Rosh, I am not one of the people disagreeing with you here, but please know this:
Your basic arguments on what is wrong with gaming
do not even touch the surface. Those things were already wrong a few years ago, but please understand that they have managed to
screw up gaming quite a bit more than that, and what you say is unfortunately too simplistic to even fully assess what is wrong with games these days.
With all due respect.
Let me explain.
Rosh said:
As the games get shinier and more vapid while cloning the shit out of each other
Cloning each other? Oh no, on the contrary, you'll find all the "innovation" you want. Games these days are all about asinine innovation, for features like quick-time events, cover systems,.etc and even the botched up game design from previous game releases gets fully replaced from scratch with even more botched up and asinine features. See Relic's games through Dawn of War and Dawn of War II.
Innovations in graphics only
See, here is another simplistic argument.
Graphics have become worse.
You will not find any good graphics in any game made in this year and the last. For heaven's sake, they are compromising and sacrificing
everything in games, including
graphics.
You don't even need shiny graphics to lure in people these days; you must understand that! All it takes at all is a simple hook, one simple vague premise. Dragon Age has graphics akin to the aesthetics of fecal matter, but the vague premise of it being a videogame version of soap opera fantasy will excuse even the terrible graphics of the game.
BioWare also seems to be going into decline with a focus upon more juvenile appeals under the guise of mature, while at the same time makes excuses as to why they aren't going to try for the extra effort. Really? As a "top" development house, that shouldn't stop them from trying to pull an Origin with creativity, instead of being turned slowly into a Western Hentai CRPG developer. Their recent work sounds like they will soon be licensing the Princess Maker series.
BioWare going into decline? You don't decline an already terrible developer, my good man, and everything BioWare does wrong is what they have done wrong in every game that they have ever made. Baldur's Gate was a juvenile game, Knights Of The Old Republic was a juvenile game, they all were. All the kinky and naughty sex talk is quite akin to the characters and interaction that they had in all their earlier games, see Viconia.
BioWare, a juvenile developer, making juvenile games for ten years, does not suddenly make a leap into juvenile territory of Dragon Age; that's the direction they were heading in since they first started.
Also, it's not because BioWare is afraid of trying, it's because
they actually believe their shit smells good. They actually believe their ridiculous ideas to be good ideas, ever since you would see people jumping out of character in Baldur's Gate to help you in the tutorial; and we are thinking that they somehow once used to be a good developer?
Sheep care mostly about graphics and little else, and are generally too stupid to anything more complex than open a web browser or install a game. Hence why consoles sell very well to the moron majority.
See what I said above about graphics.
You will not see good graphics in any mainstream game made in the past two years, period. Fallout 3 was an ugly game, Dead Space has modest graphics at best, Lost Planet is also crude-looking game.
There are other, even far more simplistic reasons for which many mainstream games sell, and the developers don't have to bother about graphics either.
You will not see good graphics on those crude consoles with their outdated machinery either. Lack of understanding of PCs is very much a big factor. But it's not out of hope that they will see good graphics on those consoles, because they have to make huge compromises on visuals for getting a console.
Just wait until the publishers have to compete for the same people because they can't draw in new crowds by dumbing down their gameplay. When gaming has reached a saturation point of being common, then the publishers will have to either truly innovate to stand out - or be known as the recycling garbage peddlers they have become. Just wait until the number of people who can remember the game industry fuck-ups start to outweigh the clueless newbies, and then the marketing departments and publishers will be in serious trouble, because that means their smoke and mirrors approach can only work on children.
Again, see above about the fact that the said developers are innovating, and those innovations are only ruining the gaming industry.
And just so you know, the rubbish that the mainstream makes does not qualify as commercial success either. Mass Effect, after its massive and expensive marketing campaign and game development,
sold only a million copies after a whole year. The profit margin on Mass Effect, if at all, is minimal. But BioWare will keep receiving funding, because its funders do not just put their money on one basket; they put it on several developers, and the failure or modest success of a single developers means nothing. It all evens out, some minor loss, some sizable gain, average it all out, and it works out quite fine. And in absolute numbers, it's still alot of money.
Sorry, it does not work that way. The gaming industry will not change. There are endless developers and endless gamers. No developer, no matter how large, controls a large enough portion of the market, and no particular audience of gamers, no matter how large, controls enough of the demand in the market. The addition or removal of even one large developer will change nothing in the gaming industry, and the addition or removal of one large group of gamers will change nothing in the gaming industry. You can take a sequel to a commercially successful game, strip off every good and well-liked feature from it, ship out a whole new and distorted product, and it would still make money. Because there is always someone to buy, someone who just wandered into the store.
With all due respect Rosh, you don't even know know what you don't know, and you don't even know that you don't know what you don't know. :wink: