Extra Punctuation: Not All Sequels Suck

[sushkis2]

HUH? I totlly disagree, that ps1 3d polygons are awful, take Spyro the dragon or Crash bandicoot series, they looked awesome back then and I'm proud to admit, that I still prefer those over (quoting Yahtzee) "Gunmetal grey lotsofbloom" shooters, and I don't give a shit that they're kids games, they're fun and colorful and far better than some of the recent mainstream platformers

 

[draythefingerless]

the problem with flash and UDK isnt its accessibility, and in retrospect, i shouldnt bash UDK that much, since it does take some work to get into it. its that they make it a fucking cake walk. like i said, i think making it available to everyone to make games is good, but effort brings forth quality. that is undeniable. case in point, LBP levels. 95%, crap, 5%, good job. accessibility with challenge, thats what we should be asking. give them UDK and Flash and Unity, but make them need the determination to see it finished. the hand held camera allowed for everyone to film stuff, and that just created youtube, 95% crap, 5% good stuff. i want people to be able to make something, without the added arrogancy that they are brilliant for doing so. i want them to say, oh i should try and make a game, but i want them to give up half way if it was just a lil fantasy they had. creatively accessible, so that anyone can pick it up and spend some time learning th groundings, but creatively challenging, where they need added effort to see it thru, and to see it thru with quality.

So, I will ask you yet again. How is simplifying the technical side going to harm the gaming industry? You cannot simplify the artistic process. What is the problem then?

Game development is foremost an art form. But in its current state it's also a heavy technical field. Like Yahtzee said, that's exactly what's holding most artists back into trying out this relatively new medium. By now most games are created by programmers in the first place, and artists second. Why not eliminate that dependency on tech folks altogether, if it's art we're talking about?

You don't seem to discern between quality on the technical side, which is, what it just is - technical. And the quality on the artistic side, which undoubtedly requires a lot more creativity than the technical one. By freeing game devs from the technical shackles a whole new frontier of creativity could be presented to them. Even from the most banal pragmatic side of allocating more funds, thus manpower into artistic department.

Gaming would benefit greatly from it, there is no doubt about it.

therelies the problem with not grasping how games are made. you know WHY you see copy pasting ALL over gaming? SPECIALLY casual and social games? because its being made by people who cannot surpass the first level of game developing. they learn the basic, and then just do the basic. most games you see out there had to be INVENTIVE in how you control the machine. people think computers are amazing, when really, they arent. they are stupid limited machines. it is only thru VERY ingenious human minds that we are able to take out potential from them. Literally, right now we are juicing their cognitive abilities to the max. Computers are very limited, and for you to make a game, not a fucking story wich is what many people here LOVE to shout about, how a game is a STORY(i blame RPGs really), you need to be inventive, you need to be able to take the plethora of libraries and paradigms in languages, and make sth out of it.

to put this in perspective, what we are doing with computers nowadays is taking fucking sticks n stones and making a real scale model of the eiffel tower. you cant make a tool right now or the near future that can comprehend anything more than what a stick or a stone is, let alone an eiffel tower. but we CAN and we SHOULD make it accessible for anyone to be able to grasp the tools and use them. what yathzee is asking is for a computer to read what he is thinking and make a game. well, impossible, so lets go into the reality realm here. he wants to make some language and tools that allow for one to, using simple english for example, make a full blown game, AND THEN SELL IT, thats the most important part.

this arouses various problems.

1. computers right now, cant do that. they are too stupid. you would need higher powers, or even if i am allowed to go a lil extreme, quantum boxes for this. neither exist right now or the near future.

2. making a game to be sellable is FAR beyond creative knowledge. you have to be sure you make the game AT LEAST a bit accessible and friendly to use, wich is sth hardcore games, made by professional companies, fail at. making a game isnt writting a book or filming a movie. it is WAY more personal to each individual. you cna make a movie, and the most theyll do is to a screening to a random audience to see a bit of that. games are that, a hundred fold. this requires studies. academic or homebrewed, but it requires study. then you need to understand a bit of marketing. not everyone is gonna have the minecraft miracle, trust me.

if reading ones mind perfectly did exist, it still wouldnt be enough to have a good game experience. many times youll see teams correcting and sharing views because one single person is incapable of grasping evth in a game, in a manner sufficient to make the game enjoyable by others.

 

[draythefingerless]

the problem with flash and UDK isnt its accessibility, and in retrospect, i shouldnt bash UDK that much, since it does take some work to get into it. its that they make it a fucking cake walk. like i said, i think making it available to everyone to make games is good, but effort brings forth quality. that is undeniable. case in point, LBP levels. 95%, crap, 5%, good job. accessibility with challenge, thats what we should be asking. give them UDK and Flash and Unity, but make them need the determination to see it finished. the hand held camera allowed for everyone to film stuff, and that just created youtube, 95% crap, 5% good stuff. i want people to be able to make something, without the added arrogancy that they are brilliant for doing so. i want them to say, oh i should try and make a game, but i want them to give up half way if it was just a lil fantasy they had. creatively accessible, so that anyone can pick it up and spend some time learning th groundings, but creatively challenging, where they need added effort to see it thru, and to see it thru with quality.

So, I will ask you yet again. How is simplifying the technical side going to harm the gaming industry? You cannot simplify the artistic process. What is the problem then?

Game development is foremost an art form. But in its current state it's also a heavy technical field. Like Yahtzee said, that's exactly what's holding most artists back into trying out this relatively new medium. By now most games are created by programmers in the first place, and artists second. Why not eliminate that dependency on tech folks altogether, if it's art we're talking about?

You don't seem to discern between quality on the technical side, which is, what it just is - technical. And the quality on the artistic side, which undoubtedly requires a lot more creativity than the technical one. By freeing game devs from the technical shackles a whole new frontier of creativity could be presented to them. Even from the most banal pragmatic side of allocating more funds, thus manpower into artistic department.

Gaming would benefit greatly from it, there is no doubt about it.

TL DR for my previous post

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUeRtHu0MdA (i dun fuckin know how to use this sites embedding system)

listen to particularly the part about why they did not accept Sovereigns technological knowledge.

 

[CrawlingPastaHellion]

therelies the problem with not grasping how games are made. you know WHY you see copy pasting ALL over gaming? SPECIALLY casual and social games? because its being made by people who cannot surpass the first level of game developing. they learn the basic, and then just do the basic. most games you see out there had to be INVENTIVE in how you control the machine. people think computers are amazing, when really, they arent. they are stupid limited machines. it is only thru VERY ingenious human minds that we are able to take out potential from them. Literally, right now we are juicing their cognitive abilities to the max. Computers are very limited, and for you to make a game, not a fucking story wich is what many people here LOVE to shout about, how a game is a STORY(i blame RPGs really), you need to be inventive, you need to be able to take the plethora of libraries and paradigms in languages, and make sth out of it.

to put this in perspective, what we are doing with computers nowadays is taking fucking sticks n stones and making a real scale model of the eiffel tower. you cant make a tool right now or the near future that can comprehend anything more than what a stick or a stone is, let alone an eiffel tower. but we CAN and we SHOULD make it accessible for anyone to be able to grasp the tools and use them. what yathzee is asking is for a computer to read what he is thinking and make a game. well, impossible, so lets go into the reality realm here. he wants to make some language and tools that allow for one to, using simple english for example, make a full blown game, AND THEN SELL IT, thats the most important part.

this arouses various problems.

1. computers right now, cant do that. they are too stupid. you would need higher powers, or even if i am allowed to go a lil extreme, quantum boxes for this. neither exist right now or the near future.

2. making a game to be sellable is FAR beyond creative knowledge. you have to be sure you make the game AT LEAST a bit accessible and friendly to use, wich is sth hardcore games, made by professional companies, fail at. making a game isnt writting a book or filming a movie. it is WAY more personal to each individual. you cna make a movie, and the most theyll do is to a screening to a random audience to see a bit of that. games are that, a hundred fold. this requires studies. academic or homebrewed, but it requires study. then you need to understand a bit of marketing. not everyone is gonna have the minecraft miracle, trust me.

if reading ones mind perfectly did exist, it still wouldnt be enough to have a good game experience. many times youll see teams correcting and sharing views because one single person is incapable of grasping evth in a game, in a manner sufficient to make the game enjoyable by others.

You don't always need to grasp how something works to make something beautiful. It's like saying a painter needs to learn chemistry in order to understand how the various types of paints interact with each other. Or a musician needs to learn physics in order to understand how sound waves affect our eardrums.

You once again mix technical ingenuity with artistic ingenuity. Art and science lie in two opposite domains. Science is dictated by reason. Art is governed by human emotions.

Simplifying gaming technicalities by the means of providing us with easier to use tools would be like making a step from chalky cave drawings to the canvas oil paintings.

I don't think that Yahtzee's "brain scanner" would accomplish much though, since thoughts need to be organized into a readable form in the first place. But an easy to use SDK with only a minimum to none at all knowledge of programming/scripting languages required would benefit us all immensely.

Still a "brain scanner" is tempting none the less. But it only begs the question: if we're capable of creating something of this magnitude, what stops us from conceiving an A.I. and thus making us obsolete as a species.

P.S.: Gameplay is art as well. A more subtle type, but art none the less. There are no rules set in stone for it, only guidelines.

 

[The_root_of_all_evil]

Could I ask you a question? I loved the Dexter TV series, something in the order of S5, S1, S2, S3, S4. Would I like he novels? Are they even worth reading now? I hear they are largely the same, with some minor differences (like Dexter and ... however you spell his Asian co-workers name's relationship getting more time and depth, and Dexter never really likes Debra or the kids).

*deep breath*

It's a tough call. The Dexter novels are almost entirely focussed on Dexter's train of thought and he does go off rather silly in Dearly Devoted Dexter(book 2), but overall it's a fascinating ride through the mind of a sociopath.

The real problem is that there are so many huge differences between the series and the book. Debra is stunning in the novels, but ...strong... in the series, Doakes is a bad-ass in both (and if I say "potato", you'll see the book 3 readers flinch) but the series has inflated the side-characters to main ones. In the novels, the only real character is Dexter, and Batista(no relation) is a slimy sod.

Dexter adores Cody and Astor, and to an extent, Rita; but Cody/Astor turn out to be...

Well, that would be giving it away.

Dexter the series is a Soprano style soap opera, Dexter the novels is more like hitching a ride with the Dark Passenger. It's a LOT darker.

They're different beasts really. Michael C Hall creates a wonderful Dexter, but the rest of the cast is more "viewer-friendly" than they are in the book. That being said, "I own you" is one of my favourite bits of the entire series.

I'd read through Darkly Dreaming and see what you think. There is a HUGE difference between the novel and the series, which I won't give away, but if you like it - go for it.

(Just take Dearly Devoted with a pinch of salt - It's like trying to equate the Dresden Files Books with the TV series - both are great, but they're very different.)

 

[Squarez]

Errm. Before Symphony of the Night, Simon's Quest was actually the first Castlevania game to make the game open-ended instead of level-based. Which as many people have pointed out many times before, did not improve the game.

 

[boradis]

Snip

Would you argue that games that attempt the storytelling crap, and gamers that argue for it, are trying to make playing with electronic toys more acceptable for grown-ups then it currently is? That gaming can't be more then a distraction and shouldn't try to be?

I'm honestly not being pedantic or rude to your views in any way, we don't often get intelligent individuals arguing against the grain, I just wondered what you thought on the matter of evolving gaming =]

It's a fair question, but no I don't think it's to justify gaming for adults. For one thing, the most successful segment of the adult gaming market is narrative-free games like variants on Scrabble. Frankly, I don't think most people over 50 can understand how a game can also be a story in the same way they struggle with the idea that a computer can be a typewriter and a phone. Yes, I am agist.

Also, when I was a kid and my friends and I would play with action figures (ok, 'dolls') we always made up stories to heighten the experience. We understood enough about Captain Kirk and the Hulk to realize they probably wouldn't get along that well. Their personalities are so deeply ingrained in the mind of a fan that it was unavoidable.

I think the reasons for the power struggle between stories and games are twofold. First off is money. A title that fails to greatly advance the gameplay can be saved by a stellar story. Without its epic scope, moments of tense drama and brilliant humor "Portal 2" is a really nice expansion pack aimed at the modding community.

Secondly, the gaming industry desperately wants to be the storytelling industry with all the glitz and glamor that comes with it. And storytelling artists are interested in gaming because it's another income stream. And they always want to be the stars and not take a back seat to gameplay mechanics. And they've got agents unlike, say, a good combo system.

As I said, games can contain stories and I've enjoyed many of them on that basis. But when the story, writing and performances push the gameplay out of the spotlight you don't have a game any more. You've got a somewhat immersive novel which replaces pages or a "next chapter" button with problems to solve.

When done well as in my all-time favorite game "Devil May Cry 3" the cutscenes, while entertaining, exist to support and connect the gameplay sections. The reason I played through it the first time was I wanted to get into the next fight. In "Portal 2" I found the gameplay to be padded and repetitious and only served to delay the funny bits of dialog.

 

[Whoatemysupper]

Rome: Total War.

 

[CrawlingPastaHellion]

I think that gaming can indeed bring a more personal perspective on the story than any other medium can. That's one of two reasons I enjoy first person view more than anything else: it is highly personal on one end and on another it's immensely immersive. Examples include: HL series, System Shock 2, Metro 2033, Metroid Prime series that I'm currently playing.

Gameplay, however, always comes first in games. A game with strong gameplay, but without any story is still a good game. But I don't see any reason why we can't have both. Or for that matter why we can't add good sound design to it too and make it atmospheric while we're at it.

A game with a good gameplay is just that - a good game. To make a memorable game however, all four pillars: mechanics, visuals, sound and narrative have to stand tall. Mind you that unlike movies, atmosphere in a game is also a huge part of the narrative. A great example of all four elements in place would be Aquaria. You have no idea how much I love that game.

boradis, DMC3 is best in series and arguably one of the best PS2 titles altogether. That one and Killer7.

 

[boradis]

I think that gaming can indeed bring a more personal perspective on the story than any other medium can. That's one of two reasons I enjoy first person view more than anything else: it is highly personal on one end and on another it's immensely immersive. Examples include: HL series, System Shock 2, Metro 2033, Metroid Prime series that I'm currently playing.

Just to be contrarian, I want to go on record that I hate the FPS format and think it is as far from "immersive" as it is possible to get. You have no arms or legs, no knees or elbows. You are just a single eye and a gun like a freaking Dalek. And like a Dalek all you can do is shoot things or open doors.

A game with a good gameplay is just that - a good game.

Which I think is the whole point, but OK.

To make a memorable game however, all four pillars: mechanics, visuals, sound and narrative have to stand tall. Mind you that unlike movies, atmosphere in a game is also a huge part of the narrative. A great example of all four elements in place would be Aquaria. You have no idea how much I love that game.

Ironically, I've never heard it even mentioned anywhere. And I read about games a lot.

boradis, DMC3 is best in series and arguably one of the best PS2 titles altogether.

I agree with you here!

 

[Patrick Cinderflame]

I have a friend who LURRRVES trying to make games in RPG Maker et. al. He invited me over to his place to unveil his latest masterpiece. Problem is, he has no earthly idea about the fundamentals of what makes a good game, and the end result makes me want to take an X-Acto knife to my eyeball and twist repeatedly.

Giving people the tools without any idea of how to use them is only going to result in more and more crap being put out. It's like trying to give a million monkeys a typewriter and expecting the works of Shakespeare...

 

[CyanLink]

Yahtzee really has a hard time staying on a positive topic doesn't he?

 

[CrawlingPastaHellion]

Just to be contrarian, I want to go on record that I hate the FPS format and think it is as far from "immersive" as it is possible to get. You have no arms or legs, no knees or elbows. You are just a single eye and a gun like a freaking Dalek. And like a Dalek all you can do is shoot things or open doors.

Not true, some FPS games have a body showing. The best examples would be "The Trespasser", a very old game and "Mirror's Edge", my most favorite of the more recent AAA titles. Still, I can't argue with you about it: it needs more games like that. I especially hate it when the protagonist interacts with the environment by using "telekineses" a la HL.

What's with "all you can do is shoot things or open doors" part? Ever played "Deus Ex", "VTM: Bloodlines", Arx Fatalis, the games I mentioned in my previous post and many other games with FPS perspective? Not all FPS games are about just running, gunning and opening doors.

 

[robobengt]

-

Thanks for taking the time to type that reply.

The one thing I disliked about the TV series was indeed the soap opera feel it had at times. This darker tone you say is present in the books sounds exactly like what I enjoyed most about Dexter.

I shall be picking up Darkly Dreaming Dexter.

Cheers.

Hope you have a better time with the books than I did. I do not feel that the books are "darker" but instead I find them silly and stupid. Let's just say I did alot of face palming while reading them.

 

[The_root_of_all_evil]

-

Thanks for taking the time to type that reply.

Welcome. Let me know what you think.

 

[exampleAccount]

It would take absolutely forever to build such a tool though, and it'd be so generically designed that it'd probably only use 30% of it's features while running. I reckon it would be possible though, maybe a little further in the future when CPUs could handle such a bloated piece of software.

The problem with most game makers though, is that you end up with everyone making very similar games. Without knowing how to actually edit code you are pretty much limited to choosing which features to implement out of the small list the designers thought of.

 

[valleyshrew]

The main reason for this is the originality of the characters and plot is mostly expended by the original. Games like Mass Effect 2 and Uncharted 2 to me are not as good as the original despite much higher ratings, because they're less fresh and exciting. We already know the characters and know pretty much the formula for the story and game design. They don't accumulate complexity and fun new features, they just reskin what we've done before. There's an incongruity in a game starting over as a beginner too. It doesn't make any sense that the combat mechanics are totally changed for ME2, why is the ammo type different throughout the universe? The whole thing doesn't make sense, but it's just a seperation of combat and cutscene that's very common in RPGs.

I'll add Metal gear solid as an example of a game clearly surpassing the original. GTAIV is also much better than 1 or 3, and from a narrative perspective it's much better than San Andreas too though I'm sure someone will try to disagree. Are we only talking about the 2nd game in a series? FFVII is vastly superior to both FF1 and FFVI.

 

[SimGrave]

If everybody had the same approach then SOTN, then we wouldn't have the 3D graphics we have today. We needed companies to have their hands at it and to make it evolve.
So the question I ask... did Castlevania had guts to stay 2D at that time, or they were afraid to make the 3D jump? I tend to go with the second option... and 3 horrible Castlevania games in 3D are there to prove me right. But hey... SOTN was a great game. Because they build on strong foundations.

 

[ilion]

Yahtzee you are a true gentlemen. I salute you sir.