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Games Industry Things We Should Leave Behind in '07
Posted by
Zonk
on Fri Jan 04, 2008 05:03 PM
from the so-many-things-to-keep-back-there dept.
from the so-many-things-to-keep-back-there dept.
MTV's Multiplayer blog has a list of nine videogame concepts we should be 'leaving behind', left to rot in the now-passed year of 2007. From the countdown clocks to Halo 3, their snarky list leaves no stone unturned: "The Phrase 'Next-Gen' - Ladies and gentlemen, 'next-gen' is now. Everyone from PR firms to development studios are still using this phrase. Please, I beg of you, stop using "next-gen" until the PS4, Xbox 4000, and the Nintendo Super Wii are slated for release. Those consoles will officially be 'next-gen.' The PS3, Wii, and 360 are the current generation of games. Now is the time to accept it."
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Can we leave "Top # $THINGS" lists? (Score:4, Insightful)
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How about poor supply chain management? (Score:3, Insightful)
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Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation. [nerdkits.com]
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Which can be a large number given the time period. Once the Christmas season was over, the money for the Wii was likely spent on other gifts and the immediate demand to satisfy the kids is over.
Deferred revenue has a cost, the same amount of money you get later is not worth as much as money you get
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Seriously, the Wii is one of the hottest products of the year and Nintendo gains nothing by limiting supply this far after release.
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Because a year after the PS2 was released, I could go into a store and buy one. In San Diego, at least, a year after the Wii was released I cannot go into a store and buy one. They're leaving a lot of money on the table by not being able to fulfill demand (I would have bought one this Xmas for my kids, but I'm not paying $500 for Wii plus eight games I
Super Wii (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Super Wii vs, Wii HD. (Score:4, Interesting)
Honestly I'm hoping for simply "Wii HD". A fully backwords compatible Wii that will display in 720p as a minimum. There would be other enhancements of course, but I think since Nintendo went "Revolutionary" with both their handheld and console I think the next generation will be "Evolutionary".
Parent
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Retrospective on the Super Nintendo (Score:3, Insightful)
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The Hardcore vs Softcore arguement (Score:3)
Top Two List of Things to Leave Behind. (Score:3, Insightful)
The 9 things (Score:5, Informative)
It's a short article, but here are the 9 things for those of you who don't want to RTFA:
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Japan-Only Releases. (If the game is done, why not also release it in the US? Maybe it will do well, maybe not. Give it a try.)
1. Region Issues
The US is - uh, a bit puritan. Any and all references to sex must be excised, since what's a kid's game in everywhere that's not the US becomes porno in the US.
Then there's the whole "not English" thing, where the game must be translated into elementary-level English to allow the majority of US readers to understand what's going on.
2. It Costs A Lot More Than You Think
Placing boxes in stores costs a lot. Producing the box and doing marketing (even if it is only to the store) is required if
Truly it's the most brain dead list in years (Score:4, Insightful)
This is the only one which actually has a point, so I thought I'd give it a nod before moving on to the real offenders. Though even here, good luck getting marketers to quit using meaningless buzzwords.
Actually, IMHO your summary here is slightly inexact. What he demands is that they stop hyping and advertising Halo 3, and start hyping again when they release Halo 4. He has nothing against the version number, and his expecting a Halo 4 kinda doesn't imply that he sees the fight as finished. He's just tired of hearing about Halo 3.
Well, sadly
A) that's just capitalism in action. If MS thinks they can still sell Halo 3, how's that different from still advertising last year's model of car, or last year's CD of some band?
B) that advertising pays for some other things he's getting cheaper or for free. E.g., since the site name seems to imply having something to do with MTV, I'd like to see how MTV would survive without massive advertising. All those music videos are, effectively, advertising for whichever band the recording companies manufactured this year.
WTF? It's not like it even costs much to release a ROM for an emulator. But more importantly, what's _his_ problem there? It's not like anyone forces him to play or buy those anyway. Plus, being that they're ancient games, he should be able to find tons of reviews and whatnot.
Plus, here's the fun part: not everyone has the same tastes. What's crap for him and he doesn't want re-released, could be someone else's nostalgia moment. Even something like "Donkey Kong Jr. Math," well, why not? Some mom or dad might think that that's useful for their 6 year old.
Now this is truly brain dead. Those delays don't happen as some premeditated marketing ploy, they happen because people are bad at guessing the future. The fact is, even if you could know exactly how much code you'll need to write (you don't), and exactly how long it would take to _write_ it, you can't guess what bugs you'll have to fix. Therefore, nor how much time you'll spend fixing those.
Then there are the inevitable design changes. Some things it's easier to just see how it looks in the game, before you decide how you'll do it. Some things sound good in theory, but you'll find out that they suck when you sic the playtesters on it. Etc.
Sure, there are ways to make things more maintainable and reduce the surprises, but even that isn't 100% bullet proof. And good luck with getting the game industry to follow best practices anyway. Especially when:
A) you have the publisher telling you that it _has_ to be ready within X months and Y dollars, you just don't have the time or budget for UML diagrams and funky frameworks, and
B) you have to push the edge in terms of graphics and whatnot (because screenshots sell), but still have a finite budget of CPU cycles and GPU gigatexels/second, and you know everyone will moan if the frame rate is even 1 less FPS than in another similar game. So, you know, you end up doing evil hacks just to meet those constraints.
Seriously, short of hideously overestimating (which the publisher will reject from the start) or being able to see in the future, it just won't happen.
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Actually, I was summarizing the article with "The PlayStation 2. (Please start pushing developers to the PS3.)" For myself, I still enjoy the PS2, and still have several PS2 (and PS1) games that I will occasionally re-play. "Ico", "Shadow of the Colossus", and "Killzone" are at the top of the stack. "Tomb Raider Anniversary" was a great game, and I'll definitely play it again that this year.
Of course, those games really show what the PS2 is capable of. You can do some amazing things within PS2 limitations
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Some of the latest stuff for PS2 is quite impressive--not because of of the raw power of the system, but because developers got so good at wringing eve
Re:The 9 things - Next gen is 2012... (Score:2)
Graphic power has no bearing when talking about "Next gen" as it is simply a meter of where we are on the evolution of Video game systems. This is the 7th generation of consoles, and being at least "2 christmas shopping seasons" into their life which makes
# 1 should be ethernet cables! (Score:3, Informative)
Arg, no (Score:5, Insightful)
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WEP is pointless (Score:2)
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You can also add Mac address filtering to better secure the connection.
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Wireless is fine if you've got no neighbors and only a device or two, but it's really a second rate solution. Especially in an environment where you've got 3+ networked devices, stream video (especially HD) or have devices which interfere with wireless (some microwaves, cordless phones, radiotransmitters).
Next-Gen (Score:3, Funny)
Misogyny (Score:5, Insightful)
Agreed (Score:5, Interesting)
The video game industry is stuck being the fantasy playground of horny young males... and I don't see this terrible trend changing any time soon. Why make a realistic character when you can just model the girl of your dreams... and on the flip side, what horny male teen wants to play a game with a lead character that looks like Kathy Bates?
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Re:Agreed (Score:4, Insightful)
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This would make a great deal of sense if:
Since video games are part of the mass media, the mass media loves
Things I would love to see gone... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Non-interactive, long, drawn out, cinematic cut scenes. Just let me play the fucking game.
Some people like cut scenes. They can be fun watch (some people like the mix of interactive and non-interactive entertainment) and they can give games more depth.
Unrealistic release schedules.
Welcome to the world of capitalism where companies need to keep consumer confidence high in order to do well in the stock market.
The yearly $60 sports games that feature incremental improvements and roster changes. We should be able to download roster changes by now; keep major changes to the game engine to a release every couple of years.
Not going to happen. If a game can guarantee profit, it will be made. Regardless, I think you can download roster updates for many sports games on next-gen systems.
Re:Things I would love to see gone... (Score:5, Interesting)
- Game trailers that are 50% intro material, 30% outro and all of 20% actual game footage
- Proper reviews from people that have played the full game (e.g., Gamespot's review of Assassin's Creed neglects to mention a questionable ending and how annoying it gets to hear "Please sir, can I have some money?" or townspeople being hassled by guards)
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Why not 7-11? (Score:2, Insightful)
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Game Delays are some times better then pushed out. (Score:3, Insightful)
If it means pushing people to work 80+ hours a week that just leads to buggy code then delay it so the game works and let QA / beta have time and alot of differnt systems to test on.
From the Wishful-Thinking department (Score:5, Insightful)
Where are big monitors for 4 players on one PC? (Score:3, Insightful)
[I'd like to see a lot less of] Emphasis on online games [and] Console-only games.
On a PC, how do you do multiplayer without an Internet connection and without requiring the host of a party to buy multiple PCs? If you want to plug four gamepads into a machine to play a Bomberman or Smash Bros. style game, you need a monitor that's big enough to seat four people around, and in my experience, that means 25 inches diagonal or larger. But most PC owners, even owners of a PC whose video card has a TV output, do not connect their PCs to a television. This is why almost any party-style game fr
Battery life; streaming vs. installing (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, requiring the disk has completely killed the portable and console markets, both of which require the player to insert the game disk/cartridge.
What kind of battery life do you get out of a PSP playing games from UMD? What kind of battery life do you get out of a notebook computer playing games from an optical disc vs. playing games from the hard disk?
That's like complaining about be required to insert the DVD to watch videos.
Not it's not. DVDs stream completely from the optical disc. Games for the Windows OS, on the other hand, often need to be installed, and they still need the optical disc.
No game delays means suckier games (Score:4, Interesting)
Take Zelda. The developers learned the hard way that hitting the release date was less important than finishing the game. The Wind Waker was in danger of missing its street date
Interesting tidbit: after Wind Waker turned out the way it did, the director of the game wanted to let the series end there. This is the guy Miyamoto handed the series off to after he didn't want to be forever tied to it anymore, and he wanted to throw in the towel! (I'd pull out a cite, but I gotta run.)
Yeah. Delays suck. And when it's for a reason other than 'the game needs more time', they REALLY suck. But to just say 'there should never be a delay!' is to ignore the deeper reasons why delays happen, and that would be catastrophic.
I say it every time, but... (Score:5, Interesting)
Save points.
This absolutely retarded convention should have disappeared with the Genesis and SNES. Why is it, when I was playing Doom on my 486 back in 1994 and could save (and QUIT...you know... STOP PLAYING ) whenever I wanted, that I have to wait 20 minutes until I get to a magical spot blessed by the video game pope before I can save my game and turn off my Playstation 2 , a system that is orders of magnitude more powerful than the save-on-the-fly-capable PC on which I was fragging zombies?
Attention developers:
And sometimes I want or need to stop playing on a moment's notice. I don't really want to leave the console on eating up power and running up my electric bill, and I also don't want to lose hours of gameplay (some JRPG dungeons do last that long) because you assholes thought it would be cute to not let me save my game and do something else. Your game is not the only thing in the world I want to do for fun, and moods can change, especially after long sessions. Furthermore, I know you can do save-anywhere because SaGa Frontier, LUNAR, and Persona 2 all did it on the PS1.
Death to save points in 2008. Long live save-on-the-fly.
Just to name a few... (Score:3, Interesting)
- Poor AI Coding -
Considering this generation is supposed to be the one that renders further graphical improvements irrelevent, we should be seeing more attention paid toward improving core gaming elements, such as better NPC AIs. Even if you have to sacrifice some visual quality to do it, making a fun game should outweigh making a pretty game.
- Locked, On-Disc Game Content -
The whole idea of calling content that's been on the game disc since day one "downloadable" is extremely underhanded and motivated entirely by greed alone. I agreed to pay the additional $10 per game for the next gen experience you promised me. Don't turn around and ask me for more money to access the content I already own.
- Proprietary Game Development -
We're now in an age where many gamers are just as competent about the mechanics of a game as the game designers themselves. Instead of locking us out, let us in to create and distribute our own custom content to other users. The end user could well become the best source of innovation in an industry notorious for becoming too complacent with formulas that work, rather than experimenting with untested concepts.
- Games Based On Past Wars -
While we've seen some gems such as the Call of Duty series, the games themselves are becoming a blur with one another simply because the protagonist and antagonists are always the same, just with slightly different controls. Instead, why not create ficticious battles or introduce antichronistic advantages/disadvantages to each side. (For example, a small WWII axis forces army with late 20th/early 21st century weaponry vs the allied forces armed only with time correct weaponry and shear numbers.)
- Tedious Game Clichés -
Perhaps it's time we consider putting some game play styles to rest, such as party-themed mini-games (especially on the Wii) and the ever dreaded escort mission. Why should the user have to pay for lazy game development by enduring crap that only serves fill in the total game play hour odometer.
- Franchise sharing -
Ok, the whole Mario vs Sonic argument died the day Sega killed off the Dreamcast. After we get our fill of Super Smash Brothers Brawl, I do not want to hear any more on the subject... period.
- Console Exclusivity -
Mostly referring to 3rd party titles favoring one console over the others. Instead, stop asking us to choose and just make the game for the system I do own. The PS3 owners aren't going to rush out and buy a 360 over one game, and 360 owners aren't about to do the same for the PS3. If they don't already own one, they probably never will.
- HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray -
Given that the loss of Blu-Ray in the format wars would crush Sony under the PS3's weight, this battle is unlikely to die anytime soon. One side eventually needs to conceed or else both will lose out to a 3rd choice that is more easily adopted by the traditional DVD users out there. At the moment, HD-DVD edges out Blu-Ray in this respect due to the ease of creating hybrid DVD/HD-DVD discs for distribution in one box.
That's asinine (Score:3, Insightful)
Being pedantic about next-gen versus
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