Gaming Clichés That Need To Die 416
MojoKid writes "The PC and console game industry is in desperate need of an overhaul. With skyrocketing costs to develop games, consumers aren't going to accept $80-$100 game titles, especially not with mobile game prices in the 99 cent — $4.99 range. Not to mention, how games are designed these days needs some serious rethinking. This list of some of the industry's most annoying gaming clichés, from scripted sequences to impossibly incompetent NPCs, and how they might be solved, speaks to a few of the major ailments in modern gameplay with character and plot techniques that are older than dirt."
So... (Score:5, Insightful)
You want them to make games much more complex--with completely destructible environments, near limitless borders, better AI, more complex NPC's, etc.
But you also want them to be CHEAPER? Okay.
And you complain about how long it takes to develop a triple-A title, so I guess you also want them SOONER too, huh?
Perhaps you would also like to have them hand-delivered to your house by Natalie Portman in a bikini? Hell, sure, why not!
Re:So... (Score:5, Insightful)
They still make PC-only titles?
Re:So... (Score:5, Insightful)
No, he's saying that instead of spending tons of money making games LOOK and SOUND better, they should spend that money on making games PLAY better.
-- 77IM
Nethack (Score:5, Insightful)
Like Nethack!
Nethack is free!
Nethack will be available twenty-five years ago!
Go Nethack!
All joking aside, roguelikes exhibit this kind of complexity, yet it takes quite a bit of time for them to develop that complexity (tangent: are roguelikes gaming wine?), and that's with ascii art. Once you have graphics, you lose the justification for "use your imagination" and have to have different graphics for the 9000 different objects in the loot table, etc.
Also most people don't really have the time for that kind of game unless it's the only game they play.
That said, I wouldn't mind!
Re:So... (Score:5, Insightful)
Alternatively they could stop making the same tired 1st/3rd person shooters with the exact same set of escort and assault missions played out across a costly yet unimaginative set of levels, and instead come up with a new game concept that doesn't need NPC AI, complex physical simulations, and destructible environments.
Pacman has none of those things and it is still better than 99.9% of the shit that gets released these days.
Re:Graphics and sound are now a cliche (Score:2, Insightful)
It always surprises me how big budgets are for "AAA" titles when those budgets involve huge outlays for things like licensing technology (the notoriously bad Havok physics engine, graphics engines like Unreal, or audio engines like FMOD... Hell, there are even engines for MENUS... and guess who owns Scaleform? Autodesk! Enjoy haggling licensing terms with those sharks). Frequently all these huge cash expenditures look like checking items off a list without even questioning whether or not it would be cheaper to just build the damn thing in house (and as an added benefit license it when you're done).
Just look at Hawken. They did something amazing in an indie space without ever once having to blow cash on something they didn't need.
Re:So... (Score:5, Insightful)
That's too hard. It's much easier to just throw another few million at the developers and tell them to make more detailed models. Major publishers are terrified of making games that don't play exactly the same as the last big hit.
Re:And I'd like a pony (Score:5, Insightful)
It costs money to avoid unskippable cut scenes?
How about this, let me skip all the bullshit logos at the beginning of the game and we can call that already a huge win. Then you go look at halflife and see how you can not have cutscenes. The Portal series would also be good for you to check out.
Original NES (Score:5, Insightful)
from scripted sequences to impossibly incompetent NPCs, and how they might be solved
You must be under the age of 30 to say that. The original NES, the first major standard ever created, thrived on making games that were cheap, painfully difficult (Battletoads, anyone?), and wasn't advertisement supported. The reason the industry is suffering is the same reason everything turns to crap: Money.
Producers have gotten the notion in their head that they don't just expect profit, that it's an inalienable right. Take linux for example; There are hundreds of command-line based programs that are there, for free, that can be combined and manipulated to perform almost any basic function. In the windows world, I'm expected to pay $30 for an application that can rename multiple files at once. It gets worse when they see dollar signs in advertising revenue.
Imagine Super Mario Brothers if it were made today; The entire first level would be a tutorial where it cheers everytime you press 'A', gives you an 'achievement unlocked' after you stomp 10 goombas, and at the end of the level asks you to 'upgrade' to a Premium Mario that would start every level in 'fireball mario' mode for only $9.99. Especially in MMOs -- microtransactions now mean you can buy levels, gears, whatever you want. Some guy who slaved through all the levels gets no respect when some 14 year old with daddy's credit card comes in, curb stomps him, and then steals all his hard-earned equipment, which he just drags to the trash anyway, because hey, I can just buy it with real money. ha ha!
Good games are about personal achievement, and being difficult enough to be a challenge without becoming tedious. Good games are intuitive and don't require a three hour introduction, and they are immersive experiences; You're thinking about your next move, not wondering if there's any way to unlock that next level without spending a weeks' worth of groceries on upgrades.
No... Money is what ruined games; Businesses don't look at it as providing entertainment anymore, it's revenue, it's eyeballs for advertisers.. they aren't selling a product anymore: You are the product of the modern game. And it shows: The quality of modern games is shit.
DLC is a new cliche that needs to die. (Score:5, Insightful)
DLC is fast becoming a gaming cliche and needs to die off. Everytime you buy DLC you tell developers.....
I want to pay more than 60 dollars for my game.
I want to buy something that I will never own. I will pay for content I cant trade, sell, or give away.
I want my games chopped into small pieces and sold me to seperately over the MSRP price of the main game.
I am fine with paying for a inferior product because DLC is never as good as the original.
I want to pay for something that more than likely wont be availible to me in 5 or 10 years if I want to go back and play it.
I want features sold as dlc. Like how tecmo is selling a difficulty setting for ninja gaiden 3 as dlc.
I want endings sold as dlc. Like how square is selling the ending for final fantasy 13-2 as dlc.
I want content on my game disc I paid for to cost me extra. Like how capcom sells on disc dlc as extra.
I want content on day 1 that should be a part of my game I bought. Like how bioware put content out on mass effect 3's first day.
Every single time you buy DLC you are telling developers and publishers that. Now DLC is almost expected for everything and becoming its own cliche.
Re:So... (Score:4, Insightful)
I've mentioned this many times before. We're going to have a bubble burst here pretty soon.
I've heard it stated the entry level for a AAA title is $15 million, with the average AAA game costing $25 million to develop. Some games like GTA IV cost north of $100 million.
Very few console games sell more than 1 million copies. For instance, only 25 titles have ever reached that mark on the PS3.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_video_games#PlayStation_3 [wikipedia.org]
NES games cost $50 back in 1985, which is over $100 in today's dollars. We expect far more from a game now while we're willing to spend far less, and yet consumers constantly complain that games are too expensive.
Now, I hear rumors today that EA is about to be bought out. Do people realize game developers often work 80 hour weeks without paid overtime? Do they realize developers keep going bankrupt?
Sure, EA is the devil and people may relish in publishers going bankrupt, but without developers we don't have games. I'd rather not see all my favorite developers out of work.
Video Games Have Crashed Before (Score:5, Insightful)
People seem to forget, or never learned, that the gaming market has crashed before; in the 1980s, to be precise. And why? Because loads of shovelware titles were being released to capitalize on gamers' increasing willingness to buy them, while development costs were skyrocketing, and every other game was a ripoff of another title that came before it. Sound familiar?
Eventually all the bloat collapsed in on itself and the market for video games nearly died.
Personally, I'm of the opinion another video gaming crash may not be such a bad thing. The price of games is already many times over that of other forms of media (would you buy a typical book or movie for $60?), while development costs are starting to outpace even most big studio movie productions. Ingenuity and creativity are among the casualties, while developers and publishers are trying every way under the Sun to extract as much money as possible from customers, from activation limits, to invasive DRM, to serious considerations to kill used game sales (a first sale right that extends to every other product on the market, yet gaming companies seem to think they, somehow, should be a special exception). Financially, the market is booming, while creatively, it is dying.
Without the gaming crash of the 1980s, we never would have had Nintendo. I'd like to see what major boons would come out of another crash.
Re:So... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:incredibly dumb article. (Score:3, Insightful)
"incredibly dumb article"
^ This is the most accurate thing that can be said. The article was the dumbest thing I've read about gaming in a long, long time. The thesis: "Games are too expensive so you should add exponentially more complexity to make them cheaper" is obviously a non-starter. And yes, the indestructible objects item was a low point:
"Ideally, let's just get rid of invulnerable structures, period... Giving players the freedom to re-shape terrain does create certain challenges, but not as many as you might think. There's a reason why soldiers in the real world don't go around firing rocket launchers inside of buildings or hurling blocks of C4 at the opposing side.... At the same time, destructible environments open up more avenues for players to experiment and have fun inside the game."
Translation: Players must be able to blow up literally everything, including entire buildings. It's OK because even if you spend the colossal effort to make it possible, players won't do it because there are drawbacks. Except that players definitely will do it because it's fun.
Totally incoherent.
Re:So... (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually it's more a combination:
#1 - trying to make games run at OMG FUCKING HUGE RESOLUTION and OMG FRAMERATE are big ones. You want 120 FPS at 1600x1200 or higher? Well shit, there went a ton of calculating power. Even if your video board is handling the rendering, you still have to calculate collisions and other factors on CPU.
#2 - trying to make AI work is fucking HARD. Sure, you can code it to be perfect, and constantly win because it never misses, but then you're just replicating the kind of shitty experience you get on the Call of Duty and Halo servers full of aimbots and lag-hack cheaters. Make the AI miss too often, or make too many obvious mistakes, and it looks bad. The sweet spot is hard because inevitably, players figure out how to "trigger" the mistakes of the AI and then the game seems easy. And that's just FPS AI. RTS AI and anything involving team dynamics (like CTF), it gets even harder.
#3 - programming and dumbing it down for consoles. Compare: Deus Ex, Deus EX: Invisible War, Deus Ex: Human Revolution. The first, on PC, programmed for gameplay over graphics = phenomenal. The second, programmed for the console and graphics over gameplay, = a steam pile of shit. The third, programmed for console but for later gen consoles and with an eye towards trying to redeem the franchise's gameplay? Somewhere in the middle, good game, but still not up to the gameplay quality of the first.
Re:And I'd like a pony (Score:5, Insightful)
From my experience, the unskippable logos at the beginning are actually there because the game is loading and they're nicer to look at than a progress bar.
That'll be why the disk light stops flashing while it's playing the 'We paid megabucks to license the Whatsit Engine' video and why the game loads much faster when I can skip through those videos.
Re:So... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Original NES (Score:2, Insightful)
Those NES games had their origins in painfully difficult arcade games that rewarded memorization and pattern recognition. Why did they do this? So they could suck down quarters faster. Your specific example, Battletoads, was patterned after the TMNT arcade games which were notorious quarter-munchers.
It's always been about the money.
Speaking of Cliches... (Score:5, Insightful)
How about overly short paragraphs interspersed with lots of pictures spread over an unholy amount of pages, simple to get more pageviews for ad driven revenue.
Re:So... (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is not just with the games being release, but what people buy and what advertizing sells.
This is a tough problem to solve. Think about it. Long ago, you sat at your first FPS. Your heart raced as you blew things up and spent many sleepless nights beating a game.
Well, someone today will turn 13 and get a Gaming system, and for the first time ever will get that same feeling.
To you, it's an old feeling. To someone else, it's brand new. I think the popular mind set is that old gamers should go away and sit in a bar instead. To many of us, it's our hobby, we don't like to sit in bars. There needs to be a market for people that game as a hobby, something better than Warcraft at least.
Re:So... (Score:4, Insightful)
Here, I always thought the spirit of Software was re-use... making iterations easier. Instead, we have people making all new engines every year, copyrighting their code so nobody else can use it, locking up their assets and IP in restrictive licenses, and generally making sure that it takes more money to make the next sequel than ever.
How many times has a game studio written inventory management code? How many have rewritten code to make an NPC follow a path? How many have remade mission trackers? How many have tossed old sound management classes because "they can do it better"?
Re:Original NES (Score:5, Insightful)
NES games were modelled on the arcade experience, where the games were designed to be endorphin-fueled quarter-suckers. Ultimate success was having a crowd gather around as you mastered the game, publicly acknowledging your superiority.
Game developer eventually figured out this approach doesn't work when the customer was sitting home alone in their basement. There was no great penalty for failure, nor reward for success beyond personal satisfaction. So modern games usually are not very much of a skills test, and (as the article noted) more of an interactive movie where the player is 'rewarded' with plot-points and virtual trophies.
Re:So... (Score:4, Insightful)
The cost of recording an album or printing a book hasn't risen dramatically in the past 20 years.
The cost of making a game has. Perhaps you should read the article and check the chart right up at the top. In the 16-bit era, it cost 50k-300k to make a game. This article lists $17m-$20m to produce a game. And we know certain games like Max Payne 3 and GTAIV cost north of $100m.
Record companies aren't going bankrupt left and right. Game developers are. Please read what I wrote and respond to what I actually said.
List missing clichès here (Score:5, Insightful)
Game clichès that need to die that are not mentioned in the article:
- The US are the good. The <insert other nation here> are the evil.
Re:So... (Score:5, Insightful)
They are at the highest audiovisual-resolution possible.
Haha, hoho, hehe, I almost cracked a rib at that.
They aren't even close to the highest possible. Not remotely. The modern midrange PC graphics card has ~6-8 times the power of the PS3 or Xbox cards, and some games can push even those, not to mention having much newer features (like hardware tesselation). The PS3, in particular, hurts my eyes with the lack of anti-aliasing that seems to be universal to that system. The biggest problem, though, is probably RAM: the 360 only has 512 MB, and the PS3 256MB for the system, which is horribly limiting on map sizes for games (similar for their video RAM and texture sizes). Console games are incredibly limited because of that.
Re:So... (Score:2, Insightful)
In the 16-bit era, it cost 50k-300k to make a game. This article lists $17m-$20m to produce a game. And we know certain games like Max Payne 3 and GTAIV cost north of $100m.
And yet the average quality of games in the 16-bit era was far higher than it is now. Maybe designers should go back to making games that way, with sprites instead of 3D models, and two-dimensional parallax-scrolled levels. Back then they actually had to think about what they were doing, not just throw in some graphical glitz.
Only Nintendo and (occasionally) Square/Enix have used 3D effectively. For most other vendors, 3D was a step back in quality and playability.
Re:So... (Score:5, Insightful)
Average quality? well thats a shuit matrix. are you including any game that can be played on a computer? words with friends, angery birds, those game? ot are you comapring top tier games from the era to top tear games to recent top tier games.
Find me ONE 16 bit era game that has higher quality;which, btw, is another useless word without qualifiers.
There was some magic wand that got waved. People like glits, that's why the industry makes prettier games.
Portal II, TF2, Half-life, Star Craft II, GTA IV, TOurchlight. I can't think of any 16 bit game that can hold a candle to thiose games.
And before you say it, yes, in fact I do remember 16 bit games. I've played alomet every system sins there where system to take home.
I don't say that to add authority to my statement, because that would be a foolish logical fallacy. I stated that to stem off the inevitable "Well you weren't around so you don know what you are talking about' reply.
I thought the same thing from Pong, TiaPan to M&M to Mario. This is fun, I can't wait for graphic to get even better.
"3D was a step back in quality and playability."
That's complete bullshit.
Re:Right, that'll work. (Score:5, Insightful)
what's the point of beating that really hard level if you can just fail it and move on to the next one?
Some missions may be too tough for some players. People are different. For example, I couldn't figure out the dance mission in GTA Vice City. There was no way to bypass. I seriously considered soldering wires to the controller so that the mission can be played automatically, by a timer.
As another example, the RC helicopter mission in the same Vice City is needlessly long and complicated. There are many complaints that the game is unplayable just because of that mission (there are no save points during the mission.) Rockstar ensured the "game time" by forcing you to repeat missions over and over and over again until you really learn to operate ... what? A fictional RC helicopter that you will never meet IRL?
The same can be said about flight training in GTA San Andreas. There are many complaints. In essence, you'd be better off trying the actual two airplane missions and learning to fly that way.
Same can be said about the driving school. But, interestingly enough, it was optional. I could not progress past a certain point. Generally all GTA games are timed so that if you do everything flawlessly you maybe have three to five seconds left. There was zero value in the driving school. I haven't finished it and still I was able to complete the game just fine. I suspect that Rockstar just decided to add play time by reusing existing assets in a way that is easy for them to code but nearly impossible for you to pass.
To summarize, it is very important to be able to skip some missions. Perhaps a certain boss fight that requires agility and reaction time of a teenager can be replaced with an alternative fight that requires planning skills and patience and stealth of a 40 y/o professional sniper. But most games just blindly assume that everyone can do *this* chord on the controller. Assassin's Creed II comes to mind where you need to jump at the wall and at the same time move to the side. This is an essential skill to proceed, mind you! This sequence is pretty hard to do because when you do it it doesn't f. work! The reason is that you need to push the controller's joystick just right and not in any other way. But why not, you have plenty of time, like 20 milliseconds, to do that - time after time after time. I wish I had an alternative path where I'd have to fight 100 guards and solve puzzles but skip this jumping business.
In reality, learning to play the game is pointless. The skill of pushing on joysticks is not translating into anything usable in real life. Limitations of the controller force developers to invent more and more chords. In that Assassin's Creed there are so many control sequences that nobody but the developer himself, on a good day, can voluntarily execute one sword move or another. I could only randomly mash buttons and hope for the best. Any attempt to stop and think - or, even worse, try to execute the combo per instructions - will only get you wounded.
Timer missions are another bane of many games. I'd like to replay Assassin's Creed II, but there are so many timed missions smack-dab in the middle of the story that I fear them. What's the point of chasing a thief across rooftops? IRL there are very few timed missions; maybe if you are a doctor or a CIA agent you need to be able to act quick. But in most cases speed is not as essential as quality. I suspect that game developers just use timers as yet another FAIL criterion, so that you are stuck for hours replaying the same mission again and again and again. In case of that thief (the 1st timed mission of the game) you have to literally study every step of your path, or else you will fail. What is the point of that act, other than to annoy the player? If you want to make it into a decent intro to roof-hopping, get rid of the timer and make the thief wait for you whenever you fall or get delayed. But make the route 100 times as long. It would be actually educational, since the leading thief could show you some tricks.