Are games today really that bad?

[veloper]

FPS can't really have good writing, they get to alright with the likes of Jedi Knight or Half Life, but after the fact they're still about shooting people/things in the head and making things explode with little bits around that trying to tie it all together. I didn't say they're not fun and I probably played a lot of shooters from Duke Nukem, Doom, Quake, SIN, Soldier of Fortune, Kingpin, Serious Sam to most of the newest stuff like Bulletstorm, Bioshock, Dead Space, Gears of War and all that but comparing them to genres like RPG (the true RPGs, not the stuff out today or Hiking Sims like Oblivion and Skyrim) or Adventure games (Grim Fandango, Day of the Tentacle, Sam&Max etc.) in regards to story is insane.

It's like comparing Rambo, Universal Soldier, Predator and the likes to Shawshank Redemption, City of God and 12 Angry Men and say that they have "THAT BETTAH STORYE".

Well, I disagree. Good writing in FPS is tricky but there are games that pulled it off. Half Life is one example that springs to mind.

The biggest difference between the genres is how the story is told. It is easier to tell a story in RPGs and adventure games since there people expect this segments. In FPS on the other hand most developer still try to mimic RPGs or action movies. And they fail miserably. Narrative and story in FPS lives through the setpieces. And only few games can deliver on that regard.

If I'm honest: The difference in RPGs and FPS in regards of storytelling is nonexistant. You say that they are about shooting dudes? Well, this is the combat mechanic. If you just regard the combat mechanic even the best RPGs can't live up to the complexity of Serious Sam 3 (from the tactical standpoint, the ressource management, the actual player reaction speed, decisionmaking in combat and so on). And then the RPGs are just about whaking dudes and sitting through cutscenes / dialogues. Yup, it is easy to dismiss an entire part of a game.

And what about the story? Are you really suggesting that a writer can't come up with a good story for an FPS because it's an FPS? Because this is wrong. Not even just wrong, it's stupid. We have FPS with probably better stories than most classic RPGs (STALKER, Half Life, even Bioshock which was basically a copy of Atlas Shrugged) and if you take off your rosetinted nostalgia glasses you may realise that the cRPGs you remember are the few ones that were basically gems in a lake full of bland shit.

Heh. You obviously didn't read any of Atlas shrugged.
Maybe not impossible, but writers haven't come up with good stories for shooters sofar.
RPGs have a slightly better track record in this regard. Planescape was alright.
Better storytelling in games is a lost cause anyway. Gameplay is missing in this discussion.

 

[Kahunaburger]

Re: FPS and story, I don't think that FPS is a particularly good genre (at least in it's present form) for telling the same sort of plot-driven stories you see in RPGs. What FPS games are good at, IMO, is atmosphere. Take Bioshock: the actual story is nothing to write home about. The decaying Objectivist city, the ranting splicers, and the children who run away from you screaming things like "all your faces are melted!" absolutely is.

 

[Frozen Fox]

I do not know if it is they are all that bad as much as all that similar. Game get more boring with time like any activity and there is to little change in 2, 4 even 5 generations of a franchise to keep various customers happy

 

[GiantRaven]

No, they aren't. Go out to any game shop that sells old PS1 and PS2 games (and so forth) and marvel at the utter depthless crap that we were offered alongside the actually memorable games of those eras.

The recent flood of generic military shooters does not hinder your enjoyment of old isometric RPGs, and whats more, a few studios are still bringing them out today.

There are still isometric RPGs coming out? Could you point me in the direction of them, cause they've utterly passed me by.

 

[Canadish]

The magic died.

The culprit isn't one man, company or innovation. It's a culmination of several events.

Technology advanced, which increased team size and production cost.
This brought the need for more cash, which attracted Suits like Bobby Kotick.
It also brought gaming more mainstream attention.
The combination of these two caused creative stagnation in the name of safe profits.

At the same time, the mystery died.
The internet, wonderful as it is, makes those little secrets, Easter eggs and Chinese whispers impossible.
("Mew is under the Truck, really, my Dad works at Nintendo!" This generation will never know that feeling or have that fun.)
Bungie was the last company to really put those bizarre and strange little details in their game that just made it magical for the community.

At the same time as that, things have gotten less "fun" for developers now as well.
It's not some growing creative industry. It's a corporate production line.

Not only that, but as the economy suffers and costs continue to rise in spite of this, Publishers need to keep making more money to keep the shareholders happy.
They want to make gaming a "service" not a "product".
They want to make gaming Subscription based, essentially.
(This is where alot of concern over the ME3 ending is at. We're at a watershed moment. If they try sell the "real" ending as $7 DLC, then we have a bleak future on our hands. It WILL become the trend.)
I understand why developers want to use DLC and how it helps them, but it's being used to abuse consumer trust at this point.

Not only that, but with Draconian DRM, and things like EA's Origin asking for your Privacy alongside your money...it's alot to ask someone for, when they just want to enjoy their hobby.

However...

Now, that's not to say that we didn't have a bunch of lazy rip offs back then either.
It was just Platformers rather then shooters.
(Which I kind of prefer the idea of kids playing tbh, but that's another issue...)

On the other hand, the future has a glimmer of hope.
The AAA industry is next to worthless now in my own opinion.
I'm playing through all the old PC classics I missed as a kid, and I'll tell you: I don't miss the fancy graphics, the orchestral scores or the voice acting. The charm, creativity and passion make up for it in spades.
I don't have any nostalgia goggles as I never played these at release.

But the idea of smaller budget games and Indie titles have a future now.
As much I hate the death of brick and mortar stores, digital distribution has given us the benefit of allowing smaller teams to reach a large market.

I think we may well see more "niche" products in future the way things are going.
We're going to have/already have a generation of savvy, disenfranchised gamers who have money to spend and nothing they want to spend it on in the AAA market place which has long since abandoned them.

 

[Danny Nissenfeld]

There are tons of great games coming out daily, they're just not games you can find on the shelves of Gamestop, or any other shelves for that matter.

Actually look for games on the internet. Don't wait for EA or Sony to drop 1m in advertising for banners, tv spots and paid reviews on major sites. Go out there and find the games because people are making them and they're ending up on flash sites, indie sites and the dark corners of Steam.

The fact of the matter is you only hear about A, AA and AAA titles because that's who has advertising budgets. You've been passed over by a ton of games because you're just not looking. Not all of them are good but there are quite a few that are.

 

[Auron225]

Games are becoming more cinematic because people want to see big budget movies, just paying 60$ for them and playing them for 5 hours.

I'll just leave this right here

Haha!! That is awesome! =P Describes well how loads of RPGs have changed too!

OT: People do tend to wear rose-tinted nostalgia glasses too much nowadays. I think loads of games now are fantastic and people will look back on them one day the same way we look back on stuff now. A theroy is that its like being addicted to something (not to say this only applies for people who are actually addicted to gaming). People get a high off of it when they first try it and look for that high again but it wont ever be quite the same.

Im not sure how much weight that theory actually has, I just thought Id share.

 

[hazabaza1]

Hell no. People just A-Have nostalgia glasses and B- Like to complain.

 

[Zeckt]

Games are becoming more cinematic because people want to see big budget movies, just paying 60$ for them and playing them for 5 hours.

I'll just leave this right here

That is a fucking amazing picture! hahaha!

P.S, Yorick rules :3

OT: Well companies nowadays stick less effort into their games if they know it will sell just as well anyway, it's all about the money!

Maybe so, but its just a copy / paste Wolfenstein 3d level made with the same texture with the intention of getting lost. Or it could be a doom level, where 1/3rd of that map is 5 minutes to get the yellow keycard all on one floor because the games engine is not even capable of second floors.

Coming from a person who has probably spent hundreds of hours on doom over his life, I would rather play Halo Reach now.

 

[Arcane Snowman]

No, I don't think games are worse.
Every era of gaming has had it's own separate focus, and games which excelled under those foci.

For that reason, I think it's silly to compare new and old games, as they oftentimes do not accomplish, neither by design nor by result, the same things. And I therefore don't play them for the same reasons, quick examples:
Planescape: Torment is one of the best stories I have played through, in terms of writing. The delivery and gameplay however is overall pretty bad. Bioshock on the other hand has mediocre gameplay and story, but it's delivery is simply astonishing.

Different games focus on different things, and whilst I think it's true that it's hard to find an epic story like that of Planescape: Torment around, it's a pretty hard one to top. However, in recent years, we've had gems like Bastion and the Stanley Parable, which explore some things more unique to our medium, in the form of narrative delivery.

If you go into games, with only a single criterion, or perhaps even just a pair of criteria, of what constitutes a good game in mind, then I think you're missing out on a lot of things which that game in question might be doing right. Of course, there is nothing wrong if you only enjoy games which fills certain criteria, that's all up to you, but that doesn't necessarily make those that don't, bad.

I personally enjoy games over many different genres: Torment, Portal, Terraria, Persona, Bastion, Painkiller, Dear Esther, Starcraft, Diablo and the list goes on. They're altogether different experiences and I think games would be the poorer if we were to focus on only one kind.

 

[Kahunaburger]

Coming from a person who has probably spent hundreds of hours on doom over his life, I would rather play Halo Reach now.

Although Halo is actually pretty good - the levels are on rails, but many of the actual fight areas are big, nonlinear, and populated by enemies with good AI. It's miles ahead of the brown modern shooter scripted whack-a-mole stuff.

 

[Mr. Omega]

You just need to know where to look.

I've been catching up on the Wii backlog now that enough time has passed for the shovelware and crap to go through the filter, and the good stuff has had time to accumulate. I must say, I've been having a lot more fun playing games from a couple years ago on an "outdated system" than I have getting most of the major new releases for the past couple years, and not because the games were technically superior, but (among other reasons) because actually playing the game is a much simpler endeavor. A lot less hurdles for me to jump, and plenty of good and different games to play.

And that really gets to the heart of the problem: games today are good, and are getting better, but they're being weighed down by tons and tons of inconvenient bullshit.

 

[Alrocsmash]

Well the problem with games today is that they're often being developed for PC and for consoles at the same time, this is bad for quality in two ways.

1) Playing a game with a gamepad is very different from playing a game with a mouse/keyboard, developing a game to work with both control schemes often means the controls are often not as tight as they could have been, usually more for the PC side than the console side.

2) We're over a year overdue for the next generation of consoles and developers have hit a brick wall in terms of how far they can push themselves. As a result we're not seeing as much progression as we could be seeing, especially for the PC side because the average gaming PC can now blow the socks off any PS3.

This is very correct and well written.

Also, in the nature of true capitalism, we have de valued from "what would make this game good" into "what would make this game the most saleable". Cut enough corners and you get a circle.

 

[Frostbite3789]

Writing is getting better, gradually. (Very gradually.)

I'd disagree here, again on the quality of writing of the isometric RPGs. Stuff like Planescape Torment just absolutely rapes the face out of everything written in the last five years. Metaphorically, that is.

That's one game. You can't point to one single game from the late 90s and say it's proof positive that games suck nowadays.

Besides, for all I hear about how wonderful PS:T's writing was, it certainly wasn't good enough to keep me interested.

I'm not saying they are sucking, I'm saying that I disagree that writing is getting better. It is entirely a matter of opinion for this. I would further add that the old D&D RPGs by Black Isle, as well as Fallout 1 & 2, pretty much blow away everything made in the last 5 years.

I have at least presented games (Fallout 1 & 2, Baldur's Gate, Arcanum) that I believe are superior in writing, I note you have not presented anything.

I'll chime with Mass Effect 1, the two Witcher games, The Old Republic, the HL2 games possibly.

Writing is hard to pin down though - I really liked the writing for Alpha Protocol, but that was more a good use of cliches I guess than anything else.

I never played the Witcher games (well, I played the first for an hour but it didn't grab me).

The Old Republic is hard to pin down as to which one you mean.

KOTOR1 - the story is ultra-generic except for the one twist. HK-47 was very well done. But the story was basically about as deep as a child's cartoon.

KOTOR2 - fantastic story. Funnily enough, written by a lot of the people from the studios I mentioned earlier. This game is a contender to those I mentioned, but it's not a new game.

TOR - BLhehhhhh. Seriously awful writing. I'd blame the genre for it, trying to put a story into an MMO just didn't work. I felt massively let down. Companions were trite and contributed next to nothing.

Fallout's story, water chip is broken. Get new water chip. If you want to play that game. You can oversimplify anything and make it sound stupid.

 

[Something Amyss]

but all we do today is look at them, sigh and turn back to things like pokemon yellow, or things along those lines.

Who is? Gamers as a whole? Because gaming is bigger business than ever.

Core gamers? Define core.

Hipsters?

Nostalgic fans trying to recapture their childhood?

I don't think this is by and large true.

 

[MiracleOfSound]

I just think culture in general has changed, not just games but movies and music too. There is much more focus on getting a quick, cost-effective product out than on creating something memorable and awesome.

That said, I do love the current gen and it's given me most of my favourite games.