SpartanBlackman said:
Call it nostalgia, but the general quality of games are going down.
It's nostalgia. The general quality of games has gone up
exponentially over time. People just don't remember the piles and piles of steaming crap from previous generations. A "bad" game from today does not hold a fucking candle to a bad game from ten years ago in terms of terribleness.
SpartanBlackman said:
1. Pirates and Consolisation
Pirates are going to ruin PC gaming. This is a fact. The problem lies that because PC games are some of the best pieces of work out there (Witcher franchise), when they get ported to the current gen, they tend to get somewhat dumbed down. A prime example of this would be Crysis 2. But why would a company switch from making great games on the PC to console games? It's because of pirates. Gears of War 2 and 3 will not be on the PC due to large amounts of pirates. And what annoys me the most is what some people think that they can justify pirating a game because it is not "perfect" or that it's "Consolised garbage". The thing is, people pirate, devs switch to more platforms to get enough money to fund future projects, so more people pirate. It's a circle. Consolistation is not always a bad thing, but when it is used just to make money due to pirates, it's a shame. But when it's used to just make more money, it's bad.
Alternately: consoles are a much cheaper, easier entry point into gaming, which has lead to wider-spread adoption versus gaming PCs. Devs want to release into the largest markets they can, so they release to consoles. It has very, very little to do with piracy. While piracy of PC games is pretty definitely the most damaging sort, it still isn't as damaging as people make it out to be (I'm sure others will make the relevant points: a pirated copy is not a lost sale, piracy leads to better word-of-mouth advertisement, etc.). But piracy is very definitely not the primary cause of dev drift toward consoles.
As for consolisation, the main problem there isn't the fact that these games originate on consoles, it's how little work often goes into the ports. For a lot of games, just tweaking the menu system to fit mouse-control better would go a long way toward fixing things. Also, you want to be very sure that you're not confusing streamlining with "dumbing down". You might argue that Crysis 2 is "dumbed down" in the sense that they've replaced the open environments with more linear gameplay (personally, while I think it's a less interesting concept, I think the actual gameplay was much improved by this change). But how on earth could you blame that change on it being geared toward consoles? If your complaint is about suit control being simplified and such, that's just the devs refining the concepts and streamlining. I really think most claims of games being "dumbing down" for consoles recently are people who just feel uncomfortable with the fact that devs are finally starting to figure out how to make compelling, workable games with simpler control schemes and more refined gameplay concepts.
SpartanBlackman said:
2. Premium fees and DLC's.
I'm looking at you, Activision, EA and Capcom. If people want to play games currently, they have to spend £400 on a decent gaming pc, or £150 on a new-ish console, pay online in some cases, pay a subscription fee, pay £40 for the game, and then pay more for bonus content locked on the Disk or for just more items. Lots of the "Great" companies do this. Bad Company 3 has day one DLC with guns not availiable in the full game. MvC3 has Jill and Shumagorath locked onto the Disk. Resident evil 5's online. Call of Duty Premium service? WoW premium service? What most companies don't realise is that it harms their repuatation to charge even more than what we already do for the lulz. Look at Film. It costs me $10 to go out and watch a film with friends. I pay that for the content locked onto a disk in half of EA or Capcoms games. Related to this, Bobby Kotick can go die. By no means should games be free, but locking content and charging extra on top of subscriptions is cheap, and would probably lead to a loss of primary fanbase. You'd be pissed off if you watched a movie with 20 scenes, and you had to pay an extra $10 on scenes 13,14,15 and 16. Gaming should be no different.
(1) Stop pretending like it is a bad business decision. You can't argue that it's motivated by greed
and constitutes a bad business decision. I agree with you that, just like any other business, it's motivated mostly by a desire to generate profit. As such, they're not going to do it if it's hurting their profit.
(2) None of the things you mentioned are in any way required to enjoy the parts of the games you already bought. Are you going to similarly complain that all expansion packs should be free because they're closely related to something you already bought? Is it immoral to charge for sequels too?
(3) Why does it make it worse that the DLC is day-one? Would you feel somehow better if they waited to develop/release it? Does the fact that it was developed at the same time bother you? When I buy Pokemon Black, should I get a copy of Pokemon White for free since they're related and were developed simultaneously? Is it immoral for them to hold the Pokemon White content ransom for additional money?
(4) Your movie analogy is silly because you make it sound like they're holding onto scenes that are an integral part of the film. A better analogy would be "You'd be pissed off if you watched a movie with 20 scenes, and you had to pay an extra $10 to buy the special edition DVD with director commentary, extended scenes, and an alternate ending."
(5) The argument against DLC seems to be predicated on the notion that you are paying more for something you already bought. But you aren't, because it's being sold as a separate product and you
didn't buy that product. The argument is that the DLC is part of the game, and you bought the game, so the DLC should have been included for free. Except the DLC expressly was
not part of the game you bought. Unless the marketing was sneaky and tricked you into thinking the game included something it did not, this is a terrible argument.
SpartanBlackman said:
3. Follow the Leader and lack of innovation.
Regenerating health. Done in one game then COPYPASTA'd over every shooter since '08. Even in game that's been in development for over half my lifespan. 99% of MMO's are WoW clones that get DESTROYED due to lack of innovation. Most best selling games are "Boring brown shooters". Some games just disregard their primary fanbase, and do whats popular, because screw innovation, it's all about the money, right? Dragon age 2 is an actionized sequel that is best summed up as ME2 not IN SPACE. There is still some amazing innovation to be found, the biggest being Portal, L.A. Noire and Minecraft+Terraria. But video games risk falling into a trend of nothing but Brown shooters if people ignore the indie developers and devs keep up with the whole Cackadoody 8 and Gears of war 7. Lets just see what the cod games have added- CoD4: Amazing multiplayer, GOTY, the best CoD game. WaW: More browness. Zombies. Worse online. MW2: Worse online. Nukes. Blops: An attempt to balance the game. More zombies. I don't want to have a world of follow the leader gaming.
Once again: THIS IS NOT SOMETHING NEW.
Derivative games intended to cash in on better, more popular games have been churned out ad nauseum since gaming started. Just like films. Or Books. Or television.
Let's also not forget that massive innovation isn't
required to make a good game. We want to criticise poor games that use concepts stolen wholesale
in place of good design. What we don't want to do is say "everything you do from now on has to be wholly original". Regenerating health was a great idea that fits very well into a lot of games. Suggesting that games shouldn't use it because it's not original anymore is silly. Should games stop using analog sticks for input because they're all just copying the first games that did that?
SpartanBlackman said:
4. Cash cows and not doing it for the art.
Cash cows are bad. When a franchise is going to die, let it die rather than go on forever. Don't keep selling spin offs of questionable quality and prequels. Also, would it kill devs to do anything for the art? "Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines" is regarded as one of the best RPG's of all time. But damn, on release it had so many bugs it made New Vegas seem bug free. Want to know what the developers, who were going bankrupt, did? They stayed on, without pay, and patched the game. THEIR game. If companies did stuff like this now, then they would have more supporters, and we would support them. Overall, Devs need to balance morality and money.
(1) Companies should worry less about money because it will give them more supporters? "Don't do it for the money. Instead, do it for the art...because it will make you money." You must realise how contradictory this is.
(2) Surprise! Developers are people! They need to make money to live just like everyone else. At some level it
has to be about the money and that is unlikely to ever change.
(3) More than anything else, I wish people would stop acting like you can't make a good game and try to profit. There doesn't even need to be a "balance". The quality of a game does not magically improve if the company worries less about money and worrying more about money doesn't magically hurt games except in the most extreme cases. Quality and profit do not lead to a zero-sum game.
SpartanBlackman said:
If all of these are gone, then gaming would evolve rather than stay in the sorry state it's been in for a few years now. Already have we seen some franchises die (Metroid, Sonic) and some of the blandest continue.
The franchises you mention are sadly very lacking in innovation for the most part. Metroid Prime was certainly innovative and a beautiful game, every other Metroid game is either Metroid Prime with some bells and whistles or Super Metroid with some bells and whistles. Sonic had a poorly-executed transition to 3D and even then all of the 2D sonic games are pretty samey and all of the 3D Sonic games are all pretty samey (and pretty bad).
TL;DR: None of this is new, your problems are fairly ill-conceived, and the continuing insistence that "things were better before" on these forums is getting tiresome.
