Popular Games that have Negative Impacts.

[Soviet Heavy]

there are some games that, no matter how good or popular, can have negative side effects on the industry. I'm not here to ***** about how Game X sucks and Game Y is great, but about the side effects that come from popular releases.

Take the Activision juggernauts for example. There is no denying that WOW is a well designed game. The amount of play time and longevity of its lifespan speaks towards its endurance. The problem comes from the competitors aping design choices in efforts to take over the top spot. Age of Reckoning tried it, and it failed miserably.

Same can be said for the COD franchise. In order to compete with it, opposing developers and publishers take design choices from the top dog in order to win over their audience.

So instead of providing alternatives to big titles, the game industry thinks that emulating them and slapping a different art design on top is enough to fight back. Instead of new risks, they all follow the leader, never reaching the same level. I mean, why would you want to leave WOW for a game that does the same stuff, only not as well?

So yeah, those are the two obvious ones. Can anyone else think of really popular games that might have had a negative impact on the industry as a whole?

 

[OldKingClancy]

GTA causes children to run over old ladies and murder their pets.

Sorry, couldn't resist, truthfully I say any successful game will have a bad impact as many gamers will use that as a benchmark and hate on actually good games by saying 'This is crap, it's nothing like (insert insanely popular game here).'

Of course this isn't all gamers but a majority of them unfortunately.

 

[Scalli]

Just from reading the title, I had instantly though 'WoW'. But you already covered that one, and CoD... So I'm struggling to think of another big one.

I've been browsing the app store for a month, and almost every game is a free-to-play social gaming experience, with increasingly necessary in-game purchases... so whoever started that trend. Farmville I guess? Second Life?

 

[Thaluikhain]

Well, more or less any trend setter, I guess. Though, alot of them refined the original at least a little, so they could claim to be legitimate improvements, rather than mere copies.

 

[DEAD34345]

Actually, I disagree completely with your opinion that COD and WOW have negative impacts. I don't like or play either of those games, but I understand that both are reasonably well polished and do what they intend to do very well. If there was no WOW all of the WOW clones would just be clones of an inferior MMO. If there was no COD all of the COD clones would just be clones of an inferior FPS. You will always get clones, so why not have clones of the good games rather than the bad ones?

 

[cookieXkiller]

mw2... because now everyone thinks sniping is bad.
and all the trickshotting clans are making it worse, yeah its fun to do it with friends but dont bring it infront of everyone.
maybe bad isnt the word im looking for ... hmm :/

 

[Richard Po]

I don't think games them have "Negative Impacts". I think its more of people playing the games, take what they see in it into reality. What determines if a 10 year-old should play GTA or not is not a question of how old physically he is, but how mature he is mentally, and how conscious he is of the world around him. Hence why I find the ESRB to be kinda of stupid, but thats just IMO. The execution of certain subject matters could also be questionable.

 

[PsychedelicDiamond]

I really don't like Heavy Rain... it's exactly the kind of game that hopes to involve the player as little as possible so he doesn't get in the way of it's (not even really good) plot and that's just not what games should be about. The player should actually experience them and not just sit there and watch them. We have movies for that.

 

[Atmos Duality]

Well, these are my opinions.
By no means are these three examples the ONLY reasons for the consequences I provide (lack of innovation/market stagnation); there are thousands of aggregate reasons that one could provide of varying degrees as evidence for such things.

Spoiler: Halo

-Halo-
At the time of Halo 1's launch, it was actually a very good looking game AND it ran on a console. Quite an accomplishment considering that this was during PC's FPS heyday.
Halo was also pretty well designed for a shooter, even though there were bigger and more numerous innovations being made elsewhere in other shooters (all of them on PC) in both the tech and the gameplay, Halo can claim credit for several good gameplay mechanics.

The extra profitability of console titles combined with its low difficulty/easy learning curve made it the shooter to beat, and over the course of the new few years it caused a sharp decline in quality PC shooters. Consoles were easier to control and now the industry had a model standard that was proven to be profitable via minimal effort. Thus came a line of clones.
By the time the Xbox 360 launched, PC shooters were mostly aping Halo's now-tired design space; today, it's difficult to find AAA FPSes on PC that aren't "Dumbed down/Streamlined" (whether you prefer the euphemism or the dysphemism) for consoles or a made as a quick-buck port job.

Worse, all of that experimentation and variety in FPSes in the early-mid 2000s was stamped out by market exploitation (this is to be expected in a big business/industry). Today, I find that any AAA First Person Shooter provides a largely generic experience with few real defining gameplay traits beyond that which Halo established.
Even Call of Duty owes its success to many of the standard marketable gimmicks Halo popularized (and while CoD4.x popularized Iron Sights in shooters, it certainly didn't invent the concept).

Taken in that respect, Call of Duty 4.x is the new Halo. Its market popularity and dominance stifles creativity and innovation in a time where we need it the most.

Spoiler: World of Warcraft

-World of Warcraft-
This game monopolizes time to generate money. It goes beyond what one might think of as a standard "game" and reaches into "addiction-exploitation".
WoW is *not deep*. It's popular because it presents the illusion of depth while being notoriously easy to get into. A great deal of WoW's alleged complexity can be broken down fairly easily into a simple binary of Action->Response balancing.
This is important because without that the game would be too complicated to maintain the massive playerbase it has today.
Once the player understands how to actually play, WoW drags them into the game with Operant-Conditioning and slowly turns up the dial until it resembles something of a gambling-addict (towards the end, you are essentially competing with other raid members for increasingly rare gear).
The grind in WoW is Biblical in proportions; as I understand, Cataclysm reduced the grind entry to reach level 80; this simply has the effect of adding more players to the end-game realms who in turn are competing for the same rare loot. More competition = more time on average (even with Instancing, Raid groups will often ostracize players based on gear score, increasing the required grind at end game to be closer to all of the content Blizzard let them "skip"; thus the game never really reduced the required grind, it simply shifted it).

All of this leads to a point: Since WoW monopolized and monetizes its players' time so effectively (you shouldn't need me to tell you how immensely profitable WoW is) it has lead to the creation of several clone MMORPGs almost to the exclusion of anything innovative or different.
(TOR claims that its branching storyline will break this cycle, but last I heard it was doing its best to ape WoW's formula anyway for familiarity marketing).
It's very disheartening to see so much work go into a game that does little more than deliberately waste the player's effort (I must say effort because some would argue that a game could be defined as a deliberate waste of time in the first place; even though I disagree with that sentiment).

Spoiler: God of War and the QTE

For the longest time God of War popularized one of the absolute worst gameplay mechanics ever: Quick-Time-Events.
Thankfully, the popularity of QTEs has fallen in the last year and a half; gameplay developers are finally starting to realize how horrible and meaningless they are.
It's easy to see the appeal in QTEs from a developer's point of view: They require absolute minimal effort to develop and implement. You simply take a cutscene and add a binary Pass/Fail resultant to it, then you put the Simon-Says button logic in.
In terms of gameflow, QTEs are used for two purposes:
1) Showboating
2) Pure Reaction Tests/Tension Tests

With Showboating, you get God of War style QTEs. The input of the player is secondary to what the player is watching. Adding the illusion of meaningful input turned what would have been regular cutscene into one with (minimal) player involvement. The problem here, is that these QTEs will often require the player to pay rapt attention looking for the QTE input prompts rather than what his character is doing as a result of them; rendering the QTE ultimately pointless for the player.

Reaction/Tension Tests are exactly that: A simple, lazy "Do-or-Die" test for the player where the animation/cutscene the QTE is tied to has less meaning than the end/gameplay result of the QTE. A good example might be an early QTE from Deadly Premonition, wherein an axe wielding psycho will randomly jump you from out of nowhere and kill you if you fail both QTEs.
The manner in which he kills you is unspectacular, and the encounter is ultimately little more than a nuisance.

It almost feels unfair to talk about QTEs so much when it's God of War in the title, but the blame must be placed squarely at God of War's feet not for inventing QTEs (Shenmue used this same system years before God of War 1 was released) but for popularizing/marketing them.

QTEs became a tool for the lazy developer (or one in a rush to meet deadlines) for years, and while they are finally dying out, I feel that it still falls under the topic retroactively.

 

[synobal]

The whole no scoping thing. I find really dumb. I've really only seen it in the COD series but I fear it might try to make its way into battlefield games.

Also I'd say WOW is nice but they really have stagnated the MMO market. Everyone tries to "Be WOW but" and they always fail.

 

[Atmos Duality]

Also I'd say WOW is nice but they really have stagnated the MMO market. Everyone tries to "Be WOW but" and they always fail.

I'd say that they succeed in cloning/being WoW, but they fail to take WoW's playerbase away.
If MMOs are meant to monopolize time to make money, which MMO are you likely to play: the one where you already have time invested (and friends to keep you there) or a new MMO that offers everything your current MMO offers down to the letter, but without your current investments?

 

[matrix guardian]

Portal has ruined many games for me. I can't stand having to walk everywhere in other games.

(joke if you can't tell)

 

[The Abhorrent]

It may be a bit harsh (and vindictive) to say that some games have had a negative impact on the industry, but I would agree that some games have had such an impact. In most cases, it's one particular game (or series) which has effectively created a monopoly within its own genre and/or it has been so successful that other developpers try to "follow the leader" [http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FollowTheLeader] and emulate that success; quite often, it's both.

One of the obvious targets would be World of Warcraft, because it's the game which popularized a genre that I consider to be dangerously addictive by design [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/9.285740-Trapped-in-Another-World-An-Essay-on-MMORPG-Addiction-long]. Think about it, what other genres profit from player being addicted to a single game for so long? Then there's also the fact addiction would inherently hinder players from trying other games (particular games within the same genre, WoW's direct competitors). The sheer multitude of problems associated with the genre is a clear indicator that MMORPGs should have never been made popular, but WoW did just that.

Other games are probably far less of a problem in comparison, though I do see Call of Duty mentioned a lot in these types of topics. Quite honestly, I've never even played any of the games in the series (not an FPS fan in general, though I've enjoyed the Halo series; Forge mode in particular is great)... but I find it odd that it releases a new game pretty much every year and its still successful. That probably looks more negative on the players themselves than the developper behind it, but it could only be a matter of time before players get both bored & tired of the annual FPS games and move onto something else.

---

Meh, it seems that the only problem with the gaming industry right now (to compare it to the film industry) is that too many players are indulging in what is effectively the "Summer Blockbuster"; popular games/films which are lacking in depth (but still enjoyable... usually, they're just lacking anything which would allow it to be better than a brief bit of cheap fun). As a result, more ambitious & artistic projects are getting side-lined for the easy cash-cow.

As I've said, I think it's only a matter of time before players start to get bored of these sorts of things. If you've seen one popcorn flick, you've seen them all. Once more players start gettting bored of the cheap thrills (weakening the sales of "popcorn games" as a result), they'll be craving & demanding games with actual depth to them (boosting their sales). Developpers will have to step up their workmanship as a result, and games should start to get deeper.

Unfortunately, businesses in general don't believe in the mantra of "Build it, and they will come."; they very much prefer products which are (more or less) guaranteed to make them a profit. The recession of 2008(?) probably didn't help things much either, shareholders are probably still weary of any risky projects. Unfortunately, "popular games with negative impacts" and most commonly those which are signs of stagnation in the industry, and those are almost always "safe bets" (or an already established cash-cow in the case of WoW).

So yeah, a lot of this rests in the hands of the players (as a collective whole). You want games with more depth? Buy games with more depth (and possibly avoid those without, just to drive home the point to developpers).

 

[hotsauceman]

Wow. That thing sucked up so much of my time. Like the guy who mentioned before me it is a massive grind. By the time i got my first decked out in epic gear i dreaded playing it again. It just revolutionized to idea of doing thousands of things and NEVER GOING ANYWHERE.

 

[Soviet Heavy]

Uber SNIP

I definitely agree on the Summer Blockbuster mentality that has afflicted the gaming industry. That alone isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it is the lack of other factors that causes it to drag gaming down.

Take the Summer Blockbuster method for films. Yes, you get all the big bombastic, substance lacking extravaganzas in the sunny months, but you also get the artistic films near the end of the year as Oscar time approaches.

Now look at how gaming does it. Instead of big summer games, we usually go through a drought period in summertime. Most of the big blockbuster releases are in November and December to capitalize on the holiday shopping. This cuts out any chance for artistic games to release without being in direct competition with major AAA releases. Heading into the new year, you get the post holiday big releases, like Mass Effect 2 did, which tide people over until May. Then in May, a smaller number of AAA games are launched to hold gamers over till the summer ends.

So the gamers are still playing their AAA games over the summer, which kills any chance for smaller studios to get decent launch windows. They are constantly in competition with the overbearing AAA market.

 

[Terminate421]

Call of Duty unfortunatly suffers from creating generic conversations of "The latest cod is the best game ever".

I do Like the series and I do still buy the latest one, but I feel the franchise is the reason why military shooters went through the roof in amount. (Battlefield was like the only one you'd find before CoD4)