Some thoughts about current gen game creation.

[Pixel_Outlaw]

Until tonight I really couldn't pinpoint what I didn't like about many modern games. Simply put I think developers are doing it incorrectly. To make a game of any genre, I feel that the developer must first strip the concept down to the essential parts. Then features are added in only if they enhance the way a game plays. This used to make controllers very simple. You had a directional pad and a few buttons. Modern controllers have around 12. Why is this? Well I feel that modern developers look in through the wrong end of the game making telescope. I feel that the current school of thought is to take a real world scenario and try to force, cram, and jam every aspect of it into a game. MANY times this leads to very odd and unexpected quarks in the way the game plays. FPS games I feel have really gotten too complex among other genres. I feel that realism has trumped playability in many modern games. I want a video game, not an uber realistic cinematic simulation. What's next in the ever popular FPS genre? Jamming bullets? Dulling knives? Wounded legs and crawling? Grenades not going off? Developers are so focused on forcing a complete realistic concept into game, that they are neglecting how fun games should be.

Can you imagine how horrible games like Mario would be if they factored in the fatigue and weight of 2 real plumbers running jumping for an entire level? (Today developers would probably put in a health bar and limit the number of fireballs Mario could shoot too!)

I urge developers to strip a concept down to the basic elements and then only add in features if they make the game more fun, not more seemingly realistic.

Another note is how long player matches are in some games. I've been in multiplayer games that take about 20 minutes to win. What ever happened to many short rounds? Bomberman was fast and fun. Why do matches have to last so darn long? You could get in 10 complete bomberman matches in the time it takes do a single match in many games.

The sad thing is the decline of abstract games too. Now, a game must be based on an existing cartoon franchise, movie or real life event. This is sad because companies are not creating their own unique style in many cases. People now write off games like Qix and Galaga simply for not having any emulatable real world situation.

Also developers are going to more and more LAN only based games. This is fine if you do not have real friends but if you do, it requires each player to have a copy of the system and game. Also this raises a very real concern for games that people intend to play long after servers are taken out of service.

Just my opinion. Feel free to disagree and call me close minded.

[neorichieb1971]

I've been touting these things for quite a while and being told that I'm talking nonsense. However, I do go about it in a slightly different way, causing mass arguments with politically incorrect fanboy quotations. However, your essay on the matter has brought this subject back to the surface where it belongs.

The only thing left that is fantasy in games is that you come to life after you die. Everything else is going the way of being far too industrial. Games have come to street level. I personally don't touch any game which has its roots in every day life. If I want to walk around a GTA city I only have to go outside to see that. I want something along the lines of Tron brought up to nextgen standards. Lets get REZ into the realm of millions of polygons with DLC. You float around a whole world that isn't on rails just doing your own thing listening to pumping techno beats. Lets see Mario come to life in HD.

As for the controls, it is a bit nerve racking to get used to a game these days. I know people that think the original wolfenstein is a great game, but think the latest iteration is not that good. Because all they have done is over complicate things with the so called nextgen graphics.

The problem is that money that is heavily invested into the industry is going mainly into FPS, sports and racing games. All 3 of those genres have limited potential in how far the boundaries can be pushed because theoretically, your playing exactly the same game you did 15 years ago with flashier graphics and knobs on. I will pay any developer my hard earned money for something that is not about mass violence, has a great story or can muster up something a little different. Unfortunately, different to them, is basically Guitar hero and music games. Therefore, you have 2 leagues, the AAA and the quick buck league. Surrealism is something too hard to do with limited returns.

Part of the problem is the audience. MW2 will sell a quadrillion copies. So what will everyone else do? Make a modern warfare ripoff.. Games industry is flooded with copycat games. Its just so ridiculous that I only buy about 5 games a year nowadays.

Sony still have one foot in the surrealism part of gaming. With GOW, The last Guardian and maybe one or two others around the corner, I still have faith that those 2 games can muster up solid sales to make other companies take notice that these games are still potentially profitable. Unfortunately GOW3 is the last game in the franchise. I just hope Sony come up with something as exciting to make up for that.

[Herr Schatten]

I think that the recent trend of making games more "realistic" has something to do with two key factors.

1. Games aren't made anymore by a bunch of bedroom coders, but by huge staffs of specialists. Those are not necessarily gamers anymore, they are technicians. They are just not able to create something artistic or imaginative, and they have no interest in doing so, unless they've got a director at the helm who really has a vision and sticks by that. This is not very often the case. And even if it is, he will be pestered by the guys in marketing, who aren't gamers either, and who try to sell games like movies, even though games are fundamentally different. (I know it, because I had to work with those people.)

2. As a result of the above, and of the shift in gamer demographic that came with marketing games as mass media instead of quirky little things done by nerds and for nerds, people don't expect to be enticed by the gameplay anymore, they expect to be wowed by them. So here's a problem: Most people won't be wowed by innovative play mechanics or by graphics of high artistic value, because they have nothing to compare it to, unlike us jaded gamers who've been around since the early days of the industries. If they are given something "realistic" looking, they can just compare it to the world outside, and when it comes close, their jaws drop - mission accomplished.

To sum it up: Games got driven into the mainstream by people who had no clue. Unfortunately, they got so successful that no one who makes games for money wants to go back to the days when games were about playing them anymore. This has drained most creativity, but as long as the money keeps rolling in, no one really cares.

[Ex-Cyber]

Fundamentally I think it comes down to control issues and risk aversion. As far as I understand the prevailing model, the primary role of publishers isn't to handle the actual task of publishing (after all, the doujin game circles and various others have figured that out), it's to fund the game's development in the first place. Publishers, not developers, basically run the industry. It's obviously possible to make a commercial-quality game without a publisher financing it, but I gather it's really hard and involves a lot of (potentially personal) financial risk, which developers simply might not be able to take. The publishers, on the other hand, seem to see it almost purely as an ROI issue.

To put it another way, the overlap between "the best games" and "the games that are the best investments" seems to be somewhat limited, and the people allocating the money tend to be much more interested in the latter.

This disconnect, in various forms, led to the founding of Gathering of Developers, which was intended to be a "developer-friendly" publisher co-owned by a bunch of development companies. It didn't take long for the company to be bought out by a major publisher that had very different ideas about how to run things.

[neorichieb1971]

Fun = Gameplay mechanics, not realistic graphics.

If you just make a game that has a learning curve or a trick (use mariokart as an example) you have something of a skill that people want to show off. Street fighter 3 is such a game, it has depth that requires quick timing and skill.

Take any Cave shmup, its just a shooter, but it takes dedication to master it.

So essentially, all games made today take that away. Even though I like God of War, its a game that essentially runs itself. Tekken is a franchise that can literally play itself, you don't need to learn anything to play it. But it doesn't offer much to the enthusiast of Tekken to learn any more moves (well from personal experience).

Nextgen platforming isn't about making everything look like a flash game (as has been commented on here before), its about the artistic impression that can be allowed using nextgen hardware. If you don't change the way you go into developing a game then the outcome won't be worth our while. Playmore keep releasing Metal slug games, but they haven't adopted any nextgen strategy at all, just releasing rehashed ideas.

Then you look at some the ideas that have come out. Flower for example.. Its a nice little game but although its got a windy floaty controller aspect to it, it doesn't go far enough to keep your interest. If they put a combo system that could make tornados and make buildings fall down, then maybe it would have some longevity to it.

[Super Laydock]

The most negative observation I have about new games these days is that the require the use of too many different buttons. I want to play intuitively and not have to think too much.

r1,r2,l1,l2, 2 analogue sticks (clickeable as extras of course), normal d-pad, a/b/c/d buttons/select/start, it's to much if all used in 1 game.

It's way too much effort to learn about all these buttons again for every new game.

[Pixel_Outlaw]

I really feel sorry for the kids who's didn't grow up in the 8 and 16 bit era. They are missing so much and will mostly write these games off as "odd" or "stup[id" because they cannot relate them to real world scenarios. They will be fed a diet of industrial stagnation and vomit, and will in turn continue to fund slop as they grow older.

Where does that leave traditionalists?
Is there any real chance to revive our favorite genres without having to plaster the overused, and poorly defined "retro" phrase on everything that resembles what a video game should be?


Games from the 16 but era back are so insignificant in modern players eyes that they will create one genre for all older games. They are now "retro" genre. These games are not looked upon by what they contain they are just tossed into the "retro" genre. No longer do we have platform, fighting, dungeon crawling, shmups, run n gun, and puzzle genres. We just have games that are old or "retro". Yucky smelly old games that do not emulate the real world.

In all honesty can you imagine Nintendo or Tengen trying to sell Tetris today? It would have a few fans but would fail hard because of its abstract nature.

Tetris in 2009

Kid: "Where am I?"

80's Kid: "You have to just move the blocks and avoid making holes."

Kid: "Do I have a bomb to clear the screen of my mistakes?"

80's Kid: 'No, you just have to get it right as you go."

Kid: "Is there a powrup to slow the game down, it is getting fast!"

80's Kid: "No the game gets more challenging as you do better."

Kid: "This game is stupid, you can't even do anything in it! It doesn't even have realistic graphics."

80's Kid "What do you mean, this game is just stacking shapes and rotating them, squares are what the puzzle pieces are made of."

Kid: "Yeah but I would never do this is real life for fun."

80's Kid: "Obviously not..."

[CMoon]

These are interesting thoughts. One perspective however is that games trends come in waves. Remember when shooters were a dime a dozen on the genesis? Maybe those were the days, but back then, people were sick of shooters and never wanted to see another one (they almost got their wish!) Most of these trends have a backlash, and incorporating RPG elements into everything, or using every button on a modern controller just because it is there, may wane with time, but I'm sure new stupid trends will follow shortly.

I do think the 'controller' issue is forgetting that with 3D, more buttons may be required. Let me pick on God Hand for a second, which I think most people would agree is not an overly lush or puffy experience; yet virtually every button (short of the D-pad) comes into play. Certainly games have become more complex, and I think this is a good evolution of video games, but I agree that sometimes these things aren't thought out well, or a game is needlessly complex when it shouldn't be.

Ultimately I'm for having lots of different types of games--simple to complex; but with trends, we often get a boatload of one style of game, and you have to wait it out or find something in it you can appreciate. I think all the new consoles DO have good games on them, but if you not open to exploring current game styles, then it's just going to be you hitting your head against a wall.

[ZacharyB]

It may also be a case of more people in the industry. As a result, all of the games we still like to play are there, but they are hidden by the bombast of the well-funded corporate endeavors. It reminds me of what the internet is. All of the old people are still there, but they are hidden away by the more vocal younger group. This illusion is especially powerful on Youtube.

It's true that the style of the games we liked has exited the mainstream. They will be harder to find now as a consumer. But people are still trying hard. In the Developer's section of this forum, there are interesting games still being made. These games would pass for commercial games in the 80s or early 90s. I'm also working on a couple of games.

I think as technology gets better, the bar keeps getting raised. Kind of like having sex with sexier and sexier women: each successive woman turns the previous one more homely. But you developers are still doing a great job; don't give up because your game doesn't look like Cave's latest endeavor. It's easy to forget that a single person can only do so much. It doesn't help that in American English, we refer to corporations as a singular noun, not a plural as the Brits do.

As for the younger generation's gaming, I think they have moved into their own culture of gaming. I wonder what the next generation of "gaming" will be.

[EPS21]

Kid: "Do I have a bomb to clear the screen of my mistakes?"

Pretty much half the definition of shmups right here

Kid: "Is there a powrup to slow the game down, it is getting fast!"

Many shmups, new and old been doing this as well. Dieing to decrease rank in raizing, the slowdown in Cave games, or even the espgaluda series, for instance.

Not really trying to disagree with you here, but mechanics like these are necessary to balance a game, like the reason why Image Fight is a bit too hard with its NO BOMBS and all. The problem with today's games is that the balance isn't there because they don't really get progressively harder, or with such a nonexistent learning curve you can breeze your way through with the increase of tools/moves/etc you're given. So as good ol' 80's kid put it "No the game gets more challenging as you do better" needs to be seriously reinstated in all these genres of todays current games to make them worthwhile.

I just wanted to warn you with the example you gave there cause it seemed all too ironic being on a shmup forum

[crithit5000]

[SamIAm]

I liked Herr Schatten and Ex-Cyber's points about the pressures which developers feel from the disconnected people they must cooperate with to get funding. With the ever-increasing costs involved in making games, it's no surprise that this is an ever-worsening issue.

I also think that the expectations of gamers themselves have changed most of all in the area of gameplay, not so much "realistic vs. abstract" graphics (although that's still a major point). Older games, including our modern shmups, are in a way very stressful to play. The player has to spend a lot of time failing and retrying, and must put a lot of energy into strategizing and memorizing in order to get better. Many modern gamers aren't so much interested in a challenge like this as they are in something simple they can kick back and play through casually. This above all governs the approach developers take to the bulk of modern games across all genres, IMHO.

[PC Engine Fan X!]

Kid: "Do I have a bomb to clear the screen of my mistakes?"

Pretty much half the definition of shmups right here

Kid: "Is there a powrup to slow the game down, it is getting fast!"

Many shmups, new and old been doing this as well. Dieing to decrease rank in raizing, the slowdown in Cave games, or even the espgaluda series, for instance.

Not really trying to disagree with you here, but mechanics like these are necessary to balance a game, like the reason why Image Fight is a bit too hard with its NO BOMBS and all. The problem with today's games is that the balance isn't there because they don't really get progressively harder, or with such a nonexistent learning curve you can breeze your way through with the increase of tools/moves/etc you're given. So as good ol' 80's kid put it "No the game gets more challenging as you do better" needs to be seriously reinstated in all these genres of todays current games to make them worthwhile.

I just wanted to warn you with the example you gave there cause it seemed all too ironic being on a shmup forum

The idea of games becoming more challenging as you get better at it -- this what all the good arcade game devs (Atari Games, Bally-Midway, Williams, Namco, Sega, etc.) strived for in their PCB titles back in the early 1980s and into the early 1990s...it would only be a matter of time before a console port hit the street and watch the profits/revenue go downhill at the local arcade establishments. When Starcom's Dragon's Lair LaserDisc arcade game first came out, LaserDisc technology was touted as the saviour of the arcade industry as it was a hitting rock-hard slump in 1983. But the new-fangled arcade LD fad lasted from 1982-1985 and ended with a whimper.

There was talk about utilizing LaserDisc technology for home console gaming use back in the early 1980s but it fizzled out rather quickly (but the LD technology give rise to the new smaller CD-Rom interface later on). Without the pioneering efforts of LD, there wouldn't be PSX or Saturn consoles for that matter. It's all true, folks. ^_~

PC Engine Fan X! ^_~

[antares]

One thing that really annoys me in modern games is the "you can't die" approach. You don't have lifes anymore and respawn at the last checkpoint if you die. Most of the time the checkpoints are so close to each other that you virtually are at the same place after dying only with full energy again.

Also the med-packs have come out of fashion. If you loose energy just stand around for a few seconds doing nothing and wait until you have self-healed.

Then there is the rewind feature. Who came up with that stupid idea? I first saw it in Braid, if you die simply rewind a few seconds and try again. Or in racing games, if you miss a corner or got overtaken, who cares just rewind.
If you tell other people something like this you only hear: Well, just don't use it if you don't like it. Yeah, but back in the good old days when I could complete Sega Rally on the Saturn on hard difficulty on first place my friends were impressed. Now everyone can complete Forza 3 and I'm sure if someone does it without rewinding his friends would just say: you're stupid, that's so much more work and I got all the achievements using the rewind feature much faster.

[BryanM]

There are still people making platformers, olde jRPGs, shoot them aparts, etc. And sometimes, even hyooge companies toss one out now and then (Megaman 9, New New Mario Bros, Four Warriors of Light, Yuusha 30, Cave). Just like there are people still making classic rock music.

The only difference is the advertising budget for these things are nascent and they can't attach the knowledge of these games to your brain like a cancer. Because that's what blockbuster hype is - a meme - thought cancer.

In no just world would anyone care about Call of NFL Blitz.

The only thing that can be done about it is be one of those guys who constantly mentions games no one fucking knows about and eventually something will hit a person or two. Just be all like "Aveyond Aveyond Aveyond" "Hikari 4 No Senshi 4 No Senshi 4 No Senshi" "DeathSpank DeathSpank DeathSpank" "Badguy Badguuuuy!"

The times I've posted images of Guwange's Spider Cat... yeebeesh.

Delusion and rage are more useful emotions than the other ones in general.

[neorichieb1971]

There are still people making platformers, olde jRPGs, shoot them aparts, etc. And sometimes, even hyooge companies toss one out now and then (Megaman 9, New New Mario Bros, Four Warriors of Light, Yuusha 30, Cave). Just like there are people still making classic rock music.

The only difference is the advertising budget for these things are nascent and they can't attach the knowledge of these games to your brain like a cancer. Because that's what blockbuster hype is - a meme - thought cancer.

In no just world would anyone care about Call of NFL Blitz.

The only thing that can be done about it is be one of those guys who constantly mentions games no one fucking knows about and eventually something will hit a person or two. Just be all like "Aveyond Aveyond Aveyond" "Hikari 4 No Senshi 4 No Senshi 4 No Senshi" "DeathSpank DeathSpank DeathSpank" "Badguy Badguuuuy!"

The times I've posted images of Guwange's Spider Cat... yeebeesh.

Delusion and rage are more useful emotions than the other ones in general.

People? Thats the problem, its not anyone we have heard of. When EA came to the table, they ignored what was previously there and designed games based on real life. It was successful. Now, they are responsible for everyone wanting a piece of that success. Therefore, it is only "people" that make platformers anymore. Wouldn't you like to see what a $10m budget platformer would look like on the PS3 or Xbox? Or a side scrolling fighter? Or a sonic.

Maybe it would look like this - http://orioto.deviantart.com/

That guy has got more talent than any "technician" programmer. He's an artist. He should not be ignored, yet all the praise he has got has got him nowhere. Its a shame. Those pics he drew have a lot of character and charm.

[dcharlie]

Wouldn't you like to see what a $10m budget platformer would look like on the PS3 or Xbox? Or a side scrolling fighter? Or a sonic.

i assume you mean a 2d based platformer as, well, EA have already done a platformer and , hell, it's not that bad. And let's just kill Sonic off, once and for all.

I get the overarching rage, but there's a lot of decent games that just happen to have a real life art style. Or maybe it's just me?

[neorichieb1971]

Yes, the days of the helicopter tails are well and truly over.

What is this EA platformer you speak of?

The last big platformer that had a AAA budget was the PS1's SOTN. Which sold 200,000 copies in the USA. Thats what todays industry calls "small fry". Little Ralph done today would be nice. Something with Gothic overtones such as a new GnG game (not on handheld) would nice too. If you take something like Trine, it looks good, but it incorperates too many gimmicks. As does LBP.. Even the latest Banjo title seemed a little bit OTT with all its gimmicks. There is nothing that truly relates to the roots of old with a truly nextgen feel.

I agree, Sonic needs to bow down now. I haven't liked the look of Sonic since the DC days. Although it was new in the DC era, its just old since then.

The latest Sega arrival at MK is some crane picking machine, which looks barren with a few cubes in the middle that you can pick up. Are Sega really stooping to those kind of levels? The days of wow'ing audiences are truly behind them. Namco, there is a lesson to be learned, yes i'm not buying Tekken 6 with its uprezzed Tekken 5 graphics with long loading times and artsy fartsy scrolling beat em up game.

[Taylor]

I feel that realism has trumped playability in many modern games. I want a video game, not an uber realistic cinematic simulation. What's next in the ever popular FPS genre? Jamming bullets? Dulling knives? Wounded legs and crawling? Grenades not going off? Developers are so focused on forcing a complete realistic concept into game, that they are neglecting how fun games should be.

No, and for a reason that disproves your point: None of those things are fun. These games are in a realistic setting because they are inspired by films and real-life events, but very few of them attempt to be reality simulators like you're suggesting with your Mario hyperbole. All the first person shooters I’ve played recently let me regenerate health crouching behind a crate - that's even less realistic than the system we were using before!

In all honesty can you imagine Nintendo or Tengen trying to sell Tetris today? It would have a few fans but would fail hard because of its abstract nature.

But casual puzzle games are at an all time high right now.

[dcharlie]

What is this EA platformer you speak of?

Henry Hatsworth - puzzle/platformer - though not for a console (DS)

I was also thinking of Mirrors Edge - yes, it's 3D , yes it's realistic (but with a gorgeous colour scheme) and it has a ton of problems, but it's a platformer at heart - not a 2D one of course.

I'd say that Braid is the last 'big name' 'console' platformer - and screw the haters - i thought it was great.

In all honesty can you imagine Nintendo or Tengen trying to sell Tetris today? It would have a few fans but would fail hard because of its abstract nature.

um - popcap have made a fortune off very simple puzzle games.

[Ex-Cyber]

Then there is the rewind feature. Who came up with that stupid idea? I first saw it in Braid, if you die simply rewind a few seconds and try again.

The phrase "simply rewind" has no relevance to Braid beyond the first handful of levels.

[Gozer]

As for the younger generation's gaming, I think they have moved into their own culture of gaming. I wonder what the next generation of "gaming" will be.

I certainly hope it's Kosho.

[dcharlie]

Then there is the rewind feature. Who came up with that stupid idea? I first saw it in Braid, if you die simply rewind a few seconds and try again.

um... did people not play Braid ?!

[UnscathedFlyingObject]

The last big platformer that had a AAA budget was the PS1's SOTN.

If I won the lottery today, I'd give money to Konami to make a completely new 2D Castletroid for consoles. There's no doubt in my mind that it'd sell much better than any of the not-so-good 3D ones and blow many more people away. I really don't understand what they're thinking. Do they really want people's money or not?

[BryanM]

I'm a bit tired of platformers with only a few things on screen at once.

You know in Cave Story's Sacred Ground, where you have about a dozen things on screen at once? That's a start.

[Ixmucane2]

Most of these trends have a backlash, and incorporating RPG elements into everything, or using every button on a modern controller just because it is there, may wane with time, but I'm sure new stupid trends will follow shortly.

I do think the 'controller' issue is forgetting that with 3D, more buttons may be required. Let me pick on God Hand for a second, which I think most people would agree is not an overly lush or puffy experience; yet virtually every button (short of the D-pad) comes into play. Certainly games have become more complex, and I think this is a good evolution of video games, but I agree that sometimes these things aren't thought out well, or a game is needlessly complex when it shouldn't be.

Maybe console developers think that:

• Unused controller elements are an available resource that can be spent on extra controls for extra features.
• In addition to the best controllers, inappropriate ones should be supported too (e.g. steering/turning with buttons or D-pad in addition to the analog stick): imaginary users might want them, or less imaginary managers might ask for flexibility and "accessibility".
• People will try every button, so every button should do something.
• Their console game must be a faithful adaptation of a keyboard and mouse PC game. (The opposite can happen: the first choice of Microsoft XNA is using the Xbox 360 joypad on a PC, neglecting the keyboard).

But above all, there are few incentives to "waste time" to tighten UI design when there are "enough" buttons to support slovenly designs, and many incentives to have more features rather than more simplicity.

The simple controllers of old consoles restricted the complexity of games, but in a way that (in principle) kept out useless fluff and kept in something simple and fun. Complexity tended not to disturb the simple user interface, but rather to consist of learning complex strategies, making maps, following and compiling arcane walkthroughs etc. on the user's side; and complex rules and a lot of content on the game's side.

There's an obvious "classic age" of good controllers between an explosion of simple and experimental controllers and the progressive complication of a narrow variety of controller types.

For instance, the Nintendo DSi should be a more powerful Nintendo Gameboy, not unlike the clamshell GBA SP, but it adds two buttons (a significant but modest increase), a second screen, a camera, another camera, a microphone, a large touch surface, and maybe something else. As the number of available arms to point the camera, hands to hold the stylus, and eyes to look at screens has not increased, this new hardware is obviously meant to support new kinds of software that couldn't work with buttons and D-pad; and in fact most DS games either use the classic controls or contrive to use the new ones in limited ways to show how modern they are (e.g. handling Pokémon with stylus gestures).

Joysticks are a sadder story: when I had a Commodore 64 I could buy joysticks of all shapes and sizes (and I had different ones for different games), now for practical purposes there are only monsters straight out of a jet fighter that only work for flight simulators. The thumbsticks of newer console controllers are deemed good enough, even if it means the death of many joystick-dependent genres or their adaptation to arrow keys.

Controller expansion has been worse on home consoles than the two extra buttons of the DS because everything that graces the surface of a joypad can be used conveniently and quasi-simultaneously without strategic design choices: when thumbsticks, progressive buttons and accelerometers appeared, they were added to joypads without removing anything.

[Specineff]

The last big platformer that had a AAA budget was the PS1's SOTN.

If I won the lottery today, I'd give money to Konami to make a completely new 2D Castletroid for consoles. There's no doubt in my mind that it'd sell much better than any of the not-so-good 3D ones and blow many more people away. I really don't understand what they're thinking. Do they really want people's money or not?

Dude, Curse of Darkness was really, really great. Maybe the areas didn't translate well since we are so used to the 2D Castlevanias, but everything else made it very worthy of the legacy. Music, gameplay, weapons and weapon-making, the innocent devils... I don't see why people think it's not so good.

[louisg]

I don't think any of this is particularly new. It's at least been going on since the early 90s in PC games and then crept into console games during the 3d era. Maybe the emphasis on "immersiveness" has again expanded, because I remember at least early in the generation people were making a big deal out of the fact that you didn't need any status info on-screen. Anyway, here are what I perceive to be modern mistakes:

- Treating the game design as a feature list. A lot of great games have few features, but infinitely complex ways that they can combine. Take Chess, or M.U.L.E., as an example. This is also the reason I'm a big believer in simple A.I.: You can have simple A.I. and set up various enemies in an area which compliment each other. The player's goal then is to find their way through the patterns. The player learns, and improves at the game in a general sense. This is impossible if all the enemies are constantly hiding, doing gymnastics, or performing one-time scripted behaviors.
- Realism is too-often a goal. This was cool and amazing back when computers had trouble drawing a few polygons, but it's just boring now-- or at the least, only really interesting in a computer science way (cool physics). Realistic behavior is basically ruleset feature-creep. Which brings me to:
- The more rules you have in your game, the more likely it is to be buggy, and the more likely it is to just be an uncontrolled mess. There's probably something to be said for sandbox games where you define a bunch of complicated rules and let it rip-- say, GTA (to a large degree)-- but it definitely makes things unfocused.

Finally, nothing is all that new. MMORPGs? MUDs. Call of Duty? Navy Seals (the 3d EA one). Open-ended games? Ultima. Too many cinema scenes? FMV and Laserdisc games. And games were imitating movies in the NES era. Bad Dudes, anyone? Contra? Not to say that this makes them bad, but obviously if it were technologically and financially possible then to make some corny 3d cinematic nonsense back then, I assume the developers would have done that instead.

I think, though, that these trends are reversing to some degree. Due to XBLA and WiiWare, I can probably think of more successful 2d, abstract, and game-focused games this gen than we've seen in a long time. People (outside of gamer circles) also want to play their old games again finally, which we can see from VC and all the oldie resurrections on the various downloadable services. Mainstream reviewers, as far as I've seen, are no longer dissing games with 2d graphics as "Bah, my Genesis could've done this"... things are changing.

[neorichieb1971]

I don't know about retail games, but doesn't it seem rather funny that Wipeout HD is a great game and has a footprint of about 1GB?

With the retail PS3 market, most games take what? 20GB of disc space!!!

So with all that digital real estate to fill you can have a game that is relatively easy to make. But Wipeout is quite a small game but I can tell it was quite a difficult feat to get made.

So the problem is, is that developers don't want to iron out things to make games better, they just want to make them bigger and more complicated to cover up what is essentially last years purchase.

I know this is the wrong forum to ask this question, but -

Does anyone have a favourite game that was made this gen?


I can honestly say without even consideration that my favourite games were definitely last gen. With very few games in my top list from before that. So I believe the PS2/GC era was about as good as it got for me. Whether thats because of the stage of my life or the best games I don't know.

[t0yrobo]

I think one factor is that what passes for game journalism generally sucks, and rarely gives out the sort of critical feedback it should. Neither do many gamers, and places like here where people will go on and on about play mechanics etc are just considered these wacky little groups of elitist nutcases.