Sorry about the long post, i just had a lot to say on the subject. If you don't like reading then i've made the important bits bold.
Lately i've come to the realisation that i'm actually dissapointed in the quality of video games in the last 6-7 years (2005/2006 ish).
I was just wondering if anybody else felt the same.
As a few examples, i mean the way that certain genres appear to be taking a step backwards overall while others don't really seem to be going anywhere good either.
An example is the racing genre.
The destruction derby series was one of my favourite series' of all time, and i spent many hours playing through it.
This series was from the late 90's to early 2000's. It was one of possibly the first games to have destruction for vehicles.
But now it seems like many racing games that have been released as of late appear to be just bland and unimaginative, and even in many cases have less features than games released years ago.
Hardly any racing games these days seem to even have damageable vehicles (the Dirt series being the only one that comes to mind right away), and the vehicles seem to be unreasonably tough, and if you crash and get anything more than a slight scratch, you're penalised and have to wait to be reset before you can continue driving.
In other games, there's either very basic damage where you have a health bar and your entire car explodes if your health bar is too low, or no damage at all.
And i'm not saying that racing games NEED to have damagable vehicles, but it sure adds a lot to the gameplay, and the games that haven't had damage as a feature haven't exactly had that many redeeming qualities (or been very innovative, not that there's a lot you can really do with racing) otherwise.
Another genre that seems to have taken another step backwards is the simulation genre, for reasons that i'm sure most of you will already know of.
Before a few years ago, simulation games actually seemed to have a much wider audience and actually made some ideas into interesting and fun to play simulation games, such as theme hospital, sims 2, rollercoaster tycoon, simcity..
Now we have tow truck simulator, fork lift simulator, garbage truck simulator, street cleaning simulator, woodcutter simulator.. the list goes on, all of which you perform very boring and mundane tasks. And sims 3 wasn't exactly as good as sims 2 either, having more cartoony-ish graphics and yet trying to be more realistic, and trying to cut down on load times without trying to improve any on performance issues that people had in sims 2.
What happened?
A final example is the horror genre.
While it hasn't suffered as much (IMO) as the other genres, it's still lost most of the reputation for being scary that it had with the likes of resident evil and silent hill. The survival horror subgenre has all but vanished now with resident evil turning into an action genre with the start of RE4/5.
The horror games that have been released have been very tame such as the latest few silent hill games, and amnesia tries to build up suspense but the annoying special effects when you lose your sanity spoil the game for me, along with the whole game being in basically the same environment and the lack of actual encounters (and the water monster not even having a visible model, and the one monster model not really looking too scary either).
The slender game was kind of scary the very first time i saw it but after that very quickly became boring for me, i was actually kind of interested in possibly seeing a game involving the slenderman mythos but this one seemed poorly made and lost most of the reason that slenderman was so terrifying.
As a side note, it also seems as though a lot of games or series that were great around 2006, have now taken bad decisions and have now greatly lost popularity or just been completely changed (IMO for the worst).
Gunz: the duel lost popularity completely and the community that was with it around 2005 is now basically completely gone.
War rock, a game that wasn't the best game around at the time but still a pretty good game, had some bad management and greatly lost popularity in the last few years.
IJJI, a company who used to host several decent games including Gunz, did some bad management, closed Gunster back around 2007 before it really got a good chance to do good (but was a very well made game), they also lost popularity on all of their games including gunbound as well.
Runescape made a design decision back in 2007 that split the entire community, and after that made pointless updates to the graphics that didn't really look good (IMO a bad decision considering it was a web game made in java, not really that much improvement you can do with the graphics), and then seemingly became money hungry a few years ago when they realised that they were losing profits because of losing a large amount of players, and they ruined the novelty of the game by making other decisions such as removing quite a bit of the old content that made the game unique (such as random events), and making the game a lot more centred on economy rather than playing the game like it was supposed to.
I've already mentioned resident evil and silent hill, but both of them lost most of the horror- RE especially - when the respective companies decided to take the series in the more action-oriented route.
Habbo hotel, (updated with some terrible updates and the game just became boring)
coke music (shut down around 2007), the command and conquer series (became too cartoony and the last one that i really liked was generals), grand theft auto (i didn't think that GTA IV was terrible, but people around here think it was.. i thought it was average at best though).. the list goes on.
And finally, another reason is that although the graphics of the games have "improved" (though many of them now extremely overuse special effects such as lens flare), other aspects such as animation, the music and level design seem to be getting worse. Games that had some really great rock or metal tracks such as tony hawk's pro skater or destruction derby would probably have some unfitting dance or rap tracks instead, if they were made today. And levels were designed with exploration in mind, not so much now (linear paths etc). And finally animation seems to be worse, with stiffer less fluid animations, or animations that just seem odd.
I'm not saying that there haven't been any good games whatsoever since about 2005/6, i'm just saying that the industry hasn't really been as successful or put out as many quality products as i had imagined it would back in 2005 and 6 (again, obviously in my opinion).
So anyway, what do you think? that's just my opinion, most people are probably thinking the exact opposite.
Lately i've come to the realisation that i'm actually dissapointed in the quality of video games in the last 6-7 years (2005/2006 ish).
I was just wondering if anybody else felt the same.
As a few examples, i mean the way that certain genres appear to be taking a step backwards overall while others don't really seem to be going anywhere good either.
An example is the racing genre.
The destruction derby series was one of my favourite series' of all time, and i spent many hours playing through it.
This series was from the late 90's to early 2000's. It was one of possibly the first games to have destruction for vehicles.
But now it seems like many racing games that have been released as of late appear to be just bland and unimaginative, and even in many cases have less features than games released years ago.
Hardly any racing games these days seem to even have damageable vehicles (the Dirt series being the only one that comes to mind right away), and the vehicles seem to be unreasonably tough, and if you crash and get anything more than a slight scratch, you're penalised and have to wait to be reset before you can continue driving.
In other games, there's either very basic damage where you have a health bar and your entire car explodes if your health bar is too low, or no damage at all.
And i'm not saying that racing games NEED to have damagable vehicles, but it sure adds a lot to the gameplay, and the games that haven't had damage as a feature haven't exactly had that many redeeming qualities (or been very innovative, not that there's a lot you can really do with racing) otherwise.
Another genre that seems to have taken another step backwards is the simulation genre, for reasons that i'm sure most of you will already know of.
Before a few years ago, simulation games actually seemed to have a much wider audience and actually made some ideas into interesting and fun to play simulation games, such as theme hospital, sims 2, rollercoaster tycoon, simcity..
Now we have tow truck simulator, fork lift simulator, garbage truck simulator, street cleaning simulator, woodcutter simulator.. the list goes on, all of which you perform very boring and mundane tasks. And sims 3 wasn't exactly as good as sims 2 either, having more cartoony-ish graphics and yet trying to be more realistic, and trying to cut down on load times without trying to improve any on performance issues that people had in sims 2.
What happened?
A final example is the horror genre.
While it hasn't suffered as much (IMO) as the other genres, it's still lost most of the reputation for being scary that it had with the likes of resident evil and silent hill. The survival horror subgenre has all but vanished now with resident evil turning into an action genre with the start of RE4/5.
The horror games that have been released have been very tame such as the latest few silent hill games, and amnesia tries to build up suspense but the annoying special effects when you lose your sanity spoil the game for me, along with the whole game being in basically the same environment and the lack of actual encounters (and the water monster not even having a visible model, and the one monster model not really looking too scary either).
The slender game was kind of scary the very first time i saw it but after that very quickly became boring for me, i was actually kind of interested in possibly seeing a game involving the slenderman mythos but this one seemed poorly made and lost most of the reason that slenderman was so terrifying.
As a side note, it also seems as though a lot of games or series that were great around 2006, have now taken bad decisions and have now greatly lost popularity or just been completely changed (IMO for the worst).
Gunz: the duel lost popularity completely and the community that was with it around 2005 is now basically completely gone.
War rock, a game that wasn't the best game around at the time but still a pretty good game, had some bad management and greatly lost popularity in the last few years.
IJJI, a company who used to host several decent games including Gunz, did some bad management, closed Gunster back around 2007 before it really got a good chance to do good (but was a very well made game), they also lost popularity on all of their games including gunbound as well.
Runescape made a design decision back in 2007 that split the entire community, and after that made pointless updates to the graphics that didn't really look good (IMO a bad decision considering it was a web game made in java, not really that much improvement you can do with the graphics), and then seemingly became money hungry a few years ago when they realised that they were losing profits because of losing a large amount of players, and they ruined the novelty of the game by making other decisions such as removing quite a bit of the old content that made the game unique (such as random events), and making the game a lot more centred on economy rather than playing the game like it was supposed to.
I've already mentioned resident evil and silent hill, but both of them lost most of the horror- RE especially - when the respective companies decided to take the series in the more action-oriented route.
Habbo hotel, (updated with some terrible updates and the game just became boring)
coke music (shut down around 2007), the command and conquer series (became too cartoony and the last one that i really liked was generals), grand theft auto (i didn't think that GTA IV was terrible, but people around here think it was.. i thought it was average at best though).. the list goes on.
And finally, another reason is that although the graphics of the games have "improved" (though many of them now extremely overuse special effects such as lens flare), other aspects such as animation, the music and level design seem to be getting worse. Games that had some really great rock or metal tracks such as tony hawk's pro skater or destruction derby would probably have some unfitting dance or rap tracks instead, if they were made today. And levels were designed with exploration in mind, not so much now (linear paths etc). And finally animation seems to be worse, with stiffer less fluid animations, or animations that just seem odd.
I'm not saying that there haven't been any good games whatsoever since about 2005/6, i'm just saying that the industry hasn't really been as successful or put out as many quality products as i had imagined it would back in 2005 and 6 (again, obviously in my opinion).
So anyway, what do you think? that's just my opinion, most people are probably thinking the exact opposite.
