The Dumbing Down of Video Games

[More Fun To Compute]

Enter the era of dumbed down gaming. Most gamers will be perfectly content with the contrived and mediocre, and most giants of the industry have noticed this. Who needs a meaningful and interactive storyline when you have a pet dog and a big sword? Who needs a solid plot and a decent ending when you have explosions and super mutants? Why have a deep and innovative game when you can have a dumbed down collection of colorful Mini-Games? Kudos to anyone who knows the games I'm speaking of.

Fable 2, Fallout 3 and Mass Effect?

The reason why we don't get more games like Arcanum is not due to dumbing down as much as it not being all that good. I do think that there is a problem with there not being enough people, as in any people, making RPGs of that type and with that sort of scope though. It's probably due to the industry being serious business for serious mass markets only and no independents caring enough to fill the gap. This may also be partly due to the western RPG fan community being a pack of poop flinging chimps who will eat the soul of any developer who tries to cater to them.

 

[Erana]

Curly, to say that they were better written is not a matter of opinion, there is an actual literary standard by which they can be judged. I didn't say that the games themselves were better, I think Arcanum of Steamworks and Magick Obscura and Assassin's Creed are too different from one another for any reasonable standard of comparison to be drawn, but the former was better written than the latter. Assassin's creed, by the way, is a very dumbed down game. It's run and stab action with little story other than "Go Here, Kill Guys, Ark of the Covenant Cliche" and you bring that up in comparison to the games I mentioned (Planescape Torment, for example).

And I'm sorry, it's hard not to assume the ignorance of someone who compares Portal to Baldur's Gate 2, I mean one is a fun but fairly simple pick up and play action/puzzel game that plays with physics and all that fun stuff, and one is a deep story driven adventure title with lots of dialogue and character development. How you compare one to the other is beyond me. Yes, Bioshock is superior in many respects than the games it was based on, but my point there is that Bioshock is an exception to the rule and owes a lot of it's success to the older game that inspired it.

OK, you're getting elitist.
Elitism equates to trolldom in my book.
Trolls are not welcome here. Rethink what you're saying and come back when you can respect other's opinions.

 

[Shamanic Enzan]

This may also be partly due to the western RPG fan community being a pack of poop flinging chimps who will eat the soul of any developer who tries to cater to them.

Dead Or Alive: The RPG with separate "Breast" stat.

Instant best seller.

 

[Rickyvantof]

Eh...right, you need an IQ of 130 to play Contra?
Since when were all games back in the days "smart"?

 

[Valentine82]

More Fun, Arcanum just had bad graphics and bugs that required a community patch. Thing is, there's a reason hundreds of thousands of copies of Arcanum are still sold each year, when Black and White 2 now only sells a little over 30k copies a year. Arcanum provided an experience you're not going to find in many other places, it was a high brow well written game that was somewhat akin to an interactive novel.

Nice straw man Rickyvantof, You're proof of the last thing I said in my topic post.

Did I mention Contra? No I did not. Go crawl back under your bridge troll.

 

[PizzaDentist]

Games like Planescape Torment can never be recreated to a satisfactory degree. It's one thing to write novels worth of text, and another thing to have voice actors perform that and have it in game.

The industry has suffered from fatigue as the technology has advanced and because of the increasing cost of producing games. Designers have become less interested in embellishing their work with content that gamers might not see. In finance terms this is wasted content.

Thus the seeming waste of money on games with multiple endings, just to take one example. Statistics show that most games purchased are never completed by their purchaser. You can tell me you finish all of yours, but for every one of you, there is a casual gamer that doesn't finish any of his/hers. Game production has become streamlined to give gamers that part of the experience that they demand, but have trimmed the fat on extra content that is routinely overlooked or never seen. In this way, they can take the extra money and put it into something else.

This is what is looked upon as dumbing down. Games like Planescape Torment can't happen again, because with current technology would be too expensive (the studio isn't around anymore, as some indication).

The closest we get these days is games like Fallout 3 which, although epic in their own right, hardly compare with the expanse of storytelling and overall experience of some of those other games. Instead you get recycled character models, repeated dialogue etc. all in the name of making things cheaper to produce.

 

[Beltaine]

And I'm sorry, it's hard not to assume the ignorance of someone who compares Portal to Baldur's Gate 2, I mean one is a fun but fairly simple pick up and play action/puzzel game that plays with physics and all that fun stuff, and one is a deep story driven adventure title with lots of dialogue and character development.

You see Baldur's Gate as a deep story driven adventure. I felt like it was more of a top-down hack'n'slash button masher game trying to be an RPG by inserting character building and walls of text. (I didn't care for Diablo either)

One person's interpretation of a work has nothing to do with their IQ or how "dumb" they are.

The same argument can be made for all media: movies, television shows, music, books.

Different things grab different people in different ways. Comparing your opinions to others and deeming them "dumb" if they differ from yours is just elitism.

 

[Valentine82]

Games like Planescape Torment can never be recreated to a satisfactory degree. It's one thing to write novels worth of text, and another thing to have voice actors perform that and have it in game.

The industry has suffered from fatigue as the technology has advanced and because of the increasing cost of producing games. Designers have become less interested in embellishing their work with content that gamers might not see. In finance terms this is wasted content.

Thus the seeming waste of money on games with multiple endings, just to take one example. Statistics show that most games purchased are never completed by their purchaser. You can tell me you finish all of yours, but for every one of you, there is a casual gamer that doesn't finish any of his/hers. Game production has become streamlined to give gamers that part of the experience that they demand, but have trimmed the fat on extra content that is routinely overlooked or never seen. In this way, they can take the extra money and put it into something else.

This is what is looked upon as dumbing down. Games like Planescape Torment can't happen again, because with current technology would be too expensive (the studio isn't around anymore, as some indication).

The closest we get these days is games like Fallout 3 which, although epic in their own right, hardly compare with the expanse of storytelling and overall experience of some of those other games. Instead you get recycled character models, repeated dialogue etc. all in the name of making things cheaper to produce.

Pizza, you make some interesting points about the industry that are worth considering. I somewhat disagree with some of what you say, there's no reason Fallout 3 couldn't have had a better written story and more meaningful quest options and dialogue interactions, but some of your points are particularly worth considering.

It's refreshing to see a poster who can give an intelligent disagreement, instead of just the average "Dur, I liked Spore, Spore is better than Plumber Bros for the Atari, you're an idiot" type posts I've been getting from people who disagree with me.

 

[Erana]

More Fun, Arcanum just had bad graphics and bugs that required a community patch. Thing is, there's a reason hundreds of thousands of copies of Arcanum are still sold each year, when Black and White 2 now only sells a little over 30k copies a year. Arcanum provided an experience you're not going to find in many other places, it was a high brow well written game that was somewhat akin to an interactive novel.

Nice straw man Rickyvantof, You're proof of the last thing I said in my topic post.

Did I mention Contra? No I did not. Go crawl back under your bridge troll.

Ohh... You know what logical fallacies are.
Even if you do have a higher I.Q. or something, why aren't you applying it? Why not prove, through a logical proof, that modern games are less intellectual than older games? You haven't even defined where the line between new and old games lie.

 

[Anachronism]

Baldur's Gate 2 Shadows of Amn

Finished playing it through today, actually. Brilliant game.

And yes, I agree that gaming is being dumbed down. The reason, in my opinion, is that it has become much more mainstream than it used to be. To use RPGs as an example, BGII was made before gaming had broken through to the mainstream, and as such, BioWare knew exactly which group of people they were developing the game for, and were able to make it as good as they could as a result. They knew exactly what kind of game they wanted to make, and they made it.

These days, though, everyone is a gamer to some extent. The result of this is games like Oblivion. While it's not a bad game in its own right, it's much, much simpler than BGII, and arguably eliminates a lot of the role-playing that you should expect to get in an RPG. Every class can do everything, provided they practise enough in it, which pretty much eliminates the distinction between the classes that you had in BGII. Whereas BGII excelled in the specific areas it needed to excel in, Oblivion tries to be all things to all people and ends up bland across the board.

So yes, gaming is being dumbed down a lot.

That being said, the fact that the game is simpler doesn't mean it's worse. To continue with the above example, Baldur's Gate takes a long time to get into, and fighting your way past the interface can be very difficult. Oblivion, by contrast, has a much more friendly interface, and you start off much more powerful than in BG. While this makes for a simpler, easier game, being simple and easy is no bad thing. Now, I do prefer BG to Oblivion, but just because one game is simpler than another doesn't make it any worse, and certainly doesn't make it less fun.

This isn't necessarily my opinion, as, like I said, I think BG is more fun than Oblivion, but I'm just presenting the case of the people who prefer the newer games. There's nothing wrong with appreciating more streamlined and simple games.

 

[Shamanic Enzan]

Am I the only person that finds Consoles actually make better games available to all? PCs are finicky with their requirements, while consoles, if it works on one it (theoretically I know there are exceptions) works on all others of the same console. Easier to program for means more time to actually plan out the game.

 

[Loxes]

I'm quite young, so although I was not old enough to appreciate many games when they were released, I have still played them now. Yes, MAINSTREAM games as a trend seem to be becoming more suited for the simple minded, but I guess that's how the cookie crumbles. Maybe things will pick up again?

Then again, I'd take your argument more seriously if it weren't that you were being a massive twat to anybody with a different opinion to you.

 

[More Fun To Compute]

This may also be partly due to the western RPG fan community being a pack of poop flinging chimps who will eat the soul of any developer who tries to cater to them.

Dead Or Alive: The RPG with separate "Breast" stat.

Instant best seller.

It didn't work for Vampire the Masquerade - Bloodlines.

More Fun, Arcanum just had bad graphics and bugs that required a community patch. Thing is, there's a reason hundreds of thousands of copies of Arcanum are still sold each year, when Black and White 2 now only sells a little over 30k copies a year. Arcanum provided an experience you're not going to find in many other places, it was a high brow well written game that was somewhat akin to an interactive novel.

Don't forget the bad (from a game standpoint) RPG system, bad combat and bad quests that had you spending more time running around like a headless chicken than doing anything meaningful. Other than that it was quite good.

 

[Valentine82]

Erana, need I explain to you how Fable's story driven elements are drastically dumbed down compared to Baldurs Gate II's story driven elements?

 

[PizzaDentist]

Am I the only person that finds Consoles actually make better games available to all? PCs are finicky with their requirements, while consoles, if it works on one it (theoretically I know there are exceptions) works on all others of the same console. Easier to program for means more time to actually plan out the game.

I agree to an extent, particularly with multiplayers. For years my friends always had better PC's than mine. Every new game that came out and I would have to cough up for better hardware just to run it on low. Getting an XBox means that I could at least relax a bit and play with my friends for a couple of years without having to worry that my hardware would be obsolete when I woke up in the morning.

 

[Beltaine]

Remember when people used to play board games?

Did you play checkers? Then you obviously were too dumb for chess.

Did you play Battleship? Then you must have not had the IQ to play Risk.

Did you play Life? Too bad you weren't intelligent enough for Monopoly.


Now... where did that point I was making run off to?

 

[fix-the-spade]

What about Half Life 2, Bioshock, Assassin's Creed, and Portal,

There's a great deal of irony therer, specifically hovering around Bioshock.

Bioshock's a perfect example of games dumbing down, it's a chopped down clown of System Shock 2. I thought the similarities were exaggerated until I played it but really it is. It's shorter, much easier and much more straight forward in it's story.

To an extent that's a good thing, SS2 was an intimidating old bugger to play, not least because it was so very eager to kill you in increasingly unfair ways. But it does show how much games are getting easier/shorter/dumber when Bioshock is lauded for it's story telling and depth.


Anyway, I think games are definately dumbing down. For the most part they're replacing story telling and/or depth with spectacle. It's a similar situation to effects laden Hollywood Blockbusters (Star Trek, looking at you...).

 

[Sixties Spidey]

Two words:
Console Tards

Two Words: Nintendo Wii

 

[Drakulla]

Video games have to be dumbed down for the next gen players. When corporations get into the bizz, its all about the money they can make on the first day of sales. This translates into easier games with huge budgets that suffer from short gaming experiences and higher prices. This was the case with Terminator Salvation. The game play wasn't anything spectacular and the story wasn't there either and the game was as long as the movie. They Dumbed the game down to get it out in time for the movie release.