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The State Of Current Generation Gaming; Where Did We Go Wrong?

Discussion in 'Miscellaneous' started by thebonesauce, Nov 13, 2012.

Mods: BlueLuigi
  1. thebonesauce

    thebonesauce All life begins and ends with Nu Staff Alumni
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    I think back to when SNES and Genesis (Megadrive) was supreme. I had both, but really only bought games for my SNES. I had Sega Channel, a monthly subscription based cartridge that plugged into your cable service, and every month you got a ton of new games to play. God, it was a blast...

    I remember back in the day when gaming standards were all over the place. A vampire hunter using a whip, fighting Death himself (who takes his orders from Dracula) was the norm. Anyone remember Toejam & Earl? An AMAZING little gem of a Genesis co-op game where you play as two aliens trying to rebuild their crashed ship to get off Earth and back to Funkitron. Megaman went from being a fun little blue robot shooting hilariously named robots into some super serious bullshit...

    Prime example. Banjo-Kazooie! I know you guys remember Banjo-Kazooie... It went from being one of the most fun games I've ever played on the Nintendo 64 to a shitty car-building game (Nuts & Bolts) when Microsoft bought them out.

    Games nowadays are far too focused on the real, far too focused on world wars and shooting and being the same fucking game over and over and over...

    Why are developers so afraid to take any risks nowadays? Why is it that the fun I remember having as a kid had completely disappeared? KAG is the only game I've played in recent memory that has brought back that feeling of wonderment and balls to the wall fun I had as a kid...

    It really seems that the only hope we have as gamers are creative, independent developers who aren't afraid to take chances...

    Thoughts?
     
  2. GloriousToast

    GloriousToast Haxor Donator

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    i think we went wrong when dlc became a thing.
     
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  3. thebonesauce

    thebonesauce All life begins and ends with Nu Staff Alumni
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    Personally, DLC isn't bad... DLC in terms of buying shit like WiiWare titles (La-Mulana, MM9&10, Castlevania ReBirth, etc) is awesome. DLC in terms of hats and stupid shit that has no real bearing on the game? DLC that allows the player with the most money the best equipment? Shit.
     
  4. GloriousToast

    GloriousToast Haxor Donator

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    Dlc brings in the added content that i was too lazy to add when the game originally came out
     
    thebonesauce likes this.
  5. Nighthawk

    Nighthawk gaurenteed shitter

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    I think we went wrong when half of the games we produced became first person shooters.

    Honestly, though. It's a wonder the genre hasn't worn out yet. It's like Pokemon. Great concept when it came out, but you guys are basically making the same game over and over and over...

    We need more originality.
     
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  6. Jim_Dale

    Jim_Dale Arsonist

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    Developers usually find what works decently and produce the holy shit out of it. It's a general rule.
     
  7. thebonesauce

    thebonesauce All life begins and ends with Nu Staff Alumni
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    I just think its disgusting that the industry is being outclassed by teenagers on iMacs in terms of creative and original ideas. The guys that used to bring us games as creative as Psychonauts are clamoring to bring out the next gray-brown shooter set in a dystopian future against some form of alien. I remember when sequels were something to be excited about, now its a sure sign of a franchise's demise. Its a sad concept, but at the very least we have indie devs who are willing to try something different.
     
  8. Jackard

    Jackard Base Burner

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    At least it looks like some decent stuff will come out of kickstarter.
     
  9. dnmr

    dnmr Ministry of ban Global Moderator Forum Moderator Donator Tester

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  10. BlueLuigi

    BlueLuigi :^) Forum Moderator Donator Tester

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    That's not DLC, in what everyone means as DLC.
    Those are basically DLG, Downloadable Games.

    DLC is Downloadable Content you pay for games you already own, basically 'extra' content for an 'extra' price.

    However I digress, where we went wrong was that as with all things no one bothered taking risks the moment they realized that they could replicate something and get money, that's how it always works.

    Your typical super popular book does good in movie sales, especially with good series /fiction, Harry Potter queued, Twilight, etc. Romantic Comedies no matter how cliched and overdone sell, so they are still made.

    Games simply followed the same mold. MMOs are probably the worst culprit as you can see, in the West it's "WOW KilleR!!! New WoW clone, we changed ONE thnig it's OVER WOW IS FINISHED", in the East it's "MICROTRANSACTIONS, WE GOTTA MAKE MONEY, NO, DONT, MAKE THEM UNDERPOWERED THEN SELL CASH SHOP TO BE RICH KEKEKEKE"

    In other video games, well generic realistic shooters work because that's what little KIDS want, it doesn't matter what the rest of us want those of us that are older and grew up on the shit, if it seems like there is some skill involved( even if there isn't), most 18+ will play it just so they can beat the shit out of little kids and laugh at them yet still call the game shit. They win from all sides.

    Innovation isn't proven to work and when you have publishers wanting tons of money put into a commercial game (potentially millions per game usually), it's not something you take a risk on unless you're sure. Business realistically is generally done in a low risk decent output fashion, when the reward is not worth the investment, then you might consider taking a risk ,but you want to take a risk that you can then keep capitalizing on just like the FPS genre, like Rockband/Guitar Hero/etc.

    This shit sadly will probably not go away, when you toss in the money grubbing that comes on top of that with DLC Day-0 merchandise/RL goodies to force you to day-0 buy or not buy at all it all becomes apparent quite soon that things will not hit a downhill because they are aiming for a specific crowd, children, children who don't know better and parents who don't care TOO much. Every now and then we'll see a few good titles, but I've yet to see an A+++ title in years, a title that really hits it home in all ways, because no one is willing to innovate.

    Crash, and Spyro might as well be dead with what they're doing to them, Banjo is dead, Ratchet and Clank probably one the last 'innovations' in platforming/action adventure titles might as well be dead, Mario is just rehashing it's ass off even if they are all fun for a bit, you can play through them so fast it's meh, at least they kept the core mechanics in place well and the new ones do blend nicely. Donkey Kong has went a few places he shouldn't have, but some of the games are still very fun (DKCR).

    Starfy was a decent new title that would have garnered some good attention in America I think but Nintendo never brought it over, so whatever.

    Can't think of anything 'this' generation that was truly unique and fun though, maybe "Prinny: I want to be the hero" games?

    If you really don't like where gaming has gone, pirate the bad games, buy the good ones (that aren't money grubbing and are also fun, i.e. Borderlands 1 is a good buy game, Borderlands 2 is a good pirate game), just play indie games, you will find more change in indie games than anything else, even if there are still 40% of them copying Cave Story's success.
     
  11. Contrary

    Contrary The Audacious Paramount of Explosive Flight Donator Tester

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    People act like copycat games are some sort new trend. This cycle of innovation and then repetition to the point of redundancy is a well known business phenomenon that has been going on since before video games were even invented.

    It's the exact same as people who claim that there is no good music or television shows now and that everything from the 80's was amazing. There was tonnes of shit back then that was just a rehash of other titles, it's just that only the noteworthy stuff gets remembered.

    It's the exact same with games. Sure there may be a lot of games coming out now that try to mimic Call of Duty, but since Street Fighter there have been millions of fighting game series that try their damn hardest to be exactly like Street Fighter with the exact same mechanics, controls, and even characters sharing a common pool of aesthetic and functional archetypes. Think of Darksiders, King of Fighters, etc. Doing tonnes of sequels isn't even a new thing. Remember Final Fantasy? Fire Emblem? Megaman?

    I really haven't been keeping up with new games all that well but even I can tell that there are fun, fresh new games being made all the time. Arkham Asylum was a very tasty game that played in its own way, Borderlands fused shooters and Diablo-likes in a very palatable way, Minecraft (whatever you may feel about it personally) helped popularize an entirely new genre, and the list of delicious games goes on. People 20 years from now are going to be saying the exact same kind of stuff, "remember in the 2000's when games had heart" and it will be nostalgic bullshit then as well.
     
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  12. thebonesauce

    thebonesauce All life begins and ends with Nu Staff Alumni
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    Let's not forget rehashing Cave Story's success either. Had to wait 3 years to try La-Mulana on Wii because Nicalis was too interested in releasing Cave Story 10,000 different ways. It really is disgusting.
     
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  13. Nighthawk

    Nighthawk gaurenteed shitter

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    IKR!
    If you really want to enjoy Cave Story, download the damn game for Windows (for FREE!) and play that classic version (which actually has translation which is 100% better than the stupid DS version).
     
  14. Hella

    Hella The Nightmare of Hair Global Moderator Donator Tester

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    It's true that vitually every game is effectively a rehash of what has come previously, although there is always, in good games, the element of development progression, improvement seemingly through war of attrition. Most large scale developers seem to no longer feel the need to be ground-breaking, and though the same old formulas of FPS and such can yield high quality results, it's unlikely to see the scale of progression which one might feel happened before, in the retro-nostaligic times.

    Personally, I'm a sucker for a really good game, particularly console games, which I buy fairly rarely now. The latest I played was Dishonored, which reminded me of so many other good games, and still managed to pull it of in a fun and reasonably fresh way. There's always gonna be the money-grabbing side of basically all industry, but that's just called capitalism, greatly flawed but still grinding ponderously along like a bastardised machine.

    I've lost where I was going with this now. I think it was mostly in the direction that great games still arrive, but they don't necessarily need to be as new or fresh as you might like to expect. Original concepts lead to the birth of a great series, but ultimately that series is based upon the victories and improved mistakes of the past. Almost like some kind of digital evolution. Yeah.
     
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  15. BlueLuigi

    BlueLuigi :^) Forum Moderator Donator Tester

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    @Contrary - The difference is that the games that might be worth a shit lose so much in funds from all the DRM they put in that they cut corners and ask you for tons of money in DLC/etc so in 10 years if you want to play for example Borderlands 2, or hell let's say Max Payne 3, enjoy attempting to get any DLC short of Steam, hoping it works with the newer OS at the time, etc.

    You try and play any DOS games on Win7? It's a real bitch. Now imagine trying that when Win7 looks like Win98 to the OS 2-3 from now or we're using Linux cause Microsoft fucks it so hard and we try to lpay these games but no one can without dualbooting/triobooting because of some crazy shit. They'll become quite unplayable at some point where an NES/SNES game is easier to play than a '10s era PC game.

    In any case, yea it's not a new phenomenon but music has been around long enough to grow out of the phase, at least somewhat, music is still inbetween but not fully engrossed in it still like gaming is, we'll grow out of it eventually.

    I mean really what games do you see of this generation that you'd want to play in 10 years? How many games did you play 10 years ago that you knew 'shit 10 years from now I'd still play this'.

    Age of Empires II.
     
    FuzzyBlueBaron likes this.
  16. Fate

    Fate Studying seashells

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    Note right of the bat: I haven't read this topic.

    I don't think the gaming scene has gone that much downhill. It's the AAA titles that have gotten monotonous (coughFPStitlescough) and are the prime sustenance for 12 year old graphics whores, but take a look at the indie scene... it's flourishing.
     
  17. Andr01d

    Andr01d Bison Rider

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    I think we need to face the facts that the 90's was a golden age of kids toys, and video games are, at their core, essentially a childrens toy. So like you said, even though we have better technology and graphics now, we still can't make good games because there's not the overall creativity and quality in the field that there once was.

    My main thesis is that in the 90's there were simply more kids, as all the baby boomers had just had kids, and the market was bigger, so more people got into the business of making things to appeal to kids--video games, toys, cartoon shows, and the overall quality of these things reached a high point in the 90's and then dropped.

    I mean, there are still good games getting made, but I know what you mean about creativity, which used to be the norm, and is now so rare. Maybe early video game systems seemed more exciting because they were new, and thus attracted a more creative class of developer than they do now?
     
  18. BlueLuigi

    BlueLuigi :^) Forum Moderator Donator Tester

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    That sounds like a case of 'when I was 12'.
     
  19. FuzzyBlueBaron

    FuzzyBlueBaron Warm, Caring, Benign, Good and Kind Philanthrope Global Moderator Forum Moderator Donator Tester
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    I'll have to disagree with you on that one. Video games may have been originally pegged as 'idle entertainment for children' but, like cinema before it, it's a much fuller/broader/richer medium than that.

    There's a lot here I could go into, but what much of it boils down to is that video games are a relatively young art/entertainment medium. Currently the medium is suffering having passed it's immature creative peak (where most of the possibilities of the medium are still being explored and technical limitations are rife--both factors leading themselves to early successes based more on luck and instinct than careful thought and application of design theory) but still being in the middle of hashing out a conceptual framework for itself so that it can proceed in a more developed and mature fashion.

    What this says about games produced today is that they're being produced while the medium is in the dark Crappyfrankenclone Valley between early, spontaneous creativity and mature, sophisticated understandings. This means that many of those creating games do so without a solid understanding of what actually makes a game work and thus resort to either a) slicing bits off of various, successful, games and creating some horrid Frankengame in the hopes that it'll be 'creative' and sell; or b) cloning a successful game and hoping that better graphics/slight tweaks will sell.

    Of course, there are still people who make good, successful, original games; but the number of them who do so through luck/spontaneous inspiration is growing smaller and is being replaced by game devs who have an increasingly solid grasp of what it is about their game that makes it good and why/how those parts of their game work.

    tl;dr
    Games won't stay crappy, it's just that for the moment we've exhausted most of the more obvious options and now need to invest some serious cogitation into the theory behind games.

    {edit}
    Actually, it's kinda exciting, realising that the second wave of game design (where theory is king) is in the process of breaking around us and that we can be participants in cleaning up the legacy of the first wave (where innovation was trump).
     
    Contrary likes this.
  20. Andr01d

    Andr01d Bison Rider

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    Ok I may have phrased that wrong, but what I was trying to say is that video games were intended originally to be similar to toys, and most of their marketing is geared towards young people. Not necessarily children, but definitely people in their 20's or younger. I stand behind my theory that the swell of children produced from the result of the baby boom generation having kids--the so called baby boomlet--has had a broad effect on the choices of what products have been developed and marketed at different points in recent history. Looking at the graph from this wikipedia page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_boom, you can see the spike in birth rates in the early 90's. Just my theory, feel free to disagree.
     
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