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A Gamer's Manifesto
Posted by
Hemos
on Mon May 30, 2005 10:05 AM
from the ten-things-i-hate-about-you dept.
from the ten-things-i-hate-about-you dept.
Krimszon writes "The top 20 things you always knew were wrong about games, but were afraid to talk about, since you thought that was just the way is was."
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Ahh.. jumping puzzles... (Score:5, Interesting)
The most annoying part of FPS games, which require you to take a break from gleefully blowing the crap out of your enemies to make meticulously-timed jumps across platforms, like you've suddenly turned into Mario or something.
Personally, my biggest pet peeve is that the AI in strategy games hasn't advanced significantly in the past 10 or so years. More annoyingly, playing "harder" settings on these games doesn't change anything about the AI, it just lets the computer "cheat" to produce things quicker than you do.
Re:Ahh.. jumping puzzles... (Score:5, Informative)
Games use finite-state machines for AI simply because the range or variety of moves in each game is limited. And for each move or state, there is a logical reaction, not unlike rock-paper-scissors. It's hard to move forward on intelligence without expanding the variety of plays. Black and White worked because the range of abilities was far greater than any FPS.
However, for people like myself that prefer strategy and thinking over gfx, we still have the time-tested games of chess, go and sudoku.
Spoiler Warning: Star Wars movies have it too (Score:5, Interesting)
OK, I am not a gamer and I hadn't seen Clones until last week on TV, but I am interested in graphics and adventure/SF/fantasy/whatever-the-heck-Star-Wars-i s-supposed-to-be. I also channel-flipped into Clones about halfway through, where in a great piece of Lucas dialog, Padme orders Anakin to "follow my lead" and they go into the battle droid factory.
Something about that part of the movie seemed so cheesy for something as big-budget and hyped as Star Wars, and I couldn't put my finger on it. Padme and Anakin go down this long corridor when suddenly all of those buzzing winged monkey creatures come out of the walls, and then Anakin defends himself and Padme by hacking them up with his light saber. I guess Padme leads by crawling through a hatch to fall into the actual droid factory with Anakin following that lead into the same mess, where they have escaped the buzzing winged monkeys but Anakin not only light saber all of the droids but also dodge these stamping presses of the droid assembly line while Padme rides around in a foundry ladle.
If it weren't for all of us being fans of the Star Wars franchise, when you think of it, this kind of hero and damsel in peril cliche gets much, much better treatment by the Indiana Jones movies. But there was something I just didn't get about the Clones scene until I read the Gamer's Manifesto post. The hero triggered the alarm and had to fight off hundreds of BWMs (buzzing winged monkeys), for no good reason to the plot or the character or the story apart from when you walk down some long corridor with nothing in it, hundreds of BWMs will appear from seemingly nowhere -- it is just the formula. Also, after escaping the BWMs, you will have to fight droids and have to engage in what I guess is called a jumping puzzle -- avoiding the stamping presses, and I guess, also jumping across moving platforms now that I think about that scene in Clones.
Not only is single-handed combat against hundreds of BWMs followed by a jumping puzzle a gaming cliche, it has crossed over to become a movie cliche, and I guess it is just as lame in the movies as it is in games.
The greatest game...the best AI..highest realism (Score:5, Funny)
It's called US-Soldier. What a wild game! You don't have to buy it. Just sign up. You start by running around endlessly and having some guy yell at you for trival things. This goes on for weeks while you learn the rules of the game.
Then, the playing action begins. You get physically relocated to some hot-dry shithole on the other side of the world. Surrounded by thousands of the enemy. You can't tell them apart from ordinary people, but it doesn't matter because everyone hates you just for being there. The enemy has hundreds of years experience fighting new gamers like you. They know all the tricks. They communicate in a special language that you or anyone on your game team can't understand. But they know how you think from watching your television shows and movies. They have a secret religion that enables them to kill anyone without remorse and to accept their own and their fellow gamers deaths without hesitation.
Such incredible realism in this game. And your enemy's gaming stategy is based on the experience of a permanent hot war that has been going on there since you were born. They were gaining combat experience while you were watching cartoons. They've already made all the mistakes in this combat game and they won't make them again, but you will.
Just like an arcade game, when you're done playing, you get sent right back to begin again.
And just like every other video game, no matter how good you get, in the end, you always lose.
Sign up now!
Re:Ahh.. jumping puzzles... (Score:5, Insightful)
I didn't play Half Life completely (I didn't like it), but, as far as I got, jump puzzles weren't a problem either. That said, why can't I see the feet of characters in FPSs?
Metroid Prime should hardly be called a FPS. It's first person, and you shoot, but it's more a FPS / Platformer hybird. You don't really aim so much as you lock on, and dodge / fight like a platformer. It's unique in the field.
If you didn't even finish Half Life, you're concerned about your feet in games (Halo 2), and these are the only two examples you give, I'm guessing you don't play too many FPS games. The end of Half Life had some really horrid jumping puzzles, for example.
The problem has lessened since older games though, Alice was the last really jump-happy game that instantly comes to my mind. Doom 3 had some tricky jumps / platform fighting, but not a heck of a lot. If done right, jumping can add to the complexity of an environment and give the game depth. If done wrong, you are indeed jumping from floating / moving platform A to floating / moving platform B, C, D, and E for no good reason.
Re:Unreal AI is *dang* good (Score:5, Funny)
The bot then hid for the entire rest of the round, and waited for the time to expire.
It ran away from him, and waited out the clock, causing it to expire.
They also say that UT2k7, they're completly revamping the AI, to be much, much, much harder. That's perfectly okay with me, I could use a good challenge
Better AI: do you really want it? (Score:5, Insightful)
While I generally agree with the author's complain, I can recommend him a game with quite decent enemy AI: Operation Flashpoint [bistudio.com]. However, this is also a good example why too good enemy AI can be bad for gameplay. In Flashpoint, you can really be killed by Russian sniper or sneaking soldier just behind your back - but it's as exciting as getting blue screen of death when playing. You just die - and that's it. Personally, I found it surprisingly boring and quite happily returned to totally unrealistic, AI-foolish "Max Payne 2".
Re:Better AI: do you really want it? (Score:5, Informative)
OF is a great game, but as you say, gets boring real quick.
100% Ack (Score:5, Interesting)
this is obviously just another example of the ironic fact that most gamers would make very bad games if they were to design one.
it's simply amazing how many of them have no idea of what makes a good game.
they always cry for more, more AI, more realism, more micromanagement etc.
but all those things have nothing to do with a good game. they might make a good simulation, but games are supposed to be fun, a good simulation would be as frustrating as real life. excluding
Re:Gamers never know what's good for them (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the point was that a challenging game would have an inherent challenge. A game is not challenging merely because you have to replay 10 minutes of stuff you've already seen to get to the part causing you trouble
This guy (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe it goes back to what you grew up with, but the videogame "Type" that I always loved the most was "Adventure Games". I was a major Sierra and Lucasarts junkie as a kid ... I lived for each release of Kings Quest, Monkey Island, Quest for Glory, Sam and Max, Day of the Tentacle, etc ... then then doom came out (yes I know wold3d was first, but doom was the *BIG* hit) and Adventure games stopped getting made, and videogames got dumbed down forever. Instead of intellecutal challenge and witty writing, we got button mashig, searching for ammo, and looking for what switch opened that door. Grim Fandango (1998) was the last *GREAT* Adventure game. To put it in the words of a friend of mine, "I actually feel a sense of loss that the game is over, like someone has died and won't be a part of my life anymore." Has anybody ever felt that way about a FPS?
Re:This guy (Score:5, Insightful)
Allow me to add one more:
NO MORE DAMN 5-CD INSTALLS!
We've had DVD-ROM drives for YEARS, and most people have burners now. PUT THE DAMN GAME ON A DVD AND QUIT WASTING OUR TIME!
It's much easier to install (and store) a single DVD than the massive CD case that comes with the game (or an armload of flimsy paper sleeves (ala WoW)).
N.
#9: Immersion and the invisible hand of God (Score:5, Interesting)
Almost every game does this. In Lord of the Rings: Return of the King there's actually a "run out of a crumbling building" level and where stones rain down on your head and block your path. So the biggest difficulty in the level is that you can't jump over a knee-high stone because THERE IS NO FUCKING JUMPING IN THE GAME.
This one really hits home, because it's exactly the reason that I didn't buy Guild Wars [guildwars.com]. Yeah, it might be a really fun game otherwise, but it's like your character is on rails. Hey, there's a cliff. I think I'll run off the edge... hmmm, nope there's an invisible wall preventing me from moving. In a game that's supposedly a cross between FPS and MMORPG, this is just super lame.
For all of it's fault, at least in WoW I could explore terrain, climb mountains, and roam aimlessly if I wanted to.
The article sounded reasonable until: (Score:5, Insightful)
Wherever did he get this idea? It is completely unrelated. "Unpredictability" only harms in-order processing at the scale of single assembly instructions (nanoseconds). A good bot should hardly do something unpredictable more often than once every other second.
And for that matter, more advanced AI algorithms, such as ANN or SVMs, are usually massively parallelizable and very easy to predict. The Cell would be ideal for such applications.
IAAGD (Score:5, Insightful)
Most of the things in the article (having shorter load times, better AI, no invisible borders, etc) are things decent game developers strive to do on every title. However, many of these problems are hardware-bound (you can only stream data from dvd so quickly regardless of how you optimize your code), knowledge-bound (AI isn't exactly a solved problem is it!), or practicality-bound (yeah, "come up with a new genre" is easy to say, you do it, find funding, get it published, etc.)
Another few quick points -
"bullshit" about graphics is indeed bullshit, but it *sells games* and people put up with it for some reason. Trade description laws might well apply, if they do, use 'em!
Save points are a fairly nice way of saving progress in a completely linear world, like for instance Halo. Less so in free-roamers like Resident Evil, but thats just my opinion. I can see why developers use them, and I've worked on games which have them in, and its better than the alternative. They're not there to save space!
Sports game commentary will suck for quite some time, game DVDs aren't 9Gb (usually, anyway), and commentary is difficulty not because of how much speech you record...
"Superimposing shit" on the screen is going to happen until you can come up with a way of conveying all information without text (or sound, because deaf people play games too y'know). Even cunningly hiding it like in The Movies isn't getting rid of it.
And do you have some kind of magical map that shows you floor layouts of places you've never been before? No? Didn't think so. How do you find your way around? Exactly.
Hmm. This turned into a huge post.
The "arbitrary barriers" are what annoy me... (Score:5, Insightful)
Basically, I think the rule is: a gamer should NOT be aware of the cruel hand of God fucking with him.
If you ever say, "Damn you, (programmer)!" then there is something wrong. (well, unless Will Wright is peeing on you [penny-arcade.com], but that's another story) There should never be moments so arbitrary or evil that you're snapped out of the game universe to curse the designer. A door which you JUST walked through should not suddenly be locked, for no reason at all, just to prevent you from going back to that save point you passed two rooms before. (I'm looking at you, Metroid Prime 2 - and your older brother DIDN'T DO THIS!)
Or if you're near the endgame... You've got all the keys and magic spells... And all you have to do is march into the Temple and kill the evil wizard... this is NOT the time to make you go on a scavenger hunt all over the fucking map for a ludicrously high number of pieces of an arbitrary key which has no purpose except to draw out the last act! *cough*WindWaker*cough*
(if I pick on Nintendo, it's because if any game design company should know better, it's them)
It's really simple. Just ask yourself - if this were a MOVIE, would I believe in this event? (Paul Anderson and Uwe Boll movies excepted) Would I believe that the characters need to spend three months item-gathering? Would I believe it's necessary for the heroes to take a break from the plot to crossbreed giant chickens? Could I conceive of a world in which a character is unable to climb over a ten-inch high barrier?
If the answer is "no" then there is no excuse for having it in the game.
A game developer's response... (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Give us A.I. that will actually outsmart us now and then.
Actually, this is the point of the cell processor. The cell is meant to allow lots of pipelined tasks to happen with little additional overhead. This means that the difference between a "simple" AI and a complex "AI" (in terms of performance) is little different. And the cell is actually seperate from the RSX, which is the graphics chip from NVIDIA.
2. Give us a genre of game we've never seen before. Something that's not an FPS or an RPG or Madden NFL or...
The fallacy of this statement is laughable. Games don't simply exist. The reason that a particlar game genre is produced again and again is become you asshats keep buying them. Again and again and again. Want more games like Katamari Damacy? Then buy the game. No, pirating a copy doesn't count. Want games of alternative genres? They're out there. They're just not advertised and they're not always available at your local Best Buy. They will often be at your smaller game store, or available online. So get off your lazy ass and go vote with your dollars.
3. Don't bullshit me about your graphics
We wouldn't have to, except that by the logic in argument 2 this seems to be the #1 thing that people care about. You vote with your dollars. Your mouth is saying "graphics don't matter" but your wallet says "grapihcs are all that I care about. Shit in the box as long as the graphics are top notch." Doom 3, Unreal 3, Half-life 2... All top sellers because of their stellar unrelated gameplay?
4. Nipples?
5. And on the opposite side of the nipple coin...
A game these day costs in the tens of millions of dollars to release. A company is simply not going to risk that kind of green (and possibly the fate of the company) on an analyst's hunch. There has to be something more than a gut feeling to release that kind of game. I mean, when's the last time you bought a Japanese dating simulation? (NSFW) [jlist.com]
6. All of the new consoles will have hard drives. Use them.
Agree.
7. Loading...
As soon as you come up with a mechanism to physically get 16 megs of data off a DVD rom faster than 1 second, I'll be all over improving load times. It's truly staggering how much data has to be loaded from disk and how frequently it has to be done. On the PC, fire up ye old task manager sometime and turn on the I/O stats for the process. Then be shocked as your game loads multiple gigs of data from disk over the run of the game. All in the name of that "immersion" you're looking for.
8. I understand that John Madden was raised by wild boars...
This hooks in with #7. Bottom line, consider the requirements of this. It's a simple M*N cost to have more sounds. (M events by N events per sound, assuming a flat distribution of sounds). Of course, one could argue (successfully) that an increase in all sounds isn't necessary, and just in the sounds that come up again and again. Of course, you could also forsake the Madden franchise in favor of a lesser known football series. (This would also have the side benefit of ceasing to support the EA cartel.)
9. Immersion and the invisible hand of God
Agree. This is generally just laziness (or a very tight schedule).
10. And while we're at it...
I sort of agree here, but I see the other side of the coin as well. I mean, if I let you get to areas that aren't important for gameplay, then I need to populate them with content. You also might become lost and frustrated, which is something I don't want to happen either.
11. And while we're still at it...
I agree, with the caveat that this is a genre-specific complaint. For example, I don't mind health bars imposed in an RTS, because I realize it's just a game that I'm playing. On the other hand, having numerous hea
Re:I loved the "loading" part (Score:5, Interesting)
Did you know you can't have mini-games during a loading screen because of patent law?
Re:No, really. (Score:5, Informative)
Last I heard, Namco owns loading screen games on the PSP. Not sure about in general though, but it's a good guess. Here's a quote from Game Developer magazine, interviewing EA's Dave McCarthy:
BS: Do you forsee anything like minigames during the loading screens?
DM: Minigames during loading screens is actually patented by Namco, so they're doing it!
Re:best games are often the cheapest (Score:5, Insightful)
The game keeps you coming back for --more--, time and time again.
Re:He doesn't know what he's talking about (Score:5, Insightful)
> talking about.
Something is a challenge for the developers, therefore he doesn't know what he's talking about? He didn't say "adding good AI is easy, get on it"; he said that good AI was a seriously lacking element in modern games. And he's correct.
I think he's pretty much right on on every point, and the fact that developers would have a lot of work cut out for them has nothing to do with whether he "knows what he's talking about".
Re:On point 2: games are all the same (Score:5, Funny)
Except for Harvesters... (Score:5, Funny)
Stupid, stupid, stupid!!!
Damn things need a babysitter.
Re:Some good points, some not-so-good (Score:5, Insightful)
"Hey man, want to play DK Jungle Beat? You use the bongos!"
"No thank you sir, it's simply a 20 year old Mario designs married to an overpriced, single use gimmick controller."
"Hey man, want to play DDR? You totally have to use your legs to play!"
"No thank you sir, I grew tired of that sort of thing with the NES's power pad."
There are times when the use of the word "innovative" is incorrect. Katamari Damacy is not one of those times. There is more to the innovation in the game than just rolling a ball. The easy-to-grasp concept and controls, the cute/bizarre art and music design, the level and size scaling, the original IP. Combine that with ball rolling and you still get innovation. Katamari deserves all the credit and good word-of-mouth it received, which is more than you can say for just about every mainstream game out there.
Oh wait, they completely ripped off "The Little Prince" with those small planets in the game menus! INNOVATION IS DEAD.
Re:True (Score:5, Interesting)
I only have a few hours a week to play games, and those come at odd an unpredictable times; thus it is a royal pain to log onto a server of join a clan, etc.
Hell, I play games because I want to gedt the hell away FROM having to interact with other people!
Give me the following:
1- GREAT AI
2-unpredictible replay
3- DVD install
4- supreme realism (e.g if you get shot with a 9mm round your subsequent performance WILL be seriously impared, DOH)
5"good enough" graphics - nice but will not make up for bad design as afar as the immersive experince goes.
Do the above and I'll gladly pay $100 or so several times a year for a good PC game. I'm 44, I've been playing games since Spacewar in 1976 and rebuilt my whole PC to play Wolf 3d when it came out; cost is not an issue, quality is.
No slam on teens and 20 somethings, was there and still think that the average gamer is above average intelligence, but my demographic is a little different.