[Rant] What's Wrong with Video Games These Days?

Originally Posted by Infernal Monkey

I own six copies of Klax and it's still nowhere near enough!



My real :nerdrage: with it is the fact that the industry has picked up on it in a serious kind of way. I mean, we have publishers crapping out all these spin-off labels for 'casual' gamers now, like EA's All-Play, Take-Two's 2K Play and Ubisoft's... well, Ubisoft. Why... why not just release them normally? I'm pretty sure the average consumer doesn't give a shit about this vidya game forum war that originated because Wii Sports became a success. They don't shoulder barge into Target asking for the latest 'casual' games. DO YOU HAVE THE NEW ONE? I ALSO NEED THE NEW CASUAL PENS AND CASUAL BAGS OF CHIPS.

Might as well release the next GTA game under some wacky casual label while they're at it. It makes more sense than some sales-failure like Randy McFlannington's 30 Fun Family Party Disco Go Time Games.

That's just a product of natural supply and demand though. If people didn't buy the shitty games, they'd stop making them. As gaming has become an entirely mainstream passtime now, of course developers are going to make some easily accessible, cheap as fuck games to cash in. It's the same reason tv companies make stuff like the X-Factor. It's not exactly highbrow but it makes them a fuck load of cash.

The thing some of the kids here are missing is that having a mountain of shitty cash-cow games is a good thing for those of you who want something a bit more art-house. With all the money rolling in from mainstream, obvious games, the developers can afford to try something a little risky now and then. Without wads of cash from all these poor idiots who bought Madden 09 or what have you, developers would have to make sure that every game they make is a guaranteed high seller so they'd take even fewer risks.

Also, to claim there's been no innovation in the current generation is just retarded and shows that you basically know nothing about any games that have come out lately.

Burnout Paradise gave you a high speed street racing game, just like all the Need For Speeds and Testdrives and other Burnouts only now, because of the huge processing power available in an Xbox 360, they let you run the race in an entire fucking city, rather than a pre-laid route. You're playing online against 7 other people and if you want, you can ignore the race and go for a quick drive down by the lake. I mean, what old school game ever gave you that level of freedom? How can you possibly say that's not an incredible step forward? I don't even like the game that much but that they were able to manage that technically means the same open world ideal can be applied to all sorts of other games. A flying game where instead of being dropped in a small arena for a mission, you take off from your base and fly across an entire planet to get there can't be too far off now for example.

On the same level, look at Oblivion or Fallout 3. Sure some old rpgs were pretty good but you were never really roleplaying as you never had any choices. Final Fantasy tells you you need an item from inside a castle so you go down the linear path laid out in the sewers, through the linear path inside the castle and fight the boss they put at the end of it. Oblivion doesn't even tell you you need the item but if you want it, you can sneak in after dark or you can slaughter your way in through the front door or whatever you want. There's little decent character development in Oblivion and the story is pretty generic but the actual amount of roleplaying you can do blows pretty much every Japanese "Roleplay" game out of the water.

Less successful but hugely innovative none the less was Too Human, an action game where you don't press buttons to attack your enemies. Last Remnant is an rpg where you can't choose your companions' equipment and the fights are entirely tactical with several units and your position on the battlefield making a big difference to the fights. Frontlines gave you the chance to play with 49 other people online for the first time. GRID has a damage system that not only realistically reflects the damage done to your car visually but that effects it's performance in a pretty accurate way. Add to that an AI that bears a grudge against you and 20 cars on the track at once and again, you have an experience that simply wasn't possibly a generation ago.

As Deni says, a lack of innovative story telling is nothing to do with improved graphics or what have you. What's happened is that developers have had these massively capable machines dropped on their laps and being the speccy nerds that they all are, their first reaction is to see just how many polygons they can make it spew out at once or how many decisions they can make the AI take every second. Now they've got the hang of that, the groundwork is in place to allow them to concentrate on other aspects of the game. They don't need to pay software engineers to optimise the graphics engine, it's already optimised so instead they can hire a decent script writer.

At the end of the day though, gaming for the majority of people is about the immediate experience more than it is about the end result. People play games because they enjoy playing them, not because they want to know what happens at the end of the story. If that's what you're after, go read a book or something.

Also, Crash, you've not played many FPS games have you? Rainbow is as different from Halo as Pokemon is from Kingdom Hearts. They share some features sure but they're completely different experiences. Also, Crackdown is one of the silliest games ever made. If you can't laugh at throwing your teammate up a building in a car because they can't make the jump themselves then, well, what can you laugh at?

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Originally Posted by tebian

There is the exact problem with RPG's these days. The new and great way to play the game has left out the meat and potatoes for me.. the STORY. I enjoy a "role playing" game when I feel like I am part of whats going on. Maybe the old turn based games give you more time to enjoy, idk. But the new battle systems are just that... more to learn more to distract from what made some of the old games great. I can only talk about RPG's other genres are geared for fighting and tactics but as to whats wrong with games these days. They forget the role playing aspect that gamers had enjoyed.

You didn't read my post, did you?

As Pang suggests, watching a bunch of cut-scenes and following a proscribed path is not roleplaying, it's storytelling. Roleplaying is taking on a role or persona and playing through the game as that persona, in the way you want.

Final Fantasy telss you where to go, when to go there and what to do when you get there. KOTOR tells you where to go but gives you a choice of when to go there and although there are certain things to go when you get there, you have a range of choices of how to approach each situation. Final Fantasy tells me I have a bunch of characters, one's a kid with a sword, one's a mage, one's a healer and so on. KOTOR tells me I'm a jedi and leaves it up to me to choose whether to be a force-user, a lightsaber fighter, a rifleman, a sneaky stab-people-from-the-shadows type or whatever. Final Fantasy tells me that in order to reach the next section I have to follow this path through the dungeon and kill this boss. KOTOR tells me I need to sort out a problem in the underwater lab and then leaves me to decide whether I fix everything the hard way and save the planet or just kill the giant shark and destroy the planet's economy, getting myself permanently banned in the process.

If all you want is a good story, try books or films perhaps. If you actually want to interact with a game, go buy Fallout 3 or Oblivion or KOTOR and stop bitching.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Originally Posted by tebian

nope and glad i didnt

You made a post complaining that having to learn a few extra button presses distracted you from the story which is what you like about rpgs. I pointed out that watching a few cut-scenes isn't much of an interactive experience and is more like reading a book, Pang said the same thing. We were saying that maybe, instead of playing crappy old rpgs, you should, you know, go read a book.

And you then say that you didn't even bother to read the nice, sensible reply I made to your post and you say I'm not nice! I'm quite upset actually, having gone to all that effort to try and improve your life only for you to dismiss what I said without reading it. I think that's very rude and you should apologise.

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It is roleplaying though, provided the role you want to play is that of a brain damaged guy with a big sword who doesn't speak much and wants to save the world by visiting each town on the planet one at a time in a set order.

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

Originally Posted by wvlfpvp

Isn't that Brady's character in the D&D campaign?

Ha ha, I suppose it is, yes.

I was speaking idiomatically.

Originally Posted by Rotorblade

The subject just makes me curious as far as what games have suffered greatly for limited development time.

Mass Effect, both KOTORs, Fable, Little Big Planet (Which without the patch was broken as fuck) and Gears of War 2 (Equally broken without a patch) spring immediately to mind and that's without actually giving it any thought. Admittedly the prevalence of online access for consoles means that developers can at least fix bugs post release but without that capacity, and for anyone playing without internet access, these are essentially broken games. It's a worrying trend in console gaming, this releasing of games that don't work properly then patching them and symptomatic of the pressure to meet release dates. Rockstar were seen as brave or even foolish for delaying GTAIV to April rather than rushing it out for the previous Christmas but luckily they held off, a decision probably made easier by the knowledge it was inevitably going to be one of the best selling games ever, whenever they released it.

As OP pointed out, there were a fucking ton of great games that weren't sequels last year. Of my whole 360 collection, the only games with numbers in the title are GTA IV, Halo 3, Fallout 3, Rainbow Six V2 and the Guitar Heroes. A lot of the games I spent most of last year playing, Too Human, Frontlines, Last Remnant and Crackdown for example were original IP's and all quite different from other games in their respective genres. Those game I have which are sequels are generally considered to be some of the best games released in recent times. GTAIV brought a whole new level of believability to the city and although the basic gameplay was much the same as the previous few titles, the attention to detail was unprecedented and they create such a distinctive world with each of their releases that, assuming you like that kind of game, each seems quite different, despite them all being basically the same.

Halo 3 on the face of it is just like Halo 2 and the first one but to anyone who's spent even a brief amount of time playing them, the differences are clear. Halo is all about the multiplayer and Bungie have worked to refine this, balancing the weapons, adding equipment and designing levels that work well with the gametypes that are popular. Sure, it's a game designed for fans of the series and hardly breaks new ground but in a series as hugely popular as Halo, I fail to see why this is a bad thing. If you were a developer of a series that had an installed fan base millions strong and rather than tweaking and improving your system, you released something completely different in an attempt to appeal to a different audience, I'd call you a fucking idiot and all your investors would ask for their money back.

Rainbow is "Just like all the other Tom Clancy games" insofar as it features pseudo-realistic squad combat and again, it's not a huge departure from previous games in the series in terms of plot or setting but the innovative cover system makes it a completely different game to what's come before. A game that used to be all about spotting the bad guys before they saw you and killing them quickly has become a game all about managing fields of fire, whether alone and ordering around your team mates or as a group online. The addition of increasingly "clever" AI has made the difference between the older Ghost Recon games where the terrorists would run around a corner blindly into a hail of machine gun fire and Rainbow Vegas 2 where you can easily be flanked and have your whole squad wiped out by one dude with a shotgun. It's a massive difference but one you'd only notice if you'd played both games.

To accuse Halo and Rainbow of being the same thing is beyond ridiculous. Halo is all about wading your lone soldier into hordes of enemies, actively dodging attacks, constantly moving and jumping and calculating how much incoming fire your shield will take up before you die and as such, whether to charge in or hold back. Rainbow is all about working out how to get the angle on the defenders, to take them out without exposing yourself to their fire, one bullet of which is normally fatal (If you're playing it properly on the hardest setting). They're quite different online too with Halo being essentially one big deathmatch, even in the team games where nobody really plays tactics and even so, the best tactic is always kill as many people as possible whereas Rainbow is a game primarily played co-op, either working through the campaign or playing terrorist hunts where cooperation is essential and running off on your own just results in you being dead very quickly.

Now as you all know, I'm not the world's biggest jrpg fan and to me, most of them are pretty interchangable but there's plenty of people here who'll tell me that Mother 3 is nothing at all like Persona 4 or Lost Odessey or whatever. My self confessed lack of interest means I view them all as pretty interchangable but that doesn't mean I don't see their worth in the eyes of people who play them. A lot of people enjoy linear games like those and as such, of course companies will keep making them to meet demand. I don't really see how that affects my own game playing.

Of course, I'm lucky in that according to you lot, I'm a pretty "average" gamer. I'm a few years above Brady's demographic but I'm white, male, smoke a bit of pot and enjoy gaming as a form of escapism from my boring job. I have no problem with buying sequels for games I enjoy as in my opinion, they allow me to extend the enjoyment I got from the original. Much as I enjoyed the first Halo, after a while I knew where every single bad guy was going to spawn from, the campaign had grown stale as a result. Halo 2 mostly kept the system, tweaked it a bit and added a new set of enemies in different places, essentially extending the lifespan of the game I already enjoyed.

That's not to say I won't embrace new ideas. I'm probably one of the more vocal supporters of Too Human and Last Remnant here, both brand new games and systems. I'm looking forward to Too Human 2 as I enjoyed playing the first one and would like to play a game using the same system but with some new challenges. Can someone explain why this is a bad thing?

All those of you complaining about games all being identikit, can you explain what exactly it is you are looking for in a game? There's lots of calls for innovation and less recycling but nobody has any suggestions it seems. It's like you're complaining for the sake of it. I find this especially amusing in the light of a few people here posting and implying that they are abnormal gamers and in fact, somehow above normal gamers, like your playing of games is somehow a higher calling or more worthy than mine, simply because I like games that are widely popular. Looking down on people for buying into something popular doesn't make you superior, it makes you weird, a bit sad and ultimately, in line for a lifetime of disappointment. I'm not denying your right to moan about not being catered for by the games development community but until you come to realise that this is a commercial industry and not an art form and that snobbery and commercialism just don't go hand in hand I fear you'll never be happy as gamers.

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

Whilst I agree to some extent, if one views games like that as expansion packs rather than new games, their validity increases. One of the best selling titles last year was that World of Warcraft expansion and as far as I'm aware, that changed the skills around a bit (Akin to a new weapon set in CoDWaW), let you add a few levels to your character and stuck in a big old new area to wander around. That could be a bad example, I've played neither the original nor the expansion so there could be a lot more to it than that but the premis is basically that people enjoy interacting with a game world and an expansion of this kind allows them to continue to do so in a fresh setting. One could argue that charging full price for a game that is little more than an expansion is cheeky but if the consumers weren't willing to pay that much, they wouldn't charge that much.

Even in the case of sports game updates, they do add new features and controls and tweak the AI so it's not exactly just a roster change but even then, if people are willing to fork out for a new Fifa every 9 months then more fool them. Some people just buy one every two or three years when they feel there's been sufficient upgrading to warrant a new purchase and at the end of the day, the sales figures speak for themselves. If these things didn't pay for themselves they wouldn't get made. The development costs involved in updating the rosters in Fifa probably aren't very high so EA get a load of cash from the franchise. This at least gives them the option to be a bit more daring with some of their other releases whilst still keeping the shareholders happy. Whilst you might not agree with the practice, nobody is making you buy EA sports games and the money from people who do is paying for the new Syndicate game or Mass Effect 2 or Lord of the Rings Conquest or the next Burnout or another Left 4 Dead or whatever else, you see?

How ya doing, buddy?

Originally Posted by OmagnusPrime

Oh no, I agree, I'm talking about lazy sequels from the point of view of a gamer who wants more from those experiences.

Fair enough although again, the ambiguity of the titles works in your favour here. Take the new CoD as an example. Most people bought it because they liked the last one and perhaps it failed in that respect as I've heard people say it's a step backwards but then, the internet being what it is, these opinions were freely available within days of the game's release. If you were a fan of the last CoD, you could have read a few customer reviews (Because seriously, who listens to trade reviews any more) and seen that criticism then possibly waited for the price to fall a bit before you bought it. Perhaps you pre-ordered it because of some pre-order bonus but then you're just a sucker for the marketing, the reason they offer pre-order freebies is precisely so everyone will get the game on day one, at full price and before they've had a chance to be put off by negative comments.

You might also have got it early because you wanted to play it online when the community was at it's biggest. It's certainly true that the number of people playing any given game online drops off pretty sharply after a month or so but personally I find the people still playing after that month are more likely to be fun to play with as they're the ones who really enjoy the game. There's probably no more tha a couple of thousand people playing Frontlines online any more but none of them scream into the mic or run round team killing or any of that other shit.

If you were thinking of getting the new CoD because you like WW2 shooters, rather than necessarily the CoD engine, thanks to the surfeit of such games you won't have to wait long for another one to come along and with any luck, whoever makes it will have learned from Treyarch's mistakes and made a better game, you benefit in the long run.

Even if you don't realise it, there is a fairly complex economic decision gong on every time you buy a game. You're weighing up whether the additional cost and risk of buying on day one is worth the bigger online community and free tat you get for pre-ordering and of course, whether it's too much to pay to not have to wait a couple of weeks for the second hand copies to hit the shops.

Games are only worth what people are willing to pay for them. A combination of a lack of personal time to play them and wanting a bargain means I rarely pick things up on day one anymore, instead I wait a couple of weeks and buy a used copy for cheaper. I often play demos first or read peer reviews so I know what the game's actually like rather than buying into the hype but that's my decision.

The problem is perhaps that people are so easily swayed by advertising and hype that they'll rush into things these days. The promise of some Halo 3 levels and an in game flaming Warthog has probably increased pre-orders of Halo Wars by a few thousand, with people not wanting to miss these limited (And yet largely pointless) offers, at the cost of waiting to see if the game's actually any good.

I'm getting slightly off-topic here but I guess my point is that the problem with games these days is that the end users, the gamers are too easily swayed by cheap offers and advertising gimics and as such, developers can hide a sub-standard product behind a raft of pre-order bonuses. The advertising department is now as important as the development team.

In the same way that a democratic country gets the government it deserves, I feel that the gameplaying community gets the games it deserves and whilst people continue to get feverish over day one purchases, developers will continue to cut corners to meet deadlines and save money. Essentially I think if people would take more time to consider their purchases they might be disappointed less often.

What, you don't want my bikini-clad body?

Originally Posted by Bradylama

I don't need to go through all the differences in Frontline: Fuel of War to explain why it wouldn't exist without Battlefield.

Nobody would deny that Frontlines owes a lot to Battlefield and to the casual observer they're basically the same thing. Only anyone who's played both would tell you that when it came out, Frontlines improved on the previous Battlefield games in every possible way. Frontlines allowed for 25 a side battles (I'm comparing console games here) to Battlefield's 16, Frontlines had a single player campaign that was actually fun and worth playing as opposed to Battlefield 2's pointless effort that nobody ever bothered with. Frontlines had a really good balance of vehicles and infantry which worked equally well on the smaller battlefields and the fucking massive ones (Which were massive compared to Battlefield) rather than Battlefield's Helicopter+Tanks=win formula. The balance in Frontlines meant squad cooperation is damn near essential to succeed whereas Battlefield caters for lone-wolf tactics, essentially making it a deathmatch game. Frontlines keeps the combat close by shifting the current objective to where the action is rather than allowing you to skirt roudn the battlefield and pick up the unguarded one at the back. The list of ways in which Frontlines is superior to the previous Battlefield game on 360 is almost endless and as such, why does it matter than it draws a lot from it's predecessor?

From your point of argument, it looks like you're saying that once a game of a certain type has been made, companies should never again make a similar game. That improving on a concept is verboten and all new games must be entirely original ideas and frankly, that's just stupid.

By that logic there would have been no Fallout 2, no Suikoden 2, no Quake (Which was basically Doom, which was a dressed up Wolfenstein), no Command & Conquer, Red Alert, Starcraft, Warcraft or any other RTS after Dune 2, no Galaga (Which is a tarted up Space Invaders after all) and so on and so on.

You simply can't criticise a game because it draws on another game for inspiration, especially when it's something like Frontlines which was made by Kaos Studios, the people who made Battlefield in the first place before Dice took over. Yes, as OP says, direct copies are lazy and pointless but then people very rarely buy direct copies. What people buy are games that are similar to game types they already enjoy but that develop the concept and move the genre forward. Of course there are completely original games from time to time, look at Loco Roco or Katamari for example but these are rarely massive sellers. People are creatures of habit and like the familiarity of a game that's similar to things they already played.

If we were talking about music, would you agree that GWAR are basically pointless because deep down they're just Slayer? (Or some equally silly comparisson, fucked if I actually know who GWAR sound like but I hope you see my point).

Jam it back in, in the dark.

32 man servers, 16 a side but yeah, over a whole map it can get a little lonely, hence why Frontlines upping it to 50 plus the frontline concept meaning only the objectives currently on the frontline are capturable makes for so much better gameplay as all 50 people are generally focused in a smaller area rather than wandering all over the map looking to sneak a capture of an unguarded map at the back (Or spawn camping which to be fair, does happen in Frontlines, especially with the auto-sentrys but a camera switch as you die to show who killed you plus a 5 second spawn invulnerability and the choice to spawn by your squadmates rather than at a base cut that right down). I think the Battlefield maps were slightly smaller on the console versions too.

There's nowhere I can't reach.