What is Wrong With Game Development? 408
Warrior-GS writes "Seamus Blackley, who has done everything from work at Looking Glass Studios to evangelize for the Microsoft Xbox, sounds off on what's wrong with the relationship between developers, publishers and their audience. Also, as part of coverage of the D.I.C.E. Summit in Las Vegas, GameSpy has chats with Miyamoto about The Wind Waker and Yu Suzuki about his gaming influences. Some interesting reading."
Nothing's wrong IMHO (Score:4, Interesting)
I think maybe the companies put too much stress on the developers to create hits, but as a part-time developer, I think it's easier said than done to just create a smash hit out of thin air. Everything's already been done, or so it seems, so really original and entertaining gameplay+graphics is a tough combination to create.
Re:Nothing's wrong IMHO (Score:4, Insightful)
I can't agree with this. Although, I would like to work on games purely for the sake of the art, or to build something my friends and I could play on weekends, the truth is that very few games make good money for the developers. The "hits" take the lion's share of the profit (more than 90% by most accounts) - so these are the games that keep publishers and developers afloat. If you aren't interested in hits, fine... just don't expect to be in the business of building console games for long. (Although I believe there is a market for cheaply developed PC titles)
Re:Nothing's wrong IMHO (Score:4, Insightful)
Also, citing two outstanding titles doesn't mean anything for the industry as a whole. OK, so there's two great games. How many bad games are there? Are they worse or better than the bad games of the past? Are they more or less plentiful in terms of percentage of titles?
What is the cost of a game that flops? Is the risk taken by developers greater or less than in the past? What's required of the developers to overcome the obstacles? Long hours? Burnout? Taking safer risks and not innovating too radically?
There's a lot of questions that need to be looked at before you can say the industry has nothing wrong with it. I'd say the industry is healthy, and is even doing well, but that doesn't mean everything is peachy.
Re:Nothing's wrong IMHO (Score:3, Interesting)
I disagree. There are two perspectives here, and we are switching between them. As a gamer, I could care less how screwed up the development process is (barring major immorality/illegality) as long as they make good games.
Further, I don't care if 99/100 games suck. I'll depend on friends, slashdot, gamespy, and sales figures and so forth to screen the wheat from the chaff.
And there is plenty of wheat out there. Counterstrike for goodness sake. WCIII and Starcraft. Civ, Sims. Everquest and all the clones. More than any serious person can ever play.
From the perspective of the developers, I sympathize. But I'd be a lot more interested in hearing how the WCIII add-in is going.
Re:Nothing's wrong IMHO (Score:5, Insightful)
I disagree; I think the idea of "everything's already been done at least twice" is a common phallacy. Some people claim that all good music has already been done, or all good movies, or even all good paintings.
And yet amount of permutations for basic components of music (melodic, harmonic, rhythmic), literature (themes, characters, time, style) or, computer games (ones similar to literature), is pretty much infinite. There will _always_ be room for new things in any of above-mentioned forms of art.
I agree with the article. Lack of innovative games has more to do with business objectives of predictable revenue than with not having room to explore that limits original games. 20 years ago technology was limiting things much more; nowadays it's almost a moot point, at least from game idea point of view. Any interesting non-novelty gameplay idea can probably be implemented on standard gaming system of choice. But since coming up with a new idea IS more difficult than refining an existing idea (I'm not arguing otherwise), the risks associated just make it so much more compelling to "just write yet another sequel of a hit".
Funnily enough, this is just one of those problems with short-sighted businesses. Without new innovative hits, there won't be chance for new predictably profitable sequels. You can only do so many sequels from a certain theme, with lowering profitability... and then have to move on.
Sometimes, it really has all been done. (Score:3, Interesting)
now which show that it is possible to "say all
that is worth saying" within a genre. Look
at the "big band music" genre -- by the end
of WWII it had all been said, and the innovators
moved on to create new types of jazz. The
bands that play that music today do it as
historical preservation. Given a set of
instruments, and stylistic rules for
writing to the instruments, there is only
so much one can say.
Re:Sometimes, it really has all been done. (Score:3, Funny)
Really? Obviously you haven't met my girlfriend!
Re:Nothing's wrong IMHO (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, yes, yes!
Everything WE KNOW HOW TO DO has been done at least twice. I see an idea, I'll use it to do something, someone watching me will copy the idea and do something else, until eventually everyone gets sick of my idea.
But what about anything we DON'T know how to do yet? Duh! It hasn't been done yet! Come up with an original idea, useful enough that other people like it, and suddenly that idea is everywhere, and the whole process repeats.
So to anyone who says "Everything has been done already", I'd like to know what makes you so absolutely sure that you're right. What you're really saying is that you haven't come up with anything new, and are complaining about not being able to magically turn a "old" product into a "new" product and make gobs of money like the last "new" product. Well duh! We consumers may be stupid most of the time, but we aren't completely ignorant.
One of the very common business fallacies (IMO) is to assume that the past predicts the future. If something sold well before, then it's going to sell well in the future. I admit the past is a pretty good indicator of the future, but historically, when you're wrong, you're really wrong (Great Depression anyone?). So to any future game publishers out there, repeat after me: "The past does not predict the future. The past does not predict the future. The past does not predict the future."
Re:Nothing's wrong IMHO (Score:4, Funny)
No, a six inch penis is a common "phallacy".
What's wrong about the video game industry (Score:2, Funny)
Re:What's wrong about the video game industry (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What's wrong about the video game industry (Score:5, Funny)
Re:What's wrong about the video game industry (Score:2)
Re:What's wrong about the video game industry (Score:3, Informative)
Though it does kick ass.
Re:What's wrong about the video game industry (Score:2, Interesting)
Anyway my point was just that most of the stuff Id has released hasn't been very good. Impressive technically, but not that good.
Re:What's wrong about the video game industry (Score:4, Interesting)
Those things might seem common today, but then everything that The Legend of Zelda does is common today. Is it a bad game?
Re:What's wrong about the video game industry (Score:2)
Re:No. (Score:3, Interesting)
Id has indicated that no matter what hardware the gamers have will not be enough for Doom 3, while I understand that games have pushed hardware upgrades in the past, usually it was due to new technology in the game (3D engine changes, multiplayer, etc) Id is simply making a game that is going to overwhelm almost everyone's hardware and they think that is cool.
SimCity 4 was shipped and it's slow as crap on machines twice the recommended hardware on the box because they put too much crap in there going on.
Game designers have a case of the God-complex in many cases, and I say that's what is wrong in the industry.
Re:No. (Score:2)
No, that's mainly because of nVidia, ATI, AMD & Intel "sponsoring" new games probably...
Promotionalism (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Promotionalism (Score:4, Interesting)
This whole publishing thing, it seems, is just BEGGING for a different, more efficient business model (both monetarily and in terms of intangible factors like creativity). Games developers who aren't with any of the 'big few' who make big bucks on a good release, are stuck with working with publishers. I get the impression that publishers often make the process more tedious, and are in a prime position to lower the integrity of the process by dorking around with royalties, net revenue figures, etc - all of which are used to ascertain how much the game developer gets paid. I'd love to see this process changed so that games developers, like music artists, get more of what they deserve, and and a lot less of the burden introduced by the current business model.
Re:Promotionalism (Score:4, Insightful)
You're confusing cause and effect. The way to make money - and the publishers know this - is to sell the market what it wants at a price it is willing to pay. Gamers as a group say they're interested in quality, but their actions tell a different story, as they rush out to buy the latest sequel. Guess which one, speech or action, actually results in dollars changing hands?
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that any gamer who has ever bought any sequel, or any generic first-person shooter (or any game that fits easily into a "genre") is a part of the problem.
Re:Promotionalism (Score:3, Interesting)
OTOH, buying Fallout Tactics without trying the demo is being part of the problem. FOT probably sold more than Fallout 1&2 combined (in particular, it sold more at full price) but from all I've read and from my playing of the demo it's really got nothing to do with the ideas behind Fallout. It's just an isometric tactical shooter which happens to use the SPECIAL system and hence capitalised on brand recognition. People buying FOT promoted the idea to publishers that real-time combat variants were "it" and turn-based should be abandoned.
Thank goodness for Troika [troikagames.com]. Can't wait for Greyhawk: The Temple of Elemental Evil [troikagames.com]
The value of publishing (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm sure I'm not the only slashdotter whose written games for personal amusement. Nor am I the only one whose distributed them to friends and gotten positive responces (I think honestly, but they might have just been being nice to me).
Now picture all those games coming unsorted through some sort of web portal. Combined with buggy games, games which only run on an SGI mainframe, games with trojan horses, over-used joke games (thermonuclearwar, the game that just pops up a dialog saying "You lose") and downright trolls (a game built around goatse.cx).
Now, I'm not saying publishers are the only way to strain this down to something acceptable. Gaming magazines can give reviews (though less than 1% of games would ever get reviewed at all); players would have favorite game authors; there could even be something like slashdot moderation (we all know how well that works -- actually, IMHO, it's one of the better forms I've seen).
I'm just saying that publishers can't just "get out of the way" -- they can only be replaced by something better.
A lot of the ideas here are based on an essay [baen.com] of Eric Flint's. He expounds in detail.
.sig: We go to war with Iraq to prevent them from building nukes and using them against us, destabilizing Pakistan, allowing Al-queada to get nukes, and use them against us -- oh the irony!
Re:Promotionalism (Score:3, Insightful)
Money. (Score:5, Insightful)
In fact, they seem to think that if you release a game half-done it'll make more money than a game that's complete.
Re:Money. (Score:2, Insightful)
Despite what you might think, most manager's aren't stupid. Any MBA newbie can look at a spreadsheet and see which games made the most money and which cost the least to develop. You know that MS Project can automatically report on which parts of a project overran, who was managing those tasks, who was assigned to actually code them? Must be nice to have a piece of software that can do your job for you*.
When the market stops rewarding the first and starts rewarding the best, then managers will change their policy, but not before then. All those people who bought Daikatana (or games like it) are guilty.
* I said that to a PM once, she sighed and said yes, I wish I had something like DBA Studio
Re:Money. (Score:2)
Chris
+5 insightful (Score:5, Funny)
Shigeru Miyamoto: For me, the most interesting thing about video games is taking the controller and using it to move something around on the screen.
Hmmm, indeed. Is everybody sure this is the actual genius behind the classics like SMB?
Re:+5 insightful (Score:5, Insightful)
That's one thing he's nailed beautifully in his titles, and it's probably one reason they're so well received.
Re:+5 insightful (Score:2)
Re:+5 insightful (Score:5, Insightful)
Games are about user interaction, that is taking the controller and using it to move something around on the screen. There are far too many game developers who forget the fundamentals. Actually it is a mark of a true professional that they focus on the fundamentals, this is why Shigeru Miyamoto has developed an unprecedented string of hit titles and is respected by almost everyone in the industry...
Re:+5 insightful (Score:5, Interesting)
Shigeru Miyamoto: For me, the most interesting thing about video games is taking the controller and using it to move something around on the screen.
Hmmm, indeed. Is everybody sure this is the actual genius behind the classics like SMB?
Can't be, everybody knows the most interesting thing is watching the characters play out a dramatic and artistic movie everytime something happens (a la Blood Omen 2, Final Fantasy 8.) Doesn't he know how hard it is to create a program that takes input from the player and actually does it on the screen!?!?
Furthermore, there is no need for the player to control his/her character (Myst, Riven.) They are just there to fork over the dough for our cheeply made, low budget movie clips! How dare he malign our marketing model.
Gamers *playing* games. Hummprf. The nerve...
Re:+5 insightful (Score:4, Informative)
Re:+5 insightful (Score:4, Insightful)
The reason i say this: remember in some super mario bros boards, when your char is traveling along the top of the ceiling, just offscreen? when you move the character around and you jump over holes (to keep from falling down throught the ceiling, or whatever), you can actually *feel* where mario is going to land
Problems with Game Development (Score:5, Insightful)
As computer games have become big business, the process of creating one bears a striking resemblance to the process of developing a film idea: no-one (as William Goldman famously said) knows anything, and they're all terrified of risk.
1) Avoid Technical Risk -- don't develop new game engines. Use an existing engine and plug new content into it.
2) Avoid Financial Risk -- sequels do better than new titles, so invest in sequels.
3) Aim for the lowest common denominator -- dialog needs to be localised, so avoid too much of it. Everyone understands explosions -- so do lots of them.
4) Spend as much on promotion as development. The key is to sell a lot of copies at full price really soon after release, because if you don't, people will figure out how unoriginal your game really is and you'll be selling at a tiny margin.
And as in the film industry, most of the interesting stuff is done by small independent developers on shoestring budgets. Of course, once they have a hit they get converted into a commodity product that spawns huge budget low innovation sequels.
Re:Problems with Game Development (Score:2, Insightful)
The problem is, if you change it too much, people will complain that it wasnt anything like the original, and then wont sell. (see points 1 & 2)
If your big flagship product doesnt sell you go under and then cant make "original" games that only the minority will buy
Again, the problem is, theres too much money invested in games.
Publishers pay millions for liscences, publishers pay developers millions to develop it, developers pay millions(ish) to Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony to develop on their platforms
If it doesnt sell, A LOT, theres problems.
Re:Problems with Game Development (Score:4, Insightful)
Games (Score:3, Interesting)
Gameplay, Fun vs. Cool and Eye Candy (Score:5, Insightful)
High-quality gameplay back in the old days was the sole focus of developing games. They didn't have the gimmicks of fancy graphics or the capabilities massive hard drives or even memory. It all had to be stored in a ROM that fit into a few kb.
The gamplay was great because it had to be. I recall seeing an interview somewhere with Nolan Bushnell of Atari fame saying as much.
The concept of FUN was a core idea. It sounds simple but the core idea nowadays is often COOL. What's cool is not always what's fun. That is a lesson that many producers need to learn. (I say producers because the developers are rarely in control of the games they work so hard to create.)
Just because you can use the latest eye candy it doesn't mean you should. I like great looking games as much as the next person, but I like great-playing games even more.
Re:Gameplay, Fun vs. Cool and Eye Candy (Score:5, Insightful)
I can't believe you can say high-quality gameplay was the sole focus of developing games with a straight face. There were a slew of sequels and license tie-ins then too. I'd say there's an even greater signal to noise ratio these days, but we see all the garbage that gets published today, and forget all of the horrible things that came out back then.
Oh, and the other thing is that there is one key difference that made some games back in "the day" really fun, is that games never used to end. It was just a point race against yourself until you weren't good enough to keep up at that speed/difficulty. Things have levels and end these days. That's the only real difference that I've noticed.
Problem With Video Games (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Problem With Video Games (Score:5, Insightful)
Ahem (Score:3, Funny)
So how do we know this is Miyamoto? YOU'RE JUST TRYING TO TRICK US!
Gamer's know what they want! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Gamer's know what they want! (Score:2)
If you have a really cool idea, have you considered actually emailing a development team about it? Geez, it's not that complicated. Just don't be surprised if there is actually a good reason why your concept isn't in the game already. Or if like a billion people haven't already thought of it. But send it anyway! Who knows?
Re:Gamer's know what they want! (Score:2)
Re:Gamer's know what they want! (Score:3, Funny)
(cracks whip)
Get back to work!
Re:Gamer's know what they want! (Score:3, Insightful)
Gamers play game A, a FPS for example. He'll find a list of hundreds of items to make game A better if he's a creative gamers that cares, otherwise he won't even think about it. However, these are just additions and changes to a specific game, or 'genre'. Gamers are blinded by the games they play, the games they are given, simple. Gamers usually aren't creative enough to think about a new and innovation game. That's why good game designers exists. If people like Sid Meiers and Miyamoto never existed, and only gamers would make games, the industry would be in a lot worst condition.
This is the problem with the industry. They can only make 'game A, which is game B with better X, Y and Z.' Good designers are able to come up with new a fresh ideas. Not revolutionary or anything, but fresh and new. However, since gamers are blinded by what they play, and only want to improve the games they play, these games either sells poorly, or are smash hits. No in-between. Gamers either give it a chance and see how great it is, or they don't bother and miss on an incredible game.
Great designers are few and far between. Anyone can think about how to make product A better, whether or not it's a game. However, to come with the idea of product A, it doesn't take a consumer/gamer, it takes a great mind(or many great minds).
Consumers, which gamers are, simply don't know what they want. They only know how to improve what they are given.
That's why focus groups and surveys and such are just the wrong way to do it. However, since making something people 'want' makes money, that's what they do, simple. That's why you get cars like the PT Cruisers that is just a piece of crap, but hey, it's popular because that's what drivers wants. Same with SUV. You could extend this problem to Democracy as a whole, but I won't even try to go near there, hehe.
Designers should make a game for THEMSELVES, not for the gamers.
Look at Blizzard. They make games for the gamers. Sure, they are very polished and incredibly detailed games, but they are just more of the same. However, since they make games for the gamers, they make tons of money. I love blizzard games, but you can't say they are innovative or anything, just more of the same, but MUCH better.
Look back at Looking Glass. They really created innovative games, for themselves and not the gamers at all. System Shock 1, Thief, Terra Nova, and some more. They created some new 'genres' themselves. The company failed, despite the critical aclaim and incredible games. Why? Simple, it wasn't 'more of the same', it wasn't what the gamers were feed with. Gamers didn't bother to try. Now, tell me capitalism doesn't have problems with innovation?
Back in the days, gamers would try new things, gamers were really all-around gamers. Today, we have gamers who 'camp' genre, who only buy type A games, like FPS, RTS, etc. They won't even bother to try other games, and won't give them a chance if they do try them.
So, the problem is as much with the gamers than the developers than the publishers.
I know! (Score:2)
This way we get a cool "rebel without a cause" video game AND we get to co-opt the anti-globalization movement and sell it back to the very people who are supposed to be so anti-commercial in the first place thus compromising their "street cred!"
Game reviewers and the common man... (Score:5, Interesting)
They sit there and carefully and systematically work through each game, taking notes on the sound, music, graphics, etc. They evaluate the game the same way Roger Ebert carefully picks through a movie and sees it's good bits and bad bits.
But then, every once in a while, the normal non-professional movie fan just says "Fuck it," and rents Six String Samurai.
It's the same thing with games. I mean, I loved the depth and careful construction that went into the last Final Fantasy game. I appreciate the graphical detail in the last Warcraft game. But unlike a professional game reviewer, I'll occasionally just say screw it all and toss a quarter in the Ms. Pac-Man machine in the local arcade.
The average gamer often just wants something fun. Games that start as 300 page design documents just don't sound fun, no matter how much effort went into them. Now, maybe if the game started out as a 15 page comic book.....
Game Reviewers - The Problem (Score:5, Insightful)
They sit there and carefully and systematically work through each game, taking notes on the sound, music, graphics, etc. They evaluate the game the same way Roger Ebert carefully picks through a movie and sees it's good bits and bad bits.
That's only one thing that a game reviewer is supposed to do. They are also supposed to review the game as a whole. More often than most would care to admit, there is nowhere near that level of attention to detail when conducting a review. How many times have we seen so-called reviewers exposed for being nothing more than fanboys on the take from publishers (bribes, junkets and payola [slashdot.org])? Or even worse, how often do they write reviews without ever seeing or playing the game in question (fraudulent reviews [slashdot.org])?
As long as the publishers know that they can manipulate reviewers by the carrot --bribes, junkets and payola [sfweekly.com]-- or the stick --threatening no review copies of games or no access to staff for interviews-- they know that they can get away with just about anything when publishing games. Is there any wonder why 95% of games published don't make a profit?
At Geartest.com [geartest.com] we have faced the latter problem, where publishers will not send us the actual products, even when we occasionally request them.
They send us press releases, screenshots, more PR about promotional offers, bundle discounts and contests, but they rarely send the software.
Maybe it's because we have repeatedly told them that we won't publish non-news, and we won't publish features without direct access to the game in question and/or the staff who made the game (in the case of interviews/features).
Meanwhile, you get self-proclaimed 'journalists' like Marc Saltzman [slashdot.org] who carve out a cottage industry for themselves while doing nothing to advance serious, legitimate, journalistic or critical coverage of games.
There are an endless number of Web site and so-called 'game press' that are happy to publish PR and advertising and call them articles or features. As long as there are gamers who give these sites and magazines their traffic and pay for this type of PR content, the game companies, their marketing agencies and the publications themselves have no incentive to stop pimping, whoring and publishing lousy games.
designing games (Score:4, Informative)
"Game Engine Anatomy 101" by Jake Simpson - http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,3973,594,00
"Formal Abstract Design Tools" by Doug Church - http://www.gamasutra.com/features/19990716/design
"2000: Formal Design Tools: Emergent Complexity, Emergent Narrative" by Marc "MAHK" LeBlanc - http://www.algorithmancy.org [algorithmancy.org]
I'll tell you whats wrong with the game industry (Score:4, Redundant)
Waaaayy back in the day, the atari 2600 was the #1 console. It died a horrible death mainly because of all the crap "me too" clones of astroids, combat, and pac man clones (actually the 2600 pacman stunk like turds)
Later we got the nintendo 8-bit. OOh wow, easter eggs in mario, now every game has easter eggs and secret codes. Now everyone wants to program platform games because "If mario is such a popular platform game, mine should be too!"
Later we saw the puzzle game "me too" phase where everyone and their brother was doing some sort of "tetris" clone. Nintendo had Dr. Mario, Sega had columns, Atari came out with some shit game called "klax". For a while there it seemed everyone and their brother was trying to do some spin on tetris.
Now it's the same old crap, and game companies STILL haven't learned their lessons. Yay we have procedural textured mapped polygons on a box that can do 3gabillion vertices per second. Who cares about the game! Just look at those fill rates! Wow look it's tetris, but it's better because it's IN 3D WOW! Yeah i'm just lining up at best buy before they open so I CAN GET MY COPY TOO!
I suppose when they release the next generation of consoles, we're going to see the same old crap, but with more wizzbang graphics than you can shake a stick at.
In the words of Roddy Piper, "It's like putting perfume on a pig."
You young whipper-snappers! (Score:3)
What we have is akin to an evolutionary process. Good ideas (easter eggs, puzzle games, platform games) get copied shamelessly, until you have hundreds of games that fully explore the design space. First we had simple games like Breakout and Galaga, because that was really all that computers were equipped to handle. Then when the hardware was sufficiently beefed up, we got scrollers like SMB and Metroid. Within that one genre, a lot of new ideas were incorporated. Just look at how much evolution happened between Super Mario Bros. and Super Mario World, despite sticking to the same "run/jump/scroll" formula.
The way you describe it, Tetris was the only "real" puzzle game, and the rest were merely wanna-bes. That's a difficult assertion to make, since Tetris wasn't even the first puzzle game (Q-bert, for example, preceded Tetris by three years). All that can really be said is that the success of Tetris led all the other game publishers to see the potential of the genre.
It's especially strange that you dismiss Dr. Mario as "just another Tetris clone." Its conceptual lineage is blindingly obvious, but I would say that it was just as playable and addictive.
Ideas get stolen, rehashed, reworked, combined, pushed to the limit, and distilled back down until they're nearly unrecognizeable. What you need to understand is, this process actually strengthens the gaming industry. Sure, it sucks when some company decides to dash off a half-hearted clone of Warcraft. But if a great game spawns ten paint-by-numbers clones and one mind-blowing twist on the original formula, gamers are better off than they would be if nobody had copied it for fear of being "derivative."
Half-right (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, that's half right, he certainly does talk a lot. Honestly, I think the main thing that's wrong with the games industry is pricks like Blackley who are more interested in acting like rock stars than in making games.
Developers have too much pressure (Score:2, Interesting)
I love programming. It's like a cross between a fine art, such as opera, and a deeply complex science, such as molecular physics. There's a math portion of it, and there's an art portion of it. But the bottom line is that there's no business part of coding. So, when managers and the other suits try to tell the coders, "OK, well put in a good 8 hrs of coding today, and Mike and Punjab will as well, and we'll have 24 hrs of coding done today on NewGameApp v1.0." Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way.
Go read Mythical Man Month [Link [amazon.com]]. It's all about these typical manegerial expectations and how they're blatantly wrong.
You want to fix game development? STOP WORKING THE PROGRAMMERS SO HARD.
Insane release deadlines? (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, and people who have spent most of their lives passionately making cool games should realize selling out to a greedy, stupid and public company like EA isn't necessarily going to make their lives better- even if they are very (very) rich.
Re:Insane release deadlines? (Score:2)
I agree with you, BTW. I've seen a lot of games that could have used an extra 6 months in development, and would have been show stoppers if they had had that extra time.
Video games are not just software anymore (Score:5, Interesting)
Video games nowadays are becoming much more complicated beasts and require much larger teams... they are much more a product of their process and much less a product of the talent creating them. If the process is broken, you get crap no matter how good the individual developers are. All is not lost, though... Hollywood uses the same model. I think we will see the video game equivalent of a "Director" emerge... someone who manages the process to create something of quality. I think companies like Blizzard already do this well (although their "Directors" are fairly anonymous, I'll bet they are there).
Re:Video games are not just software anymore (Score:3)
Re:Video games are not just software anymore (Score:2)
When you play, you truly feel like you play a part in a war movie.
Finally (Score:5, Insightful)
Finally, it's being said. I had time to play endlessly long games when I was in junior high, but now in college, I just won't touch the 30 hour game (let alone the 70-100 hour group!). I don't have that kind of time. Maybe the "no-life" crew still has that kind of time to blow, but I'd say a good majority of us have outside engagements. And what's more, I'd MUCH rather play 3 excellent 10-hour games instead of one 30-hour one.
Re:Finally (Score:2, Insightful)
There's no question that quality should come before quantity, but we also shouldn't be giving game developers the message that no game should be more than 10 hours.
What do you think - if they make the games shorter they'll charge us less? If you don't have time to play a 40 hour game this month, then play half of it now and half of it next month.
This reminds me of the diet craze, due to which in certain stores you now pay almost twice as much for half the calories. If you don't need that much, don't eat as often. Don't get the industry to charge all of us more for less product.
Re:Finally (Score:2, Funny)
No. I think I'll play a 10 hour game with 10 hours worth of ideas, instead of a 40 hour game with 10 hours worth of ideas.
Re:Finally (Score:2, Funny)
Plus, RPG gamers who end up buying short games feel cheated. You underestimate the size of this group; understandable since you probably aren't a part of it.
If any modern Zelda game were released as a 10-hour jobby, you could expect riots in the streets and crumbled buildings. Lots of us RPGers/ARPGers are heavy, angry motherfuckers. I know I am.
I can think of a couple things of the bat (Score:3, Insightful)
2 - No change of the storyline. As soon as someone integrates diablo2 with doom3 we will have a game everyone can enjoy.
3 - NO FREAKIN COOP GAMES. I'm personally very sick of playing Quake1 coop over and over simply becuase its the basically the only one out there. I'm sure there are others, but they've hidden pretty well from me.
4 - graphics card manufacturers. It takes much longer to port a game for multiple vid cards that it does for just one, and you get much more performance if it was just one. ATI and Nvidia need to agree on a set of standards - that would help immensly.
Re:I can think of a couple things of the bat (Score:2)
The fun they had (Score:2)
Fewer polygons, more creativity (Score:5, Insightful)
Why did Unreal 2, the most technically advanced FPS I've ever seen, get 51% from firingsquad? Because apart from the graphics engine, it's shit! The level design is horrid, the plot is unimaginative, we've got the same guns that have been in every FPS since Doom 1!
Games like Soldier of Fortune, Mafia, and Mobile Forces all have the same problem - more time is being spent on the graphics than the rest of the game COMBINED!
Back when game designers couldn't rely on oh-wow-gee-whiz-better-buy-a-radeon-9700-pro graphics to draw the gamer, they had to actually - wow! - make good games! Involving storylines (Wing Commander 2 & 3, anyone?) and crisp play control (I wowed someone the other month with some stunts in Super Mario 2 - running on a SNES - that you can't do in today's games), the games of yesteryear were better than today's!
And it all went to shit after Half-Life.
A simple question... (Score:2)
For me, it's been a long time. IMO GTA3 is close but not quite ground-breaking. The concept was new, missions in a big city as a gangster, but it still had a lot of old concepts like shoot stuff, blow stuff up, shoot stuff, drive cars, and shoot stuff. There are two games I'm looking forward to playing: Star Wars Galaxies and Doom3, but I can't say either of them are anything new once you get passed the fancy graphics. Where are all the radically new ideas for games like we had 10 years ago?
Re:A simple question... (Score:2)
Probably the original GTA. The London expansion was too easy, but quite possibly the best fun I've had in a game in years. Zipping about the place on a Mod scooter or in Austin Powers' car... ah, the memories :-)
Obviously I'm going to buy Orion 3 at the first opportunity (damn late release in .uk, gits gits gits) but the game that I'd go mad for would be a 3D version of Solar Jetman. Something similar to Descent would do the job quite nicely, I think.
Just my 14,1 øre... (Score:2, Interesting)
So... whats wrong with game development? Or rather, why does the games of today seem to suck compared to the ones I played when I was young?
I think there are many reasons, some off which has ben adressed by other posters. Still, beeing me, I'm gonna list up the ones I think are among the most important.
- Lack of any attemt of original gameplay. Most, or all, of todays games are simply 'more of the same'.
- Too much focus on 'eyecandy'. Modern games look the part, but often I find that too much development has gone into good looks, and too little into things like plot, levels and gameplay.
-Rehashing of old ideas. What is 'Medal of Honor'? Simply a better version of the original 'Doom'. And what was 'Doom' in the first place, but a souped up version of the original 'Castle Wolfenstain'?
Don't misunderstand me. I still buy and enjoy games... but I'm not sucked in as I was before.
The downfall of the gaming industry, I feel, began when the graphicsadaptors started becomming good enought to allow for 'nearly real' gameplay. That shifted the focus away from good games and towards games that looked good. Maybe because it was easy to describe a scene where you had to feed a 10' carrot to a mutant spacebunny as long as you had to rely on text, but impossible to do it visually. That, and while a textphraser could actually make sence out of what you wrote, a visualy based game was dumbed down to walk about and clicking on stuff.
Maybe a game like Valhalla [lemon64.com] could solve that last problem - eyecandy and a reasonable smart textphraser.
Seamus Blackly is a complete tosser... (Score:5, Insightful)
Saying that a 300 page game design stifles creativity is completely wrong, unless for some reason your publisher is requiring you to stick to the letter of it instead of being flexible. How do you think you get a team of 20+ people to produce a coherent game? Normally you can't see which parts of the game was made by which artist and so on, why? BECAUSE THERE IS A GAME DESIGN DETAILING HOW THINGS SHOULD LOOK AND WORK. Of course if something is not fun, you come up with a new design for that part and update the game design document accordingly.
He also seems to think that everyone can do business like Microsoft where it does not matter how much money you lose because there is always the operating system monopoly there to feed you... Saying that developers make bad games because they have to make them on a budget and a timeschedule is of course true, but not very interesting as this is likely to continue to be the case for the foreseable future...
Re:Seamus Blackly is a complete tosser... (Score:2)
Re:Seamus Blackly is a complete tosser... (Score:2, Informative)
Ok... (Score:5, Insightful)
Meanwhile, guys like Miyamoto - working at the largest game developer in the world in terms of sales and the number of projects released yearly (yes, bigger than Microsoft) - keep on churning out games like Pikmin and Animal Crossing, which I would consider pretty innovative. Then the guy gets derided for saying things like "what I find most interesting about games is being able to push a character around the screen with a controller." Well hey, ever think maybe the guy's onto something? He's only the most successful individual game developer and producer in the history of video games, going back to the original Donkey Kong. Again, it's the results that prove the validity of a theory, and Miyamoto's theory has always been that simplicity and innovation are what count. He doesn't go around complaining that the publishing system is broken; he works within that publishing system and continues to make great games (and games that sell quite well - when less than a million is considered a "failure", you know you've set the benchmark pretty high).
I'm not sure the system is broken when we continue to get games like Super Monkey Ball, Rez, Animal Crossing, Pikmin, Samba De Amigo, Dance Dance Revolution, and plenty of other highly innovative games that very often become popular without the name recognition that "branding" provides. And I don't see Seamus Blackley's name attached to any of these games.
I think we need to all finally agree that Blackley is not worth talking about. He's at best a footnote in video game history; one of the two guys who convinced Bill Gates to release the Xbox. But he's no longer involved with Xbox and didn't do much but evangelize it while he was. And I don't see him doing much of note since leaving Microsoft. Miyamoto, on the other hand, says lots of things that lots of people don't seem to "get" but has been directly responsible for 4-5 major hits and highly regarded games in just the past year, with an indirect hand in 20-30 others. Whose opinion counts more here?
A sick industry (Score:5, Insightful)
A case in point is Sega's former executive, Peter Moore. Moore was a former professional soccer player from the UK who got an MBA and worked at the athletic shoe company Reebok. When Bernie Stolar was CEO at Sega, he hired Moore as the vp of marketing. In a political fight just before the Dreamcast launch, Stolar got thrown out for insisting on the inclusion of a 56K modem with the console. With Bernie fired, Sega filled in his position with a "temporary" executive from headquarters in Japan. All eyes were on the advertising campaign Moore had put together up for the launch date called "Inside the Box". Dreamcast sold very well in its first few months after the initial launch -- thanks to the groundwork that Stolar had laid down before. Flush with the huge sales, Sega promoted Moore to President.
This was the moment where higher executives demonstrated that they had no idea why the initial Dreamcast sales were successful, and promoted the wrong guy.
As the year went on, the Dreamcast sales flagged. Despite Moore's best marketing attempts, which were ill aimed and ineffectual, the numbers grew bleaker and bleaker. Moore spent money like water, creating elaborate sets at E3 where professional roller skaters did tricks on ramps to promote "Jet Set Radio", renting out the entire Great America amusement park for one day for the Game Developers Converence attendees, and getting Sega to sponsor the MTV Music Video Awards to promote "Space Channel 5".
All for naught. Within a year, sales were so bad that Dreamcast was discontinued. Despite all of the failures, Sega allowed Moore (clearly out of his element) to stay on as CEO, as Sega branched out to support other platforms.
But look what happened: Last Christmas, Moore thought that Sega's football game could beat EA's football game if Sega continued to throw money into advertising. It was once again Moore's theory of spending money like water.
How much money? Almost all of the entire allocated budget for the year 2003! Moore's plan failed badly, which punched a huge hole in Sega, a hole so large that the company began looking for a buyer. Eventually Sega wound up with Sammy, the Korean pachinko manufacturer, which was posted on Slashdot a few weeks ago. Moore announced his departure from Sega, and three days later, he resurfaced again...
If this story doesn't illustrate the illness of the game industry, I don't know what does.
Don't Be a Pro, then (Score:4, Interesting)
Now he has a Master (publishers, the market, whatever) and it's not for himself anymore. That's the problem with turning pro: in the end, the only thing you really do for yourself, is get your paycheck. I face the same problem in my job; I don't always get to do what I want. That's why it's called "work" instead of "play."
Don't like it? Quit working 16 hour days, and save some of that passion and energy for your amateur projects after you get home. The market never shares your values. If they did, they wouldn't have to pay you.
He seems to think the problem is with the middlemen, though, and that he would be happy to serve the end users (the "audience"). I'm not convinced this is really the way to happiness either (ahem, I said: the market never shares your values) but I guess he disagrees. I guess it is a fairly decent compromise to have at least a little fun, but still make a buck.
No realistic driving sim?! Heard of Gran Turismo? (Score:4, Insightful)
In GT3 you have to get different levels of licenses to drive in the different classes of races and even getting the early licenses is challenging. You make $$ from winning races (highly ghetto races to start with) and as you get enough you buy better cars and mod them. There are so many mods; I have no clue what most of them are, but the game handily gives you before & after horsepower figures (for the power related mods) in your current vehicle.
And the racing is awesome. Great graphics, great sense of speed, but most importantly every little thing you do with the controls has an impact. Some cars handle it better when you take a short cut through dirt and grass on the side of the road than others. The rear wheel drives are soo hard not to spin out. Each car is different in it's feel and road handling, etc.
Anyway, are there problems with the game industry? Yes, of course. However, it's preposterous to suggest that there are no good games out there.
And if you think there are no good driving sims, you must be playing the wrong ones. Unless you're looking for a good non-racing driving sim ("Supermarket & Back: Station Wagon III"). If that's the case I can't help you.
Realistic?!? (Score:2, Funny)
I only played this game briefly on someone else's machine, and I guess the other physics and stuff might have been realistic, but this seems to me to be a fatal flaw.
Re:No realistic driving sim?! Heard of Gran Turism (Score:2)
cars don't break in gt3..
Yeah, it kind of jars you out of the game when you face-plant into a barrier at 100Mph, then just back up. It should at least kick you out of the race.
Hear a gamer: It's bloated. (Score:4, Insightful)
Look at ID Soft, my favorite example: I don't like their games very much nor are they extremely innovative, but they've remained the same 15 head team since god know's when and something like twice a decade they release a game they like and their fans like. Just like it should be.
The counterexample: Dynamics and their last hit Tribes2. Great game. Best Multiplayer only game out there. I LOVE it. It rocks and still kicks UT2k3 and whatnot around the block fun and varietywise. UT2k3 will take another 2 years till they've patched the server overview to meet T2s standard.
Yet the fan base built up to slow for the VCs so they shut them down. That's what happens when you get greedy. Game developers should do just that without getting greedy: Develope games. And nothing else. Then their products would be better, they would be fewer, they would make a fine living and I as a gamer would be happier and have to spend less money on crap. And I'm shure they would be happier too.
Large corps buying independent studios... (Score:5, Interesting)
Microsoft, and even moreso: Electronic Arts.
Both are large corperations that don't practice much innovation (Honestly... Madden 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003???), but since the mid to late '90s have been running around buying out smaller developers, milking whatever profits they can out of the franchises, and letting the studios wither on the vine.
It was only a few weeks ago that it was announced that Westwood (now a subsidiary of EA) was closeing up it's Las Vegas development offices. When WAS the last time anything good came out of the C&C series? I bet it predates Westwood's fall to EA.
Westwood in particular stings ME hard, because, before EA, they used to do some REALLY cool games outside C&C. Remember the Blade Runner "adventure" game? That was one of my faves. Do you think that, under EA's flag, we'll EVER see anything from Westwood but more played-out C&C's?
Or take microsoft's assimilation of one of my other previously-favroite game developers: Bungie. I STILL dig out Marathon and Myth every so often. And who else remembers all the previews of what Halo was going to be before gates had it stripped down to become the Xbox's flagship yet-another-generic-FPS.
Back to EA... Remember Origin? Remember Autoduel and Ogre? What about the Wing Commander series? Crusader? BioForge? Remember the excellent storytelling in the old Ultima series? I sure do. What is Origin all about NOW though, under the stewardship of EA? Ultima Online, Ultima Online expansions, and a sequel to... Ultima Online!
Remember "Jane's"? Remember the excellent military simulations of the '90s. 688i, in particular, STILL has quite a following. Quite an achievement for a game released in 1997! Where is Jane's now? Electronic arts. What has Jane's done recently? Nothing since 2000.
Remember when Maxis had a sence of humor? Remember when they released some really WIERD sims? Remember Sim Ant, Sim Earth, and Sim Tower? NOW what does Maxis do? Well, they just released another Sim City... one which I'm told is STILL not as fun as Sim City 2000 was. Oh, and they do expansion packs for The Sims. Quick check of EA's site to be sure.... yup.
I'm sure there are MORE game studios that others could name that have been assimilated by microsoft or EA. The above are mostly my pet peeves in the "large corperations buying and destroying small game studios" world. But I think THAT is the problem with game development. In my experience as a gamer, studios have been so much more creative, and... well... FUN when they were independent. The big corperations seem to forget that games are supposed to be FUN. They just see a trend (FPS, RTS, MMRPG, etc.), and want to milk it dry.
cya,
john
Re:Large corps buying independent studios... (Score:2, Insightful)
Small independent developers just can't afford these things. Those Madden games cost millions to make, but bring in tens to hundreds of millions. Only the big players can really sink that kind of cash in development.
I've heard many in the game industry say that production is moving to Hollywood style, with huge budgets, fancy graphics work, entire fresh musical scores, the works. And that's just darn expensive to do.
what's missing. (Score:2, Insightful)
Interactivity and joint Story Telling with other living people in a virtual environment. MMO'a remind me of table top pen and pencil gaming of the early 80's. Mud's and dungeon crawls dressed up in fancy gfx, but little more. Sure, there are RPing guilds in EQ, but that's not what i'm talking about.
How many game designers have stopped to actually read Aristotles' Poetics?
Why you aren't playing Infinity (Score:5, Interesting)
The GBC glaringly lacked RPGs. At the time, I could safely say that the best RPG for the platform was Final Fantasy Legend 3, and that was for the monochrome GB! Infinity was going to change that. It was a game SquareSoft would have made, had they stayed around to make GBC games. Our game played a little like something between FF2 and FF3, with a full 25,000 word story. No real innovation here (except for maybe the battle system), we were simply trying to fill a nitch on the platform. For that reason, we got so many emails from gamers wondering when this thing would be released. After all, their only other choice was Pokemon. Many of them wondered if we would face a similar fate as Mythri, another GBC title that you never saw (both games were highlighed on RPGamer).
Unfortunately, Infinity never saw the light of day because we couldn't land a publisher. We sent a letter out to nearly all publishers, but in only three cases did they contact us back: EA, Nintendo, Crave. I actually flew to Washington to meet a guy at Nintendo (pretty cool place, looks just like the stuff in the pictures), only to be denied an offer. He did, however, show me a GBA prototype with Mario Kart. Sure, Mario Kart is a cool game, but I wanted to play an RPG. On the first day we met with Crave, the guy asked if we could substitute the characters with some from a movie. We tried to get them to go along with the game as-is, and we had a long negotiation period, but they ended up just stringing us along with no result. At one point, their plan was to show the game at E3 2001, but we were denied that also (I even have the 1 poster of the game we had made for the occasion, hanging on the wall behind me right now).
What I learned from all this is that publishers generally only want to take safe bets. Why go for a risky RPG when you can just make Men in Black 2? It pained me to walk down the GBC isle at stores and see something featuring the Olsen twins. How on earth do these games get published, but ours not? It is the sad state of the game industry.
Re:Why you aren't playing Infinity (Score:3, Insightful)
Here it is (Score:3, Insightful)
Because of this, they have to appeal to the LCD of the computer game public.
This means they have to be very dumb, at all levels. 90% of people won't "get" a smart game.
Back in the day, a game could be wildly successful with a small niche audience, because production costs were so low.
Blackley produced the Trespasser disaster (Score:3, Interesting)
Blackley was the "producer" for that game, and also wrote (unsuccessfully) the physics engine. "Why did physics code that was barely usable actually ship?" says Game Developer's postmortem [gamasutra.com], which names Blackley as the major problem with the project.
Blackley has since turned to evangelism and punditry, at which he's better.
I am so out of touch (Score:5, Interesting)
He feels that more of a focus should be made on the mass-market consumer
So, basically we already have the entire entertainment industry boiling products down to the *lowest* common intellectual denominator, and this guy proposes that games design be further trimmed down and be based even *more* on more consumer polling data??? Great.
Yet we make games that require 10, 20, 30, or more hours for the gamer to fully enjoy
And I thought that we already live in an instant-gratification culture that has reduced our average attention span to below 10 seconds! And now we need more ego shooters and mario clones that don't require your brain to be used *at all* because having something esoteric like a story line (or any kind of in-game development process, for that matter) is taking away too much of our time?
Well, that's all not what I think the direction of games development should be. Computer games are becoming a more important social factor every year. Soon, they may take the place of television in the areas entertainment and education, especially for children. I don't care what marketers say, the nature of the games we play *does* reflect and even influence the state of our society. And please, I'm not talking about sex and violence here. But we should think hard about if we want to align our entire society by the lowest common denominator. I think not.
I used to edit a UK videogame mag... (Score:5, Interesting)
Three years later, frankly I wanted to kill myself - or never play another videogame as long as I lived, whichever was easier. Luckily I got the chance to move out of games and into movies (but that's another story).
I'd been playing arcade games since the Seventies, had most of the computers that were around in the Eighties and the consoles in the Nineties. And as I got older, I realised that the more advanced the technology became... the less fun the games were.
Don't get me wrong, there have been games I've enjoyed playing in the past few years - Halo, the original Tomb Raider, Goldeneye, Crazy Taxi, MGS, Unreal Tourney (once all the Futurama mods are put in). But these days, the 'big' games just require too much of an investment of time for too little reward to be worth it. I was talking to a guy I used to work with who's now on an Xbox mag, and he told me that a senior designer at one of the majors had admitted that his company doesn't bother spending too much time on game ending sequences "because hardly anyone can be bothered to play that long". Chicken or egg?
Certainly, the only big game I've played through to the end in the last few years has been Halo, and even that had some infuriating bits where I was very close to putting it down forever. FFVII I gave up on when I got stuck fighting Barrett's ex-mate and had to keep sitting through five minutes of exposition before getting killed again. MGS - getting blown up by Metal Gear Rex for the fiftieth time was just too much. Even something like Jet Set Radio Future's skyscraper stage... life is just too short!
I actually get more fun out of a quick blast on MAME or Frodo or Spectacle, or Robotron on GBA, or 30 minutes of Crazy Taxi on DC, than any of the so-called megagames of the moment. I have no interest in committing 70 hours of my life to some game (which I know is going to frustrate me with the die/retry trial-and-error loop that designers still think is *soooooo* clever) when there are other things I could be doing.
Not even Miyamoto is infallible - I couldn't be arsed to play through to the end of Ocarina Of Time, simply because I got caught in a die/retry loop and decided I couldn't face playing through the same section yet *again* just to reach the next checkpoint.
The idea of the 'short, sharp shock' seems to have all but disappeared from modern designers. But right now, those are the only kind of games that I have the time (and patience) to play. I've seen everything already - there hasn't been a new gaming genre for years, and nobody seems to even be bothering with new twists on what's already been done. (After three years on an N64 mag, I'd rather eat my own toenails than play another 3D platformer with a cartoony hero. Oh look, the ice level! The volcano level! The minecarts! The jungle! The haunted house! FUCK RIGHT OFF AND DIE, YOU UNIMAGINATIVE SHITEHAWKS!)
The only problem is, nobody's developing games that are designed for a quick 10-15 minute blast, because the focus groups want FMV and level bosses. I couldn't care less about FMV if the game's playable, and I *hate* level bosses, so that's why the big, bland game companies that thankfully I don't have to deal with any more aren't getting any of my money...
Re:I used to edit a UK videogame mag... (Score:4, Insightful)
The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time is widely considered to be the best videogame ever made. It remains ranked at #1 among all videogames at Gamerankings to this day.
Fine, you didn't want to finish it. However, suggesting that somehow it's the game's fault seems a bit childish. It's impossible to please everybody, and I hardly think the fact that Miyamoto's masterpiece failed to please one random Slashdot poster should count as a failure on his part.
A chance (Score:4, Interesting)
Open Source developers unite! We are not bound by the $$, so we are free to create any game we wish. Forget about cool programming techniques, think about a great game idea - the game you've always wanted to play - then check out sourceforge to see if anyon'e building it. If they are, join them. If not, start it yourself and finish it.
Then we can see if we can produce some unique, high quality games.
Article title not quite on target (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm not talking about PC vs. Console flame wars, nor PS2 vs. XBox, but it is important to point out that the first article mentions NOTHING about Sony and it's relationship with developers. Or, for that matter, the sales of PS2 gaming consoles and games vs. those of X-Box and Nintendo.
It's not contested that Microsoft and Nintendo need to get their act together. PC makers have it the hardest, given the wide variety of hardware out there (and the combinations thereof).
But Sony isn't exactly hurting in this economy. In fact, they quadrupled their profits just last year.
Plus, Sony wants to eliminate any charge for development on the PS3, adding a freedom that PC developers have enjoyed for some time.
The Playstation 2 is technically inferior to the GameCube, XBox, and most modern PCs, yet it continues to net a more than substantial share of the market. This alone, if anything, is a sign that graphic/hardware superiority in games isn't "all that".
All rebuffs/criticism welcome.
Re:no requirements gathering phase!!! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:[OT] Anyone in the game development biz? (Score:2)
And just make a game. Copy something simple just to see what it takes.
There isn't a magic answer to these questions. There are lots of different routes and specialties and they change all the time. Just be a good programmer and study whatever you can.
Re:Let me guess.... (Score:2, Interesting)
The gaming industry as a whole allows easy access to employment if your any good. I've watched at least thirty people go from newbie to getting jobs at some of the biggest companies and still are friends with a few.
Re:Doom3, Doom3, Doom3 (Score:2)
Mod that -1 Redundant, people. Might as well have said 'the sky will still be blue' or 'the sun will rise in the morning'.
Re:Games... (Score:2, Insightful)
Publishers don't like to let developers develop on their own terms, even though the best games are done that way.
They need to be more venture capitalist minded - sure, 10 out of 12 will go bust, one might break even and the 12th one will be a big hit that makes more money then was lost on all the rest.
But they are too risk averse, so we get crap.
*sigh*