Is it just me getting older and crustier, or is there a lamentably dimishing trend in the PC Games market? So many of the 'new' releases are little more than rehashes of tired, old formulae that have been churned out repeatedly for over 10 years. And furthermore many of the much vaunted upcoming mainstream titles are merely sequels of existing mediocraty.
In RTS's, World War 2 has been done so often that the very mention of it in a title turns me off almost immediately (Order of War being yet another one). Only Majesty appears willing to try anything different, and even that's a sequel to a game originally released in 2000.
MMO's all want to be like WoW but rarely achieve anything unique enough to drag people away from the roller coaster chewing gum addiction with which Blizzard has infested our lives. Eve manages to be unique, but it's an acquired taste. Jumpgate Evolution looks more and more like WoW In Space with every new blog.
When hunting around for engaging strategy games, I am presented with the same handful of old titles over and over again: Civ4 (2005), Rome: Total War (2004) and XCOM: UFO Defence (1993!). Has there really been no evolutionary development of the genre for so long?
RPG's seem to be suffering from a surfeit of sequel syndrome (alliteration ftw): Oblivion, Fallout 3, Fable 2 (not PC mind you), Mass Effect 2...none of which are necessarily any more engaging than the originals and too often patently worse.
You all know I'm not much of a fan of FPS's at the best of times, not least because I honestly believe that genre has yet to develop its gameplay concept significantly from the days of Doom and Quake. Only Farcry 2 really made much effort to take things in a genuinely new direction but even that fell short of the mark (and arguably ArmA2, if you care to include that in the FPS genre although it leans more towards a tactical sim than anything else).
It's a sad indictment of the industry that some of the most enthralling games I've played this year are pretty ancient by computer game standards: SimCity 4, XCOM, Mount & Blade and Civ4, albeit only one of which isn't a sequel. Is Molyneux right when he says that PC gaming is dead?
Where did all the good games go?
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I've been wondering the same thing. There was a time that I'd look through each new issue of PCG and want at least two games in there. Now I'm not interested in most of them, and there are months where not a single game scores over 85%.
In some respects I agree with you, that not much is being released with originality, but in another respect I think that the established genres are progressing. COD4 is a far cry (excuse the pun) from Doom. It has the same basic principles but it's been refined to be a far superior game. The same can be said about RTSs - compare Dune 2 to Red Alert 3, Empire Total War and Supreme Commander and you can see just how far the genre has come.
I'm not sure PC gaming has stagnated, and I certainly don't agree with Molyneux - PCs are in no different situation to consoles with respect to originality. Games before were limited by technology, and as new technology allowed people to realise their ideas more accurately we were treated to marvellous new genres. However now it's hard to see what can be improved on, superficially at least. I think the differences will be harder to spot - improved AI and physics rather than 3D graphics and higher resolutions.
Unfortunately you do have a point about new ideas being sparse. Gaming is a far more mainstream industry than it once was, and so the audience is far more mainstream. Games appeal to the masses, and so, like the movie and music industry, the publishers fund what the masses comfortable with, because for the most part that's all they'll buy.
In some respects I agree with you, that not much is being released with originality, but in another respect I think that the established genres are progressing. COD4 is a far cry (excuse the pun) from Doom. It has the same basic principles but it's been refined to be a far superior game. The same can be said about RTSs - compare Dune 2 to Red Alert 3, Empire Total War and Supreme Commander and you can see just how far the genre has come.
I'm not sure PC gaming has stagnated, and I certainly don't agree with Molyneux - PCs are in no different situation to consoles with respect to originality. Games before were limited by technology, and as new technology allowed people to realise their ideas more accurately we were treated to marvellous new genres. However now it's hard to see what can be improved on, superficially at least. I think the differences will be harder to spot - improved AI and physics rather than 3D graphics and higher resolutions.
Unfortunately you do have a point about new ideas being sparse. Gaming is a far more mainstream industry than it once was, and so the audience is far more mainstream. Games appeal to the masses, and so, like the movie and music industry, the publishers fund what the masses comfortable with, because for the most part that's all they'll buy.
Last year had a load of great games. Fallout 3, Far Cry 2 and Dawn of War 2 to name a few that I liked. Note that while they were all sequels, they were all far enough removed from the original games that they might as well have been renamed or rebranded entirely anyway.
This year I have Champions Online entertaining me a fair amount, with Modern Warfare 2 and STALKER: Call of Pripyat on the way. Oh, and Borderlands looks pretty interesting too.
You don't need hundreds of games bombarding you every year. What are you going to do with all of them?
This year I have Champions Online entertaining me a fair amount, with Modern Warfare 2 and STALKER: Call of Pripyat on the way. Oh, and Borderlands looks pretty interesting too.
You don't need hundreds of games bombarding you every year. What are you going to do with all of them?
Maybe it's a perspective thing. I bought all three of those and didn't complete any. It could just be that the longer you've been playing games the higher your expectations become, and that mine and Friz's have become unrealistic. Certainly I've found that going back and playing old games I loved at the time is disappointing as I find most of them to be not nearly as good as I remembered. The ones that do stand up, interestingly, are often ones that were considered to have poor aesthetics even on release - the likes of X-Com and Civ.Shada wrote:Last year had a load of great games. Fallout 3, Far Cry 2 and Dawn of War 2 to name a few that I liked.
This is true, as long as you have a few good games to keep you playing.Shada wrote:You don't need hundreds of games bombarding you every year. What are you going to do with all of them?
It's the opposite for me. The longer I play games the less I expect developers to tailor games specifically to what I want, and the more I come to accept that there will never be a huge open ended post-apocalyptic horror RPG/FPS hybrid with randomly generated features for endless replayability.
Borderlands is looking pretty close to that dream, though.
Borderlands is looking pretty close to that dream, though.
I think the Old Crusty must have alot to do with it - I personally have nearly 20 years of gaming 'experience', starting with Hungry Horace (the first game I ever bought, on cassette, for my Dragon 32) and so far ending with Armed Assault 2 (my latest purchase, downloaded from Steam, for a computer that has more processing power in the keyboard than the Dragon had in the whole box). Throughout that time I have played a variety of games, many of which were conceptually brilliant, ground breaking or unique.
The problem being that for every new title that's released, you somehow expect it to be at least as good as the last-one-that-was-similar but with all the bad bits improved upon. So for example, Rise of Nations had to be better than Red Alert which had to be better than Star Craft which had to be better than Command and Conquer which had to be better than Dune 2. Which we all know isn't exactly the case, because it just doesn't work like that. We expect new titles to be increasingly sophisticated and are therefore disappointed when they are simply more of the same, albeit with slightly better graphics or a new toy gimmick (e.g. throwing chickens around, or setting fire to the grass).
It's interesting to see, for example, that Bohemia is remaking Carrier Command which in the day was the nirvana of open ended strategy simulations and kept me hooked for years. I'm betting it'll feel shallow and over simplistic this time around though.
The problem being that for every new title that's released, you somehow expect it to be at least as good as the last-one-that-was-similar but with all the bad bits improved upon. So for example, Rise of Nations had to be better than Red Alert which had to be better than Star Craft which had to be better than Command and Conquer which had to be better than Dune 2. Which we all know isn't exactly the case, because it just doesn't work like that. We expect new titles to be increasingly sophisticated and are therefore disappointed when they are simply more of the same, albeit with slightly better graphics or a new toy gimmick (e.g. throwing chickens around, or setting fire to the grass).
It's interesting to see, for example, that Bohemia is remaking Carrier Command which in the day was the nirvana of open ended strategy simulations and kept me hooked for years. I'm betting it'll feel shallow and over simplistic this time around though.
Yeah, I'll give you that.
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buzzmong
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It has got to a plateau at the moment.
Lots of the issues come with the console crowd, not the end gamers fault but the marketing teams, they keep pushing for better and more realistic graphics to use to flog the games with, which is why I hope that new ray tracing hardware is the equivilant to the invention of the GPU rather than onboard Phys-x.
It's the push for "better" graphics that has stunted the advances in gameplay, like Pants has said, go back to some of the original titles of yonder years and they reached their graphical plateau with their hardware and focussed on making good games. Nowadays with the money being poured in for graphics and crucially, the development time spent on graphics is removing time from other areas, namely the actual game. Duke Nuken Forever is a good example of this, there was probably a good game for all the versions, but it's base tech kept getting scrapped and replaced in order to improve the graphics, not the game.
It's happened before and it'll happen again.
For another example, I present the Quake 3 Engine based games via this link:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/c ... tree_2.svg
Once the technology gets past a certain point, you start getting different and more fun games, just look at the list of the Q3 based games, some classics in there.
This is why I hope the ray tracing hardware will work, because it'll mean graphics suddenly become a whole lot closer to being completely real and essentially unimprovable for the most part.
Lots of the issues come with the console crowd, not the end gamers fault but the marketing teams, they keep pushing for better and more realistic graphics to use to flog the games with, which is why I hope that new ray tracing hardware is the equivilant to the invention of the GPU rather than onboard Phys-x.
It's the push for "better" graphics that has stunted the advances in gameplay, like Pants has said, go back to some of the original titles of yonder years and they reached their graphical plateau with their hardware and focussed on making good games. Nowadays with the money being poured in for graphics and crucially, the development time spent on graphics is removing time from other areas, namely the actual game. Duke Nuken Forever is a good example of this, there was probably a good game for all the versions, but it's base tech kept getting scrapped and replaced in order to improve the graphics, not the game.
It's happened before and it'll happen again.
For another example, I present the Quake 3 Engine based games via this link:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/c ... tree_2.svg
Once the technology gets past a certain point, you start getting different and more fun games, just look at the list of the Q3 based games, some classics in there.
This is why I hope the ray tracing hardware will work, because it'll mean graphics suddenly become a whole lot closer to being completely real and essentially unimprovable for the most part.
Not entirely true, it's not how long you have been playing games, it comes down to whether or not you played the classics. I mean anyone who played for example Monkey Island can't help but compare all those new adventure games to it. Expectations are not raised over time, but each time a game tops the bar, you expect everything that comes after to be equivalent or better. What makes the usual good game though? It's something you enjoy completing, and not only the first time, something you can revisit year after year, something that you can regard in 5 years as something you enjoyed playing all over again, in 10 years you can call it a real classic, and there is an important yet not required, but often forgotten feature which the old games didn't have the capability to do, and that's modding. Even omitting the last one, I can only name one game that actually I will mention as a classic in a decade, and that's Portal.Dog Pants wrote:It could just be that the longer you've been playing games the higher your expectations become
The gaming industry today just lets you down, they keep saying here we're making this game which will make your jaws drop so deep you can actually use it to masturbate, well I say bring it. The past few years were really just a disappointment.
Last edited by Baliame on September 8th, 2009, 15:33, edited 1 time in total.
Good point with the modding. It certainly extends the lifespan of a game, almost creating a metagame in itself. I'm sure that Warcraft's success is at least partially down to the amount of stuff you can do to the game and outside the game, and loads of shooters have had massive success by being moddable.
Exactly, let me bring up DotA for example, it's the most popular Warcraft mod ever, I mean seriously, barely anyone actually plays the game itself now. Without it, Warcraft would be pretty much dead. BUT it should be demoralizing to the actual developers that they created an engine basically, but noone actually cares about the game that shipped with it, that's just not the right design approach. Have you seen the last few Warcraft updates, they were basically only adding modding features, it's like you have a very average house built, then come the guys who built it and tell you, hey, here's some tools for you, how about you build yourself a better one here, and five years later he comes back and tells you, hey, here's some more tools, now go get working. What's really the point here is that if you write a game that's pretty mediocre, you cannot expect the community to make it awesome for you.Dog Pants wrote:I'm sure that Warcraft's success is at least partially down to the amount of stuff you can do to the game and outside the game, and loads of shooters have had massive success by being moddable.
I think a good example for a moddable game done right is the original UT, and that's what you're probably thinking about as well, it's been still absurdly popular even after UT04 came out, the game itself was very well done and more than enough to keep a playerbase around for a while.
In fact, an even better example should be Counter-Strike, it had a target group of elitist fags, and it was pretty much a hit there too. Modding is still present in the game but it's really restricted to very basic stuff, and while that's not good, it's an excellent example of a game keeping players around without the need of mods.
TL;DR Modding should be a bonus.
EDIT: paragraphs for Pantsu!
Last edited by Baliame on September 8th, 2009, 16:17, edited 1 time in total.