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

Personally, I tend towards the expectation that anything can be good if someone is given enough time to work on it.

It's my belief that because gaming has become more popular, it has become more industrial. Where before you might have a studio that was made up of like-minded individuals who had the same vision of their perfect game, now the publishers and to a lesser degree the dev studios themselves make it a point to stick to the dev cycle. A studio might have a great idea, but in order to get the money to have it published, they have to agree to get it done in a year, or a year and a half.

Now, I don't know about you guys, but working under a stopwatch has never been good for my own creativity. I imagine the same goes for anyone who isn't totally committed to the game they're making (and sometimes even if they are).

Producers have always been present in game design, but it's only more recently that an expanding userbase has increased their expectations.

Let's take a game like Diablo, for example. I was on the internet around the time it was released, but I never heard a thing about the game until I got word of mouth from my step-brother, who had bought it and showed me a bit of it. The features on it were amazing for the time, but this was a game that had been under construction for 4 years, IIRC.

Compare that to something like Advent Rising, which had a huge hype train running behind it at the time of release, but got slammed because of the bugs and general disorganization in the game. The actual gameplay was great, but it was obvious it hadn't spent long enough in the oven, so that even if the whole team felt committed to making a stand alone universe, ripe for a trilogy, they were still committed to putting something out on the shelves, because their publisher had demanded it be so.

There's nothing sinister about publishers or producers, because it's their job to ensure tangible results from the creative side of things. But, the expectations people have about video games today is that if they haven't surfaced for some time, they're probably dead in the water. (See Team Fortress 2) So because most studios don't have the leisure of whittling away large chunks of time and money on an assuredly great game, they settle with a publisher and do the best they can in the time they're given.

Which, I suppose, has simply become less than it used to be. The thought seems to be that as long as they get a large enough quantity of bodies in a room, they'll make a cash cow, when really what they need more of is time.

And of course, because there's no guarantee that something as good as, say, Shadow of the Colossus or Odin Sphere will make big returns, most publishers would rather play it safe than take chances.

It's really no one's fault that gaming got this way. It just got popular, is all. Attract enough attention to something and you'll get it standardized and riddled with bureaucracy in no time.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Originally Posted by RacinReaver

Duke Nukem Forever is so going to be the best game ever.

Did you have something to contribute or are you going to busy yourself with a strawman?

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Originally Posted by RacinReaver

But take my favorite game at the moment, TF2. Do you really think it takes as long as they're waiting between patches to create the new content, or do you think they're just dragging their feet for no good reason?

With Valve? I'd say yes, truthfully. Depending on how many people they have actively working on it, they do a lot of playtesting and balancing before anything sees the light of day.

It doesn't hurt that the staggered releases help keep interest levels high in the game and produce good word of mouth, but I don't think they squander the time that they're given, by any means.

Valve happens to be the exception to the rule in the gaming industry right now, however. They are running counter to a lot of business models that other companies hold dear, and fortunately for us it seems to be working well.

I don't think longer=better, which is why I responded the way I did. But the tendency is to push the deadline aspect of it, and put the product out in a functional state, instead of trying to see that it reaches its original vision. It's a disappointing fact of the industry, but it's also sometimes with good reason. Vanguard was doomed to failure from the start, if the behind-the-scenes stuff about the main producer being a paranoid drug addict are to be believed. But they salvaged something out of it to make a product that was, if substandard, at least playable. (As opposed to nothing at all)

My point is that there's a threshold. When you involve enough people who don't share the original spark that started the project in the first place (or if no one cares about the project they're working on other than to get a paycheck), you get poorly made games. So, in other words, trying to say that there's too many games of this genre or that this kind of gamer is ruining everyone else's fun, or even that games X years ago had it all figured out is not seeing the bigger picture.

They didn't have it all figured out, there just weren't as many people breathing down their neck about it. Gaming wasn't a cash cow (at least not as big of one) as it is today.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.