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."
Right, that'll work. (Score:5, Interesting)
Show me a $5 mobile game with the depth and length of a good AAA title, and I'll agree there's no point in spending $60 for games (where did the $80-$100 figure come from? Only collectors' editions cost that much, and even they are often less). Also, it has to have good controls. Not "well, this is pretty good for a mobile game", but actually good. I've bought all of five games on my iPhone. Two were terrible (Scribblenauts, Angry Birds), two were ports (Chrono Trigger and Vay), and one was a decent time-waster (7 Words). Certain types of games can work pretty well on a phone or tablet, but it's a small subset of what works on PCs or consoles. And, unfortunately, the games that work well on mobile devices don't seem to be the same games as the ones I actually want to play.
The first poster did a good job pointing out that the added complexity the article wants will cost more, not less. I would like to point out that these cliches aren't universal, but there are problems with trying to "solve" them. I'll use "mandatory missions" for my example, alongside the article's example of Wing Commander.
Wing Commander allowed you to progress through the story while failing every mission. Your ending would suck, but that should be expected. It was a neat idea. There were a two major problems with that, though. Orion discovered that most people never saw the "failed" paths, because people would restart missions until they succeeded. People want a sense of accomplishment, and failing a mission doesn't give that. The other big problem was the added complexity. When they set out to make Wing Commander II, they wanted a much larger, more expansive plot. It became much too difficult and costly to create all the possible branching paths, cutscenes, and script if they followed the same formula as Wing Commander. So they cheated. There are less branching paths than in the first one, but the result is a game with a better-structured story.
There's also a side issue with allowing players to fail missions: You can game the system. If you just want to see the good ending of Wing Commander, all you have to do, IIRC, is play four missions. For every other mission, just eject as soon as you have control of your ship. Want to see the bad ending? Just eject on every mission! You can finish the game in just a few minutes, this way.
I also feel like allowing a failed mission takes something away from the experience. It's more realistic, but what's the point of beating that really hard level if you can just fail it and move on to the next one?
In the end, as I mentioned earlier, and as others have as well--I'm not sure how adding complexity is going to somehow magically drop down the price of games, or make them shorter to develop. I would also like to point out that games right now are cheaper than the SNES or N64 days. Heck, even NES games retailed at $50, and that's before you take inflation into account. I'm not sure where this "gaming is too expensive these days!" myth came from.
Re:So... (Score:5, Interesting)
This depressing discussion makes me want to dust off the "PC" known as the commodore amiga (or Sega genesis; very similar hardware), and play some games that were actually FUN to play. And now thanks to the internet: free! (No wait; they were always free.) Screw spending $70 for modern crap. Besides I've only played about 20% of the amiga library.
Prices (Score:5, Interesting)
Does anyone actually believe this? It gets repeated over and over, but it makes zero sense. There isn't a single gamer that can't recognize the difference between the complexity of a mobile game and something like Skyrim. I get the feeling that this statement is just being repeated over and over in a lame attempt to brainwash people into believing it.