What cau$ed the decline?

[Xenich]

People really exaggerate the bugs Bloodlines had. Unpatched bloodlines had just one serious bug that could stop you from finishing the game. The game crushed when you were getting back from the Leopold vampire hunters base. Thats it. And it could be fixed by one simple console command. Also how can people call Bloodlines buggy and glitchy after Gothic 3 or Dead State??

For the most part people don't play Gothic 3 or Dead State, the latter at least has sold even worse than Bloodlines did.

I picked up Gothic 3 on release as well. Now that one... well, that game was FUBAR'd on release. The optimization was horrible (and I had a top of the line machine at the time, no really TOP of the line) and so it played like crap and the bugs were pretty intrusive. That was a game that I patched numerous times and to be honest, I gave up on it and never bothered with it again. I still have the disk sitting there.

 

[Stainless Veteran]

People really exaggerate the bugs Bloodlines had. Unpatched bloodlines had just one serious bug that could stop you from finishing the game. The game crushed when you were getting back from the Leopold vampire hunters base. Thats it. And it could be fixed by one simple console command. Also how can people call Bloodlines buggy and glitchy after Gothic 3 or Dead State??

For the most part people don't play Gothic 3 or Dead State, the latter at least has sold even worse than Bloodlines did.

Most gamers in Russia really was into Gothic series, and man, were we disappointed. I still remember not only hideous optimization in Gothic 3 (complete lack of it, more like), but also when I started the game I got very annoying bug right away - constantly changing day and night cycle. It was solvable through downloading some AMD drivers, IIRC, but it soured my impression of the game considerably. Not so long after that I abandoned my playthrough entirely, it was just way too unfinished and buggy.

Bloodlines, on the other hand, had ran smoothly on my machine on release, and while it was certainly buggy, I encountered only one game-breaking bug. It was that fight with the hunter. I got through it using a console command, and was able to finish the game.

 

[Necroscope]

This is all kind of vague. Someone needs to put together a proper decline timeline. For example, which game was "patient zero" in terms of decline?

Oblivion, of course. There are earlier examples of games that showed the symptoms (but then again, not every lackluster title can be automatically labeled decline™™), but it was Oblivion that broke the circle: the beginning of the DLC, level scaling, mini-games, unprecedented amount of false advertisement (Oblivion E3 demo looked better in some departments than Skyrim), consolized UI etc. It was the whole package that bombed in the very beginning of Xbox and immediately spread like a virus and installed among an enormous player-base to whom this was the first RPG. There was not a place on the Internet that I knew about at that time where you wouldn't get gang-raped by saying anything negative about this game, hence I believe it also started the first wave of apology. Oblivion unfold the carpet for Skyrim that every Akshun RPG wants to be now.

 

[MRY]

Oblivion may be, like, the patient in which the disease mutated into an especially virulent form, but no way can a 2006 game be deemed "patient zero." (Apparently it wasn't even an XBox game, but an XBox 360 one.) Ultima IX was released in 1999. (King's Quest VIII in 1998 seems like another decent, albeit tangential, data point.) BIS's switch to 3D in Torn happened no later than 2001. Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance is 2001. X-Com Enforcer is 2001; X-Com Interceptor is 1998. KOTOR is 2003. Halo is 2001. In other words, consolization, streamlining, 3D, emphasizing action, etc. were all dominant forces long before Oblivion hit.

 

[GloomFrost]

This is all kind of vague. Someone needs to put together a proper decline timeline. For example, which game was "patient zero" in terms of decline?

Oblivion, of course. There are earlier examples of games that showed the symptoms (but then again, not every lackluster title can be automatically labeled decline™™), but it was Oblivion that broke the circle: the beginning of the DLC, level scaling, mini-games, unprecedented amount of false advertisement (Oblivion E3 demo looked better in some departments than Skyrim), consolized UI etc. It was the whole package that bombed in the very beginning of Xbox and immediately spread like a virus and installed among an enormous player-base to whom this was the first RPG. There was not a place on the Internet that I knew about at that time where you wouldn't get gang-raped by saying anything negative about this game, hence I believe it also started the first wave of apology. Oblivion unfold the carpet for Skyrim that every Akshun RPG wants to be now.

Everything you wrote is 100% true. I still can not forget all magazines and websites giving it 10 out of 10 (except for codex of course). I guess the only thing worse for rpg industry was the release of that abomination called fallout 3. Bethesda burn in hell!!!

 

[Shannow]

I don't remember being unable to finish the game and I picked it up on release. Same with ToEE, there were a couple of bugs, but none that caused me to be unable to finish the game. /shrug

I'm not 100% sure since I didn't play it until well after release, but I remember hearing that it was impossible to finish on release day. Are you sure you didn't patch it at all?

As was said, there was an unavoidable crash when fleeing from Leopold's. No idea how long it took them to patch it. I used the console command/cheat.
What certain people here ignore is that internet was far less ubiquitous at the time. Google was not everybody's first answer to everything. Many people still got patches and the like with CD additions to gaming magazines.
An unavoidable gamebreaking bug was kind of a big deal.
(But Morrowind also had such for certain video cards. Right at the beginning, too. And Morrowind sold quite well?)

Another issue was that Bloodlines used an early version of the source engine. It simply didn't run (well) on mid- and lower tier machines at the time. I was only able to play it because I'd recently gotten a new rig. Another thing that may have been forgotten after a decade of mostly multi-platform games. If 70% of the potential player base do not expect to be able to run the game (in high settings) that will hurt sales.

 

[mondblut]

Ultima IX was released in 1999.

And Ultima VIII in 1994. Stop justifying the late 90s crap.

 

[Krivol]

I bet Oblivion too - it was like a kick in the balls in every single aspect (maybe except for modability ot this). Other shit games of this times were like "ok, it's not good, but who cares", Oblivion was like "Why everyone is trying to convince me this shit is actually good?" Bad game is bad game (U9 for example, or M&M 9 to stay with 9 series), but bad game with all 10's in every single gamers magazine is like red alert for gaming industry.

 

[Necroscope]

it wasn't even an XBox game

Mental shortcut, I meant Xbox 360 of course.


On a side note, I find this relevant to the topic in an artistic way:

 

[Machocruz]

Oblivion is when I first noticed that game "journalism" was a hoax, that's for sure. Game reviews were always lightweight. The upper quadrant of the scale was the whole scale back in the 90s too. But 10s were extremely rare. If your game scored something like 8,8,8,9 from EGM reviw staff, it was considered as good as could be reasonably expected. If you got all 9s, your game was way ahead of the pack and as polished as can be, a masterpiece of its kind. To get 10 you had to do something like create a new genre and be polished as can be. Alot of rags didn't even have scores, you had to read and understand words! And the reviews were straight forward and not full of outright lies. No one said "Street Fighter 2 is the first fighting game to have female character!" or anything like that. The guys knew their stuff.

But Oblivion comes out and it's "revolutionary" (exact word I saw in a couple of reviews) for doing nothing more than being another Elder Scrolls game and having less content and attention to detail than Morrowind. Bioshock was the second major salvo in The War On Truth And Past, and it's been lies and selective* cheerleading all the way down.

*In old magazines it seemed less predictable which games would receive the more enthusiastic previews. If it looked good to the writer, it didn't matter the genre, publisher, budget, social issue, etc. Now I can tell you with 98% accuracy, years in advance, which games are going to be the new best thing ever. And which of them will be loose turds, btw.

 

[Davaris]

Paycheck talking heads ruined politics. Why not games too?

 

[Gnidrologist]

Judging by the brofist count, Gozma's interpretation is slightly edging over Akratus's take on this issue. Should make a poll between these two versions.
(of course, everyone knows the real anyway)

 

[sser]

Sunny D and Capri Sun.

 

[Kattze]

Vault Dweller: Do you still feel:

Arcanum is a Hall of Fame - type game that will be remembered and recommended just like we recommend Darklands today. Bloodlines will be forgotten soon.

If not, is it because Bloodlines improved with patching? [I'm not asking whether you think, as a factual matter, Bloodlines has been forgotten, obviously it hasn't -- even on the Codex top-70 list, it's only one slot behind Arcanum. I mean your relative evaluation of the two games.]

Kinda.

As an RPG Bloodlines kinda sucks. The focus on combat ruined it and the illusion that you can play it as a non-combat character, using all these awesome non-combat skills and abilities, doesn't last long. The lack of inventory doesn't help either. Plus it's linear as fuck, filled with endless action sequences (I played it twice, I would replay it more but the thought of doing the hotel run again and escaping the burning house again keeps me from doing it).

However, it's a very atmospheric game with great voice-over and writing. The abilities are also well implemented and for awhile you can play the game in very different ways.

No. Bloodlines butchered the abilities, which I think is partly why it failed hard with V:TM fans. The abilities/disciplines is something Redemption got right quite well. They even had shapeshifting, and this was back in the 90s. A pity the combat in that sucked balls.

 

[Xenich]

What certain people here ignore is that internet was far less ubiquitous at the time. Google was not everybody's first answer to everything. Many people still got patches and the like with CD additions to gaming magazines.

Not really (not at that time), I mean... if you said that about the internet in the mid to late 90's, I would agree that only those who were real hobbyist or academics knew how to obtain information via the internet. By 2004 though, well... you were behind the times, computer illiterate, etc... if you couldn't find your way around. Google didn't invent web searching, the implementation was around long before they became the leader of it. People could find information quite easily if they wanted and many companies offered access to various downloads (I downloaded Duke Nukem 3D in 96).

The problem back then was as I mentioned in a previous post. Many computer illiterates were getting into the PC gaming scene and they were... REALLY illiterate. I was a PC tech for a repair shop at that time and we had many people bringing in their machines complaining about things because the extent of their knowledge concerning the device was simply how to turn it on. Like I said, if someone didn't know to look for a patch online when they had a problem in 2004 and had major issue with the games? Well, they were part of the problem.

 

[MRY]

Ultima IX was released in 1999.

And Ultima VIII in 1994. Stop justifying the late 90s crap.

I actually thought about noting that, but I felt like pushing the start of decline to 1994 would be implausible since that predates PS:T, Fallout, and Fallout 2 (i.e., the Codex's top three RPGs), whereas a 1999 date would treat the year of PS:T's release as a pinnacle and all else that followed as decline.

 

[agris]

The change in investment attitude, as outlined by Telengard, is a great post.

snip

I think another important part of this discussion is hardware. In the 80s and early to mid 90s, hardware advancements, especially VGA to SVGA+ and increased ram and storage tech, contributed to the fast pace of advancement in games. This advancement was multi-fold. Increased screen color depth and resolution changed how art was developed for games, and changing data storage densities (harddrive, CD) influenced the production values of games. With the adoption of the high data-capacity of CDs, developers started to introduce things like voice-over and FMV. This brought gaming closer to a cinematic experience, whether the current gen knew it was happening or not.

Crucial to my arm-chair analysis is the premise that hardware advances drove game development in the 80s and early-to-mid 90s. This is when the SNES, PSX, and eventually the PS2 and Xbox 1 became gaming sensations. Gaming development driven by hardware advances stopped pushing the envelope and devs started to take advantage of the static console hardware and adopted a low-risk development holding pattern.

Think about it; it's 2000 and you wanted to make a game that will sell well. You do all the monetary analysis that Telengard discussed. You have the benefit of a well-defined install base of console users. Their hardware isn't changing, so you know exactly what memory, storage and video-rendering capabilities you're dealing with. This console install-base is a huge percentage of the market, with the remainder being highly differentiated with a multitude of hardware configs. There's a huge advantage to developing towards the console (lowest common demonator) as compared to the constantly evolving PC enthusiast community. Flash forward to the Xbox 1 generation, and you can really see the polarization. Xbox 1 and PS2 sales are dwarfing PC gaming. You have a 100% defined hardware platform. You don't have to worry about differing drivers, graphics APIs (direct X, open GL, etc) soundcards, storage-media, or interface (i.e. non-controller) problems. Your market is completely defined and makes up the plurality of the potential sales.

Innovation stagnates to suite the environment (consoles). This compounded with the higher cost of development makes investors less prone to risk, and more likely to go with the slam dunk. What's a slam dunk? A game with a defined sales-base, i.e. consoles. I hate to sound like a broken record, but I think the stagnant nature of console hardware has a lot to do with the decline of gaming innovation. Hardware stagnation (i.e. increased specification reliability) combined with a huge marketshare makes the bean-counters push for safer development. Cue CoD 1 - 4, slash-em-up series 1 to 8, etc etc. With a well defined target platform, huge market share and tons of existing sales data to support a +1 development mentality, it's easy to see why there's next to no innovation in the market. Of course I'm talking about games that will/would command any kind of significant market share.

 

[Infinitron]

Ultima IX was released in 1999.

And Ultima VIII in 1994. Stop justifying the late 90s crap.

I actually thought about noting that, but I felt like pushing the start of decline to 1994 would be implausible since that predates PS:T, Fallout, and Fallout 2 (i.e., the Codex's top three RPGs), whereas a 1999 date would treat the year of PS:T's release as a pinnacle and all else that followed as decline.

There have been multiple declines (and inclines).

(Incredibly, in both cases, the same group of people is largely responsible for bringing the incline. Though mondblut would dispute this. )

 

[Xenich]

Crucial to my arm-chair analysis is the premise that hardware advances drove game development in the 80s and early-to-mid 90s. This is when the SNES, PSX, and eventually the PS2 and Xbox 1 became gaming sensations. Gaming development driven by hardware advances stopped pushing the envelope and devs started to take advantage of the static console hardware and adopted a low-risk development holding pattern.

See, I don't agree with this analysis. I remember this point of issue during the time as it was a rant I had with my friends when this began happening. PC tech didn't slow down, it continued to progress. Now at the time that XBox came out, they built a console that was essentially a PC with a top of the line video card. So, at that time, in many ways, it was comparable to PC power. That said, this only lasted 6 months to a year and the XBox was behind the times again. Thing is, consoles were HUGE money makers and when you consider that most of the small studios who made games were being bought out by the publishers, the design focus changed as well. It became about "marketing" and chasing the fad market. Since the console market was a massive potential profit AND developing for console was ridiculously easy compared to PC (ie every machine is the same), well... these publishers could hire CS grads right out of the universities and have them droning out games. PC technology while not staying consistent to Moores Law, has definitely stayed progressing the entire time over consoles. Think about it for a moment. The games you have seen over the last decade? They have all been developed according to machine specs that are also around a decade old. You want to see what computers can do today? Go look at Robert Space Industries "Star Citizen", a game made for PC because consoles can't even consider running it. Just think if for the last decade they were actually making games for the PC rather than using the console systems as the baseline? Where would we be now? Consoles have been a cancer on the evolution of gaming.

 

[mondblut]

Ultima IX was released in 1999.

And Ultima VIII in 1994. Stop justifying the late 90s crap.

I actually thought about noting that, but I felt like pushing the start of decline to 1994 would be implausible since that predates PS:T, Fallout, and Fallout 2 (i.e., the Codex's top three RPGs),

Who said Codex is an authority on decline? 10 years most of it actually believed RPGs were invented in 1997.

 

[MRY]

Who said Codex is an authority on decline? 10 years most of it actually believed RPGs were invented in 1997.

The mid 90s to late 90s seem like the period of greatest incline, though de gustibus, etc. Other than Ultima, what RPG series can you point to as declining circa '94?

 

[Ninjerk]

Wasn't there an argument floating around here pinpointing Fallout as being the primary harbinger of the decline on some basis?

 

[tuluse]

Who said Codex is an authority on decline? 10 years most of it actually believed RPGs were invented in 1997.

The mid 90s to late 90s seem like the period of greatest incline, though de gustibus, etc. Other than Ultima, what RPG series can you point to as declining circa '94?

You should keep in mind that all intrusions of so called "story" and "non-combat" elements are decline in mondblut's mind.

 

[MRY]

Then isn't Ultima IV, not Ultima VIII, the point of decline?

 

[tuluse]

Then isn't Ultima IV, not Ultima VIII, the point of decline?

At least you have a party in U4.