There were 35. Thirty-five craftables in the entire game, including ammunition. Even WoW adds more than that in every patch (I'll conceed they don't really change the mechanics of the game with each tech level that way XCOM does the first time a new alien AOE missile lands in the middle of your carefully positioned kill squad of snipers, but that's because all the concepts: crowd control, healing, tanking are all there from the beginning rather than introduced over a few waves of play)
I wouldn't call having a large setbacks complexity. XCOM can certainly wipe your raid if you aren't careful, but that's not really any different than a wipe in any modern game. And a quick res and return to the instance is probably a bigger setback than the time it takes you to load a saved game.
Now on the topic of linearity and randomness, I'm more sympathatic. I don't normally group those under complexity, but if you want to do that, I will gladly agree that modern games tend to be too rigidly predictable. Small differences in what parts of a crashed ship in XCOM are damaged snowball into very different tactical situations and that's definitely something that I haven't seen recently in any of the MMOs I've been trying (although as I write this, I may be succumbing to nostalgia too)
I wish I was as optimistic as you but as long as there are suckers that will gladly pay for subpar/simple games, I don't see that happening. Society as a whole is being dumbed down and I don't see that trend reversing.
"Censorship is never over for those who have experienced it. It is a brand on the imagination that affects the individual who has suffered it, forever." - Noam Chomsky
Most game today play like a movie to achieve that crisp storyline everyone crave about while before we had random generated dungeon such as the xcom/diablo series.
Take for example game like torchlight and dragon age wich are both the same game except one of them use a random generated dungeon versus a rigid storyline ... DA is a much more popular series simply because it has more bling while torchlight's replayability is infinite yet get a lot less play time.
For my part i cannot wait for diablo 3 and torchlight 2 to gain (hopefully) that feeling again ....if not then i'll go back and wait for darkfall 2.0 in 2013.
There were 35. Thirty-five craftables in the entire game, including ammunition. Even WoW adds more than that in every patch (I'll conceed they don't really change the mechanics of the game with each tech level that way XCOM does the first time a new alien AOE missile lands in the middle of your carefully positioned kill squad of snipers, but that's because all the concepts: crowd control, healing, tanking are all there from the beginning rather than introduced over a few waves of play)
I wouldn't call having a large setbacks complexity. XCOM can certainly wipe your raid if you aren't careful, but that's not really any different than a wipe in any modern game. And a quick res and return to the instance is probably a bigger setback than the time it takes you to load a saved game.
Now on the topic of linearity and randomness, I'm more sympathatic. I don't normally group those under complexity, but if you want to do that, I will gladly agree that modern games tend to be too rigidly predictable. Small differences in what parts of a crashed ship in XCOM are damaged snowball into very different tactical situations and that's definitely something that I haven't seen recently in any of the MMOs I've been trying (although as I write this, I may be succumbing to nostalgia too)
Er, X-COM is a single player game. I was comparing it to other single player games, not against MMOs.
But if you want to compare oldschool MMOs on the other hand...
Ultima Online has far more craftables than WoW, not only in number, but in type of craftable items. Crafting was also actually useful in UO and something other players would actually buy too... to which a workable player economy adds another level of complexity to MMOs that is severely lacking in today's MMOs. In Most new MMOs, anyone and everyone can and usually does pick up crafting as a 'secondary' skill available to all characters.
In oldschool MMOs like UO and SWG, crafting was a completely separate and fleshed out path of gameplay that took dedication, knowledge, and planning to do well in. Not to mention that to actually sell your wares actually meant interacting with other players, either in direct sales, or by advertising your store and maintaining it's stock. The closest thing in a modern MMO is Eve, and even that game is older than WoW is.
So well yeah, there's how crafting is "dumbed down" in today's MMOs. It's largely irrelevant and the player economy is extremely superficial at best, which basically amounts to a (nearly) universal auction house where players put little thought past basically just trying to undercut each other over the same items.
Sorry to say but Idiocracy is here to stay, and still growing.
I'd disagree and wonder if that's just hubris talking.
Isn't it interesting that one of the things people complain about in WoW today is raiding growing harder again? The pendulum swings back, the way it always has.
the part where you say people complaining "in wow..."
I don't see it, sorry. Everyone that I know in real life that plays video games is satisfied with the current landscape of games... except me it seems. Gamers that crave complexity and challenge are a dying breed methinks! I pray that I am wrong and you are right though OP!
Enter a whole new realm of challenge and adventure.
If MMORPGs wanted things to be more complex they would have done it by now. MMORPGs have the capability to hook players into the game with the simple low-level play and then reel them in to higher levels, where they get this crazy UI build and keybindings to buttons for every finger they have.
Ultima Online has far more craftables than WoW, not only in number, but in type of craftable items.
UO has roughly 1200 patterns. WoW has roughly 2500. Both games have been continuously adding patterns and UO is twice as old. Granted, UO has a larger range of random properties available, although if you are going to count that, you should probably count all the permutations of art and stats now possible with reforging in WoW.
I'm not going to deny that having played both games, UO's felt more meaningful than WoW, but that's more a product of sandbox vs themepark rather than actual complexity. I'd rate both games behind EvE in terms of the overall complexity of crafting and the dynamics of the player economy.
As for games released in this past year, what do you think of Minecraft? Sure it's not really an MMO, but what do you think of it in terms of complexity? Fewer actual craftables, but the power to landscape entire continents and lego-brick together almost any structure you can imagine (even construct working computers out of blocks in the game if you are sufficiently motivated). Would you consider this a step forward or a step backwards for the industry in general?
Complexity has not changed. User interfaces have become a lot better and today's games are much more focused and streamlined. Game developers are much better at weighing wheter a feature really contributes to the game or not - wheter they should spend manhours to it or not.
One prediction that Goldman Sachs made was that fewer games will be published but they will have more polish. Players are clearly tired of unfinished games.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been-Wayne Gretzky
All video games (MMORPGs included), in recent history, have shown a strong trend towards simplification. Whether it be called streamlining, dumbing down, accessibility, whatever you call it, it just means that games have been getting more simple.
And the reason for this, IMO, is very cut and dry. Growth. -SNIP-
They are trying to promote growth yes BUT as part of this they trying to expand into the large console market that is available to get more overall market share.
Market dominance of consoles is actually the main reason all games are becoming more simplified and I suspect the trend of simplification will actually continue as developers & publishers try to expand their reach ever further into the mobile, tablet & handheld markets where games are made to be even more simple.
Over and above that there are several studies out now that are saying the average attention span of each successive generation of people is definitely getting shorter. Short attention spans mean you need ot hook your audience quickly, how do you do that in gaming ? simplify your mechanics and concentrate on making fun gameplay or enticing story. This is why the length of single player games are getting shorter & shorter and publishers are less and less worried about having good replayability.
Obviously with technology trends its quite hard to predict beyond 3-5 years but I am going to say that in the next 3-5 years games continue to get simpler and that over simplification of games is going to get a lot worse before it gets any better.
I played games like Master of Magic, Master of Orion 1 & 2, X-com UFO,TFTD, and APOC, Baldur's Gate, etc.
Most modern games are still pretty shallow compared to any of these.
Civ4 I felt had more depth than any of those strategy titles (though I never tried X-Com). And that's fairly recent. This coming from a huge MOO2 fan (also Alpha Centauri.) Civ4 was the TBS to finally beat out the old stuff and be worth playing over and over again.
Baldur's Gate's combat certainly wasn't deep. It was straight up AD&D 2nd combat; a system intentionally kept shallow to streamline tabletop play. Honestly it was one of the least compelling combat systems a videogame RPG has ever used, and in both games kept me from enjoying the fantastic writing and characters.
As for the OP's claims, games are going to get more complex under the hood of course. But the surface-layer complexity is going to be about the same it's always been.
And surface-layer complexity will still be bad. What games need to be is deep, not complex.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Comments
There were 35. Thirty-five craftables in the entire game, including ammunition. Even WoW adds more than that in every patch (I'll conceed they don't really change the mechanics of the game with each tech level that way XCOM does the first time a new alien AOE missile lands in the middle of your carefully positioned kill squad of snipers, but that's because all the concepts: crowd control, healing, tanking are all there from the beginning rather than introduced over a few waves of play)
I wouldn't call having a large setbacks complexity. XCOM can certainly wipe your raid if you aren't careful, but that's not really any different than a wipe in any modern game. And a quick res and return to the instance is probably a bigger setback than the time it takes you to load a saved game.
Now on the topic of linearity and randomness, I'm more sympathatic. I don't normally group those under complexity, but if you want to do that, I will gladly agree that modern games tend to be too rigidly predictable. Small differences in what parts of a crashed ship in XCOM are damaged snowball into very different tactical situations and that's definitely something that I haven't seen recently in any of the MMOs I've been trying (although as I write this, I may be succumbing to nostalgia too)
I wish I was as optimistic as you but as long as there are suckers that will gladly pay for subpar/simple games, I don't see that happening. Society as a whole is being dumbed down and I don't see that trend reversing.
"Censorship is never over for those who have experienced it. It is a brand on the imagination that affects the individual who has suffered it, forever." - Noam Chomsky
Most game today play like a movie to achieve that crisp storyline everyone crave about while before we had random generated dungeon such as the xcom/diablo series.
Take for example game like torchlight and dragon age wich are both the same game except one of them use a random generated dungeon versus a rigid storyline ... DA is a much more popular series simply because it has more bling while torchlight's replayability is infinite yet get a lot less play time.
For my part i cannot wait for diablo 3 and torchlight 2 to gain (hopefully) that feeling again ....if not then i'll go back and wait for darkfall 2.0 in 2013.
Er, X-COM is a single player game. I was comparing it to other single player games, not against MMOs.
But if you want to compare oldschool MMOs on the other hand...
Ultima Online has far more craftables than WoW, not only in number, but in type of craftable items. Crafting was also actually useful in UO and something other players would actually buy too... to which a workable player economy adds another level of complexity to MMOs that is severely lacking in today's MMOs. In Most new MMOs, anyone and everyone can and usually does pick up crafting as a 'secondary' skill available to all characters.
In oldschool MMOs like UO and SWG, crafting was a completely separate and fleshed out path of gameplay that took dedication, knowledge, and planning to do well in. Not to mention that to actually sell your wares actually meant interacting with other players, either in direct sales, or by advertising your store and maintaining it's stock. The closest thing in a modern MMO is Eve, and even that game is older than WoW is.
So well yeah, there's how crafting is "dumbed down" in today's MMOs. It's largely irrelevant and the player economy is extremely superficial at best, which basically amounts to a (nearly) universal auction house where players put little thought past basically just trying to undercut each other over the same items.
the part where you say people complaining "in wow..."
I don't see it, sorry. Everyone that I know in real life that plays video games is satisfied with the current landscape of games... except me it seems. Gamers that crave complexity and challenge are a dying breed methinks! I pray that I am wrong and you are right though OP!
Enter a whole new realm of challenge and adventure.
If MMORPGs wanted things to be more complex they would have done it by now. MMORPGs have the capability to hook players into the game with the simple low-level play and then reel them in to higher levels, where they get this crazy UI build and keybindings to buttons for every finger they have.
UO has roughly 1200 patterns. WoW has roughly 2500. Both games have been continuously adding patterns and UO is twice as old. Granted, UO has a larger range of random properties available, although if you are going to count that, you should probably count all the permutations of art and stats now possible with reforging in WoW.
I'm not going to deny that having played both games, UO's felt more meaningful than WoW, but that's more a product of sandbox vs themepark rather than actual complexity. I'd rate both games behind EvE in terms of the overall complexity of crafting and the dynamics of the player economy.
As for games released in this past year, what do you think of Minecraft? Sure it's not really an MMO, but what do you think of it in terms of complexity? Fewer actual craftables, but the power to landscape entire continents and lego-brick together almost any structure you can imagine (even construct working computers out of blocks in the game if you are sufficiently motivated). Would you consider this a step forward or a step backwards for the industry in general?
All trends are a parabola, and by GOD, I hope you are correct sir.
Writer / Musician / Game Designer
Now Playing: Skyrim, Wurm Online, Tropico 4
Waiting On: GW2, TSW, Archeage, The Rapture
Complexity has not changed. User interfaces have become a lot better and today's games are much more focused and streamlined. Game developers are much better at weighing wheter a feature really contributes to the game or not - wheter they should spend manhours to it or not.
One prediction that Goldman Sachs made was that fewer games will be published but they will have more polish. Players are clearly tired of unfinished games.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
I can see:
Some really simple linear loot grinding type game being a big hit on mobile phones
Sony releasing more PS3 MMOs
Microsoft doing something about their silly rules and getting a mmo on x-box
And PCs returning to being the domain of "specialist gamers"
They are trying to promote growth yes BUT as part of this they trying to expand into the large console market that is available to get more overall market share.
Market dominance of consoles is actually the main reason all games are becoming more simplified and I suspect the trend of simplification will actually continue as developers & publishers try to expand their reach ever further into the mobile, tablet & handheld markets where games are made to be even more simple.
Over and above that there are several studies out now that are saying the average attention span of each successive generation of people is definitely getting shorter. Short attention spans mean you need ot hook your audience quickly, how do you do that in gaming ? simplify your mechanics and concentrate on making fun gameplay or enticing story. This is why the length of single player games are getting shorter & shorter and publishers are less and less worried about having good replayability.
Obviously with technology trends its quite hard to predict beyond 3-5 years but I am going to say that in the next 3-5 years games continue to get simpler and that over simplification of games is going to get a lot worse before it gets any better.
Civ4 I felt had more depth than any of those strategy titles (though I never tried X-Com). And that's fairly recent. This coming from a huge MOO2 fan (also Alpha Centauri.) Civ4 was the TBS to finally beat out the old stuff and be worth playing over and over again.
Baldur's Gate's combat certainly wasn't deep. It was straight up AD&D 2nd combat; a system intentionally kept shallow to streamline tabletop play. Honestly it was one of the least compelling combat systems a videogame RPG has ever used, and in both games kept me from enjoying the fantastic writing and characters.
As for the OP's claims, games are going to get more complex under the hood of course. But the surface-layer complexity is going to be about the same it's always been.
And surface-layer complexity will still be bad. What games need to be is deep, not complex.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver