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Imagination has left the building
Malathoos
Member UncommonPosts: 199
What is going on with new games? Every game that comes out has less features and a mediocre story. I am not sure if development is being forced so quickly that games are skimping, but where is any innovation?
New games now have set rails and (at best) struggle to allow players to affect the world. Eso is on the right track and who knows Eq Next might have more, but games just don't have any choices.
Games used to have tons of skills and possibilities. I want skill lists, like UO, Marrowind, maybe even mabinogi. Game worlds such as Sword Art Online, Parallel universes. A mix of Scifi, Fantasy, Modern....I want a MMO like palladium's Rift or any other amazing book or comic series.
Is there any hope for the future?
Comments
At some point, someone will have the perfect combination of talent and $$$$....and it will happen. There will be a viable massive sandbox where roleplayers and general gamers alike can feel that thrill they once felt in their favorite titles. That day is not now, however. I suggest folks stick to RPGs until then and stop supporting the mediocrity that permeates the so called mmoRPG genre.
Game budgets have been consumed by graphics and art departments across the board. The best games innovation wise also tend to the be ones with the lowest graphics quality.
Player expectations have risen for the level of polish on each individual feature. It's a cycle that has been repeated over and over through the history of video games - each advance in art is accompanied by a drop in features. The first graphical games had far, far less variety/complexity than the text-based they were replacing, but they found an audience that was ok with that tradeoff.
You will also find threads decrying the "jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none" nature of MMOs with their sprawling basic features. Its always hard to judge how sincere any of the threads around here are, but if you take them at face value, then it would appear there is still a range of opinion on where the ideal balance is between quality (however subjective) and quantity.
I believe it is partly because of the business model and partly because of the customer being aimed at.
These businesses are not a group of people who played PnP and are trying to make a fun game for people to play. They are a business that is trying to figure out what will appeal to the most people to bring in the most money.
People apparently don't like to use their imagination in games.
People apparently don't like attachment to games.
People apparently don't like to interact much unless it's to use the LFG tool and have the solo focus on killing and looting in instances.
People don't like night and day mechanics because it's to boring to wait around.
People don't like racial/sex stats and stereotypes because they are not politically correct in the modern world.
People don't like dying, corpses, turning into ghosts and having to resurrect, losing experience, or losing items.
People don't have attachment to any type of setting. Most people liked Forgotten Realms a lot when I was growing up and around the time Everquest was made. Baldur's Gate used Forgotten Realms and had very similar abilities mechanics to Everquest. It was a great RPG and took a lot from the books of the time. I didn't even need much imagination to play a game like Everquest. I could just imagine I was Tanis half elven (Dragonlance), Drizzt, Elminster, or any number of characters I read about at the time. I don't believe many people have the same attachment to the settings now. There are so many and people rarely actually read books about them and the characters that live inside them. I believe this is also part of where the wasting time features come into play. I believe that a lot of features that are considered wasted time/space to some are actually important roleplaying tools that add a lot of life to the game. Otherwise it is just a hallow little place setup to fight a few creatures on a linear path.
One sentence....
These are businesses not passion felt game design,$$$ rules over everything else.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
I don't particularly care why .. as long as the game is fun to me.
There's no shortage of innovation and imagination, just look at epic amount of games being built as Kickstarter, Indiegogo, Steam GreenLight, etc. projects.
However, translating any of those projects into a polished AAA MMO is a vastly different story. The jump from a few million $ to $100+ million projects is an immense gulf to cross. And modern MMO players demand that level of quality, else they shun the game completely.
If making a great MMO was a trivial matter, we'd be swimming in them. But it appears that the sheer technical difficulty of bringing it all together is still a few orders of magnitude greater than the average indie team can handle. Or can handle in any way that persuades a significant amount of players to pay them for it.
We are seeing alot more smaller/indie titles in production, so I think there is hope. Even some of the larger publishers are finally catching on to the idea that they can't keep putting out nothing but the same game with a bit of reskinning over and over again.
Todays MMO's have done a good job of catering to the audience that is already fully satisfied with thier offerings. They have not done a particularly good job at building new or different audiences. That works only so long as number of products out one the market doesn't outstrip the audience available for those products. Currently, even though the audience for MMO's has grown, the number of products on offer in that market has grown much much faster, while few of the older established products have dropped out. That means at least some of the new entrants coming into the market HAVE to start reaching out and attracting different audiences or there just won't be enough room for them all to compete.
The main thing I never see talked about on this subject is theat players tend to "skip" all the creative and immersive parts of the game now a days.
I mean it think back to the last game you thought was creative and or inovating. Yea it was the lat game you read all the NPC details and quest information.
I cant note that it was the cause but it sure was a mile stone into the demize of creative MMOing: SW:ToR and the SPCAEBAR!!! epidemic.
What really hapened IMO was lazy and boring quest hub designers didnt have or had cut the creative writing personel from their teams and let johnny code eyes write all the quests and dialouge for well I wana say a very popular game but... I never played that one, and players tended to skip all the info and all the dialouge and thought I just want to "get past this ASAP" for every title since. And as a trend, that drove publishers and developers to continue in that direction.
Even single player games went that way. Look at games like dragon age or morrowind. OODLES of quest info and dialouge all very interesting and deep. Then we get "I got shot in the knee" a million times and we just dont want to hear it anymore.
We as a culture of gamers HATE the delivery system for creativity and dialouge in PC gaming.
What to do about it? My thing is I took a break from gaming and read books. Yes novels and fictions and nonfictions and historical based fictions and.. yea few hundred pages at least. Now when I game I read #1 at a faster pace and #2 have something to bias the writing against and Ive come to realize the money shoulnt have been spent on voice acting (yea some people prefer audio books yea right...)but on writing instead. I mean some of it so dry and drab I find my self with the word SPACEBAR fighting to escape my lips!
S P A C E B A R!
as long as there is endgame the questing dont mean squat! that's just how it is.. sure you might enjoy it first time but after that it's just a nuisance... and let's face it there's no way you can keep the same content relevant to players over and over again.. that's why we progress and move on to new things...
I had fun once, it was terrible.
May be MMO is the problem. Tomb Raider is a good game with imagination. Dishonored is a good game with imagination. Dead Space (the first one) is a good game with imagination.
There are plenty AAA good games with imagination.
Yeah, I mean you can still tell a good story in an MMO and the first time you play through it players might enjoy it but forcing people to repeat content over and over means that they will soon forget what the story is supposed to be and simply look at it as a task they have to do to get a reward.
I don't think you can compare MMOs to books or movies. A book or movie you finish. Most people do not go right back to the beginning and start again after they finish it. Almost any story would start to get boring if you did it that way. That's why I think the future of MMOs is either player created or procedurally generated stories. A not so good story that you've never played through is far better than a professionally written one you've seen 4 or 5 times before.
Nope, sorry, won't happen. If you spend any amount of time in the MMO gaming sphere, the word "sandbox" has a fabulously diverse meaning. The game that sandbox purists want, won't appeal to 95% of the MMO niche, ever. Even when it does, they'll complain about something and re-define what a sandbox is. They're like gaming hipsters.
Crazkanuk
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Azarelos - 90 Hunter - Emerald
Durnzig - 90 Paladin - Emerald
Demonicron - 90 Death Knight - Emerald Dream - US
Tankinpain - 90 Monk - Azjol-Nerub - US
Brindell - 90 Warrior - Emerald Dream - US
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Two solutions:
1) no repeat, just like in SP games. In fact, most of the WoW leveling quests are NOT repeatable .. so this is nothing new.
2) Make combat fun as D3, and then make random dungoen/quests like D3 .... and forget about the story and focus on dungeon hack-n-slash.
I am sure there are other solutions.
God Narius not an insult mind you but the way you play depresses me and I am even more depressed thinking may be most people enjoy what you do seeing how the games are being dumbed down and narrative and quests and other aspects being cast off.
Don't worry. I don't take things personally. Otherwise how can i have fun here?
Don't be depressed. It is not worth depressing over some random dude typed on the internet. Plus, if you can't beat them, join them. I find lots of SP games have good stories and gameplay, and very entertaining to me.
It is just entertainment ... may be you can just enjoy instead of complain. But of course, it is up to you. It is a free world.
Imagination and ideas are a dime a dozen. Implementation, and making something happen is much harder.
That's true. Not that imagination is universal - I know a sad number of non-imaginative people - but there's more imagination than can be made into games even if every single game made were imaginative. The supply of creativity exceeding the demand, it is literally a dime a dozen.
I still contest that games are more fun when you don't know what's going on. I remember playing my first RPG Dragon Warrior on the Nintendo Entertainment System. I had no clue what I was doing or what the story was, but I completed the game and made up stories in my head. There wasn't a lot of dialogue/script/lore, but it did allow you to run around the world in an overhead map wherever you wanted to. There was also some dark dungeons where you couldn't see without a torch or a light spell. Sadly this is an old game and it implemented tools that were much more RPG oriented then games today. I also like to play Dark Souls and it doesn't bother me that there isn't a lot of dialogue, text, or scripts in the game. It's mostly about finding what works against what or what you need to protect yourself properly and what you need to advance past certain areas. I believe in a single player game can be fine like that then an MMORPG could as well.
Because a lot of people don't want to make up their own stories they are purchasing a game to consume entertainment if people want to create their own Entertainment and imagine things then they purchase Role Playing Systems like Dungeons and Dragons or GURPS.
There are also Video Games that allow you to be creative and make content such as Infamous 2's mission creator or RPG Maker.
If you want to create entertainment there are games and systems designed for it or jobs that will allow you do it such as being a writer or Video Game creator. Most people prefer to be consumers so they want to "consume" the high quality entertainment given to them. I have played some fan made missions in Infamous 2 some of them are just god awful....