Is Fun still relevant to gaming?

[Arbre]

I've been reading some reveiws and preveiws for games I'm interested in buying but everyone seems more interested in Graphics, controls, Multiplayer, AI, realism and what-not then if the game is any fun to play.

Why isn't teh fun factor considered an important part of a game?

Have we become a society where watching realsitic paint drying is considered entertainment?

If anything, these must be poor reviews, or you may have missed something, because I can't picture a reviewer plastering a good note upon a classical game, without actually having any fun with it - assuming of course that the reviewer is honest.

 

[Jagdedge]

Wow, A lot of interesting points have been made.

It seems a lot of people on this forum are "games are art Hippies"

Because people who are unemployed, believe in free love, and in preserving the environment, are the same as people who believe video games are art.

Um... as opposed to...?

It was sarcasm...

 

[shadow skill]

I don't know if you realize this Cheeze but in the four or five hundred years since men have used what we would recognize as guns the basic technology has not changed all that much. Rifling by itself was a rather simple, subtle and yet immensely important evolutionary step for the firearms as it increased the accuracy of rounds fired. As we started to make guns that could fire more and do so more accurately we stopped marching at each other in straight lines and shooting each other in the face amd started engaging each other at increasing distances.

See--there's part of my point. All other things being equal, a long range gun is better than a short range gun. On the other hand, the really fun thing about _Devil May Cry_ is that you *don't* just stand off with your pistols--the awesome thing about the game is gettin' all up in someone's face with a sword. And as Kratos, it's way more fun to get close enough to use your blades than it is to stand back and throw some thunderbolts.

I mean hey--maybe I'm wrong and _Halo_ would be way more fun if you could combo someone with an energy sword and juggle them in a corner with a needler. I don't think so, though.




You said: "The combat systems in God Of War, Ninja Gaiden, and Devil May Cry are almost totally different because of subtleties not some major shift. This is what is missing from even the best FPS' of the last couple of years."

Okay. And I'm saying that you won't get those subtleties in an FPS because those subtleties are in part a function of a difference that exists between magic melee weapons that doesn't exist between guns. I mean, even *within* _Devil May Cry_ it's the sword and Dante's demon powers that get all the great action. You think that's just an accident, that you can do way cooler and more unique things with the sword than you can do with the guns in one of the games you mentioned?

You said: "This is a great discussion, gives me something to do while letting my laptop cool down from playing The Witcher. "

Glad you think so! I agree. In fact, it's prompted me to think of what might be an even simpler explanation for why FPSes don't stand out from each other the way all those games do. In an FPS, a kill is a kill is a kill. If you're walking across the map towards me and my sniper rifle, and you've got your energy sword out, I'm not going to give up a headshot just to go meet you in the middle with my gravity hammer in some kind of duel. I'm just going to snipe you as soon as I can.

On the other hand, in all the games you mention, they actually *reward* you for killing in style. I think that's just a fundamental difference between an FPS and those games: FPSes are about getting the kill as easily as possible, no points for style.

Because if you start basing the game around things you get points for in those games like combos, is it an FPS anymore, or is it just a fighting game with projectiles?

If you start being able to do combos on someone with Master Chief using guns and grenades, well, isn't that just updating Stryker from _Mortal Kombat_?

Lets see a pump action shotgun versus an auto shotgun that does not require the player to waste time manually chambering the next round. Or the assault rifle attachment I mentioned, I would think those would fall under the category of subrleties. Oh and for the record an assault rifle is not necessarily better than a close range weapon like a shotgun, at the proper distances a shotgun has more stopping power not to meantion the fact that the pellets in one shell can hit multiple individuals where as bullets can really only hit one person. (Ignoring things like richochets and bullets that happen to pass through one individual to another which is another problem with assault rifles.) You seem to ignore those and focus on completely irrelevant things like there being a reward for "stylish" kills, even though what is really going on is the player being rewarded for having more skill at the game itself. Not to mention that in any shooter you are implicitly rewarded for being more accurate by not dying and using less ammo so that contention really makes no sense.

Furthermore bladed weapons are essentially perfected, firearms however are still evolving. The only thing really left to change in a hack and slash game other than adding magical properties to the weapons is HOW the character uses the weapons, this actually happens in hack and slash games, the same really can't be said for fps' on the whole. This is really sad because there are so many different types of guns that exist in real life that could be used in video games. It strikes me as odd that in real life engineers found a way to meld the medium range capabilities of assualt rifles and the close quarters stopping power of a shotgun while having to worry about physics, yet videogame designers have only been able to copy off of Id for the most part.

Something small like a cover mechanic just doesn't seem to want to take off with FPS'. The biggest thing that has happened to shooters recently is the removal of the hud and placement of the ammo counter directly on the weapon itself, which ironically I first saw in Quake4. Oh and regenerating health rather than leaving health packs laying around all over the maps. None of which actually changes the way these games are played in any truly significant way since everything else has remained more or less the same. Though they do change how the games that employ these things feel.


Edit:

Bioshock does not have a story, three hours into the game and all I know is that there are people in front of me that I need to shoot in the face. I do not have any character at all.

Call of Duty 4 doesn't have a story either you basically just shoot people in the face. You never really get to empathize with anyone, none of the characters you play can even be considered human because they never express anything.

Ohh a game gets good reviews so it must be good right....errr not always, Bioshock is not a very good game, its actually quite boring. Mass Effect is a failure as an rpg and is saved by the otherwise good story.

No one seems to notice The Witcher yet its got a good story and is actually a solid rpg unlike Mass Effect. The Darkness is one of the most underated games of this year and it's a shooter that unllike the three biggest ones actually does have a real story. (It's not the best ever but it is there.)

You really should not kid yourself into thinking that Mass Effect is somehow not safe territory.

 

[shadow skill]

Its nice to know that you don't happen to know what the word implicit means. The fact that in games like DMC you recieve explicit rewards is completely irrelevant to the point I was making tbat DMC, GOW and Ninja Gaiden play entirely different save the most basic mechanics. All things being equal isn't an appropriate caveat because under no circumstances is anything ever equal, without even talking about real life in all of these games end up creating situations where the strengths of mid range and short range weapons come into play. So why bother making such a statement which breaks down so quickly within the context of the discussion itself? The issue isn't novelty things like having telekenetic powers, etc. those are novelties, they do not always change the way one plays a game. What I am talking about is what amounts to a complete stagnation, it's come to the point where you could just change the models on nearly any of these FPS' and call it by a different name and ship it out.

If I look at RPG games I can see the changes taking place in that the turn based rpg is steadily falling out of favor, even before the current rash of action rpg's, there were strategy-rpg's.