How conservative are you? What new shit do you want?

[Panthera]

I currently have Quake installed with tons of custom SP maps alongside current-gen games such as Mirror's Edge and Divinity 2.

I honestly don't care how old a game is, as long as it's good.

So why are you playing Quake?

 

[Zomg]

You can think all you want, but you aren't getting anywhere with that hypothesis.

Game developers are the conservative force today. Like their political cousins, they have a checklist of 10 rules and every commercial game must meet 8 of them.

Us old codgers don't hate these games for being "new", they are anything but. We hate them because they are homogenized crap and we cut our teeth on a much more progressive gaming environment where developers could build whatever crazy idea popped into their head just by mortgaging their house or going into credit card debt to raise $50k.

Too good of a post to be at the bottom of the last page.

 

[doctor_kaz]

I love advancements and innovations in gaming. The problem is, there have hardly been any in the last five years or so. What we have gotten in the last five years is not progress or innovation. It's dumbing down, stripping down, and gimping. Games like Bioshock have gotten undue credit for innovating and advancing gaming when all they have done is present gimped or stripped down versions of better games that came out years before on the PC. Since the PC titles were more niche titles, the majority of the gaming public is unaware that they are just being sold inferior remakes of old games. The major efforts in gaming since the middle of the X-Box era have not involved making games better. They have involved trying to figure out how to shoehorn staples of PC gaming like shooters and strategy games onto consoles without ruining them (my opinion -- they have failed miserably). There has also been a lot of sacrifice of gameplay to provide a "cinematic" experience, which usually means taking control out of the gamer's hands and turning all sorts of actions into glorified quick time events. Playing through interactive movies is not something that I want in gaming.

This is not a question of "conservative" vs. "progressive". This is not old codgers clinging to an old way simply out of sentimental value. Progress is TV over radio, color TV over black and white, and HDTV over standard definition. CDs over cassettes, ipods over CDs. Anti-lock brakes and power steering vs non anti-lock brakes and non power steering. What's happening in gaming nowadays is not progress. It's more like the same deevolution phenomenon that has happened in music and movies. Once the XBox 360 and PS3 get motion controllers, I think that you are going to see this bad trend accelerate. If consolization ruined PC gaming, Wii-zation is going to ruin next gen console gaming.

A major culprit in this deevolution is the decay of the games journalism business, which is a shadow of its former self. Games criticism is a complete joke nowadays. If you look at five or ten year old reviews on sites like Gamespot, you will find that they used to be harsher on games and more honest. If you want to see something hilarious, go to Gamespot and watch their video review for The Getaway. They rip on it for its lame attempts at "cinematic' gameplay and realism like having no HUD and regenerating health. Nowadays, games are praised endlessly for this shit. More and more I find myself playing games that get 10/10 A+++ scores and thinking that the reviewers must have taken an envelope of cash to hand out the score the game got. The popularity of the Wii, the worst console of the last decade, is largely due to all of the glowing media coverage that it got even though the majority of the games on it are absolutely terrible and the motion control is awful.

There have been a few rays of hope lately like Risen and yes, Dragon Age despite some major flaws, but overall I have been getting a lot less enjoyment out of games in the past couple of years.

 

[Squeek]

Here's what I want to see happen. I'd like a software company to create an entirely new kind of online RPG service aimed at everyone who owns a computer and also enjoys reading science-fiction and/or fantasy-adventure.

Instead of creating individual programs that are sold separately, it would be in the business of developing and offering access to a single-player CRPG multiverse whose content would exist in a myriad of possibilities for the player.

There would collaboration between the player and an automated intelligence controlling content distribution. It would act as the ultimate judge of C&C and do it with style and personality. Its criteria would be a mystery and always subject to change.

Each character you played would experience its own unique adventures in a place that would always remain an enigma and be beloved for it.

Just my opinion.

Edit: cleanup and misc little changes

 

[obediah]

A major culprit in this deevolution is the decay of the games journalism business, which is a shadow of its former self. Games criticism is a complete joke nowadays. If you look at five or ten year old reviews on sites like Gamespot, you will find that they used to be way harsher on games and much more honest. If you want to see something hilarious, go to Gamespot and watch their video review for The Getaway. They rip on it for its lame attempts at "cinematic' gameplay and realism like having no HUD and regenerating health. Nowadays, games are praised endlessly for this shit. More and more I find myself playing games that get 10/10 A+++ scores and thinking that the reviewers must have taken an envelope of cash to hand out the score the game got.

One quick contention, before I ramble. Developer pressure is not the only reason reviewers inflate scores. Popular reviewers aren't trying to educate consumers, they are trying to guess the consumer response. The days of reading professional reviews before deciding to buy a game (AAA hyped blockbusters, at least) are over. Just like modern journalism, reviewers process the facts and present them in a light that their readers want to hear.

The "decay" of gaming journalism is a result rather than a cause. Once upon a time, a large portion of gamers wanted to make educated decisions on whether or not to purchase a game. Now, just like popular music, film, television and books informed consumers are a very small minority. For every person that wants to no if a new games is good, 100 want to know if it's 'star wars', and another 500 juts care if it's cool to want it. So game reviewers are left with the same choice as reviewers in other media - be an out-of-touch elitest, spurned by the vast majority of gamers, or just follow the hype. The cost of producing a high quality game makes gaming even worse in that an elitest reviewer would be forced to hate almost everything because beyond the indie hobbyists, everyone is making the same safe crap.

 

[doctor_kaz]

A major culprit in this deevolution is the decay of the games journalism business, which is a shadow of its former self. Games criticism is a complete joke nowadays. If you look at five or ten year old reviews on sites like Gamespot, you will find that they used to be way harsher on games and much more honest. If you want to see something hilarious, go to Gamespot and watch their video review for The Getaway. They rip on it for its lame attempts at "cinematic' gameplay and realism like having no HUD and regenerating health. Nowadays, games are praised endlessly for this shit. More and more I find myself playing games that get 10/10 A+++ scores and thinking that the reviewers must have taken an envelope of cash to hand out the score the game got.

One quick contention, before I ramble. Developer pressure is not the only reason reviewers inflate scores. Popular reviewers aren't trying to educate consumers, they are trying to guess the consumer response. The days of reading professional reviews before deciding to buy a game (AAA hyped blockbusters, at least) are over. Just like modern journalism, reviewers process the facts and present them in a light that their readers want to hear.

This is good insight and there is a lot of truth to this. I still think though that reviews do make a big difference to the sales of games despite the common perception that they don't make a difference at all. Dragon Age for example has sold very well, but if it had gotten shitty reviews I think that it would have flopped. Ditto for other new IPs like Assassins Creed, Uncharted, Infamous, etc. There are poorly reviewed games that sell well, but they are always either sequels of good games or licensed properties. There are also critical darlings that don't sell very well at first (like Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time), but very often the sequels to those games sell very well (e.g. Warrior Within was a hit immediately). Even if they don't make a difference when it comes to sales, I think that reviews heavily influence how other developers make their games. The industry is so full of copycatting that one badly overrated game can ruin numerous other games just by imitation. A perfect example of this would be Gears of War and how a cover system gets shoehorned into almost every shooter nowadays, regardless of whether it makes sense. I think that the Wii is another blatant example of how the games journalism business failed. If the Wii had been honestly evaluated from the getgo, it would have had significantly less buzz at first and Microsoft and Sony might not be wasting time and money on motion controllers right now. Instead, the usual culprits like G4, Gamespot, 1up, etc raved about how innovative and revolutionary it was when they should have been pointing out that motion control is a shitty gimmick that stops being fun after about five minutes.

 

[Phelot]

A major culprit in this deevolution is the decay of the games journalism business, which is a shadow of its former self. Games criticism is a complete joke nowadays. If you look at five or ten year old reviews on sites like Gamespot, you will find that they used to be way harsher on games and much more honest. If you want to see something hilarious, go to Gamespot and watch their video review for The Getaway. They rip on it for its lame attempts at "cinematic' gameplay and realism like having no HUD and regenerating health. Nowadays, games are praised endlessly for this shit. More and more I find myself playing games that get 10/10 A+++ scores and thinking that the reviewers must have taken an envelope of cash to hand out the score the game got.

Yeah and the big review sites unfair treatment of smaller games. For example, I was reading a review for Warhammer: Mark of Chaos on some major site. Now, I know the game is pretty bad as far as gameplay is concerned, but as for the graphics? I thought it rivaled most modern games at the time and yet the reviewer thought he'd use this opportunity to out right lie and show off his meme dropping abilities by blasting the graphics and art as if they were made by high school students or something. There was a lot to bash about the game, graphics wasn't one of them.

I've seen it elsewhere. Another review for Risen said the graphics were old looking when they look better then Dragon Age's by a long shot. In the gamespot review, they said the combat was unsatisfying and lacked "rhythm and flow." What does that even mean? And I thought the combat was very satisfying, in that it was difficult, so when you prevail it's a great feeling. What does this guy consider satisfying?

 

[Good Ol' Drog]

I currently have Quake installed with tons of custom SP maps alongside current-gen games such as Mirror's Edge and Divinity 2.

I honestly don't care how old a game is, as long as it's good.

So why are you playing Quake?

It's one of the fastest FPSs ever made. It's great fun. I can't stand most of modern "realistic" shooters that move at a snail's pace and are constantly interrupted by cutscenes and QTEs. Quake never claims to be realistic, and its levels are surreal. Each mapper is free to interpret the setting in his own way, that's why there's such a diversity in maps.

I suggest you try some of custom maps, if you haven't. The biggest archive of SP maps is here. It's being constantly updated, since maps are still being made, 13 years since the release of the game. Can you show me another game that has such a long standing community (besides Doom, of course)?

 

[deuxhero]

I believe all genres gained a lot by moving to 3D. Except RPGs. So fuck progress I guess.

What did text based adventures gain from 3d?

 

[Alex]

Two new exits?

 

[Hory]

Text adventures aren't videogames.

 

[Kaanyrvhok]

Meh. Action combat in an RPG is nothing new. I remember a game called Little Ninja Brothers on the NES that played very similarly to Jade Empire, but I never played Shenmue. This is because I abandoned Sega when it had clearly turned to shit.

After the Saturn Sega had to come with something and they did. I thought the Dreamcast years was their best. It was the main reason I got back into console gaming. I was done with it after the PS 2. It was of coarse too late though.

What was new about Shenmue was the fact that the fighting engine was the Virtua Fighter engine. It was even better than Virtua Fighter. It was more defensive while most fighting games play to a rhythm of attack attack attack block block attack attack Shenmue was evade evade attack attack block evade. And there wasnt much combat. Shenmue 1&2 combined had maybe a 20th of the combat in DA. So you had a game that had very little combat with an engine thats designed for nothing but combat. Thats the opposite of other Action RPGs.

I would like to see the mainstream RPG devs release some actual fighting games, RTS, and tactical shooters and focus just on combat encounters for a dev cycle thus producing something thats worthy of being the central focus of their RPGs.

the bottom line is that there is too much pleasing the console crowd/casual gamers.

Nahhh. You could please the console RPG crowed by giving them RPGs that don't have metrosexual protagonist with big eyes. Morrowind, and Dragon Age have little in common but the fact that they arent Japanese. Any CRPG with marketing will sell on a console.

 

[Twinkle]

I love advancements and innovations in gaming. The problem is, there have hardly been any in the last five years or so. What we have gotten in the last five years is not progress or innovation. It's dumbing down, stripping down, and gimping. Games like Bioshock have gotten undue credit for innovating and advancing gaming when all they have done is present gimped or stripped down versions of better games that came out years before on the PC. Since the PC titles were more niche titles, the majority of the gaming public is unaware that they are just being sold inferior remakes of old games. The major efforts in gaming since the middle of the X-Box era have not involved making games better. They have involved trying to figure out how to shoehorn staples of PC gaming like shooters and strategy games onto consoles without ruining them (my opinion -- they have failed miserably). There has also been a lot of sacrifice of gameplay to provide a "cinematic" experience, which usually means taking control out of the gamer's hands and turning all sorts of actions into glorified quick time events. Playing through interactive movies is not something that I want in gaming.

 

[Jasede]

Old shit want:

* Party-based blob-combat with many options. TB. Alternatively, blob-movement with TB combat on hex-grid.
* A billion different skills, classes and races to choose from, a million things to invest points into and a hundred-thousand perks, traits and skill trees to crunch.
* A metric fuckton of numbers, statistics, graphs and information screens.
* Gigantic, confusing-to-map dungeons that are still logical.
* Encounters that do not take forever, yet are very challenging, and also very mutable, approach having to vary depending on your party.

New (?) shit:

* Decent writing.
* Blizzard-level (not style) art-design
* Ability to seamlessly speed up and slow down the TB combat. Intelligent auto-battle.
* Bonus bosses and dungeons, hard to find skills, equipment, recruitable NPCs.

 

[deuxhero]

If I were to remake Fallout, my main thing would be updating a few interface things, the combat menu opening/closing slowly like it does is why I prefer to replay Arcanum to the two of them.

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

If I were to remake Fallout, I'd make it as close to GURPS as possible, I would add Arcanum-style follower commands and I would do something to stop the enemies from obsessively targeting the protagonists when they are other targets around.

 

[Kaanyrvhok]

Stuff like FPRTS'es with 4X level overall management?

With voice rec and gesture rec too.

I could see that with Natal but its going to take a smart and daring publisher developer combo. Smart enough to advertise with some bossy celeb barking orders in the commercial and daring enough to break the novelty and actually make a solid RTS out of it. How about Sweet Genocide for a title?

 

[MetalCraze]

Stuff like FPRTS'es with 4X level overall management?

With voice rec and gesture rec too.

Voice commands actually do help greatly in games like OFP/ArmA when controlling AI squads (or playing CTI which is precisely a FPRTS)

 

[MapMan]

I want the developers to make games that are fun to play. Current-gen RPGs like Dragon Age give me too much choice when it comes to a lot of decisions. I often have to go back and check alternate routes instead of making real story progress. Its really confusing. And for fucks sake, skipping trough all that useless dialogue is really annoying. There should be an option in the menu to disable the dialogues. I also hate servers and what not in MP games. But things are looking better with MW2 and Quake Live now. In MW2 you dont have to do anything, you just click on a gametype and voila, in a matter of seconds you are in a lag-less game. All thanks to IWnet and Steam. I hope such system will be introduced to battlenet2 (for both diablo 3 and starcraft 2).

 

[Azrael the cat]

I love advancements and innovations in gaming. The problem is, there have hardly been any in the last five years or so. What we have gotten in the last five years is not progress or innovation. It's dumbing down, stripping down, and gimping. Games like Bioshock have gotten undue credit for innovating and advancing gaming when all they have done is present gimped or stripped down versions of better games that came out years before on the PC. Since the PC titles were more niche titles, the majority of the gaming public is unaware that they are just being sold inferior remakes of old games. The major efforts in gaming since the middle of the X-Box era have not involved making games better. They have involved trying to figure out how to shoehorn staples of PC gaming like shooters and strategy games onto consoles without ruining them (my opinion -- they have failed miserably). There has also been a lot of sacrifice of gameplay to provide a "cinematic" experience, which usually means taking control out of the gamer's hands and turning all sorts of actions into glorified quick time events. Playing through interactive movies is not something that I want in gaming.

This is not a question of "conservative" vs. "progressive". This is not old codgers clinging to an old way simply out of sentimental value. Progress is TV over radio, color TV over black and white, and HDTV over standard definition. CDs over cassettes, ipods over CDs. Anti-lock brakes and power steering vs non anti-lock brakes and non power steering. What's happening in gaming nowadays is not progress. It's more like the same deevolution phenomenon that has happened in music and movies. Once the XBox 360 and PS3 get motion controllers, I think that you are going to see this bad trend accelerate. If consolization ruined PC gaming, Wii-zation is going to ruin next gen console gaming.

A major culprit in this deevolution is the decay of the games journalism business, which is a shadow of its former self. Games criticism is a complete joke nowadays. If you look at five or ten year old reviews on sites like Gamespot, you will find that they used to be harsher on games and more honest. If you want to see something hilarious, go to Gamespot and watch their video review for The Getaway. They rip on it for its lame attempts at "cinematic' gameplay and realism like having no HUD and regenerating health. Nowadays, games are praised endlessly for this shit. More and more I find myself playing games that get 10/10 A+++ scores and thinking that the reviewers must have taken an envelope of cash to hand out the score the game got. The popularity of the Wii, the worst console of the last decade, is largely due to all of the glowing media coverage that it got even though the majority of the games on it are absolutely terrible and the motion control is awful.

There have been a few rays of hope lately like Risen and yes, Dragon Age despite some major flaws, but overall I have been getting a lot less enjoyment out of games in the past couple of years.

Hate to be the voice of optimism here, but your reference to movies and music gave me a thought. Gaming is still a young and growing market compared to those two. Take music, for an example: in the 60s you had what we might call the arcade 'heyday' - lots of fun, mostly simply, 3 chord wonders: The Beatles, The Animals,Stones and so on, with a couple of slightly more avant guarde works (The Doors, late-era Beatles, Yardbirds, etc). That was the equivalent of gaming's super mario brothers, Double-Dragon, Golden-Axe: the arcade age. But the late 70s that had progressed to what was basically the 90s of video-games: artpieces, innovation over fun, pushing the boundaries constantly. Then in the 80s people went 'fuck that's getting old, why can't we bring simple fun back in, sell to the masses again' and you had punk then new noise, then new wave pop, then plain old pop, gettting worse and worse until the radio was full of 'hey Mickey', 'New Kids on the Block', 'yacht-rock' and horrible late-career Michael Jackson.

Thing is, the market was big enough that come the 90s, enough people had grown up on popular music that they were tired of that shite: hence 'accessibility' and 'catchy pop' became insults rather than marketing words. It was all wearing feux-cheap feux-dirty clothing, ripped jeans, old sneakers, listening to grunge music telling you to 'stick it to the man'. By late 90s that all got a bit silly, and things went full cycle a bit to stuff like the White Stripes, the Killers, back with the smart look and hairdos, the catchy choruses and marketability - but it never ever went back to the shite of the 80s (music in the 80s being where gaming is now - everything selling to the lowest common demoninator. Don't fool yourself by how awesome the counter culture bands were- they were like 'The Void' and 'pathologic' of today - hardly anyone knew of the Pixies till they broke up, and they were purely a product of how awful all the big production house music had become. Pixies, Jane's Addiction and so on were basically the Troika, AoD, Penumbra of today.

Gaming's had it's early 'this is all new and wonderful, everything is innovation, and all innovation is pop' era with the early arcades, Doom 1, and so on. It's had it's 'let's get as innovative and intelligent as possible' - I wouldn't be expecting a return to masses of Deus Ex / SS2, PS:T, FO games coming out any more than I'd be expecting a whole run of Pink Floyd, Yardbirds, Black Sabbath bands reappearing. But I'm hoping that we may one day reach the end of our '80s', where there's enough gaming fans being fed the same shite over and over again that they'll get sick of it. Because Bethesda has already sold the same product to the same people with Oblivion and FO3. How many more times can hype overcome product crappiness. Music (and film, but I'm not doing another rant just for that one) has proven there's a limit to that. Oblivion, Mass Effect and so on brought new gamers, new people into the pseudo-rpg market, so (like the Nintendo Wii) you can feed them whatever crap they want. But by the time some kid has listened to 7 New Kids on The Block singles and realised they've all been hyped to be 'the best song ever' and they all sound exactly the same (and then he goes back and realises that even as shitty pop goes, none of them are as good as the worst song on Michael Jackson's 'Thriller' it just gets harder and harder to sell.

And then they start getting pissed off with the hype and the backlash comes.

And then the backlash becomes an equally annoying trend (PS:T 4, Vhalior cuts himself, the return!), and you get market diversification. Never as good as the 'heyday', but never as bad as what things are now.

 

[Azrael the cat]

I believe all genres gained a lot by moving to 3D. Except RPGs. So fuck progress I guess.

What did text based adventures gain from 3d?

Becoming point-n-click adventures (with the best ones still having lots of text)

 

[Zomg]

Hate to be the voice of optimism here, but your reference to movies and music gave me a thought.

Music is comically cheap to produce. The only bottleneck it ever had was radio/MTV play, which was mostly demonetized oligarchy backscratching stuff, and which is now gone. The correct analogy is the summer blockbuster and summer will never end. There will be minor "counterculture" games, which will be little meta-blockbusters, not real works unto themselves. Everything good is dead, kill yourselves.

 

[Wyrmlord]

Hate to be the voice of optimism here, but your reference to movies and music gave me a thought.

Music is comically cheap to produce. The only bottleneck it ever had was radio/MTV play, which was mostly demonetized oligarchy backscratching stuff, and which is now gone. The correct analogy is the summer blockbuster and summer will never end. There will be minor "counterculture" games, which will be little meta-blockbusters, not real works unto themselves. Everything good is dead, kill yourselves.

Man, Zomg, how does a grown middle aged family man be so negative?

I thought all this negativity was something of tough young punks, but it's like you haven't progressed from that. Is it us? Does your time around younger internet people turn you into this? Or were you always this cynical? :D

 

[Kaanyrvhok]

Do you want to see anything new, whens the last time you appreciated something new?

Whats yer Ratatouille moment?

I think thats a good question with all the RPG conservative indieopians.

Here is the Yin and Yang. If you dont want to see anything new you are pretty much dead and at the same time a lot of whats new aint better. I got to think about it myself.

You can think all you want, but you aren't getting anywhere with that hypothesis.

Game developers are the conservative force today. Like their political cousins, they have a checklist of 10 rules and every commercial game must meet 8 of them.

Us old codgers don't hate these games for being "new", they are anything but. We hate them because they are homogenized crap and we cut our teeth on a much more progressive gaming environment where developers could build whatever crazy idea popped into their head just by mortgaging their house or going into credit card debt to raise $50k.

The RPG market was won by the daring. Ipply was conservative, as is Atari. I remember arguing with people on the Ipply forums who swore up and down that you couldn’t sell non-anime RPGs on consoles, and that Action/sandbox/MMO RPGs weren’t the future at least as far as the mainstream goes. In the last decade it was the daring that blessed the sells charts and reviews.

A quick example would be ToEE and Jade Empire. Jade Empire sold at least twice as many copies and had ToEE beat in average review score by more than 15 percentage points. JE was definitely a more progressive concept.

But things change. Your picture is more accurate each day. The new guard is less likely to be as daring as they were before. Understanding that my once shinny and accurate crystal ball is cloudy. I don’t know the next decade like I knew the last. I’m not conjecturing I’m gathering opinions.

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

Why progressive? Because it emulates LARP instead of tabletop mechanics?
What's so new about it?

Also, ToEE was a bugged mess without a decent plot, which put off many fans of the genre. It sold much less than Arcanum, which means that Troika has managed to alienate a big part of their audience. It's not something that happens to conservative developers.
Troika wasn't conservative - they did what they wanted to do - they mentioned wanting to make a party based D&D-style cRPG and a LARP simulator many years before.