Ranorak said:
archont said:
eggy32 said:
HardkorSB said:
archont said:
The point is in the old days we had a wide diversity of game genres. Tactical games, sim games, tycoons and clever hybrids of all of the above. It's hard to argue games of that complexity aren't being produced any more. Back in 1999 JA2 was in every way an AAA title. You might try, but you won't find any titles like that in the current AAA lineup.
Ah yes, the "old days", when everything was better, there was worldwide peace and the cars ran on the power of friendship. Those were the days, weren't they?
Lol, ah the good old days.
Sooner or later the OP is going to realise that those genres still exist.
Fortunately Bobby Kotick didn't go back in time to kill the developers of those games and they very much exist today.
However do those genres exist as AAA titles or anywhere in the mainstream?
That, my misguided friend, is the topic at hand. The answer is, if you're still uncertain, anywhere from "mostly no" to "not anymore". This thread is about answering the question "Why not?"
Here's another question to answer.
Why does it matter if the Sim, tactical and "intelligent" games are mainstream?
Those games weren't mainstream back then either.
You know what was mainstream in the '90?
Mario
Zelda
Goldeneye
Half-life
Tomb Raider
Mainstream is based on popularity.
Looking at the number of gamers we can clearly see that they shot through the roof.
This added a whole new type of gamer. The ones that just want to sit down, play for a hour and do something else.
This doesn't make them less intelligent.
Gaming it self has turned from a niche hobby, like model train building or stamp collecting, into a full blown entertainment sector.
The focus of popular games is Pick up & Play style. Like it has been in the past.
This coming from the guy who just ended his 5th day of Hot Seat, 2 player, Marathon Mode Civilization V session. And we're still just at Musket-men.
But I do like to just pop in Saints Row 2 in my Xbox and blow shit up for 50 minutes.
You do realize that every game you listed was a console exclusive, with the exception of
Tomb Raider, which was bigger on consoles, and
Half Life, which while action oriented, wasn't particularly un-intelligent, as action games go? (Not only was
Half Life one of the first FPSs to be mainly story driven, but it ran on a modified version of the
Quake engine, which meant that movement in multiplayer was incredibly complicated, unlike nearly any game on the market today. It also had a large arsenal of weapons, all of which could be carried simultaneously, as opposed to modern games which only allow two guns at once. This makes
Half Life a poor example of how older games were supposedly less complex than modern games.)
Getting back on topic,
Sim City,
Rollercoaster Tycoon,
Civilization,
Xcom,
Baldur's Gate and so on were all hugely popular in their day.
Doom was bigger, but then
Doom was a shareware game, and a full third of it was available for free to anyone with an internet connection. I've seen a lot of people in this thread arguing that sims, strategy games, and number crunching RPGs have always been niche genres, but in the world of PC games, that's just not the case.
OT: I'd say that yes, the average gamer is less intelligent than they were 20 years ago, but the simpler games are a symptom of that, not the cause. As others have noted, gaming has gone from a niche hobby which was almost the exclusive domain of nerds, to something with a very broad, mass market appeal. We aren't dumber so much as more representative of the general population.
[sub]Incidentally, does anyone else find humor in the large number of people saying that gamers are no dumber than they used to be, while having some pretty glaring spelling mistakes in their posts? For Pete's sake, guys, if you make a typo in a post about intelligence, edit it and fix the typo. Otherwise, your argument is weakened significantly.[/sub]
