideas then maybe game companys will make new and cool games.
BTW there are companys and developers who care. They mostly work for BioWare and Valve.
If god loves the fools ,and god loves every one, dose that mean we are all fools.
I've been sifting through this thread and it's quite clear that most of the people on this site have very little knowledge of the game development industry. If you think that every single developer ever drafted into the business is to blame for drab games made for the sole purpose of money, you are sadly deluded. I would honestly love to see some of you walk up to a professional game developer and tell some of this slander to their face. I bet you anything, that they would have soemthing to say about it. Games have become chopped up for the same reason hollywood continues to make the same medicore movie time and time again. One wrong move can cause hell for a company and next thing you know, their bankrupt. Most MMOs cost several million dollars to make, in some cases, it's a lot more. When your spending that much money, you have a time limit. You CAN'T keep spending tens of thousands of dollars a month, acting like you have all the time in the world. The game needs to be done so the company doesn't go over budget. Yes, it is money that drives them because they need to make money to survive as a company. It's a business and there's nothing you can do to change that. There's no simple answer to making a better game. As much as all of you like to think your so much smarter than the millions of professionals that work 80-hour weeks, your not. I'd like to see you work under the conditions they do. Grant it, they make good money, but for good reason. Game development is not easy, let alone managing the funding and project managment. On top of all this, the economy is tumbling. I can't even begin to explain all the complications of running a professional studio.
SIDE NOTE: I saw someone post about how it's "too easy" to get into developing MMOs. They "only" have to go through four years of college to get a job. What an ignorant statement. It's not like they're immediately thrown into a managment position when they graduate. There are people who dream of being able to work on MMOs. And they are dedicated enough to spend at least 80,000 dollars, work two full time jobs (one your not paid for) AND try to balance a social life. Because they love making games. Those are the kind of people I WANT working on games. Do you think they should draft you in? Someone who isn't even dedicated enough to move out of their parents house? Try thinking for a change.
So basically the true cause is capitalism.
Also, growing complexity of graphics, physics, sound effects, etc, the whole audiovisual side of things means developers have to spend so much more time puting every piece of content to the game than previously. meaning more man hours, mening further specialization of work between larger teams, junior code monkeys typing in pices of code while vaguely aware of the overall idea or purpose, etc. The price of content and features goes up and up, overall quality of code suffers, bug appears, additional resources are needed for extra testing etc etc. So they produce feature-lacking contentless generic crap and market the graphics/IP, etc. Because all that requires suddenly ammounts in multiples of what it took to produce the same amount of content ie in the 2D era. They need massive amounts of money and those will not come for projects aimed for niche crowds. Ah well where am I going with this rant... it's after 2AM I should go to sleep.
Personally I would rather have game where a house does not crumble according to physical laws for every single log, but has 10 insances of such, because it was too complex and expensive to code, but rather a one with a populated city and 2D explosion animations.
When will we see return of features and content in generous portions? Dunno, maybe when we get an universal engine technology with library of infinite object customizations, synthetic voice technology and they only need to be put together, so once again the hard work is just putting that content ogether, not creating it.
EDIT: mokona summed it up nicely in a consistent way
EDIT2: I'm putting a lot f hope for SC2 and the map/modding community, hopefully the possibillites will be great, just look what all people did with W3
Subscribtions: EVE, SWTOR WOW, WAR, DDO, VG, AOC, COV, FFXI, GW, RFO, Aion +plenty of F2P, betas, trials
Female Dwarf player: WOW, VG, WAR, DDO . Due to the recent economic crisis and spending cuts the light at the end of the tunnel was turned off. Sincerely, God.
Are you guys saying that making a innovative game now is more costly and risky than it was back then for Verant to make EQ or for Valve Half-Life? I doubt it.
EQ is a pardigmatic example. It was doing VERY well. They release expansion 1. It is a well thought expansion and sells. Game is healthy. Then they release expansion 2. Very good one too. After a while, expansion number 3. Same thing.
But then.. something happens.
They release expansion 4. It starts to destroy the game. Expansion 5. It's crap.
Why? They are nerfing the game to catter to more people.
Why? because now suddently it's so much more costly to do them?
NO.
They (SOE in this case but could be anyone) suddenly want MORE MONEY.
When I was a kid, I used to dream about making videogames. Brought up on a diet of Horace Goes Skiing, Fantasy World Dizzy, Sonic the Hedgehog and Doom probably does that to a person. In the end, I even picked my degree course around moving into the games industry (programming, systems design and engineering, comms theory and so on). I used to play a lot of games and felt I could contribute something to the industry. Then, towards the end of my degree the market crashed. Developers were going out of business and publishers were cutting back. In the end, I put my dreams to one side and ended up working for a telco as a systems architect type person.
The funny thing is, nowadays I know a fair few game developers. They work on things from small handheld type games through to complicated racers. Some work on design while others are coders. Strangely though they both have two things in common - all of them play videogames passionately, and none of them develop MMOs. It's clear from conversations I have with them that these are a keen and enthusiastic bunch of people, who want to deliver a great game at the end of it. They're also no short of ideas, being part of various offline RPG scenes, so I'm not sure where the developer disconnect has appeared. It's certainly not something I've seen from my own experience. They definitely do care about the quality of games they produce, mostly because they're games players themselves.
As to why the MMO genre is having problems? Well, I think that's down to a couple of issues. I think that some are right in that WoW has proved to be a milestone for the industry in that it showed just how much money you can make if you get the formula right. Before WoW, you had specialist MMO developers who focused on producing the games that traditional online players wanted. It's why people often cite games such as Lineage 2, Everquest 2 and even the original form of Star Wars: Galaxies as the style of game that your veteran (some might say hardcore, but that's probably an incorrect label) MMO player wanted to experience. Then Blizzard showed the games buying public what was possible if you took the MMO concept, stripped it till it was almost bare, then iterated and polished what was left until you had a game that was very good at what it does, only it doesn't actually do very much once you scratch the surface. But this simple formula gained rapid mass-market appeal with the games playing public and introduced many of them to MMO gaming.
Strangely though, for what is seen to be an entry-level MMO that players would experience then graduate from, there's not much around that they're graduating to. And as we've seen though from this year's releases, getting the formula right is incredibly hard for a developer to do. Publishers have seen what's possible and developers with little or no experience of the idiosyncracies of the genre are trying to slot together a Blizzard-beating experience within their standard two to three year development window. But, as we've seen, it usually ends in tears with Tabula Rasa being switched off, Age of Conan cuting back and even Warhammer not meeting their numbers. The thing is, we don't want another thin and crispy MMO experience - we want to move on to deep pan, stuffed crust, the works. We want something that's altogether deeper and richer an experience. But with publishers demanding games that are shaped a particular way and developers taking the money as a way of staying in business in these difficult economic times, I'm not sure if we're likely to see it any time soon.
Player of games, smither of words, former of opinions, and masher of keys. WildStar Columnist Currently playing: WildStar, Guild Wars 2, EVE Online, Vain Glory.
The nostalgia curse strikes!!! There are always loads of crap on the market as well as plenty of gems. Do you know how much pure swill was shoveled out on the NES, SNES and GEN and 32-bit systems? Same with the PC. LOADS of crap.
There are gems in every time frame. Lets be realistic here. Its much harder to make an orignal game now than it was when EVERYTHING was original. Originality is overrated anyway. HL2 is just as good as the original. Newer FPSs are superior in bascially every way to the oldies. The God of War series is superior to most action games of the 90s and eariler. Sports games are far deeper now. The old sports games were fun, but so are todays. I'm having more fun with Fallout 3 then I did with the originals. Gears of War is insane. COD4 is fantastic. Stalker is a great indy title. ICO, Shadow of the Collossus, the Total War series. There's still plenty of great stuff.
I was playing Yars Revenge the day it came out when I was a youngin, so those were my wonder years;) I wont' for a second say its a BETTER game than something today. I appreciate older games. I just don't let nostolgia cloud what they really were.
It's not that they stopped caring, it's just that a lot of small developers responsible for the classics of old were bought up by the bigger publishers like EA and merged in to them, and as a result they lost their once innovative freedoms and some great names in the gaming industry disappeared. Well you know the rest. These big publishers will rarely take a risk on something and recycle the some things due to the cost of development.
The small developer have still broken through with a some great games over the last 5 years. It's not all bad. Go check out Kings Bounty made by a small Russian developer. Best little single player RPG to come along in years with a fresh approach.
Really, because when I read this sniffling nostalgia and the reactions to times lost I get the notion of 30-something people with the brains and education of pre-schoolers.
Yes, that's a bit harsh and it's also a bit of an exaggeration but please open up your eyes and see the world as it is.
The products that are being produced are being produced because they are marketable, there is a demand for the product. It is the common law of all commerse that in order to be as economically viable as possible you cater to your customer while minimizing your own spending thus maximizing your own profits.
In other words, in any business, be that computer games or anything else, the consumer is supplied with the products that the consumer is consuming. So if the consumer base is buying computer games of a certain kind, more of those kind of computer games will be created and released for purchase.
There are too many publishers and developers on the computer gaming market today to place blame on their shoulders. The reason, indeed the only reason, for the games being put up for sale today lies with the consumer. You cannot with any credibility demand that companies release games for potentially non-existing markets, risking the jobs of an unknown number of individuals, when they instead could create a game that consumers are demanding and buying.
You vote with your vallet. You shape the market with your purchase.
I have been reading the thread and would like to suggest that along with all the many plausible and intelligent points that have been brought out in it that a major cause could be simply time....
I know as I have grown older and my responsibilities have morphed in all directions and my experience with life have ever grown that I find myself passing judgments on games in ways that in my youth...(I'm hardly old but I was a ATARI 2600, 5200,7800 baby. Then of course moving into Nintendo, Sega and the rest as they say is history.) I would never have done. I had games I liked and games I didn't but always I looked to the Horizon with.....longing and hope.
I have a nine year old son and he plays the 360, PS3 and our Computer all the time. (leaving the Wii alone mostly I know, I know I'm raising a hard core gamer it seems) I see myself reflected in his joy, anger and general excitement about games. Still when I compare myself today to him........I must admit I have become jaded......I don't blame anyone really. There has been crap for years......and moving forward I'm sure we will have more and more. (On a side note the crap for the Wii is mind numbingly awesome in its variety and scope! Good stuff too but the shovel-ware is plentiful.)
Games look more awesome than they ever have. Still I find myself playing and buying them....... but not being moved by them, inspired to play and play.I just wonder were the passion went.....and if that more than anything is the real issue? I will give you an example.....My son yesterday spent 5 hours playing Halo 3 & 2 Switching between them and while he was doing that he had drug the portable computer over by his chair and was looking up maps and videos of the game too! I still play and enjoy but somewhere along the line I lost that....
So I suppose the point I'm making in this diatribe is I don't doubt if developers care anymore. I wonder if I do? LOL.
This is what happens when *Pop* hits a genre of art.. Music was once great, now it's mostly about money. Movies, same deal. Poetry slipped under the radar and Died instead
And this list just goes on into infinity. Simply put, as soon as you put money into art, it's ruined. Heck hospitals with private finance? Good idea.....
Art should be an expression in aestethicly pleasing ways to convey a message that cannot be truly understood in any other medium.
"I want money" isn't art.
So all there's left to do for those of us who still give a rats hump about the pleasures of consuming art for the sake of the message, it's all about wading through alot of brown to find the shiny gold.
Played so far: 9Dragons, AO, AC, AC2, CoX, DAoC, DF, DnL, DR, DDO, Ent, EvE, EQ, EQ2, FoMK, FFO, Fury, GW, HG:L, HZ, L1, L2, M59, MU, NC1, NC2, PS, PT, R:O, RF:O, RYL, Ryzom, SL, SB, SW:G, TR, TCoS, MX:O, UO, VG, WAR, WoW... It all sucked.
I've noticed this over the past year, ALL games are getting worse. Not just the MMO's but console games are getting pretty pathetic too. I've wondered why this is and this is the only thing I have come up with. The developers just don't care about making good games anymore. Everything is turning into money. "Let's make a game that brings in a lot of money!" What happened to "Let's make a cool game" Been going through MMO's for 6-7 years now and they are getting worse. I'm upset and I'm sad. Why can't they go back to making good games which will just bring them money instead of focusing completely on money. What happened to make all this happen? Agree/Disagree? Why or why not?
Agreed.
I think it is no brainer especially when one looks at recent crop of MMO's - POTBS, AoC, WAR, TR, and VG a bit before. All were overhyped, all underdelivered (albeit at different levels) and all are continued to be peddled under compunded justification of - it will get better given more time / what do you expect for $15 per month.
In my opinion we are on a downward spiral and we still didn't hit the bottom. Sad thing is that this isn't limited just to MMOs but it is present in a wider world. Cash for quality has been replaced with cash for hype that replaces quality. In other words it is all form without content.
Its the price of success. Once WoW showed the world how much money could be made, the shareholders took over. I doubt developers have much control or say over the final product anymore. See, it used to be developers developed, publishers would buy and publish. Now publishers hire/buy developers.
This is one of the most valid statements I've seen in this thread so far.
Ty.
You see it all the time in movies/tv. a great movie or show comes out. Next 2 to 5 years industry vomits out bad clones till someone else scores a hit doing something different and it starts all over again.
This is a perfect example of capitalism running amuck. It's not enough that companies make a profit, they demand huge profits. Free Market my ass. Free to screw over the cosumer, you betcha. These pukes want their multi-million dollar bonuses and they'll do what ever it takes to get them. They do that by cutting corners, reducing quality and as a result they can reduce manpower. They call it efficiency, I call it greed. Did anyone ever notice that most if not all sins can be broken down into greed in some form or another? Even if you're not religious, you can't view greed as a good thing. It taints everything it touches.
With PvE raiding, it has never been a question of being "good enough". I play games to have fun, not to be a simpering toady sitting through hour after hour of mind numbing boredom and fawning over a guild master in the hopes that he will condescend to reward me with shiny bits of loot. But in games where those people get the highest progression, anyone who doesn't do that will just be a moving target for them and I'll be damned if I'm going to pay money for the privilege. - Neanderthal
The nostalgia curse strikes!!! There are always loads of crap on the market as well as plenty of gems. Do you know how much pure swill was shoveled out on the NES, SNES and GEN and 32-bit systems? Same with the PC. LOADS of crap.
Yup,those rose tinted goggles need to have a wipe over.
Who had a C64 or Spectrum back in the 80s? or an Amiga in 1990? there was a whole tonne of crap on those systems too. If anything,at least for the most part we have proper quality control now. The SNES was a parent to some really atrocious bullsh*t games in its time as well.
Theres stil plenty of decent stuff out right now,but theres also a lot of copycat and sequal stuff out most of which is garbage. For all your Fallout 3s theres 5 Hellgate londons. We're seeing a lot of innovation with stuff like the Wii and DS-though the Wii seems to be more of a family console-but still games like the sports titles and the FPS games are great. Puzzle quest is a very unusual title which is also a great game with a decent modding scene for the PC.
You should have a look into the indie gaming world if you want some really great games,theres a huge amount of gems out there you probably never knew exsisted. Frozzd,depths of peril,trials 2,cave story,karoshi 2.0,aveyond 2,Mr.Robot just to name a few.
MMOs on the other hand I completely agree. What a load of crap weve seen over the last few years,most of which seems to have been rushed out in the wake of WOW by companies desperate to cash in. Most of them think that to achieve this you must create an almost carbon copy of wow which of course will never work and has even less chance if you shove it out at 70% completion.
The nostalgia curse strikes!!! There are always loads of crap on the market as well as plenty of gems. Do you know how much pure swill was shoveled out on the NES, SNES and GEN and 32-bit systems? Same with the PC. LOADS of crap.
Yup,those rose tinted goggles need to have a wipe over.
Who had a C64 or Spectrum back in the 80s? or an Amiga in 1990? there was a whole tonne of crap on those systems too. If anything,at least for the most part we have proper quality control now. The SNES was a parent to some really atrocious bullsh*t games in its time as well.
Theres stil plenty of decent stuff out right now,but theres also a lot of copycat and sequal stuff out most of which is garbage. For all your Fallout 3s theres 5 Hellgate londons. We're seeing a lot of innovation with stuff like the Wii and DS-though the Wii seems to be more of a family console-but still games like the sports titles and the FPS games are great. Puzzle quest is a very unusual title which is also a great game with a decent modding scene for the PC.
You should have a look into the indie gaming world if you want some really great games,theres a huge amount of gems out there you probably never knew exsisted. Frozzd,depths of peril,trials 2,cave story,karoshi 2.0,aveyond 2,Mr.Robot just to name a few.
MMOs on the other hand I completely agree. What a load of crap weve seen over the last few years,most of which seems to have been rushed out in the wake of WOW by companies desperate to cash in. Most of them think that to achieve this you must create an almost carbon copy of wow which of course will never work and has even less chance if you shove it out at 70% completion.
I agree that there has always been a lot of poor games being released but the problem I have it that the games these days that are decent do not seem to have any longevity. In the past you could buy a game and it would last you for months and by the time you were done with it there was always another to take it's place. These days you buy a very high quality game and you finish it 2 days and there is nothing to play.
Devs are not making enough games with replayability built into game design anymore. They are making too many games that provide entertainment for a short timespan, some of these games are very good but once you have played through them that is it, they are becoming more like movies. In the last few years have I found myself with nothing to play, this has never happend before in the 20+ years of my gaming life. It's not that I am getting too old either as occaisonally I still get a game that has been built to the old standards of longetivity, it's just that there are not enough of them and this leaves large gaps with no game for me to play.
This forces me to play more of the dross games that otherwise I would not have bothered with and it makes the overall quality appear to have gone down.
Maybe I should buy a console as that seems to be where the action is.
You know, I find this thread slightly strange. When I was a kid, I used to dream about making videogames. Brought up on a diet of Horace Goes Skiing, Fantasy World Dizzy, Sonic the Hedgehog and Doom probably does that to a person. In the end, I even picked my degree course around moving into the games industry (progra........
Yes I totally agree with this, that's a very accurate description of some of the problems.
The nostalgia curse strikes!!! There are always loads of crap on the market as well as plenty of gems. Do you know how much pure swill was shoveled out on the NES, SNES and GEN and 32-bit systems? Same with the PC. LOADS of crap.
Yup,those rose tinted goggles need to have a wipe over.
Who had a C64 or Spectrum back in the 80s? or an Amiga in 1990? there was a whole tonne of crap on those systems too. If anything,at least for the most part we have proper quality control now. The SNES was a parent to some really atrocious bullsh*t games in its time as well.
Theres stil plenty of decent stuff out right now,but theres also a lot of copycat and sequal stuff out most of which is garbage. For all your Fallout 3s theres 5 Hellgate londons. We're seeing a lot of innovation with stuff like the Wii and DS-though the Wii seems to be more of a family console-but still games like the sports titles and the FPS games are great. Puzzle quest is a very unusual title which is also a great game with a decent modding scene for the PC.
You should have a look into the indie gaming world if you want some really great games,theres a huge amount of gems out there you probably never knew exsisted. Frozzd,depths of peril,trials 2,cave story,karoshi 2.0,aveyond 2,Mr.Robot just to name a few.
MMOs on the other hand I completely agree. What a load of crap weve seen over the last few years,most of which seems to have been rushed out in the wake of WOW by companies desperate to cash in. Most of them think that to achieve this you must create an almost carbon copy of wow which of course will never work and has even less chance if you shove it out at 70% completion.
I agree that there has always been a lot of poor games being released but the problem I have it that the games these days that are decent do not seem to have any longevity. In the past you could buy a game and it would last you for months and by the time you were done with it there was always another to take it's place. These days you buy a very high quality game and you finish it 2 days and there is nothing to play.
Devs are not making enough games with replayability built into game design anymore. They are making too many games that provide entertainment for a short timespan, some of these games are very good but once you have played through them that is it, they are becoming more like movies. In the last few years have I found myself with nothing to play, this has never happend before in the 20+ years of my gaming life. It's not that I am getting too old either as occaisonally I still get a game that has been built to the old standards of longetivity, it's just that there are not enough of them and this leaves large gaps with no game for me to play.
This forces me to play more of the dross games that otherwise I would not have bothered with and it makes the overall quality appear to have gone down.
Maybe I should buy a console as that seems to be where the action is.
That's my theory anyway.
Actually, you were probably younger with more time on your hands, so you replayed games more often. Also as a kid, you're more easily entertained. Your critieria for good gaming has probably gone up over the years. As you grow older you have less patience for not playing something truly enjoyable. You probably played a lot of crap back then, but it all gets mixed up as happy memories. Also, NO internet to influence you. Thats my better theory=)
You know, I find this thread slightly strange. When I was a kid, I used to dream about making videogames. Brought up on a diet of Horace Goes Skiing, Fantasy World Dizzy, Sonic the Hedgehog and Doom probably does that to a person. In the end, I even picked my degree course around moving into the games industry (progra........
Yes I totally agree with this, that's a very accurate description of some of the problems.
Thanks, although maybe I should learn to cut to the chase instead of waffling on like some grandad in a rocking chair...
Player of games, smither of words, former of opinions, and masher of keys. WildStar Columnist Currently playing: WildStar, Guild Wars 2, EVE Online, Vain Glory.
I'm going to have to go ahead and disagree with my own post now. It totally slipped my mind that the developers are being run by shareholders.
But games are going down the drain lately. For example which I didn't want to put in, the new Prince of Persia game, have any of you played that? It's terrible absolutely nothing good about it. I returned it 3 days later after beating it.
Maybe we are expecting more from games, but that doesn't change the fact that games are getting worse. At least people used to FINISH the game before releasing it, I haven't seen that happen in so so long even on console games now.
Yeah there are still good games coming out, but they are getting rarer and rarer than ever. Sorry but halo is crap, there is absolutely nothing appealing about a 12 year old screaming and blowing out my speakers because of that (Yes that happened).
It's been a year now that I've had my 360 and I've kept these few games: Left 4 Dead, Forza 2, Mirror's Edge, GRID, Fable 2, CoD WaW, Rainbow 6 vegas 2, and Rock Band. I've gone through many more than that but only kept those few.
My PC game list has increased drastically over the past year and a half, Most of them I will still play occasionally, the ones I don't I'm not even sure where the box is.
So I'm going to say this as my last statement thinking things through after reading what all of you have said.
I think games are becoming to easy, to repetative and making the older gamers less pleased. I have yet to see anyone from the age of 1-16 complain about any games out yet. so maybe we just out grew it all.
Comments
I mostly agree with your comments on the two other companies.
However, I would have to say I see this comment as a leap...
Compared to which previous fallout?
Tactics or fallout 2...
And regardless Fallout 2 in comparison to Fallout 1 was not even close.
In fact I personally really liked Fallout 3 and I didn't expect to.
I'll agree in general with MMO's the term simplification comes to mind...
I have to wonder every time I see a new game that offers even less.. of everything. Than previous games did. Is it because they can't even hire people anymore capable of doing anything.. or is it simply investors don't want to take any chances. Their thought process being that rehasing anything that seemed to work is the way to go... while not realizing this is what also leads to failure.
I think EQ1 and EQ2 would be the perfect example.. not really to crap on SOE.. its just a good example.
EQ1 had so much more of EVERYthing compared to EQ2.. and when asked about it.. the answer always came back to "too complex".
So with all the advanced tools etc that weren't even dreamed of when games like UO and EQ1 were developed... its now to complex to do the things they did back then.
That's my major problem with the industry atm... Their entire idea of "core design" is so messed up I have to believe the people "working" shouldn't be.
I wouldnt say its the developers that dont care, more like the investors who are a bit more skeptical of the market. Most investors want to see a return of X on their investment, and when they look at some designs they will compare it to whats currently out and the state of those games. Add to that the ramblings of some people in the gaming industry claiming that it will take almost a billion dollars to make a game that competes with WoW and you have more investors shying away.
You also have to take into consideration that the bigger gaming gets, the more tastes developers have to deal with. Back in the day when gaming was not so mainstream it could be compared to a Coke vs Pepsi taste test. Now that it has become a major entertainment industry its no longer just Coke vs Pepsi; Its Coke vs Pepsi vs Coffee vs Beer vs [Insert many other beverage options here].
The industry is trying to appeal to the masses now so developers can either pick from a specific crowd (say the Pepsi drinkers) or the crowd that appeals to the majority (water)
There are 3 types of people in the world.
1.) Those who make things happen
2.) Those who watch things happen
3.) And those who wonder "What the %#*& just happened?!"
Games becoming a mainstream is a big factor, game developers now have to appeal to a bigger audience of people which is a bummer. Every corporation has its profit as their number one priority so instead of making a game that really appeals to a hardcore stream of people they rather blend in as much crap to draw in more people and in the end you end up with a game that is everything but nothing at the same time plus games cost alot more to produce now then before, that causes game developers to rush their games.
I mostly agree with your comments on the two other companies.
However, I would have to say I see this comment as a leap...
Compared to which previous fallout?
Tactics or fallout 2...
And regardless Fallout 2 in comparison to Fallout 1 was not even close.
In fact I personally really liked Fallout 3 and I didn't expect to.
Compared to F1 and F2 of course, tactics was just spinoff. Speaking of which, we can see how robust the original Fallout was, when it was possible to make a successful game based on 1 aspect of it, the combat system alone. I played through F1 and F2 at least 4-5 times each and the experience was always different. Will I play through F3 again? I very much doubt it.
Subscribtions: EVE, SWTOR WOW, WAR, DDO, VG, AOC, COV, FFXI, GW, RFO, Aion
+plenty of F2P, betas, trials
Female Dwarf player: WOW, VG, WAR, DDO
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Due to the recent economic crisis and spending cuts the light at the end of the tunnel was turned off. Sincerely, God.
I've been sifting through this thread and it's quite clear that most of the people on this site have very little knowledge of the game development industry. If you think that every single developer ever drafted into the business is to blame for drab games made for the sole purpose of money, you are sadly deluded. I would honestly love to see some of you walk up to a professional game developer and tell some of this slander to their face. I bet you anything, that they would have soemthing to say about it.
Games have become chopped up for the same reason hollywood continues to make the same medicore movie time and time again. One wrong move can cause hell for a company and next thing you know, their bankrupt. Most MMOs cost several million dollars to make, in some cases, it's a lot more. When your spending that much money, you have a time limit. You CAN'T keep spending tens of thousands of dollars a month, acting like you have all the time in the world. The game needs to be done so the company doesn't go over budget.
Yes, it is money that drives them because they need to make money to survive as a company. It's a business and there's nothing you can do to change that. There's no simple answer to making a better game. As much as all of you like to think your so much smarter than the millions of professionals that work 80-hour weeks, your not. I'd like to see you work under the conditions they do. Grant it, they make good money, but for good reason. Game development is not easy, let alone managing the funding and project managment. On top of all this, the economy is tumbling. I can't even begin to explain all the complications of running a professional studio.
SIDE NOTE:
I saw someone post about how it's "too easy" to get into developing MMOs. They "only" have to go through four years of college to get a job. What an ignorant statement. It's not like they're immediately thrown into a managment position when they graduate. There are people who dream of being able to work on MMOs. And they are dedicated enough to spend at least 80,000 dollars, work two full time jobs (one your not paid for) AND try to balance a social life. Because they love making games. Those are the kind of people I WANT working on games. Do you think they should draft you in? Someone who isn't even dedicated enough to move out of their parents house? Try thinking for a change.
This is one of the most valid statements I've seen in this thread so far.
I agree the quality of games have been droping for some time now. I have three verry good reason why this has been happing.
1 The cost of gaming has sky rocketed way up. In the old day it would take like four guys to make a game ten if you where making a rpg or a pc game. Now you have to have a huge teams of diffrent sizes working on diffrent parts of your game to make your game function.
2 Marketing has been telling developers and the true creative mines of gaming what to do. This means oyu have the bean counter who only care about money not caring about making a good game only a game they think will sale to a demigraphic they want to sale to. Once the game industry stops fallowign the orders of the Marketing department you could see some realy great games come out.
3 Us the consumer. With games costing now $50 -$60. We demand games that don't make us think we want a game thats like Halo, GTA, EQ2, WOW, Final Fantasy, and Mario. No one wants to try something new. Why do you think most of the game that are coming out are remakes or Sequals to games that came out 20 years ago. Becouse we the consumer suck. If people would try a demo or use Game Fly and try and maybe even buy new and diffrent games with new ideas then maybe game companys will make new and cool games.
BTW there are companys and developers who care. They mostly work for BioWare and Valve.
If god loves the fools ,and god loves every one, dose that mean we are all fools.
So basically the true cause is capitalism.
Also, growing complexity of graphics, physics, sound effects, etc, the whole audiovisual side of things means developers have to spend so much more time puting every piece of content to the game than previously. meaning more man hours, mening further specialization of work between larger teams, junior code monkeys typing in pices of code while vaguely aware of the overall idea or purpose, etc. The price of content and features goes up and up, overall quality of code suffers, bug appears, additional resources are needed for extra testing etc etc. So they produce feature-lacking contentless generic crap and market the graphics/IP, etc. Because all that requires suddenly ammounts in multiples of what it took to produce the same amount of content ie in the 2D era. They need massive amounts of money and those will not come for projects aimed for niche crowds. Ah well where am I going with this rant... it's after 2AM I should go to sleep.
Personally I would rather have game where a house does not crumble according to physical laws for every single log, but has 10 insances of such, because it was too complex and expensive to code, but rather a one with a populated city and 2D explosion animations.
When will we see return of features and content in generous portions? Dunno, maybe when we get an universal engine technology with library of infinite object customizations, synthetic voice technology and they only need to be put together, so once again the hard work is just putting that content ogether, not creating it.
EDIT: mokona summed it up nicely in a consistent way
EDIT2: I'm putting a lot f hope for SC2 and the map/modding community, hopefully the possibillites will be great, just look what all people did with W3
Subscribtions: EVE, SWTOR WOW, WAR, DDO, VG, AOC, COV, FFXI, GW, RFO, Aion
+plenty of F2P, betas, trials
Female Dwarf player: WOW, VG, WAR, DDO
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Due to the recent economic crisis and spending cuts the light at the end of the tunnel was turned off. Sincerely, God.
Are you guys saying that making a innovative game now is more costly and risky than it was back then for Verant to make EQ or for Valve Half-Life? I doubt it.
EQ is a pardigmatic example. It was doing VERY well. They release expansion 1. It is a well thought expansion and sells. Game is healthy. Then they release expansion 2. Very good one too. After a while, expansion number 3. Same thing.
But then.. something happens.
They release expansion 4. It starts to destroy the game. Expansion 5. It's crap.
Why? They are nerfing the game to catter to more people.
Why? because now suddently it's so much more costly to do them?
NO.
They (SOE in this case but could be anyone) suddenly want MORE MONEY.
And this is why games SUCK now.
You know, I find this thread slightly strange.
When I was a kid, I used to dream about making videogames. Brought up on a diet of Horace Goes Skiing, Fantasy World Dizzy, Sonic the Hedgehog and Doom probably does that to a person. In the end, I even picked my degree course around moving into the games industry (programming, systems design and engineering, comms theory and so on). I used to play a lot of games and felt I could contribute something to the industry. Then, towards the end of my degree the market crashed. Developers were going out of business and publishers were cutting back. In the end, I put my dreams to one side and ended up working for a telco as a systems architect type person.
The funny thing is, nowadays I know a fair few game developers. They work on things from small handheld type games through to complicated racers. Some work on design while others are coders. Strangely though they both have two things in common - all of them play videogames passionately, and none of them develop MMOs. It's clear from conversations I have with them that these are a keen and enthusiastic bunch of people, who want to deliver a great game at the end of it. They're also no short of ideas, being part of various offline RPG scenes, so I'm not sure where the developer disconnect has appeared. It's certainly not something I've seen from my own experience. They definitely do care about the quality of games they produce, mostly because they're games players themselves.
As to why the MMO genre is having problems? Well, I think that's down to a couple of issues. I think that some are right in that WoW has proved to be a milestone for the industry in that it showed just how much money you can make if you get the formula right. Before WoW, you had specialist MMO developers who focused on producing the games that traditional online players wanted. It's why people often cite games such as Lineage 2, Everquest 2 and even the original form of Star Wars: Galaxies as the style of game that your veteran (some might say hardcore, but that's probably an incorrect label) MMO player wanted to experience. Then Blizzard showed the games buying public what was possible if you took the MMO concept, stripped it till it was almost bare, then iterated and polished what was left until you had a game that was very good at what it does, only it doesn't actually do very much once you scratch the surface. But this simple formula gained rapid mass-market appeal with the games playing public and introduced many of them to MMO gaming.
Strangely though, for what is seen to be an entry-level MMO that players would experience then graduate from, there's not much around that they're graduating to. And as we've seen though from this year's releases, getting the formula right is incredibly hard for a developer to do. Publishers have seen what's possible and developers with little or no experience of the idiosyncracies of the genre are trying to slot together a Blizzard-beating experience within their standard two to three year development window. But, as we've seen, it usually ends in tears with Tabula Rasa being switched off, Age of Conan cuting back and even Warhammer not meeting their numbers. The thing is, we don't want another thin and crispy MMO experience - we want to move on to deep pan, stuffed crust, the works. We want something that's altogether deeper and richer an experience. But with publishers demanding games that are shaped a particular way and developers taking the money as a way of staying in business in these difficult economic times, I'm not sure if we're likely to see it any time soon.
Currently playing: WildStar, Guild Wars 2, EVE Online, Vain Glory.
The nostalgia curse strikes!!! There are always loads of crap on the market as well as plenty of gems. Do you know how much pure swill was shoveled out on the NES, SNES and GEN and 32-bit systems? Same with the PC. LOADS of crap.
There are gems in every time frame. Lets be realistic here. Its much harder to make an orignal game now than it was when EVERYTHING was original. Originality is overrated anyway. HL2 is just as good as the original. Newer FPSs are superior in bascially every way to the oldies. The God of War series is superior to most action games of the 90s and eariler. Sports games are far deeper now. The old sports games were fun, but so are todays. I'm having more fun with Fallout 3 then I did with the originals. Gears of War is insane. COD4 is fantastic. Stalker is a great indy title. ICO, Shadow of the Collossus, the Total War series. There's still plenty of great stuff.
I was playing Yars Revenge the day it came out when I was a youngin, so those were my wonder years;) I wont' for a second say its a BETTER game than something today. I appreciate older games. I just don't let nostolgia cloud what they really were.
This sums up the entire thread, and dare I say the entire philosophy of what the MMO industry has become.
It's not that they stopped caring, it's just that a lot of small developers responsible for the classics of old were bought up by the bigger publishers like EA and merged in to them, and as a result they lost their once innovative freedoms and some great names in the gaming industry disappeared. Well you know the rest. These big publishers will rarely take a risk on something and recycle the some things due to the cost of development.
The small developer have still broken through with a some great games over the last 5 years. It's not all bad. Go check out Kings Bounty made by a small Russian developer. Best little single player RPG to come along in years with a fresh approach.
How old are you people?
Really, because when I read this sniffling nostalgia and the reactions to times lost I get the notion of 30-something people with the brains and education of pre-schoolers.
Yes, that's a bit harsh and it's also a bit of an exaggeration but please open up your eyes and see the world as it is.
The products that are being produced are being produced because they are marketable, there is a demand for the product. It is the common law of all commerse that in order to be as economically viable as possible you cater to your customer while minimizing your own spending thus maximizing your own profits.
In other words, in any business, be that computer games or anything else, the consumer is supplied with the products that the consumer is consuming. So if the consumer base is buying computer games of a certain kind, more of those kind of computer games will be created and released for purchase.
There are too many publishers and developers on the computer gaming market today to place blame on their shoulders. The reason, indeed the only reason, for the games being put up for sale today lies with the consumer. You cannot with any credibility demand that companies release games for potentially non-existing markets, risking the jobs of an unknown number of individuals, when they instead could create a game that consumers are demanding and buying.
You vote with your vallet. You shape the market with your purchase.
I have been reading the thread and would like to suggest that along with all the many plausible and intelligent points that have been brought out in it that a major cause could be simply time....
I know as I have grown older and my responsibilities have morphed in all directions and my experience with life have ever grown that I find myself passing judgments on games in ways that in my youth...(I'm hardly old but I was a ATARI 2600, 5200,7800 baby.
Then of course moving into Nintendo, Sega and the rest as they say is history.) I would never have done. I had games I liked and games I didn't but always I looked to the Horizon with.....longing and hope.
I have a nine year old son and he plays the 360, PS3 and our Computer all the time. (leaving the Wii alone mostly
I know, I know I'm raising a hard core gamer it seems) I see myself reflected in his joy, anger and general excitement about games. Still when I compare myself today to him........I must admit I have become jaded......I don't blame anyone really. There has been crap for years......and moving forward I'm sure we will have more and more. (On a side note the crap for the Wii is mind numbingly awesome in its variety and scope! Good stuff too but the shovel-ware is plentiful.)
Games look more awesome than they ever have. Still I find myself playing and buying them....... but not being moved by them, inspired to play and play.I just wonder were the passion went.....and if that more than anything is the real issue? I will give you an example.....My son yesterday spent 5 hours playing Halo 3 & 2 Switching between them and while he was doing that he had drug the portable computer over by his chair and was looking up maps and videos of the game too! I still play and enjoy but somewhere along the line I lost that....
So I suppose the point I'm making in this diatribe is I don't doubt if developers care anymore. I wonder if I do? LOL.
I hope everyone has a great day!
This is what happens when *Pop* hits a genre of art..
Music was once great, now it's mostly about money.
Movies, same deal.
Poetry slipped under the radar and Died instead
And this list just goes on into infinity.
Simply put, as soon as you put money into art, it's ruined.
Heck hospitals with private finance? Good idea.....
Art should be an expression in aestethicly pleasing ways to convey a message that cannot be truly understood in any other medium.
"I want money" isn't art.
So all there's left to do for those of us who still give a rats hump about the pleasures of consuming art for the sake of the message, it's all about wading through alot of brown to find the shiny gold.
Played so far: 9Dragons, AO, AC, AC2, CoX, DAoC, DF, DnL, DR, DDO, Ent, EvE, EQ, EQ2, FoMK, FFO, Fury, GW, HG:L, HZ, L1, L2, M59, MU, NC1, NC2, PS, PT, R:O, RF:O, RYL, Ryzom, SL, SB, SW:G, TR, TCoS, MX:O, UO, VG, WAR, WoW...
It all sucked.
Agreed.
I think it is no brainer especially when one looks at recent crop of MMO's - POTBS, AoC, WAR, TR, and VG a bit before. All were overhyped, all underdelivered (albeit at different levels) and all are continued to be peddled under compunded justification of - it will get better given more time / what do you expect for $15 per month.
In my opinion we are on a downward spiral and we still didn't hit the bottom. Sad thing is that this isn't limited just to MMOs but it is present in a wider world. Cash for quality has been replaced with cash for hype that replaces quality. In other words it is all form without content.
This is one of the most valid statements I've seen in this thread so far.
Ty.
You see it all the time in movies/tv. a great movie or show comes out. Next 2 to 5 years industry vomits out bad clones till someone else scores a hit doing something different and it starts all over again.
This is a perfect example of capitalism running amuck. It's not enough that companies make a profit, they demand huge profits. Free Market my ass. Free to screw over the cosumer, you betcha. These pukes want their multi-million dollar bonuses and they'll do what ever it takes to get them. They do that by cutting corners, reducing quality and as a result they can reduce manpower. They call it efficiency, I call it greed. Did anyone ever notice that most if not all sins can be broken down into greed in some form or another? Even if you're not religious, you can't view greed as a good thing. It taints everything it touches.
With PvE raiding, it has never been a question of being "good enough". I play games to have fun, not to be a simpering toady sitting through hour after hour of mind numbing boredom and fawning over a guild master in the hopes that he will condescend to reward me with shiny bits of loot. But in games where those people get the highest progression, anyone who doesn't do that will just be a moving target for them and I'll be damned if I'm going to pay money for the privilege. - Neanderthal
Yup,those rose tinted goggles need to have a wipe over.
Who had a C64 or Spectrum back in the 80s? or an Amiga in 1990? there was a whole tonne of crap on those systems too. If anything,at least for the most part we have proper quality control now. The SNES was a parent to some really atrocious bullsh*t games in its time as well.
Theres stil plenty of decent stuff out right now,but theres also a lot of copycat and sequal stuff out most of which is garbage. For all your Fallout 3s theres 5 Hellgate londons. We're seeing a lot of innovation with stuff like the Wii and DS-though the Wii seems to be more of a family console-but still games like the sports titles and the FPS games are great. Puzzle quest is a very unusual title which is also a great game with a decent modding scene for the PC.
You should have a look into the indie gaming world if you want some really great games,theres a huge amount of gems out there you probably never knew exsisted. Frozzd,depths of peril,trials 2,cave story,karoshi 2.0,aveyond 2,Mr.Robot just to name a few.
MMOs on the other hand I completely agree. What a load of crap weve seen over the last few years,most of which seems to have been rushed out in the wake of WOW by companies desperate to cash in. Most of them think that to achieve this you must create an almost carbon copy of wow which of course will never work and has even less chance if you shove it out at 70% completion.
Yup,those rose tinted goggles need to have a wipe over.
Who had a C64 or Spectrum back in the 80s? or an Amiga in 1990? there was a whole tonne of crap on those systems too. If anything,at least for the most part we have proper quality control now. The SNES was a parent to some really atrocious bullsh*t games in its time as well.
Theres stil plenty of decent stuff out right now,but theres also a lot of copycat and sequal stuff out most of which is garbage. For all your Fallout 3s theres 5 Hellgate londons. We're seeing a lot of innovation with stuff like the Wii and DS-though the Wii seems to be more of a family console-but still games like the sports titles and the FPS games are great. Puzzle quest is a very unusual title which is also a great game with a decent modding scene for the PC.
You should have a look into the indie gaming world if you want some really great games,theres a huge amount of gems out there you probably never knew exsisted. Frozzd,depths of peril,trials 2,cave story,karoshi 2.0,aveyond 2,Mr.Robot just to name a few.
MMOs on the other hand I completely agree. What a load of crap weve seen over the last few years,most of which seems to have been rushed out in the wake of WOW by companies desperate to cash in. Most of them think that to achieve this you must create an almost carbon copy of wow which of course will never work and has even less chance if you shove it out at 70% completion.
I agree that there has always been a lot of poor games being released but the problem I have it that the games these days that are decent do not seem to have any longevity. In the past you could buy a game and it would last you for months and by the time you were done with it there was always another to take it's place. These days you buy a very high quality game and you finish it 2 days and there is nothing to play.
Devs are not making enough games with replayability built into game design anymore. They are making too many games that provide entertainment for a short timespan, some of these games are very good but once you have played through them that is it, they are becoming more like movies. In the last few years have I found myself with nothing to play, this has never happend before in the 20+ years of my gaming life. It's not that I am getting too old either as occaisonally I still get a game that has been built to the old standards of longetivity, it's just that there are not enough of them and this leaves large gaps with no game for me to play.
This forces me to play more of the dross games that otherwise I would not have bothered with and it makes the overall quality appear to have gone down.
Maybe I should buy a console as that seems to be where the action is.
That's my theory anyway.
Yes I totally agree with this, that's a very accurate description of some of the problems.
Yup,those rose tinted goggles need to have a wipe over.
Who had a C64 or Spectrum back in the 80s? or an Amiga in 1990? there was a whole tonne of crap on those systems too. If anything,at least for the most part we have proper quality control now. The SNES was a parent to some really atrocious bullsh*t games in its time as well.
Theres stil plenty of decent stuff out right now,but theres also a lot of copycat and sequal stuff out most of which is garbage. For all your Fallout 3s theres 5 Hellgate londons. We're seeing a lot of innovation with stuff like the Wii and DS-though the Wii seems to be more of a family console-but still games like the sports titles and the FPS games are great. Puzzle quest is a very unusual title which is also a great game with a decent modding scene for the PC.
You should have a look into the indie gaming world if you want some really great games,theres a huge amount of gems out there you probably never knew exsisted. Frozzd,depths of peril,trials 2,cave story,karoshi 2.0,aveyond 2,Mr.Robot just to name a few.
MMOs on the other hand I completely agree. What a load of crap weve seen over the last few years,most of which seems to have been rushed out in the wake of WOW by companies desperate to cash in. Most of them think that to achieve this you must create an almost carbon copy of wow which of course will never work and has even less chance if you shove it out at 70% completion.
I agree that there has always been a lot of poor games being released but the problem I have it that the games these days that are decent do not seem to have any longevity. In the past you could buy a game and it would last you for months and by the time you were done with it there was always another to take it's place. These days you buy a very high quality game and you finish it 2 days and there is nothing to play.
Devs are not making enough games with replayability built into game design anymore. They are making too many games that provide entertainment for a short timespan, some of these games are very good but once you have played through them that is it, they are becoming more like movies. In the last few years have I found myself with nothing to play, this has never happend before in the 20+ years of my gaming life. It's not that I am getting too old either as occaisonally I still get a game that has been built to the old standards of longetivity, it's just that there are not enough of them and this leaves large gaps with no game for me to play.
This forces me to play more of the dross games that otherwise I would not have bothered with and it makes the overall quality appear to have gone down.
Maybe I should buy a console as that seems to be where the action is.
That's my theory anyway.
Actually, you were probably younger with more time on your hands, so you replayed games more often. Also as a kid, you're more easily entertained. Your critieria for good gaming has probably gone up over the years. As you grow older you have less patience for not playing something truly enjoyable. You probably played a lot of crap back then, but it all gets mixed up as happy memories. Also, NO internet to influence you. Thats my better theory=)
Yes I totally agree with this, that's a very accurate description of some of the problems.
Thanks, although maybe I should learn to cut to the chase instead of waffling on like some grandad in a rocking chair...
Currently playing: WildStar, Guild Wars 2, EVE Online, Vain Glory.
I'm going to have to go ahead and disagree with my own post now. It totally slipped my mind that the developers are being run by shareholders.
But games are going down the drain lately. For example which I didn't want to put in, the new Prince of Persia game, have any of you played that? It's terrible absolutely nothing good about it. I returned it 3 days later after beating it.
Maybe we are expecting more from games, but that doesn't change the fact that games are getting worse. At least people used to FINISH the game before releasing it, I haven't seen that happen in so so long even on console games now.
Yeah there are still good games coming out, but they are getting rarer and rarer than ever. Sorry but halo is crap, there is absolutely nothing appealing about a 12 year old screaming and blowing out my speakers because of that (Yes that happened).
It's been a year now that I've had my 360 and I've kept these few games: Left 4 Dead, Forza 2, Mirror's Edge, GRID, Fable 2, CoD WaW, Rainbow 6 vegas 2, and Rock Band. I've gone through many more than that but only kept those few.
My PC game list has increased drastically over the past year and a half, Most of them I will still play occasionally, the ones I don't I'm not even sure where the box is.
So I'm going to say this as my last statement thinking things through after reading what all of you have said.
I think games are becoming to easy, to repetative and making the older gamers less pleased. I have yet to see anyone from the age of 1-16 complain about any games out yet. so maybe we just out grew it all.