A Look At How Far PC Gaming Has Come 427
Bit-tech is running a feature examining the progress PC games have made over the past couple decades. The article highlights aspects of modern games we often take for granted or nitpick, and compares them to earlier games in which such features were implemented poorly or not at all. Quoting:
"Doom's legacy is still being felt today in fact and it's a fair bet that you can take any shooter off a shelf, from America’s Army to Zeno Clash, examine it, and list a dozen things that those games owe to Doom. Things like the wobble of the guns and the on-screen feedback that tells you which direction you are being shot from — these were things that id Software invented. On the other hand, from a story perspective, Doom was absolutely rubbish. You start in a room, no idea what’s going on and you are surrounded by demons. You have to read the manual and supporting media to get a grip on it all — something modern games would get heavily slated for doing. Yet the idea that plot was optional caught on and the same flaw was replicated in other games of the era, such as Quake and (to a lesser extent) Duke Nukem 3D. There were years and years where the lessons of early story-driven games were forgotten and all anyone really cared about was having as many sprites or polygons as possible."
Re:Doom (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeah, it seems to basically be the argument that current games build on ideas, representations, and mechanics used in previous games. And a lot of the influence comes from, well influential games, of which Doom was one. I do tend to see Doom as pretty large too, but then I'm also in my mid-20s.
I do find the general idea of trying to trace where particular things originated interesting, though. I hadn't, until this article pointed it out, noticed that the gun-wobble was an id invention, though I suppose it makes sense.
They still have far to go (Score:3, Interesting)
Conspicuous from its absence from the article is multiplayer. So let me throw something out:
Even for as far as PC gaming has come, it still hasn't moved into one niche that consoles currently dominate. This niche is when you have friends over, and they're suddenly in the mood to play a video game. So you want a game that 1. is easy to learn and 2. doesn't need more PCs than you have available (because having to go back home to dismantle their PCs would kill the moment). Console "party" games fill this niche, such as Mario Party series and its imitators. With the rise of HDTVs that allow easy PC connections to the VGA or HDMI input, why hasn't someone outdone Mario Party on PC?
Shame it's dying (Score:3, Interesting)
And, of course, PC gaming is dying...
The reason is quite simple : consoles games sell a lot more copies. Game publishers have no choice but to make a game for console with maybe a PC port. Especially for AAA titles that need huge teams of artists and programmers to develop the graphics and game engine.
Why do console games sell more copies? One big reason is reduced piracy due to vastly better DRM with a console. The OTHER reason is much bigger : consoles are vastly cheaper to purchase than a gaming PC. Just $300, and any game works immediately without hassle. The majority of the gamers in the world don't have the patience or knowledge to screw around with the many, many incompatibilities and bugs associated with PC hardware and software.
This wasn't always the case, PC gaming was huge in the 1990s. However, consoles have 'caught up' to the point that while any given generation of consoles quickly falls behind PCs, the graphics can render to an HDTV which at least approaches the quality of a good PC monitor. Also, current consoles fully support online gaming about as well as PCs ever did.
The only edge PCs still have is the keyboard and mouse as a controller.
Yes, PC graphics cards are better than current consoles, but that only applies to a small fraction of the available PCs.
Of course, console's new reign of domination is only going to last until cloud gaming takes off, which should be over the next few years.
Re:Duke = Citizen Kane (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Crazy DRM and Phone home games (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Shame it's dying (Score:3, Interesting)
A quick google turned up this [pcvsconsole.com]:
US PC Game Software Sales
1998 - $1.8 billion
1999 - $1.9 billion
2000 - $1.78 billion (84.9 million units)
2001 - $1.75 billion (83.6 million units)
2002 - $1.4 billion (61.5 million units)
2003 - $1.2 billion (52.8 million units)
2004 - $1.1 billion (47 million units)
2005 - $953 million (38 million units)
2006 - $970 million
Re:Doom (Score:5, Interesting)
I dunno. You're absolutely right, and yet... I think DOOM! was probably the first time I perceived a PC as a proper gaming machine.
I mean, Wolfenstein was impressive, and in retrospect (I didn't play it much) a great game -- but it was very much a matter of "well, we've got this PC for business apps, I can make it play this game". At that time, if you had games in mind when you bought a computer, you got an Amiga. Or a console.
Prior to DOOM!, most decent PC games were available for Amiga / Atari ST, with better sound and graphics. Wolfenstein looked like a poor Amiga game.
DOOM! though, came out just as VGA was becoming mainstream, and sound cards were becoming available and affordable. Most PCs didn't have a sound card, and you'd add one as an afterthought, often to improve your DOOM! experience. It looked *amazing* in comparison to an Amiga game, and that was a first.
OTOH the article's author should still consider the 25 years of non-PC videogaming heritage leading up to DOOM!.
Hold on there, Tex (Score:5, Interesting)
OK, he lost me there. The entire idea of DOOM was that it was an incredibly technically advanced shoot-em-up. Being able to run around in the levels and shoot realistic-acting guns was great. All that you really had to know was to shoot the demons - the player has no other way to interact with the world other than shooting. Who needs a plot? That always baffled me about the old Japanese Nintendo games...they always had these incredibly convoluted unncessary plots that I read the first few lines of and then forgot it and went on to saving the kingdom or whatever. And I was a manual-reading completist.
When, exactly, did computer game snobs decide it was cool to call DOOM 'rubbish'? What happened to computer game snobs being polygon and FPS guys? What makes this guy look down his nose at something that he doesn't understand and apparently has no desire to understand?
Re:Sadly (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Doom's gameplay (Score:4, Interesting)
It's an old but true quote that story in video games is like story in pornography. It's expected to be there, but really only the flimsiest pretense of setting is necessary. Many early video games got on quite well with a handful of paragraphs in the manual.
I can recall playing Sonic 3 in 1994 and thinking it had a great "story" for a platformer, as in addition to the manual paragraphs, it used in game "cut scenes" to advance what shred of a plot there was. Interestingly, the game told its micro-tale without using a single word of text. The on-screen actions and emotions of the characters were like those from a silent film, without the captions.
Nevertheless, I did and still do consider the "story" in that game to be more than sufficient and moreover very suited to the type of game it was. I imagine it's similar for other games like Doom.
The watershed for storytelling in video games was probably Metal Gear Solid in 1998. After Hideo Kojima blew everyone away with his storytelling, developers started offering ever more elaborate and "cinematic" storylines in their games which ate up ever larger portions of the budget. The trouble came from two important flaws
1) Hideo Kojima never made a "cinematic" game. The resulting end product of MGS was a very different form of entertainment from a film. People focused too much on the cutscenes,(which were still quite different from raw film) and missed out on the wider package offered. It became usual to see ever more pompous and over produced cut scenes strapped on to games that never lived up to the "epic" tone set in them.
2) Most directors are not Hideo Kojima. This was probably the more pertinent point. Developers wanted to make epic (action)storylines in the mould of Metal Gear Solid, but simply lacked the writing ability to pull it off. Even Kojima himself managed to foul this up in MGS2. The end result is a pretentious and overbearing plot that gets in the way of the game and severely reduces enjoyment and playability.
I think a good example the benefits and pitfalls of story in games is given by the juxtaposition between Gears of War 1 and 2 on the Xbox. The first game has a minimalist story. Characters are barely introduced and have almost no development, detail on the setting is shamelessly scant, and where the plot is not entirely one dimensional, it contains gaping holes. Yet it works in the context of the game that Gears of War is, and I would argue works very well.
Gear of War 2 by contrast, suffers from an overblown and overproduced story that makes a mockery of the proceedings. Attempts to develop characters are almost comically absurd, the setting is wildly different tending towards the spectacular, the plot is incohesive and convoluted throughout and leaves loose ends everywhere. The end result, while eye candy laden, detracts significantly from the game. People just wanted to play as Marcus Fenix and shoot aliens; instead they ended up unsatisfied and confused. The developers desire to create an "epic" story instead created an epic farce. Smaller was definitely better in this case.
Obviously, the same rule does not hold across all video games. RPGs require a significant story. But even here, overproduction and poor writing can create an epic farce that taints the whole game. The prime example is Final Fantasy VIII; Your characters are all teenagers attending assassins' high school, and you fight the sorceress who was actually your matron in the orphanage where you grew up, who was actually being controlled by another sorceress, so she could rescue another sorceress and cause "time compression", and when that failed you simply allow the second sorceress to take over a party member who happened to be yet another sorceress so that they could go back in time to allow the third sorceress to cau
Good Old Marathon (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:doom didn't need a story noob! (Score:4, Interesting)
Agreed, that's why when Half Life came it was so nice. Story in the game flow. I still remember the first time I loaded it up and didn't touch anything when the cable car was running through mesa, and knocked the mouse by accident, wow I started already?
Re:Doom's gameplay (Score:2, Interesting)
I disagree about Gears of War 1 & 2. I started with 2 and now I've gotten around to part 1. 2 IMO is much more fleshed out and the story goes hand-in-hand with the gameplay. I was very moved by the scene with Dom's wife and that got my mind even more into the world behind the game I was playing. The story in GoW 2 gives me a goal to work for, much in the same way that Capture the Flag in Team Fortress 2 gives me a goal and makes an otherwise shallow deathmatch fun (and there is no real pretense of a "story" in TF2).
Gears of War Part 1, on the other hand, feels a little more "twitchy" in the controls (due to its Unreal Engine 3 heritage) and the story is a little more shallow in the cutscenes. It feels more like going through the motions.
Re:Doom3 (Score:3, Interesting)
Except for muzzle flash, that will lens flared and bloomed so much that it comes out as a near blinding white strobing blob in the middle of the screeen. There used to be a time when games had only 16 colours to work with and they used every last one of them, we now have 2^24 colours but only ever used white, black and brown and then call it the future of gaming.
Re:Doom (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm sure you've seen it; even played it, but perhaps not enough attention has been given to it yet:
http://www.springrts.com/
The guys started out with the Total Annihilation game, built an open-source implementation of the engine so you could play it with the original game-packs, and then went on to 'generalize' the engine somewhat so that you can create other 'games' for it.
In one word: AWESOME. All that was good with TA (gameplay) and all that is good with modern graphics (3D, shaders, realistic water, nice explosions, deformable terrain.. etc).
Check it out, if you havent yet.
(ofcourse there's linux binaries)
Re:Doom (Score:3, Interesting)
Indeed, I feel old. But wait - actually on the first page, he goes all the way back to Wolfenstein!
I also love this ill-defined statement that he starts the
The father of modern gaming is, I hope we can all agree, Doom.
So like, any game before Doom is too old to be "modern", but any game after Doom isn't the "father", as it didn't come "first" (it's an "Apple first" - first, except for all the ones before it).
I presume he means the first FPS, though he's still wrong (e.g., Wolfenstein).
One could just as easily declare Quake to be the father of modern gaming. Or I don't know - Civilization or Alien Breed 3D.
He goes onto say:
It took us from the age when games were monochrome, squinty affairs played by people with milkbottles for spectacles, to a time when it was actually cool to spend ages hooking up a modem connection between two PCs
Complete nonsense! Why does someone who obviously has no idea of the history of computer games (as if he was in his mid-20s, as you say) get to be a tech writer? By the early 1980s, games were leaving the monochrome era.
Re:Look how far gaming hasn't gone (Score:2, Interesting)
Plausibly convincing AI doesn't strictly imply strong or particularly intelligent AI. Most games use inexpensive tricks to make the AI seem more competent than it actually is. Like telling it exactly where you are even when it can't see you, but applying extra fuzziness/inaccuracy to make it appear as if not cheating. But most modern games, including the original FEAR, are easy-mode, even on the hardest difficulty.
They cater to the lowest common denominator, when even most of the PC -and- console games from the late 1980s and early 1990s could be extremely difficult and time consuming for most people not using a game guide. But, most of the difficulty back then was game mechanics and novelty, not AI. Now that everything is decided by fairly comprehensive AI, CPU is cheap, the metric between difficulty and engaging gameplay has not kept up at all compared to the 'shiny graphics' everyone obsesses about. Graphics fidelity matters very little, so long as it matches itself and has a great level of consistency.
This obviously goes triply so for strategy games, it's even sadder when game developers can't figure out how to even make a half-way intelligent/communicative AI. Master of Orion 2 was perhaps the last game with particularly lucid diplomacy options where the AI responded in an intelligent way based on previous actions, current state, and future threats. Many modern strategy games have descended into Korean MMO-esque "grind fest". Capture 80 outposts, expand your borders, never have any internal defense, build up random economy/research improvements to make it go faster, rinse and repeat. The best expansionist always wins, even if they have (by far) the worst handicap.
Most games are an insult to a decent tactician, strategist, or someone merely coordinated and forward thinking. Lots of stuff to make it -look- convincing, but no depth, no real options, and very little (if any) challenge.
One recent criticism of game journalism pointed out (again) that most modern reviews (doubly so for 'mainstream' companies) are not significantly more than "this has the best graphics EVER, buy it!"
The litmus test against AI is whether it can actually adapt over time to your non-simple tactics and movements. Does it, can it figure out any of what you're doing, or does it sit there and fall for it -every time-? That's a pretty low bar, but a few games have managed to just scrape over it. Most don't even bother to try.
Welcome to the modern day shooting gallery, where things shoot back and take cover, but don't move much, and certainly never realize anything so simple as a basic flanking diversion, or that you have grenades and guns and can kill them.
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Re:Doom (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't know about that. Sure Doom was nice, but it was the original Quake that had everybody I know crowded around a monitor going "oooh!".
I guess it depends on your age and background.
It was the "photorealistic" mountain backdrop in DOOM! that made my jaw drop. I was literally amazed that you could do that on a home system. After all, I'd been brought up on a BBC Micro where Elite was the peak achievement.
Around the same period, I was similarly amazed by Ridge Racer in the arcades. I had rationalised that by putting it down to expensive custom hardware.
Re:Doom (Score:2, Interesting)
No. I dreamed of an Amiga at the time, as my Apple 2 was starting to be horribly outdated.
Have a look at the games i mentioned and you'll see that they're from 1991/1992. I maintain that this is when the high-end PC games overtook the Atari/Amiga for quality, and that it predated Doom (1993) by a couple years. This is the time when the PC turned into a powerful (though also expensive and arcane) gaming platform. It certainly wasn't the case before.
Re:Totally disagree (Score:3, Interesting)
For a brilliant anything, you need a brilliant creator.
While a brilliant creator certainly helps, I don't think that is the core of the problem. After all its not that they try and fail at interactive narration, the issue is that they don't even try. All the lack of interaction with other characters in Half Life or similar games is there by design, not by accident. I think the issue is more that having an interactive narration requires more of a commitment from the player. When a game has lots of interactible characters and dialog the player has to memorize things, think about decisions, choices and all that stuff, you can't just put the game in and blast away some enemies. The lack of interaction streamlines things to the point where you can basically sleepwalk through those games, just follow the corridor or even the blinking arrow and you will be fine, thoughts about tactics and unaggressive behavior aren't needed. Games become much more accessible that way, but it also removes a lot of the fun you could have with them.
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Re:Doom (Score:3, Interesting)
Seriously, I'm in my mid twenties and reach farther back in gaming history than this guy. I grew up with the original Rogue, text-based dungeons, and the Atari 2600. I even wrote my own text-based space adventure game (complete with a turn-based, text-based battle engine!) as a Christmas gift to my brothers on our IBM PC Jr. in the mid 90's, when Doom and such were first hitting the market.
I'd like to see an analysis of how games evolved from Hack-style games to Doom and the like. As has been pointed out, the evolution since Doom has been at a much slower and more gradual pace, as opposed to the leaps and bounds when the capabilities of home computers were first being tested. That would be a Slashdot-worthy article... any takers?
As a side note, Rogue was a game where my grandfather, father, and I would compete for the high score list... I can't think of any game since that really had such a cross-generational appeal.
Re:Doom (Score:3, Interesting)
Descent is sadly missed. I still remember that feeling of utter vertigo and disorientation when you fly into a cavern, flip upside down, reorient to nearest surface and... wtf which way did I come in? Which way even is 'up'? Aieee! There is no up! I'm stuck in space in the middle of an asteroid with a reactor about to blow! I'm fifteen kinds of dead and my lunch is coming up!
good times, good times.