The Comfy Chair said:
Depends really. On PC it's improved dramatically. Games like Guild wars 2 and Witcher 2 are fantastic AAA games, the indie gaming scene is booming, and crowdfunding has really changed how we can get the games we want made created. It's a perfect time to be playing PC games and the future is so bright it's blinding. Hell, PC gaming may even be completely divorced from microsoft in the next few years depending on what happens with steam/linux, that's an exciting prospect having an operating system pushing PC gaming as opposed to sneakily pull it back whenever possible.
Console has nosedived horribly. Bloated marketing budgets, scared investors, low returns from retail, a horrible shift to 'dudebro shooter or nothing' in terms of sales and therefore investor confidence. All of that and more has crippled consoles, sending many talented developers into bankruptcy. It's in a bad way and i don't have the confidence console gaming can survive another generation like this. Put it this way, those AAA games on PC above did very well, made healthy profits and the staff are now working hard on new projects and/or expansions. On console, they'd have been fired if the game didn't sell 10m copies because the marketing team decided to spend far too much and the investors didn't see enough 0's on the profit sheet. It's not right that devs can expect to be made redundant post launch on a console game. It's not a 'sign of the times', it's a sign of the diseased console industry that is quickly becoming terminal.
Mobile is starting to find its feet and i think we'll see some real gems in the coming years. It's still in it's infancy though and at the moment it's still struggling to be more than a collection of quick 'casual' games and HD versions of PS2 games.
Overall, i think on average it's been about the same. Back in 2005 console games excited me. Current gen consoles started going down the crapper, then PC gaming started exciting me. So for me personally i just seeked the greener fields
I think you pretty much covered it with that post. Console gaming really has become almost pointless whereas PC gaming improved greatly and is now even a little better than gaming on the consoles a few years ago, at least from a development point of view.
Owyn_Merrilin said:
Wait wait wait... racing games don't model damage anymore? Talk about losing a feature, I remember that being a prominent part of Nascar '98 on the PS1. It did do the whole "press X to reset" thing, but only if you turned the damage modeling down. If you had it on full, your car could get really screwed up, maybe even screwed up enough to be unable to finish the race (can't remember for sure on that last part.) Whether it could be completely destroyed or not, though, the damage had effects on the handling of the car, doing things like slowing it down or making it list to one side. In 1998, on the PS1. For that matter, I remember this formula one racing game for the game.com[footnote]If you're too young to remember that, it was a handheld with a monochrome screen, basic PDA functions, and the gimmick of a built in text only dial up internet browser. You had to plug it into a wall to use it, but it worked. If you're too young to know what a PDA is, it's the little handheld devices business people used to keep track of contacts, their calendar, and later on, e-mail in the days before smartphones. In fact, Blackberry started out as a manufacturer of PDAs that could receive E-mail, with the whole phone thing being added on later, of all things, that had damage modeling. Obviously it wasn't as visually impressive as what the Nascar games had, but I remember if your car got damaged enough, the wheel popped off.
Pretty much. I've hardly seen any racing games using damage lately, and i know for a fact there were vehicles that could be damaged in gaming starting from at least the late 90's. I remember playing both destruction derby AND a formula one game, both of which had some excellent damage models for that era.
And what happened to need for speed? i might be confusing it with another racing series, but i think that one of the earlier games had some really good damage features, and a mode where you actually had to crash into as many things as possible in order to gain points.. now the latest game has barely any damage at all?
And the indie racing games don't seem to be doing any better, either. I've now been using steam greenlight and have been voting up some games. And out of about 450 games that i've voted on (out of like 800+, i'm still voting), i'd say that at least 50 of those were racing games, all of them featured very basic or no damageable vehicles whatsoever, without any other unique features that made them interesting.
...As for multiplayer becoming more common, i believe that's another reason that games appear to be going downhill, because the developers seem to just throw in a barely working multiplayer feature and expect the game to instantly become better, without any extra work. At least that's how it seems with some games today.
dessertmonkeyjk said:
I don't know about you but when I look at these, I scratch my head in confusion
[Videos and stuff and things]
I think i might not have explained my point too well in the OP.
Yes, technology has advanced and we now have much better graphics, sound and other features than we did a few years ago. But my point was that games just don't seem to be made as well as they were a few years ago, the new technology doesn't always seem to be used to its full potential.
As an example, the last video you posted, showing off vehicle damage.
It does look really good, and i'd actually like to see it being used in a game.
But we haven't. Or, it has been used, but not implemented well.
Simply, no games are using it. Dead island, your vehicle took a little bit of scripted damage, but it never went beyond just smashed windows or a smoking engine, and your vehicle never actually exploded. It felt unfinished.
In the latest need for speed game, the crashing seems to be very tempromental, and doesn't always seem to work. You can crash into another car at like 100+ MPH and sometimes it will only slightly dint your car. And when you do really crash, the game tries to use some special effects and slows down the game, trying to make it seem dramatic, but it also slows down the gameplay and just doesn't really look too good.
Another thing that i'd have really liked to have seen being used more often is the euphoria engine that was used in GTA IV. I remember seeing the euphoria engine in action and it looked really good, but some of the features were just never really used in GTA IV.
Furthermore, i'm also a little dissapointed that it seems as though some technology just hasn't been worked on enough yet. I remember seeing these two videos in 2007 and being amazed at how great they looked. But here we are 5-6 years later and we still barely see anything like it.
War Rock, which i mentioned in the first post, had some great ragdoll physics. This was a game made in 2004 in korea. The ragdolls occasionally got stuck in objects, but that happens even today. Sure, they might not have been too realistic, but the game still made it great to watch somebody (even yourself) get shot, then fall down a big flight of stairs, dropping blood everywhere as it went down.
Now, the CoD series is extremely popular, and yet it looks as though they hardly use ragdoll physics at all, and no blood either.
Speaking of blood, overgrowth, an indie game made by THREE PEOPLE has probably the best blood effects i've seen in a game, and yet there's other games that are still using very basic blood effects.
(They've been updated since then and are now even better, too)
So it's not just that i'm dissapointed with the way that games seem to be designed worse today, but also with the way that the newer technology (at least the things we know work in an actual game) doesn't seem to be taken advantage of either.
