Jimquisition: Perfect Pasta Sauce

[Magmarock]

Oh god awesome video Jim. In my opinion the industry had more variety in the 90s then it does now but I'm a bit of a retro gamer. It's good to see so many indies making great games though. What your opinion on that, was the industry better in the 90s in terms of the process of how games were made and if so what changed and why?

 

[thesilentman]

I know I would like more plat formers that are not Mario

I mean just look at how the killed Banjo Kazooie by turning into a racer and stating as much in game. They literally said they were broadening the demographic and assumed gamers nowadays just want to shoot things with some serious 4th wall breaking. DAMN YOU MICROSOFT I WILL NEVER FORGIVE YOU FOR WHAT YOU DID TO RARE!

Okay. Try Braid, Limbo, Terraria, Cave Story (my personal favorite out of the bunch), and any games from the Basement Collection. Like I said, Cave Story is the one I recommend the most, as it feels more platformy than the others. In my opinion, of course. All of them are for PC, so go check them out.

(I want 2D platformers too. I freaking love those games.)

OT- YES JIM YES. I fully agree that I'd like something new and interesting. I don't want homogenization, I want my good games. Considering I'm getting out of my zone and trying new things, I really what I'm seeing. I started Ys Origins. Fucking fantastic and a change from my days of playing TF2 and Skyrim.

Bravo man, bravo.

 

[tehwalrus]

If there is one thing that really needs to listen to Jim's words and fits the pasta sauce analogy, it's the MMO genre. Considering WoW is the Ragu, and a whole lot of other MMOs are Pregos, no wonder people just aren't finding the series interesting enough to explore. GW2 really tried, and for the last few months I've heard nothing about it; TERA tried, and it ended up going F2P, and we all know what happened to TOR. TESO isn't looking too good either.

I know a lot of people have heard this from me, but I feel that the next big MMO will break a few "taboos" hovering around the genre and prove the thoughts about them wrong. One taboo I'm waiting for to be broken? Private server support. That word "Massive" in the acronym MMO can stand for something else in the games, it doesn't have to be about how many players there are on a server.

Guild Wars 2 is out, it's good, and it's like a love-letter to World of Warcraft and anyone who wanted to play that game but found it stupid, as they'e specifically re-engineer all the things people mock about WoW. instead of 120 skills you get 10. Instead of killing wolves to fetch hearts only to realize this wofl -has no heart- you go to areas where there are three different things t do and they all count equally towards the quest. instead of standing still in combat, tapping the number keys, the game requires dodge and maneuvering. Instead of the holy trinity of classes, the game is specifically designed so that every class is a red mage, and it's impossible to make a dedicated tank or healer. The gameworld is more unique than a cookie-cutter fantasy. The higher tier and harder to get loot is, the less of a difference in makes. You can put any skin on any armor so you don't have to choose between stats and appearance. Each level takes about the same amount of time to unlock, and you get the same experience from a level 5 zone as from a level 80 one. When you attack a monster someone else is fighting, you each get a seperate loot roll, and each get the same experience you'd get from soloing it. I don't know about WvW and PvP but I hear good things.

 

[talideon]

I've been playing the Mass Effect trilogy for the past 2 months or so. The first game was really sweet. I knew the other two parts are shootier and shittier but I really didn't expect them to go this deep into the bland 3rd person cover-based shooter mud hell.

Seriously guys, what gives?

I think it's because people looked at the first game, saw a guy a guy with a gun and a third person perspective, and though "oh, this must be a third person shooter!"

Of course it wasn't; it was an RPG. And so those people bitched about the shooting mechanics being janky and not skill based, which would be fair if it were a third person shooter. But it wasn't; it was an RPG.

And so Bioware were bought by EA, and EA/Bioware decided that what people wanted *wasn't* an RPG, but a third-person shooter with RPG elements. That lead them to scrapping the inventory system rather than fixing it by introducing context sensitive stacking and ordering (which is all that was needed to fix the inventory system from the first game), turned the gameplay into a third-person shooter, and turned the game into a relatively small number of linear missions.

Now I really liked ME2, but I *loved* ME1 in spite of its myriad flaws. ME3 just fell apart completely as soon as it hit London.

 

[SoopaSte123]

Thank god for Jim and his knowledgable truthiness

 

[daxterx2005]

Activison pulled the plug on all their Crash bandicoot adventure games to focus on their COD games.
Jim is so right.

 

[Timzilla]

I really liked this episode. The example given at the beginning, of how every sauce was the same, and now we have variety, makes me hopeful for the day that we break out of the rut that the industry seems to be in and have a lot more choice of what we play.

 

[Lightknight]

Wow, insightful to say the least.

Recently you've been looking into how budgeting has been going on in the AAA companies and I believe this to be one of the conclusions of that line of thinking. Keep at it, this is what I've been wanting someone in the public eye to say for years. Not only is swinging for the moon every time bad, but it misses out on smaller opportunities. Well made inexpensive games are doing very well right now. Not just doubling or tripling investment but tearing the ROI calculator a new one. Big companies need to get their act together and realize that while they're dicking around with the AAA money they can still throw some money to these smaller games and make good or even better returns per dollar invested.

Frankly, it's a significant opportunity cost of them failing to do so.

 

[ungothicdove]

Sigh...

This just reminds me of how much I want a good new RTS that isn't totally indie or some f2p nonsense, I just want a fair priced RTS with a decent single player story and some skirmish modes for me to mess around in.

Sigh....wonder how much Red Alert 3 is on steam.

I don't know if you've heard of it but give this page a look. It's an RTS called Planetary Annihilation where you can literally fight across the entire galaxy. I saw it on quickstarter and am now waiting impatiently for it's release.

http://www.uberent.com/pa/

 

[M920CAIN]

T F eachother and T F eachother and T F eachother and there's no substance! LIKE EPIC GOLD! The ending to this video is probably the best part.

 

[UM536]

God save our gracious Jim.

I'll add on to that.
God save our gracious Jim,
God save our noble Jim,
God save Sterling.

Also diversifying into markets where competition is not as fierce is not really risky. Personally I compete on an airplane design team. After dominating one competition we diversified into a more prestigious competition, but the stiff competition shut us out, so now were going the other way to a competition which is no where near as competitive. AAA could throw it's weight into any number of genres and make some money, and gain a loyal fan base.

 

[Reyold]

Yet another fantastic episode, Jim. If companies would branch out even a little, they'd probably see more profits. But I doubt they will. After all, that involves risk! (GASP!)

Indie developers have more wiggle room in this regard because they can afford some risks and fill in untapped niches. For example, I like hard games (like Super Meat Boy), so naturally, I gonna make hard games because 1.) I like them, so whatever I make will be better for it, and 2.) it's a niche that many have yet to tap. If Dark Souls and the aforementioned Super Meat Boy are any indication, it's that there's a market for these kinds of games.

 

[Bvenged]

That was absolutely superb and I couldn't agree with that analogy more. This is yet another episode which I truly believe would do the industry good if publishers and developer CEOs watched it.

 

[Atmos Duality]

Had Prego just asked people what they wanted, it's likely they'd not have discovered extra chunky, because nobody would have said it.

And right there is a great metaphor describing the death knell of gaming variety that has plagued the mainstream.

Consider the previous console generation: the Playstation 2 along with GBA and DS, had the most varied game libraries ever; Far better than this generation has.

Even comparing the PS2 GBA and DS to its competition at the time, it was always the system with the best game variety and not the best graphical fidelity that "won" (financially succeeded), and in all cases, it was not by a small amount either.

 

[Yuuki]

I reckon it goes something like this: Music industry > Movie industry > Games industry
What I'm referring to is the order of severity (least to most) of wanting to repeatedly cash-in to the latest fads and desperately trying to make something "perfect" by forcibly mashing everything that was successful in other media into one product.

In the music industry you see this happening the least, for the most part all a band wants to do is what Jim was raving on about: making music that the band wants to make, for the people that want to listen to it.
Alright, there are quite a few examples of bands that simply want to cash-in to a generic fad and make something that sheep want to lap-up en masse purely for the sake of moneeyyyyyy. But it's nowhere NEAR as bad as the game industry.
There is endless scope of upcoming new bands with new ideas, low-budget garage bands that sound good, there is endless scope of finding buried talent (hint: Youtube and musicians who to put their work on Piratebay!). You don't have to be afraid of big-time bands shitting all over you, getting turned-down by studios/publishers just because you're not homogenized is less common and more often than not there is a studio/publisher willing to sell your work.

Then there's the movie industry and the scope becomes a bit more restrictive, budgets become significantly bigger and what is "selling" suddenly becomes a lot more attractive. So we see sequel after goddamn sequel to the point where they keep getting released purely for the SAKE of sequels - Call of Duty comparison anyone? While we do see stuff like Paranormal Activity (low-budget movie which made huge bucks) they are rare, very rare.

And finally we have the game industry, the worst of the worst when it comes to cashing-in to fads. Jim pretty much described everything regarding this.

What say people, would I be correct?

 

[romxxii]

Just a slight correction with your XCOM example, Jim. Development for both the FPS XCOM (to be retitled The Bureau) and Enemy Unknown allegedly happened concurrently. So they were making both games at the same time, but released info on the FPS one earlier. Nobody outside of Firaxis even knew of Enemy Unknown until the damned thing went gold.

To use your pasta sauce analogy, they already made two sauces; they just didn't let you know about the extra-chunky blend until after everyone spat out the plain FPS flavor.

 

[Flying Pilgrim]

I think a good Single player low magic Conan Game would sell like hot cakes since Age of Conan did well initially then it dropped off. Also look at Obsidian, those guys take existing engines and make amazing games with them in a little over a year when typical development time is a little over two to three years, and they make money. Look at Nintendo, sure they carved their niche as the Disney of video games but they have in their history only lost money one quarter.

They did make a single player Conan game, simply titled Conan, around the same time AoC was released. It was a decent-enough game, but it proved to be a very big financial failure.

 

[Terminal Blue]

I don't know if you've heard of it but give this page a look. It's an RTS called Planetary Annihilation where you can literally fight across the entire galaxy. I saw it on quickstarter and am now waiting impatiently for it's release.

Ooh.. is that a spiritual successor to Total Annihilation I see?

I like this idea, not only because RTS games are kind of rare right now but also because those that exist seem to be steadily moving towards deeper micromanagement, which I'm not opposed to but it would be nice to get away from.

On topic.. excellent episode, and I think a strong counterbalance to the episode on innovation (which I somewhat disagreed with at the time, but I think you've added a lot of context to your argument here).