Maybe we should stop ignoring gaming's screams for help.

[Silvanus]

Gamers do make silly, unreasonable, ever-increasing demands; that's true.

The fact is, however, that consumers of pretty much everything else do the same thing. People who buy books, watch films, purchase TV packages. It's all just noise. It's the developers who respond to this and its they who shoulder the responsibility.


Gamers might act like demanding little assholes, but they're not genuinely exploitative. They're just a but loud. They're not the main problem.

 

[Norithics]

I was quite happy until the ps2 era ended.

This is a very important point. The PS2 era was one of a variance of titles, where developers could create anything from a stunning Resident Evil 4 to a laughable but fun God Hand. There was room for that kind of thing, and it just seems like this is getting elbowed out in favor of the video game equivalent of garnishing every meal with an entire chocolate cake.

 

[rob_simple]

Oh, and also...

We're stretching ourselves too thin. We want more, newer, better, flashier, and we want it all at the same price. Reading that sentence twice should reveal the problem. Gamers want more and more stuff in their games, but don't want to pay extra for all the more that they're getting.

Um...I don't. I was perfectly happy for graphics to stay the way they were in the PS2 days, when everything was distinct and functional, knowing that it would free up production costs that would give developers the ability to expand their games in directions that are actually interesting.

It is the publishers at fault, here, for assuming that all anyone cares about is how good things look. You just have to look to more recent E3 shows, where they spend ages wanking over how powerful their hardware is, and then two minutes towards the end go, 'oh and here are some games, I guess. Whatever'.

Gaming used to be about the games, about having fun, but now it's just a pissing contest to see who can cram the most polygons into their stupid pre-rendered cutscenes. That's where the money is really being wasted, and I don't ever recall hearing any gamer ask for this.

Yeah? Well, until recently, I was the graphics whore to end all graphics whores. We therefore balanced each other out.

The reason they talk endlessly about technological advancement and new hardware at E3 is because that's what people want. And I HAVE heard gamers ask for this, over and over and over, in real life and on the web. I don't know how you've missed it. Maybe you never go to other gaming websites?

Quite frankly, most would agree that E3 is a significantly better barometer of what gamers as a collective want than you are.

The only people I have ever heard championing graphics are either casuals who think better graphics=better games or the PC Master Race who like to build those hypothetical future machines to run Crysis.

Maybe it's just the case of only hearing what we want to hear, but the majority of gamers I talk to, and opinions I read, (including people high up in the actual industry) believe that graphics are a dead end for gaming because, at the moment, we are forcing them beyond what the machines are capable of; making both hardware and development more expensive.

I have never, ever understood this Graphics are God mentality. If a game has good graphics then that's nice but if it's boring as shit to play then who cares? I want to see games advance in the gameplay department, something that is a lot cheaper to do and wouldn't have landed the industry in the quagmire it's in today.

Oh, and unless you missed it, Microsoft generated a tiny bit of controversy at this years E3, so I guess it's less of a barometer for what the consumer wants and more of a barometer for what companies have decided we're getting. You may also have missed the many people on these very forums, who highlighted the fact --yes, myself included-- that both Sony and Microsoft's presentations could have done with less tech talk and more actual games.

You know, games. The thing console gaming used to be about before we decided to just turn them into shitty PC's.