What cau$ed the decline?

[Machocruz]

Consoles did it. Not to mention the fast pace that is so popular in all of media nowdays. People want everything to be fast, go quick and then jump to the next, best thing. Sadly.

Ironic given how much slower modern FPS games are compared to the old ones.

One of the turn offs of modern games is how much time they waste on bullshit. Cutscenes, walk-and-chat storytelling, long tutorials, open world travel, climbing shit, QTE sequences, collection quests. And yes, slow ass character movement is another turn off, in action games. The Japanese and FPS developers of old mastered action. Then Halo came along and had you plodding along in your armor suit and set the pace for mainstream FPS ever since. I still enjoyed Halo overall, but others came along and must have thought "Halo has slower movement, and since Halo was a big hit, if we want our game to be a big hit we must have slower movement. Eureka!"

That doesn't negate Xarthrodox's point about attention spans, but it is ironic.

 

[belowmecoldhands]

(..........)
A painted box doesn't cost that much to make (the way early 3d games were made). A transparent box surrounded by a detailed background shell, railings, and lots of mixed details can get pretty expensive.

Now, new tools do reduce the cost of using old tech, but that is true every year all the way back to the 70s, and the tech race ever marches forwards beyond the tools, with graphics whores demanding ever more detail to be added to the people, to the background, to the textures, to the number of unique objects, to the number of unique animations, and so on.

Which is why I think Draq's post is wrong. He wrote something lke "Content creation is getting cheaper because the hardware and software is advancing so nicely. Soon you'll see indie games with AAA quality." The problem is just as indie games are producing AAA quality, theactual AAA games will be years ahead of them. You just can't do with 5-20 people what you can do with 100-300+. It's only limited by our ability to find jobs for those 100-300+ developers. Somehow, I don't see us exhausting it.

Now if you by chance have 5-20 of the most genius creators ever devised by God then maybe. But because AAA companies have the money, they're more likely to buy those genius creators and have them instead. It's like science, don't disbelieve.

 

[a Goat]

I mean there are niche products and distributing channels in other industries. Why not RPGs/videogames? For example, banks give loans to small businesses all the time with no expectation that they will be the next Facebook or Google. They just want to make a return on their investment.

I'm sure I'm missing something here, but it just seems crazy that everyone has this "AAA or go home" kind of attitude. I mean it makes sense for consoles, but for PCs?

As I've said - these games tend to have LOOONG lasting sales, but they get their company on the green years after credit givers will want them to return cash which makes devs jump into another credits and we know how it ends up. Note that while Divinity:Original Sin, along with Dragon Commander paid off, many kickstarter projects didn't and I'm not only talking about Tim 3,3 millions or Peter Molyliar.

At the same time, games are more than small business. Let's pretend we want to make mid-sized game. How much money will we need(I'm assuming we're working in Western Europe or America of course)? 1M? 5? That's a lot of money, small business often costs less than 100k.

Of course - you can always find funding if your niche is particularly attractive for some "special" investors - Bohemia Interactive used to get contracts from some armies(from what I know - at least from US Army) and their games(OFP/ARMA) are toned-down versions of their military simulators with campaign attached. That's why Greeks were so butthurt when they've made photos of their military bases during ARMA 3 pre-production - if somebody ordered them to model part of Greece in their game, it means that said military simulator will have this thing modelled too. Which implies that somebody is interested in training their soldiers "how to fight in Greece".
But I don't know any RPG games that are military sims at the same time so those special investors will be hard to find.

And then there are niche publishers - Paradox it probably the best-known one and they state officially that they're not interested in AAA at all. Not even niche - Ubisoft has their "indie" section with some pretty cool stuff like Child of Light or newer Rayman games(why haven't they made full-fledged 3d sequel yet? I have no flying idea).

Consoles did it. Not to mention the fast pace that is so popular in all of media nowdays. People want everything to be fast, go quick and then jump to the next, best thing. Sadly.

Ironic given how much slower modern FPS games are compared to the old ones.

One of the turn offs of modern games is how much time they waste on bullshit. Cutscenes, walk-and-chat storytelling, long tutorials, open world travel, climbing shit, QTE sequences, collection quests. And yes, slow ass character movement is another turn off, in action games. The Japanese and FPS developers of old mastered action. Then Halo came along and had you plodding along in your armor suit and set the pace for mainstream FPS ever since. I still enjoyed Halo overall, but others came along and must have thought "Halo has slower movement, and since Halo was a big hit, if we want our game to be a big hit we must have slower movement. Eureka!"

That doesn't negate Xarthrodox's point about attention spans, but it is ironic.

Check Turok or Turok 2 if you're at it. They were one of the first FPS games developed with consoles in mind, and they're quite slow(at the same time they offer hilariously good maze-like level design that you'll either love or hate and completely unique weaponry and this is something you won't hate, that's for sure). Halo wasn't first, the formula was here for much longer, Halo popularised it.

 

[Xathrodox86]

I mean there are niche products and distributing channels in other industries. Why not RPGs/videogames? For example, banks give loans to small businesses all the time with no expectation that they will be the next Facebook or Google. They just want to make a return on their investment.

I'm sure I'm missing something here, but it just seems crazy that everyone has this "AAA or go home" kind of attitude. I mean it makes sense for consoles, but for PCs?

As I've said - these games tend to have LOOONG lasting sales, but they get their company on the green years after credit givers will want them to return cash which makes devs jump into another credits and we know how it ends up. Note that while Divinity:Original Sin, along with Dragon Commander paid off, many kickstarter projects didn't and I'm not only talking about Tim 3,3 millions or Peter Molyliar.

At the same time, games are more than small business. Let's pretend we want to make mid-sized game. How much money will we need(I'm assuming we're working in Western Europe or America of course)? 1M? 5? That's a lot of money, small business often costs less than 100k.

Of course - you can always find funding if your niche is particularly attractive for some "special" investors - Bohemia Interactive used to get contracts from some armies(from what I know - at least from US Army) and their games(OFP/ARMA) are toned-down versions of their military simulators with campaign attached. That's why Greeks were so butthurt when they've made photos of their military bases during ARMA 3 pre-production - if somebody ordered them to model part of Greece in their game, it means that said military simulator will have this thing modelled too. Which implies that somebody is interested in training their soldiers "how to fight in Greece".
But I don't know any RPG games that are military sims at the same time so those special investors will be hard to find.

And then there are niche publishers - Paradox it probably the best-known one and they state officially that they're not interested in AAA at all. Not even niche - Ubisoft has their "indie" section with some pretty cool stuff like Child of Light or newer Rayman games(why haven't they made full-fledged 3d sequel yet? I have no flying idea).

Consoles did it. Not to mention the fast pace that is so popular in all of media nowdays. People want everything to be fast, go quick and then jump to the next, best thing. Sadly.

Ironic given how much slower modern FPS games are compared to the old ones.

One of the turn offs of modern games is how much time they waste on bullshit. Cutscenes, walk-and-chat storytelling, long tutorials, open world travel, climbing shit, QTE sequences, collection quests. And yes, slow ass character movement is another turn off, in action games. The Japanese and FPS developers of old mastered action. Then Halo came along and had you plodding along in your armor suit and set the pace for mainstream FPS ever since. I still enjoyed Halo overall, but others came along and must have thought "Halo has slower movement, and since Halo was a big hit, if we want our game to be a big hit we must have slower movement. Eureka!"

That doesn't negate Xarthrodox's point about attention spans, but it is ironic.

Check Turok or Turok 2 if you're at it. They were one of the first FPS games developed with consoles in mind, and they're quite slow(at the same time they offer hilariously good maze-like level design that you'll either love or hate and completely unique weaponry and this is something you won't hate, that's for sure). Halo wasn't first, the formula was here for much longer, Halo popularised it.

And Call of Duty mastered it. Sometimes tough the fillers such as cutscenes or QTEs can work in game's favor. Wolfenstein: The New Order is a good example of that.

 

[DraQ]

Which is why I think Draq's post is wrong. He wrote something lke "Content creation is getting cheaper because the hardware and software is advancing so nicely. Soon you'll see indie games with AAA quality." The problem is just as indie games are producing AAA quality, theactual AAA games will be years ahead of them.

Two things:

• I did specify "turn of century classics" - stuff like Unreal, Deus Ex, Homeworld, Wizardry 8, Morrowind. Today you could feasibly make that sort of game on fraction of original budged thanks to far more powerful tools. I don't care if AAAAAA+ front is advancing faster than the tools and cost reduction enabled by them. The important part is that those tools do advance and keep advancing. And would you honestly scoff at game on par with those classics? They were good enough back then, why not now? We have faux 8 and 16 bit indies coexisting with high budget blockbusters now, why not more advanced ones? AAAAAAA+ market won't be reclaiming the niches it vacated, you know, and you won't need AAAAAA+ level sales to profit from them.
• Visual progression is not infinite. There is only so much visual fidelity a monitor is capable of and only so much human eye is capable of perceiving. AAAAAA+ may keep advancing, but it already suffers from diminishing returns even when not hampered by console hardware - compare the best graphics of today and say 5 years ago - is it easy to spot the difference? Now do the same with similar period around nineties. In the end, even if the AAAAAA+ tech race keeps going (which it won't) you may eventually get indies that are techniaclly everal generations behind the cutting edge, yet near indistinguishable in terms of visual fidelity (and that's why it won't keep going).

(...) QTEs can work in game's favor.

just no.

 

[Machocruz]

Check Turok or Turok 2 if you're at it. They were one of the first FPS games developed with consoles in mind, and they're quite slow(at the same time they offer hilariously good maze-like level design that you'll either love or hate and completely unique weaponry and this is something you won't hate, that's for sure). Halo wasn't first, the formula was here for much longer, Halo popularised it.

I hardly remember Turok. I think I didn't think too highly of the movement, but that might be that I wasn't yet familiar enough with the N64 controls. Halo wasn't the first, but it was the biggest at the right time. I remember it getting all 10s from the review staff at EGM, which like I stated earlier, was not common.

We have faux 8 and 16 bit indies coexisting with high budget blockbusters now, why not more advanced ones?

I think this is coming soon, and I think the game Routine could be an instrumental milestone, a turning point even. It looks little worse than a lot of AAA games, looks to be more faithful to the spirit of Looking Glass design than anything else, and is being made by 4 people. If this happens, all bets are off. No more excuses for AAA cheerleaders, graphics whores, indie haterz, hipster games with "ironically" bad graphics.

There is also Stasis, which looks as good as rendered isometric has ever looked.

I think it will take less time for indie games to reach Xbox 1 level 3D visuals consistently than it has taken them to reach SNES and NES level 2D visuals consistently, which I don't think they have quite done yet. It's the lack of art talent compared to a Capcom. Klei and Yacht Club are the only groups that come to mind that have met or surpassed.

 

[Jedi Master Radek]

Thankfully there is the occasional glimmer of hope. I managed to get someone born in the 21st century to be interested in old school RPGs (and he even enjoys them more than what the AAA rpg genre devolved into).

Share your uplifting story!

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

Why leaves an interesting question: after business side of those corporations will get into hands of people who were playing games from their youth(generation change), will they produce better games? Those gamesr may still be infected by popamole, through....

The people that played Gears of War in their childhood (9s to 10s) will now be 18. Chances are, they have been infected by the popamole.

I think chances are it won't change much, because people who get into high level positions in large corporations tend to be the types who just care much more about business and money and power than art.

 

[Machocruz]

I think chances are it won't change much, because people who get into high level positions in large corporations tend to be the types who just care much more about business and money and power than art.

I have a theory that your dedicated gaming enthusiast has a strong creative impulse, and it's only because they spend most of their hobby time in games (instead of creating) that it's not obvious. I have heard from a number of creative people that when they stopped playing games (or watching TV, or Facebooking), their creativity flourished.

Were a hardcore game enthusiast to seek work in the game industry, I believe they would choose production almost exclusively, not upper management.

 

[Avellion]

Why leaves an interesting question: after business side of those corporations will get into hands of people who were playing games from their youth(generation change), will they produce better games? Those gamesr may still be infected by popamole, through....

The people that played Gears of War in their childhood (9s to 10s) will now be 18. Chances are, they have been infected by the popamole.

I think chances are it won't change much, because people who get into high level positions in large corporations tend to be the types who just care much more about business and money and power than art.

That is most likely. I dont hold much hope for the large corporations. Thankfully there is the mid tier development.

Thankfully there is the occasional glimmer of hope. I managed to get someone born in the 21st century to be interested in old school RPGs (and he even enjoys them more than what the AAA rpg genre devolved into).

Share your uplifting story!

Although rare, some younger people are willing to overlook a somewhat outdated presentation if the gameplay is rock solid. That guy has been generally unimpressed with the likes of Skyrim, Mass Effect and Dragon Age. So I decided to introduce him to Wizardry 8 and treaded backwards in time from there. Point is, even with the submerging of popamole, more old school styles may still find appeal in younger audiences.

 

[Keldryn]

At the same time, games are more than small business. Let's pretend we want to make mid-sized game. How much money will we need(I'm assuming we're working in Western Europe or America of course)? 1M? 5? That's a lot of money, small business often costs less than 100k.

It starts to add up very quickly. For the sake of easy numbers, say that you have 3 designers, 3 programmers, and 4 artists, and you're paying each one $50k per year (which is a pretty crappy salary for an experienced programmer). So you're already looking at half a million per year in salaries alone just for the core creative team. Then you also need to consider a sound engineer, a composer, at least 2 dedicated QA people to continually test your game as each new build is done, software licenses, computer hardware, console devkit licenses & hardware (if applicable), rent and maintenance of an office space, benefits for your regular staff, adminstrative overhead, potentially the cost of licensing an engine or middleware, advertising/marketing, and much larger scale QA once you lock down content. You'll probably need two years to make a mid-sized game with that team (and that might be pushing it), so yeah, you'll find yourself hitting $2 million pretty quickly. With a team of this size, everyone is going to be seriously underpaid when you consider what their salaries equate to as an hourly rate.

Were a hardcore game enthusiast to seek work in the game industry, I believe they would choose production almost exclusively, not upper management.

Definitely. The few hardcore game enthusiasts who are in upper management roles are generally the guys who originally founded the company in order to make the kind of games they like. I would say that the major publishers tend to be managed by "suits," but the individual development studios (even when owned by a major publisher) are usually headed by gaming enthusiasts. The guys who head up Rockstar, for example (Sam & Dan Houser) are hardcore gamers and are directly involved in the creative process of each game produced by the studio (including serving as the primary writers).

 

[tuluse]

At the same time, games are more than small business. Let's pretend we want to make mid-sized game. How much money will we need(I'm assuming we're working in Western Europe or America of course)? 1M? 5? That's a lot of money, small business often costs less than 100k.

Most businesses don't take 2 years to start generating revenue.

 

[IncendiaryDevice]

Although rare, some younger people are willing to overlook a somewhat outdated presentation if the gameplay is rock solid. That guy has been generally unimpressed with the likes of Skyrim, Mass Effect and Dragon Age. So I decided to introduce him to Wizardry 8 and treaded backwards in time from there. Point is, even with the submerging of popamole, more old school styles may still find appeal in younger audiences.

Not as rare as you might think. The current crop of kiddywinkles are growing up with phone games. You might despise phone games on principle (Not you personally, but you as a codex generalism) but most phone games are pretty old-school looking 2d affairs, such as the first big winner from the genre Angry Birds which is just an improved 2d flash game. The generation which has the hardest time adapting to the older games are the ones who started gaming in the early 2000s and only have experience of a plethora of triple A 3d nonsesne, who spend most of their time arguing about pixel density count and character creation barbie options.

 

[zwanzig_zwoelf]

Although rare, some younger people are willing to overlook a somewhat outdated presentation if the gameplay is rock solid. That guy has been generally unimpressed with the likes of Skyrim, Mass Effect and Dragon Age. So I decided to introduce him to Wizardry 8 and treaded backwards in time from there. Point is, even with the submerging of popamole, more old school styles may still find appeal in younger audiences.

Not as rare as you might think. The current crop of kiddywinkles are growing up with phone games. You might despise phone games on principle (Not you personally, but you as a codex generalism) but most phone games are pretty old-school looking 2d affairs, such as the first big winner from the genre Angry Birds which is just an improved 2d flash game. The generation which has the hardest time adapting to the older games are the ones who started gaming in the early 2000s and only have experience of a plethora of triple A 3d nonsesne, who spend most of their time arguing about pixel density count and character creation barbie options.

Most phone games are shit.
Why would anyone consider buying or developing a mobile game (unless it's a port from the system that won't be emulated in quite a while), when you can download RetroArch and play tons of genuine, superior games?

 

[Reapa]

I think what's even more interesting is to think of the flip side of this question: what caused the incline?

Think about it...the Internet has been around for a while. Why did it take until 2012 for Kickstarter? There were indie developers this whole time...why did it take so long for the, to make quality/niche /profitable games?

For example, to me it seems like the ingredients for D:OS have been there for years.

who the fuck said D:OS was any incline?

 

[Sykar]

Well partly because retards like this exist. From a negative Dota 2 review on Steam:

"this game is awful i have no idea why i play it"

Checking his time played on Dota 2: 3,474.5 hrs on record

Holy sweet mother of fucking christ, you play a game you think is awful for NEARLY 3500 hours, you irredeemably retarded dumbass? How the hell do you even manage autonomous body functions? Shouldn't you even lack intelligence to inhale?

 

[Xathrodox86]

Well partly because retards like this exist. From a negative Dota 2 review on Steam:

"this game is awful i have no idea why i play it"

Checking his time played on Dota 2: 3,474.5 hrs on record

Holy sweet mother of fucking christ, you play a game you think is awful for NEARLY 3500 hours, you irredeemably retarded dumbass? How the hell do you even manage autonomous body functions? Shouldn't you even lack intelligence to inhale?

I used to run a game I've hated for over a year and play it for another half. It happens.

 

[zero29]

"gambling is awful i have no idea why i do it"
not retarded, addicted.

 

[Sykar]

Well partly because retards like this exist. From a negative Dota 2 review on Steam:

"this game is awful i have no idea why i play it"

Checking his time played on Dota 2: 3,474.5 hrs on record

Holy sweet mother of fucking christ, you play a game you think is awful for NEARLY 3500 hours, you irredeemably retarded dumbass? How the hell do you even manage autonomous body functions? Shouldn't you even lack intelligence to inhale?

I used to run a game I've hated for over a year and play it for another half. It happens.

Which game?

"gambling is awful i have no idea why i do it"
not retarded, addicted.

It could be it, but I do not buy it all the time.

 

[pippin]

Well partly because retards like this exist. From a negative Dota 2 review on Steam:

"this game is awful i have no idea why i play it"

Checking his time played on Dota 2: 3,474.5 hrs on record

Holy sweet mother of fucking christ, you play a game you think is awful for NEARLY 3500 hours, you irredeemably retarded dumbass? How the hell do you even manage autonomous body functions? Shouldn't you even lack intelligence to inhale?

People use to do those reviews as a joke. You fell for the b8

 

[Azarkon]

Apologies if this subject has been done to death, but I realize that while it's generally accepted that cRPGs (and, arguably, gaming as a whole) went into a decline starting in the early 2000s, I don't have a very firm understanding of what caused it to happen and what is ultimately driving the recent promise of a turnaround.

Decline in what sense?

What Codex calls decline, the suits call expansion. CRPGs did take a nose dive in the early 2000s, but that was when MMORPGs were literally exploding in popularity. Everquest was released in 1999 and experienced year-by-year player base expansion till its peak around 800,000 players in 2004, when WoW released and became the biggest MMORPG of all time, growing upwards to 10.5+ million subscriptions in the late 2000s. This MMO fad was in turn surpassed by the even larger explosion of MOBA games in the last 5-6 years. Between League of Legends and Dota 2, they've now captured upwards of a 80+ million players market - completely unthinkable in the late 1990s.

At the same time, you had the concurrent expansion of the EA sports franchise, Call of Duty, GTA, and all the mainstream games that Codex loves to hate, each boasting tens of millions of sales each year. It's not though the games industry crashed around this time. No, the games industry exploded during this time. Revenues quadrupled from 1997 to 2008. It was not till the advent of online distribution and free-to-play business models in the late 2000s that retail sales began to fall. But in fact, revenues are still increasing, just not in the same areas:

It's fine to talk about games being dumbed down for the masses, but were that the only active force, we'd see dumbed down CRPGs at the top of the sales charts, but we don't. The Mass Effect games only sold about 3-4 million units, on average. Same with Oblivion, and even worse with Witcher and DA. Except for Besthesda's Skyrim and Blizzard's Diablo 3, no CRPG game has managed to break the 5 million units mark for a decade. The decline in CRPGs is thus fundamentally different from the 'decline' of the games industry. It's also a stretch to call a modern FPS eg Call of Duty a 'dumbed down' version of Doom, Quake, etc.

To this end, I'd rather see the decline of CRPGs as the trials and tribulations of a very specific group of developers, rather than the fault of the industry at large. Because when it comes down to it, the decline of CRPGs - in the Codex sense - primarily has to do with the decline/demise of three studios: Interplay, Bioware, and Troika, who were responsible for the late 90s CRPG boom that brought the Codex - along with the bulk of the other 'old school CRPG' sites - into existence, and it's their style of games - rather, an idealized version - that is held up as the holy grail of CRPGs. The Codex, despite its edginess, is still at its core a community of BIS, Bioware, and Troika fans/bitter ex-fans.

 

[tuluse]

What the fuck?

No has ever meant a decline in sales or revenue, it's always been a decline of quality and availability of certain niches.

 

[Tigranes]

Joined in 2005, huh...

 

[IncendiaryDevice]

Joined in 2005, huh...

Welcome to the codex, where pedantically debating the minutia merits of two shit games gets you plastered with ho-ho-ho unique tags like you're a leper, because you think fast flowing natural solo-character gameplay beats having a cut-scene ridden snailfeat pointless team party gameplay, but you can post the most tarded shit for decades, just so long as your minor opinion differences don't effect a moderator...

Look out for more great insights from some old-timers in the future, such as "Worms 3d was great because Half-Life was great" and "Planescape: Torment would have sold better if it was a gun-toting sci-fi story", not to mention "premium quality brands can't exist in a voluminous market"...

 

[Lilura]

Except for Besthesda's Skyrim and Blizzard's Diablo 3, no CRPG game

You don't need to say Bethesda's Skyrim or Blizzard's Diablo 3. We all know who shat those titles out.

"CRPG game"? - "computer role-playing game game"?

Skyrim and Diablo 3 are cRPGs to you?