Designers REALLY need to stop using budgets and deadlines as a vague estimate instead of things they need to be aware of. Too many wannabe auteurs lacking discipline and planning.Dexterity said:
Game Industry's Creativity is Still Immature, Says Miyamoto
- Thread starter Esmeralda Portillo
- Start date
I think Miyamoto's statements are more true if one only considers the Triple-A segment of the industry. If you look at Indie and small developer/publisher segments, I think the situation is much different. That is not to say those segments don't have their significant share of copy-cat-itis, but one is more likely to find some creative innovation in those segments compared to the extremely risk-averse Triple-A segment.
We got older. We started to want to experience different and sometimes more meaningful things than BJ Blaskovics's Eleventh Biannual Nazi Genocide Simulator. The fun isn't gone, it simply is less concentrated. Being an avid reader, I'm attracted to characters with more complex motivations than "Save the Girl and Save the World". I want more than just another lantern-jawed asskicker.makano said:
It's not perfect, I'll admit, and for every Elizabeth DeWitt we have a one-dimensional snark machine like Nathan Drake; but we're getting there. The fun isn't gone, it's just more meaningful.
As for meaningless fun, there's a ton of stuff on offer. The resurgence of arcade-style titles pretty much confirms that, and I can have plenty of brainless shooty action, between Luftrausers, Loadout and, in some sense, Team Fortress 2. I'm putting some nuances on TF2 being brainless because it's spent the last six years developing a pretty comprehensive lore and backstory.
All of these are IP's published by Nintendo and are IP's owned by Nintendo. Nintendo is not a developer. They are a publisher that does development on the side. A Nintendo IP is not solely something developed by Nintendo. Any reasonable definition of Nintendo IP's must include those that they own and publish.Arnoxthe1 said:
And why do Wii Sports and Wii fit and Wii play not count? They are all highly successful new Nintendo IP's. If anything it proves that Nintendo is highly diverse in terms of what they release because they cover a huge variety of games for different audiences. Just because it is not a game you want does not mean it is not real.
IamLEAM1983 said:
Growing up you say but what you mean is you want a game where you are sitting there for the first 12 hours while the main character whines about his back story/sexuality/any other flavor of the month political agenda,instead of doing something about it we do mundane tasks. It is a boring time for games when the biggest news about the latest games is that the MC is gay. Who the fuck cares is what i am saying i assume there is a big dragon that's killing people and generally fucking shit up in the land, but no we have to be bothered with the characters sexual history.
Before the pitchforks come out i am in no way anti gay(I am gay myself so that's an oxymoron).
In what Arnoxthe1 is saying, Nintendo didn't help out in the development in most of those games, and all they did was publish them. The only games on that list that DrOswald posted that had one of Nintendo's Development Studios help were: Wii Fit/Wii Play (Nintendo EAD Group 5), Chibi Robo (Group 1), and Rythmn Heaven. All the others were made by other developers and only published by Nintendo. And in the case of Pandora's Tower and The Last Story, XSeed were the publishers for other regions and not Nintendo.MrMan999 said:
What I think Arnoxthe1 is getting at are new IPs created and developed by Nintendo EAD in this case, in which the last new IP they did before the last E3 was Wii Fit, and before that it was Pikmin 1.
"Adolescence" is the perfect way to put it. I came in here to say that "immature" wasn't the right word for what's going on in the games industry since that wouldn't account for things having actually gotten worse over time, but you hit the nail on the head. Because you know who has more creativity than teenagers? Children. Raw, unbridled creativity that's often indistinguishable from sheer randomness. And that's a perfect description of early video games. You're a carpenter trying to reach the top of an unfinished building while barrels roll down at you. You're a disembodied head trying to eat all the dots in a maze while being pursued by ghosts. You're a great bloody orange bike horn with legs hopping onto blocks to make them change color! Hardly any less silly than the likes of Axe Cop or Cloud Cuckooland, really (yes, I did just see The LEGO Movie this very evening, in fact). When did we collectively decide we were too grown up to goof around like that? When we collectively hit puberty and started fixating on sex and violence and generally being not really very grown up at all.IamLEAM1983 said:
And I know people have said that we're still getting good games from the indie studios, but tell me how it's fair that those kinds of games can only come out of teams of less than ten people working with pixel-art graphics or Unity and sell for only $10-30 while the bloody shooter software gets budgets of hundreds of millions of dollars and five year development times. It's not like you couldn't make a game that marries indie-studio creativity with big, well-rendered worlds given the resources. Look at Katamari Damacy, whose graphics were on par with its peers; or the Portal games, which tarted up student projects with AAA budgets; or indeed Nintendo's own recent offerings, which at least are on par with their predecessors in a vacuum.
And that's entirely your right.makano said:
Let's, say, assume you're a fellow Skyrim player. If you're not, excuse me. I'll just use that as an example.
The way I've seen some friends go about Skyrim, there are two ways to go about things. Either you obsess about clearing your quest log and unlocking all dragon souls and finding that perfect levels-versus-quest rewards parity as illustrated by math chart upon math chart upon math chart on the Elder Scrolls Wiki, or you take the province's lore in. You absorb the moment's ambience and try and figure out where actual persons sort of pop out of the super-restrictive Radiant AI bullcrap. Squint hard enough, and Skyrim comes alive.
Blaze through your quest log to unlock Achievements and, well - congrats. You've unlocked some Achievements. Will you remember your time spent in Skyrim, though? I mean, in five or six years from now? Probably not.
Keep in mind, though, this isn't a judgement of value. Some people play for the sake of scoring, others really want to clear their backlog, and some people have enough time to put on titles that deserve it. What draws people like me into spending some of that extra time is when the characters or the world itself have stories to tell. Unfortunately, because of limitations in the medium, the best we can currently come up with in terms of meaningful relationship developments is basic sexual attraction. In modern-day Game Dev parlance, especially in the BioWare school of thought, getting some nookie equals Achievement. If not literally, then figuratively. Your character's Crossed a Threshold, in a sense, but the only way we've found to make it seem meaningful is through the use of sex.
As I've said, the medium is adolescent. Only teenagers see sex as something that's inherently meaningful, that's somehow the be-all and end-all of relationships. Only teenagers or people stuck in that adolescent mindset actually give a shit about the so-called "friendzone". Morrigan rebuffs you in Dragon Age and you're maybe one or two important plot points away from having sex with her? Better keep it up, right?
Right?
Not really. That's actually pretty freaking hollow.
My point is, you didn't pick an example that really fits. For every distaff RPG trait in a BioWare title, you've got everything else that open-world games do well, which is creating a sense of place; in giving the *world* as much development as most characters would get.
As for dragons sweeping the land and the Call to Action supposedly trumping everything else - heroes aren't necessarily meant to be perfect. Alduin and the Civil War are tearing Skyrim to pieces, but I can still give some depth to my Dragonborn by choosing to play him as a dishonorable asshole who'd rather start by getting in with the Thieves Guild. Any game that either fleshes out the dude I'm playing or that lets me flesh him out on my own deserves praise.
But, of course, that's just my two cents on the matter.
It isn't fair, but it's Free Market for ya. The pigs want their tasty slop, and that Transformers slop looks mighty tasty... Seven bucks for two hours and a half in a supercooled environment where low-quality and ultra-filling food is on offer, and where you can just turn your brain off and enjoy ninety to a hundred minutes of other people's vastly superior problems. When you're stuck seeing CGI whatsits duking it out for the fate of the world, those bounced checks or that promotion that slipped by you suddenly don't seem like they matter too much.Steve the Pocket said:
You have your meaningful experiences, and then there's the Opium of the People. That title sounds derogatory, but it shouldn't be. AAA shooting galleries have their purpose, seeing as they have the happy side-effects of ensuring I won't run into potential frustrated competitive shooters on Borderlands 2's servers. They keep a certain fickle subset of players away, and allow more space for those of us who'd *really* like to dissect the medium.
I know I sound horribly pedantic, but I just can't play a game and - unplug. I can't. I need to see some sort of aesthetic, narrative or technical investment to be interested. Give me a shooting gallery or just hands me the keys to a ready-made and passionless Hero Fantasy Factory, and I won't be interested.
IamLEAM1983 said:
I respect your view on the matter and i do think that some story elements are good and needed but this constant obsession on characters sexuality or gender detracts from the fun or takes from the narrative. Take for instance Mass effect 3(i know beating a dead horse) Bioware removed a boss fight with the illusive man who has been converted in to a massive husk like enemy(check the art book if you don't believe me) and gave us over 2 hours of forced romance plots. I felt while playing "who the fuck cares who you are sleeping with, we are on the verge of annihilation by machines who want to purge all life". I feel that instead of making a good narrative they just shift the focus on to what the characters do in there downtime and let teen fan fiction writers come up with things for them to do.
I wouldn't say the the gaming industry is "immature" so much as it's had several bricks shot directly at its cranial area throughout its existence (think the end of "Special Fred" by Stephen Lynch). Adolescent male marketing wasn't initially in its gameplan, nor did it happen overnight. It started with the Game Crash of '83 which encouraged companies to become more frugal and rely on focus groups, then got a major push when the runaway success of games like Mortal Kombat, DOOM (one of the first big "indie" titles) and Grand Theft Auto III that appealed almost exclusively to the "dudebro" demographic proved that they could be better off financially by chucking everybody else.
PC games started out as a haven for sophisticated titles such as the Infocom, Sierra and Lucasarts adventure games, stuff that was far ahead of the "jump around and shoot the baddies and save the world and the princess" concepts that Nintendo and Sega were limited to on a technological level up until the mid-1990s. But even those games could be appreciated by those outside of a bloodlusting 13-year old 2Pac fanboy. But then the developers, now purchased by ultramegacorporations, got laid off whenever they tried to make games for more than the lowest common denominator. Suddenly everything had to be made for consoles, which meant that genres like the Lucassiera adventures and space sims that relied on PC hardware and interfaces had to go, and established sellers like FPS and RPG had to be squeezed into fumbly gamepads and ancient little RAM sticks respectively.
There's been quite a bit of maturity video games for some time now, it's just corporate influences striking and holding it down. And, let's face it, you're never going to get those sorts of people to grow up. Ever.
PC games started out as a haven for sophisticated titles such as the Infocom, Sierra and Lucasarts adventure games, stuff that was far ahead of the "jump around and shoot the baddies and save the world and the princess" concepts that Nintendo and Sega were limited to on a technological level up until the mid-1990s. But even those games could be appreciated by those outside of a bloodlusting 13-year old 2Pac fanboy. But then the developers, now purchased by ultramegacorporations, got laid off whenever they tried to make games for more than the lowest common denominator. Suddenly everything had to be made for consoles, which meant that genres like the Lucassiera adventures and space sims that relied on PC hardware and interfaces had to go, and established sellers like FPS and RPG had to be squeezed into fumbly gamepads and ancient little RAM sticks respectively.
There's been quite a bit of maturity video games for some time now, it's just corporate influences striking and holding it down. And, let's face it, you're never going to get those sorts of people to grow up. Ever.