Is gaming dead?

[ThriKreen]

So with the mainstream game industry in a ruinous creative state, and indie designers failing to fill the void, the new question becomes: whereto from here?

I don't think indie games are failing to fill the void, if anything they're just bringing the dev process more out into the open.

In the AAA space, you only hear about cancelled projects that were previously announced, but never the tons of unannounced projects that were cancelled, never to see the light of day. I should know, I was part of one ... a year of promising work down the drain. =(

With indie, we hear of a lot more ideas get pushed forward and advertised, since obviously they have to drum up support and funding with support sites like KickStarter and Indiegogo. So even poor ideas could get enough funding to push to release, then we see it do badly.

What would have normally been a behind the scenes evaluation where it gets stopped there, instead now it gets further along in dev process to release, giving the perception the failure rate is much higher in the indie scene, when it's most likely the same percentage as AAA (obviously there are some exceptions).

It's like user generated content in games like Neverwinter Nights and the MMO, Little Big Planet, TF2 maps, etc. We'll always end up with content following a bell curve of quality of bad stuff, average stuff, good stuff and a very small percentage of the truly excellent stuff.

Just that with normal pro development, you'd normally have a filter and should only see the (hopefully) above average to excellent stuff.

And shows how crucial good design and internal review can be.

 

[FalloutJack]

SNIP

Ah, so then what you believe is that gaming is climbing and climbing a hill of where it will eventually just drop off?

That's silly.

It requires you to be able to predict when human creativity will run out, and that is impossible to know. The MOMENT where that happens, humanity is dead anyway. We need diversions and things to strive for, so you'd best be hoping that imagination isn't quite as lacking as you believe.

 

[Manji187]

Opinion/ possible nostalgia goggles aside...there is definitely a case to be made that the quality of games has declined. Contemporary games are, on average, shorter (single player: 5-12 hours), less replayable (in terms of content/gameplay) and, for better or worse, more "streamlined" in their mechanics. Sure, on the other hand, the quality of things like graphics and voice-acting has gone up...but that's an improvement in breadth (technology), not depth (design).

 

[Auron]

The combat was basically just virtual D&D in the old CRPGs, it's actually coming back big time with Kickstarter a lot of people enjoyed it, don't think the UI was unintuitive particularly.

I know what it was. Perhaps if I actually played D&D I would've been able to appreciate it, but as it stands it pulls me out of the game far more than I like.

But this?

That's a pretty clunky UI.

Honestly, I'm hoping that Project Eternity and the new Torment won't be plagued by the same issues that pull me out of old CRPGs, because I love Knights of the Old Republic which basically uses the same rulesets, but tweaked slightly and given a Star Wars paint job.

I don't know I actually like the model, I think the feeling gets pretty close to real D&D. the actions are pretty simple overall excepting for magic users, other than do away with the menu buttons on the left it's probably going to be similar. Neverwinter nights and KOTOR were good as well though so I don't really have a general problem with it either way though.

Now Starcraft achieved the perfect balance for high level play and was being played until Blizzard made an effort to kill the korean tournaments to promote sc2. While you can say that RTS today is generally more comfortable I'm not so sure about being better. It was hard but not impossible.

I didn't say it's impossible, and I'm pretty bad at RTS games anyway, because I didn't grow up with them. I'm only just playing Starcraft for the first time and I'd certainly say I think it still holds up today. But the fact remains that, within the game as it exists independent of its sequel, a lot of things could stand to be vastly improved along the lines of AI pathfinding and the ease of micromanagement.

The pathfinding could have been better perhaps, especially the more clunky units like Dragoons, the Micro stuff was a design choice far as I'm aware(C&C was already done with unit limits a few years before sc.) and it really raises the game's skill roof. I'm actually fonder of the simpler more modern features in sc2, but sadly a lot of amazing tricks in the old engine were lost in the process.

I played Deus Ex and Human Revolution within the past couple of years. While Human Revolution was great--and yeah, you're right about a lot of aspects being improved--I thought it had a number of weaknesses that made it worse than the original, i.e. repetitive level design, a narrower range of gameplay possibilities, a worse storyline, a linear augmentation path, lame boss battles, etc. Actually, while Human Revolution was better than Invisible War, Invisible War didn't have a couple of the abovementioned problems.

Not so sure about the worse storyline, though I'd like a bit more integration and at times Jensen's a bit hapless in the cutscenes, my only real gripe with it was the "boss" stuff which they are fixing exclusively for the wii which sucks BIG TIME. Invisible War was a mass hallucination let's just agree on that.

 

[LetalisK]

No, it's fine. I mean, it has problems, but it's certainly not dieing. And your preferences, your opinions, are not fact. However, it is a fact that the gaming industry has been significantly growing in the last decade at a rate that puts the rest of the economy to shame and that 71 out of the top 100 best selling games are from 2000 and on[footnote]Even when omitting Wii Sports for obvious reasons. http://www.vgchartz.com/gamedb/[/footnote]. You don't have to like how it's grown or the products birthed from that growth, but you can't claim it's dead just because the games you like aren't being made as much anymore.

 

[Lilani]

I'd like to see a complete AAA industry game crash. Nothing like a little armageddon once in a while to shake up the worst aspects of an industry and force some change...or at least a slow crawl back to the status-quo. That being said, kids today love the games coming out. They aren't saddled with the games of yesteryear in the same way that gamers who've had decades of great titles to fondly remember can be. I think the industry is being lazy, but my young niece just thinks the games are awesome. It's kind of weird to think that she'll look back on a certain set of games that I find repulsive, boring and uninspired as really awesome games. Perspective is everything here.

Yeah, there's nothing like tens of thousands of people losing their livelihoods because a few games have come out that you don't like.

Seriously, come on. The past generations were as full of as much shit as the current generations. Of course only a handful of games are going to be remembered decades from now--how many movies can you recall from several decades ago, compared to how many were actually made?

 

[kypsilon]

I'd like to see a complete AAA industry game crash. Nothing like a little armageddon once in a while to shake up the worst aspects of an industry and force some change...or at least a slow crawl back to the status-quo. That being said, kids today love the games coming out. They aren't saddled with the games of yesteryear in the same way that gamers who've had decades of great titles to fondly remember can be. I think the industry is being lazy, but my young niece just thinks the games are awesome. It's kind of weird to think that she'll look back on a certain set of games that I find repulsive, boring and uninspired as really awesome games. Perspective is everything here.

Yeah, there's nothing like tens of thousands of people losing their livelihoods because a few games have come out that you don't like.

Seriously, come on. The past generations were as full of as much shit as the current generations. Of course only a handful of games are going to be remembered decades from now--how many movies can you recall from several decades ago, compared to how many were actually made?

People are already losing their jobs. Mine included. Get off your horse.

As for my second point which you missed entirely was that games we look back on and say were better are better mostly by reason of nostalgia. As I said, my niece will grow up thinking some second rate Barbie game that someone churned out to cash in on an IP is awesome. I don't have a problem with that. But what the industry needs is for smaller game companies, the indie guys, to bring us back to that point where games were made because we as human beings needed to see where we could go with the medium, to try and push the boundaries of the tech.

 

[Something Amyss]

In this sense, the inert public response to the Wii U may foreshadow how people are going respond to the PS4 and next Xbox--with Ouya and Steambox being the possible beneficiaries.

If things come crashing downward, we may see a dearth of good corporate-produced titles for a few years--a kind of modern-day version of the E.T.-caused Atari crash of '83.

*sigh*

Okay, here's a couple problems, itemised for convenience.

1. Nintendo is mostly targeting a group that's unlikely to upgrade. They did so with a tablet controller that seems superfluous to most people based onthe notion that if motion sold last gen, knocking off tablets would go over like gangbusters! Except they did so with no major games and (again) at a market that probably doesn't care about the new hardware. They also ran the risk of being seen as competing with the tablet market, an already installed user base with cheaper games that can be played more flexibly.

2. There will never be another crash that resembles the 80s crash. One of the key problems with the 80s crash was the cost of production of games. The cartridges were hella expensive, even compared to BD. Standardised manufacture, established factories, and metrics will stop this from ever happening. We'd need an industry-wide equivalent of the uDraw to pull that off, and a lukewarm response o something like the Wii U is nowhere near that.

3 Ouya and "Steambox" are fare closer to a problem with the 80s crash. Both are designed to be open-source, and one isn't even a standard unit. Steambox hasn't even come out yet, and it's already got competitors. Brand competition from a lot of manufacturers and no control was one of the major issues that landed us a glut of shite games which dilluted the market.

So really, the people who stand to benefit from your 80s-style crash are historically part of the problem.

 

[Godhead]

Gaming's not dead. Innovation is still occurring today; it might not be as drastic as it was in the late nineties, but it still exists. I had gotten Starcraft 2 about two months after I had started playing the classic Starcraft and I enjoy 2 a lot more, not because it's brand new, but because it made tweaks to the original game and gave it a graphical overhaul. I love the fact that I now have a button to select every single non-worker unit in the game, and I love that as a zerg I can now just make a queen to help spread creep and make more larvae instead of making a lot of sunken colonies and 2-3 hatcheries per base. The innovation that shakes the foundations in how games are made occur a lot less than they have in the past, and that's fine. But as long as people are able to look at a formula and say 'I don't need to make a new formula as long as I can tweak it to make it work better for me' then that's a more than reasonable thing to accept.

 

[MrHide-Patten]

[quote="EzraPound" post="9.407643.17010972"
Bad news abounds: Nintendo, one of the greatest of all design firms, looks like it's on the verge w crisis. [/quote]

And ya lost me, if Nintendo is your yard stick of quality, then im going to tell you to get a better stick. Nintendo hasn't been good in YEARS.

 

[josemlopes]

1) Is re-democratization really good, though? It seems to be that what made the fifth generation so special was the combination of financial accessibility and corporate finesse. Now we have creative mobile games that can't be so ambitious on account of the limited resources possessed by their creators, and boring high-budge games, but very little in-between.

Im going to say to expect that to change, a lot of devs now are doing smaller budget games in between their bigger titles for the purpose of trying something diferent while avoiding a huge risk, such devs are Avalanche (Renegade Ops), Ubisoft (Far Cry Blood Dragon), Techland (Call Of Juarez: Gunslinger), etc...

These guys are using their already made AAA tech to make cheap games in between their big releases and I expect this trend to become bigger (Far Cry Blood Dragon made a shitload of sales). And instead of cheap mediocre games you get top quality cheap games, you arent just depending on indie devs for the 10$/15$ game anymore.

 

[Auron]

I'd like to see a complete AAA industry game crash. Nothing like a little armageddon once in a while to shake up the worst aspects of an industry and force some change...or at least a slow crawl back to the status-quo. That being said, kids today love the games coming out. They aren't saddled with the games of yesteryear in the same way that gamers who've had decades of great titles to fondly remember can be. I think the industry is being lazy, but my young niece just thinks the games are awesome. It's kind of weird to think that she'll look back on a certain set of games that I find repulsive, boring and uninspired as really awesome games. Perspective is everything here.

Yeah, there's nothing like tens of thousands of people losing their livelihoods because a few games have come out that you don't like.

Seriously, come on. The past generations were as full of as much shit as the current generations. Of course only a handful of games are going to be remembered decades from now--how many movies can you recall from several decades ago, compared to how many were actually made?

Pretty much what she said, people seem to forget games like Superman 64, Jurassic Park on the MegaDrive, every other movie and comic game(sans Arkham and some Spiderman games.) ever, Bible Adventures, Mario is Missing, Street Fighter the movie the game, every CD-I game, most Sega CD games, TMNT on the nes, 90% of the games the angry nintendo nerd reviewed... And man it goes on.

I close up the argument with this more eloquent and demonstrative bit by Jim Sterling http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWHHlnbZOYQ

 

[briankoontz]

Opinion/ possible nostalgia goggles aside...there is definitely a case to be made that the quality of games has declined. Contemporary games are, on average, shorter (single player: 5-12 hours), less replayable (in terms of content/gameplay) and, for better or worse, more "streamlined" in their mechanics. Sure, on the other hand, the quality of things like graphics and voice-acting has gone up...but that's an improvement in breadth (technology), not depth (design).

That's just the AAA market, a subset of that market, that you're referring to.

A case can be made that the quality of AAA games has gone down, especially with respect to the length of games, with Max Payne being a vanguard of the industry decline in that regard, and the simplification of interface and game mechanics caused partly by the success of click-fests like Diablo and more importantly by more developers developing for both PC and consoles.

But the tremendous rise in all other markets besides AAA has made the AAA market relatively unimportant, and many games are still made with dozens of hours of content.

The streamlining of game mechanics has been good for gaming as a whole, helping bring it to the masses. I love complicated games but one reason (the other major one being the democratization of high technology like digital distribution) gaming has become so popular and there's now such creativity in game development is that developers have focused so much on making their games easy to play. And this opinion comes from a guy who calls Skyrim an Action/RPG and wishes The Elder Scrolls had remained a hard-core RPG series while Bethesda could have formed a new IP for their streamlined Action/RPG desires.

 

[VoidWanderer]

No, Gaming is not coming to an end. And I don't think it will, unless indie games are driven out by the larger companies. While Nintendo's future is hazy at the moment, that may coming to a crashing halt, unless they pull an ace out of the hole. Given the greater possibilities due to the increased RAM of the next-gen consoles (The WiiU doesn't count), I think that gaming will actually improve as the restrictions they are currently in will be significantly reduced.

The main reason for the crash in '83 is due to the total dominance in a VERY young medium, but it has grown to be truly self-sufficient.

I am not worried about the future of gaming, but I am concerned for Nintendo and the AAA survival horror genre however.

 

[Xdeser2]

Short answer: No.

Long answer: NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

Alright, let me explain. This generation has seen a HUGE number of extremely good games, and, what a shocker this is, some people like them some people dont. Its all subjective. If you strictly like what gaming was in the 90's then yes, its a decline. But if anything, its far more diverse than it used to be.

And, do you know the funny part? Past generations have had just as much crap and shovelware as this one. Its not as if were in some unique gaming apocalypse. Remember the C64, NES, SNES, PSX, PS2 and Original Xobx (and yes, PC gamers, you're included here too)? Please tell me how many of those games you truly remember, and I'll guarantee you that there were 10 games considered subpar, shitty, or outright shovelware for every great one.

 

[Olas]

Yes, gaming is dead.

It's all over. The market is dried up. There will never be another game made or sold ever again. This site might as well be shut down and Yahtzee should start looking for work as a plumber or something. All because we hit a slow period following a few underwhelming releases. That was all it took to destroy gaming forever.

[/sarcasm]

Actually I'd say there's plenty of cause to be optimistic, if the industry does go through a sort of crash it'll probably cause a reshaping of the industry with different/smarter business models, fewer big names dominating everything, and more democratization. Anyway, the idea that a lucrative market with a consumer demand like the gaming industry simply dying makes no sense.

I don't think it's even possible to kill the gaming industry. You could make games illegal and ban them in every country; an underground market for them would form overnight to subvert your efforts. You can't stop the signal.

 

[Phlakes]

...No. Can we stop making these threads now? If you have to ask, the answer is no. If gaming really does die there'll be just a little bit more going on than layoffs and some falling stocks.

 

[Another]

Certainly not. Even if another crash were to happen, gaming would pick right back up, like it did last time. And the time before that. History's shown that gaming isn't going anywhere, anytime soon.

I didn't mean literally--just whether it's going to recover from its current creative nadir, or whether a new crash will instate terrible games as the norm.

Except terrible games are not the norm. Maybe it is because I am highly selective of my games, or maybe it is because I buy a lot of stuff from the currently very creative rich indie scene, but I don't see a creative slump for gaming as a whole. What I do see is that trends have shifted from big companies making complex creative games to smaller companies making complex creative games.

Honestly, I feel this is what happens when a medium shifts to a more mainstream audience. For a movie analogy, your creatively bankrupt, highly popular Call of Duty games and such are the creatively bankrupt, highly popular Dumb Summer Blockbuster, smaller movies are your mid tier games (admittedly the mid-tier dev studio has been somewhat gutted this gen), and indie games are your indie movies. Same pattern follows with books and music.

Will gaming die? No.

Will gaming be terrible? Sometimes, but that has always been the case.

Will things change and shift? Yep, and I think that is what is causing some panic for people. People don't like change for better or worse. In the future you may have to look harder for a really great gem of a game, but that doesn't mean that they won't be there.

And that's not even mentioning the potential for a shift back to old trends. I was just reading a few articles on Gamesutra analyzing what was popular in games last year and what trends may be making a comeback. They included some promising things: survival, harder difficulty, turn-based strategy, and even permadeath (to a limited extent they say, as not everyone is game for that sort of thing). Course it also mentioned continuing MOBA and Minecraft cash-ins, but hey you win some and lose some.

 

[bartholen_v1legacy]

Since I was about twelve years old--in 2001--gaming has visibly been in a state of decline.

Oh great, another one of these. "When I was young we blablabla" is never a good way to start any thread, or any discussion whatsoever. Okay gramps, go back to your old games and stop shaking your walking stick at us.

No, gaming isn't dead. Just because something has changed and you don't like it as much anymore doesn't mean that it's dead.

And I couldn't help but notice that this OP sounds just as smug as the previous thread I saw you start ----> http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/9.407495-Does-anyone-else-find-plot-twists-in-games-gimmicky#17002125