The Games Industry's 2007 Resolutions 57
Gamasutra has a piece up from earlier this week, with some late New Year's resolutions for the games industry. Their frequently-done 'Question of the Week' series pulled in comments from game developers and designers working right now, with their hopes for the best in 2007. From the article: "Now that 2006 is over can we finally stop worrying about who's going to win the console war and start focusing on the games? Arguing about which next-gen system is the best is as silly as arguing about which five-star restaurant has the finest china and silverware. It's the food on the plate that matters to the customers after all. With any luck we'll see delicious games with plenty of innovation on all of the platforms this year! - Patrick Curry, Midway Games"
The Gaming Industry's only true resolution: (Score:3, Insightful)
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In a game like BF:2142, ads are totally out of place and detract from the immersion that would otherwise be there. From what I read about SWAT:4, the ads were so intrusive and all over every wall of the map that it is total overkill. Really the problem is these games that have ads but the ads don't do anything for the gamer. If they are not funding a service or reducing the
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And speaking of asses... When you're throwing a party, don't make an ass of yourself, and choose the right beer for your guests, and choose Samuel Adams. Samuel Adams: Always a good decision.
*Gets handed a large wad of
Oh Dear.. (Score:1)
Depends... (Score:3, Funny)
Of course, 1280x1024 is always a good standby.
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Widescreen please! (Score:2)
Creativity (Score:4, Insightful)
Stop using wooden crates in games!
-Anonymous
Uh... How about metal crates?
-Game Industry
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The first crate is when the developers ran out of ideas. [oldmanmurray.com]
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Hm, what if someone wrote a box-pushing game that *cough* borrowed maps from the various wooden crate game, where the goal is to push all the crates into position so the player can jump on them or blow them up for powerups
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Sokoban - The Revenge?
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I'm in the last few days of finishing up a game now, I might as well do a quick plug.
http://www.rocksolidgames.com/images/darwin/shot1
Darwin the monkey must break open wooden boxes to gather the bananas inside to fill his balloon.
the annoyance .... the problems (Score:3, Insightful)
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Nintendo 64 released, Nintendo touts its graphical superiority
Gamecube released, Nintendo touts its graphical superiority
Wii released, graphics don't matter anymore!
Nintendo will always promote its strong points, like any sane company would.
And there will always be fans out there parroting their talking points.
I don't think Nintendo is going in a bad direction with the Wii. But graphics have mattered in the past and can still matter today. Depends on
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SNES released, Nintendo touts its graphical superiority
Nintendo 64 released, Nintendo touts its graphical superiority
Gamecube released, Nintendo touts its graphical superiority
This is true, but if you plot the sales figures of each of those systems you'll notice that each sells less than the previous generation. This suggests that "better graphics" is not enough to sell a system. Nintendo is hoping (and despite my initial skepticism, I'm totally sold) that changing the whole formula is the shot in the arm the console market needs.
Time will tell, obviously, but if the Wii sales vs. PS3 sales in the last few months is anything to go by it seems like they might be on to something
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Physics: Sometime between the N64 and Dreamcast processors became powerful enough to handle Newtonian Physics; by the time the Gamecube and XBox were released we had enough processing power to handle most of the game impacting physics simulations we use today. The XBox 360 and PS3 offer a lot more processing power to handle physics
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Um, yeah, that is the basic definition, but in the context of the end-product it is irrelevent (it's a static textrue or whatever on the disc regardless of how it was created), so that's not really the definition intended in the context of the game running on actual hardware.
Perhaps dynamic procedural content would be better, to make it clear that we're talking about content created procedurally on the fly by th
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Nintendo 64 released, Nintendo touts its graphical superiority
Gamecube released, Nintendo touts its graphical superiority
Wii released, graphics don't matter anymore!
Nintendo will always promote its strong points, like any sane company would.
And there will always be fans out there parroting their talking points
BS. This is your strawman, that you and your fellow parrot everywhere.
Nintendo never said graphics don't matter anymore, that's a plain lie.
There
Wii is great, but don't forget about adults! (Score:4, Insightful)
but lets not forget that more 'serious' gamers need more serious games; with mature themes. Why is everyone's first thought at the mention of Doom, Quake, Gears of War, etc just "oooh but the children..." - sod the children that's what the ratings and parental controls are for!
Just strikes me as weird that there can be this dualism to it all - and a total inability for people to draw parallels between films with their ratings systems and games (even though it was video nasties everyone was complaining about 20 years ago...)
</rant>
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Re:Wii is great, but don't forget about adults! (Score:5, Insightful)
Why does "serious games" == "mature themes"? Can someone explain this to me? How does violence and sex make something more mature?
I'm 30. Is it mostly teenagers that think this way?
Re:Wii is great, but don't forget about adults! (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a question worth asking. You look at a game like Fallout or Planescape: Torment. Rich in ideas. Fascinating setting. Not without humor or a sense of tragedy. To me, that is mature.
Even though there are times I want to shut down all higher brain functions for a quick game of Bikini Beach Deathmatch Nude Teenage Volleyball: The Game of the Year Edition.
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Holy Mother of God! There's a "Killer App" right there! What console is it for, I'll buy that in an instant...
Sir, I salute you.
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Holy Mother of God! There's a "Killer App" right there! What console is it for, I'll buy that in an instant...
Closest thing is DOA Volleyball for Xbox [ign.com].
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I think it was Super Mario Sunshine that was the tipping point for me on this. All that fucking happiness and jumping around. I grew up on this sort of thing, but give me a break, I'm not 8 anymore (I think that's how old I was when the first Mario came out). After playing it for about 3 hours I realized I never again wanted to play another kid game. So now I only play stuff
Wii is for adults, "mature" games are for children (Score:3, Insightful)
I think it's the other way around. It's mainly children who buy games for their "mature themes." A survey I recently read on Kotaku.com seems to come to the same conclusion: Children prefer the "mature" consoles.
Article Summary (Score:1, Redundant)
Mature Games (Score:3, Insightful)
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The Gamers' 2007 Resolution: (Score:5, Insightful)
In short: stop bitching. Vote with your wallet, and realize that game companies that don't want to develop their own engines will also vote with theirs.
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Oh, and I vote with my wallet. I believe the last game I bought was System Shock 2. I had downloaded a copy after a friend's recommendation (as I had never played before but it so
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Only resolution I want to hear from them (Score:3, Insightful)
I think we're at a point where we don't need to be pushing every last little bit of power out of our CPUs and graphics cards, and can lessen the pressure on that a bit while devoting some more resources towards games that are more immersive, interesting, and most importantly, fun!
Honestly, the graphics in games today are pretty damn amazing. I know people have been saying this regularly over the past many years, but we all know that games are getting amazingly realistic, to the point where people can easily mistake game screenshots for actual photographs of scenery.
The areas where games are NOT so impressive are primarily in the areas that require a lot more than just throwing $$$ into a bigger team of programmers - storyline, artificial intelligence, creativity not limited by conservativism (or the whole "Lowest common denominator" issue), and fresh ideas.
Unfortunately it's easier said than done, and when all the smaller more creative companies are being bought up immediately by larger companies like Take Two, EA and so on, unique talented individuals are made to work on games devised for the purpose of sheer profit, rather working towards the goal of some creative producer who could very well change the industry with his/her ideas.
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I'm working my way through one of the Neverwinter Nights modules at the moment. The only gripe I have with the AI is that my party members sometimes appear to get "stuck" behind small obstacles and can't figure out how to move around them (wtf? hire a first-year programmer - they're tell you how to do it!).
Those RPGs are still not "AI" in any sense of the word, but they are getting better.
Graphics vs Gameplay Myth (Score:4, Insightful)
It's amazing how often this myth is repeated. There is no such thing as a tradeoff between graphics and gameplay. They are two different things, written by two different groups of people, and the group of gameplay programmers is typically much larger than graphics programmers. If a game has good graphics and terrible gameplay, it's because of the attention to detail of the people who made it.
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There may well be twice as many game play/story line programmers than graphics programmers, but given how much the industry seems to salivate over graphics, I wouldn't be surprised if the graphics programmers get paid twice as much their "creative" cou
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Re:Graphics vs Gameplay Myth (Score:4, Interesting)
Those designers are worth a LOT, and you can probably name them by name, not by company. EA has one, Nintendo has one, etc. They're all proven guys too, so they actually have clout in their respective organizations. They're roped into franchises in at least an advisory capacity, sure, but all of those are pretty golden.
So, most of the industry rips off it's predecessors for the gameplay, maybe adds a very slight twist or two in a "wouldn't it be cool if" brainstorming session and passes it off to the grunts. You have to have *something* to differentiate your game, so you pump everything into graphics and if we're lucky style. The cost of doing this is so high that you can't take many if any risks on or with unproven designers, so they never get to prove themselves. In return, while your gameplay may very well be solid, it's either something a competitor did, or something that's straight lifted from the pre-2000.
Insomniac made a name for themselves continiously tweaking Mario 64 with guns, and now combining two FPS cliches into one. Blizzard gets by by being high polish. Jaffe's a goto guy for genre kings. None of this is bad, but it's not what I consider excellent gameplay any more so than I consider a typical summer blockbuster excellent film. Or rather, it's not new gameplay, it's good gameplay I've played before with a new coat of paint. The differentation is the graphics, level design, and presentation.
You also have the fact that if the gameplay is golden, you don't need the graphics. Just enough to represent what you need to represent and whatever else you want to pump into it. It only matters for the first 15 minutes anyway.
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I can't think of one game with great gameplay that didn't also have great graphics (I'm sure there are some, I just can't think of any). I can think of a ton of games that looked great but had crap gameplay. But that just means that great designers are in short supply, not that gameplay and graphics are
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You also have the fact that there are these things called budgets, which means every dollar you spend on graphics is a dollar you didn't spend on level design and game design. It's not an endless supply of cash and if you're shooting for
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So much for an intelligent discussion, but whatever..
Nethack, Tetris, any given MUD
When
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You forgot about gameplay designers. People who write the storyline, game universe and history, and design the overall feel and environment of the game. I assure you this team gets the least room to come up with innovative/new ideas due to companies' fear of the product not being a huge profit-maker.
The only Resolution (Score:1)
RTS? (Score:2)