MikShapi's Journal: My Private Computer Game Obituary

I'm a long-time hardcore gamer, and if anything, since gaming challenged hollywood and the multibillion dollar market, games took 2 steps ahead in terms of graphics and storrytelling (quite a few titles I can recall host hollywood-class voice actors).
The problem lies in the 3 steps back the games took in complexity, technicallity and everything else that requires the gamer to actually use his brain. For me at least that spells L-E-S-S-F-U-N.

What's happening today is a collective takeover by large corps over many successful indipendant game makers, game makers who didn't make mass money but made very good games, at least as I, not an arcade gamer, am concerned. Said corps couldn't care less about me, as I'm not where the big money lies. The big money lies in pointa-clicka-no-thinka couch-potato arcade games, aka console games.

While earlier the arcade market co-existed with the more sophisticated PC game market, the big producers are all for buying out every last successful PC brand and its developer, and riding that brand into yet-another-dumbed-down-arcade-title. And since they're wielding the heavy paychecks, there's no way to resist them (other than to cause the vast majority of consumers to stop buying consoles, which doesn't seem like it's going to happen anytime soon).

I was outraged by Might and Magic 9. A wonderful technical hack-and-slash game that successfully earned its bread for 15 years.
I was saddened by Heroes of Might and Magic 4, which looked like HOMM3 only without half the widgets.
I was frustrated at Ion Storm having sold out to a ... console "RPG" (where you're done leveling up on the second level of the game, because the whole XP and leveling up scheme was too much on console gamers. Sure, Warren Spector could go on all day with how they wanted to make the "open endedness" the main feature of the game. Right. Warren Spector knows as well as we do that Deus Ex 1 was designed to be a good game. Deus Ex 2 was designed to milk money).
Unreal 2 wasn't even a game. It was an engine demo. Again, someone who wants money trying to call his product a "game". Wolf in sheep's clothing.
And the list goes on. Black Isle went under, and with it all hopes for not only technical, but sophisticated, well-made RPG's like Torment or the first two Fallouts.
Freelancer could have been a wonderful technical game, but some design decisions to dumb it down (not being able to take more than 1 mission at a time, forcing the plot on you _before_ you could explore the world), killed the game.

Since Deus Ex 1, I really can't name more than 3 _good_ sophisticated games that hit the market (Gothic I/II and Hitman II would top that list). I can name a lot of glamorous-graphics ones like Max Payne II, but sophisticated? Zilch. Nada.

Recent game-related news lay my suspicions out clearly: people with my expectation of a game are a dying breed, and 'good' sophisticated games - From Star Control 2, to Ultima 7, to Privateer and to Deus Ex 1 - won't be around no more.

Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust.