Infinity Blade Dev: "We're in the Golden Age of Gaming"

[IronicBeet]

Dragon Age II, Saints Row The Third, and Capcom exploiting DLC like it's a sweatshop worker. Golden age of gaming, yeah.

Portal, Assasins creed, Batman AA, Deus Ex:HR...golden age of gaming indeed!! (see I can do that too)

and what was wrong with SR3 anyway?

The fact that we had good games mixed in with what's happening to video games now doesn't make this the golden age.

SR3 was a travesty compared to SR2. It enhanced the controls and driving in exchange for taking out half of everything else. (Arguably) The best activities were taken out and the remaining ones had their tutorials forced into the main storyline, one of the best characters in the game was killed off in the first half hour of the story,(Off-screen, no less) the city of Steelport had barely any diversity to it, the clothing customization was butchered, the melee system was butchered in favour of an "awesome button" that got old after an hour, and that's just some of the things it did wrong. You can't complain about it on the forums either, because all the negative criticism just gets ignored and the threads with said criticism in them get locked or deleted. THQ screwed the fans of SR1 and 2 over with SR3 in favour of money, and it looks like it worked for them. It killed my faith in Volition and in the SR series.

 

[Vault101]

Dragon Age II, Saints Row The Third, and Capcom exploiting DLC like it's a sweatshop worker. Golden age of gaming, yeah.

Portal, Assasins creed, Batman AA, Deus Ex:HR...golden age of gaming indeed!! (see I can do that too)

and what was wrong with SR3 anyway?

The fact that we had good games mixed in with what's happening to video games now doesn't make this the golden age.

snip.

thats not my point

my point was you made a sweeping claim using only a few games as an example without going in depth (DLC whoring? DRM? mabye thats what you ment specificlaly you didnt make it very clear)

I did the exact same thing with other end of the spectrum

there is and has always been crap and good, its not unique to gaming, its not unique to any point in the history of gaming,

 

[lapan]

More like the golden age of sequels, because that's most of what we are getting now. an endless stream of sequels.

 

[Atmos Duality]

On the other hand, one could potentially refute the claim by eliminating anyone working on the clones and sequel treadmills from the "creativity" pool since there's not a whole lot of it to be had in the "Military Shooter" or "Twitchy Combat Platformer" genres these days.

It's hard to claim "creativity" when the directive from management is "do what worked so well last year."

I'm not going to bother refuting his arguments anymore; we're thinking in two different contexts. If you present anything else, he brushes it away with un-substantiated "facts" that while SUPPOSEDLY being measurable, he has provided absolutely no numbers for.

I'm acknowledging the one point he makes about opportunity in the industry. Yes, it's PROBABLY numerically better now than it's been before (again, without numbers, such a quantitative claim is worthless, but he has yet to grasp this fact), but there are serious issues that need to be addressed besides that.

Besides DRM, payment and distribution models are shifting towards services, aka, "The Eternal Rental", and if my experience in other media-service markets has taught me anything, it's that these markets lean heavily towards price-gouging and customer abuse. It's naive to assume every competing service will be like Steam.

He's focusing exclusively on the good independent market and blocking out everything else.
Cite problems within the AAA industry, he marginalizes them, ignores them entirely or calls you a squawking parrot.
Trying to refute that kind of argumentation is futile, because it's utter nonsense, and it's time better spent doing anything else.

 

[Dys]

Golden age? ... This guy literally was born yesturday wasn't he. With the lack of creativity and constant copying, games have been in the dark ages for over a decade. And with the rule of EA and Activision it doesn't look like its going to be ending anytime soon. Its unfortunate his comments are right inline with a salesman. And not someone speaking about something they have passion for. He just wants you to fill his wallet. Nothing more.

That seems a little harsh. Sure, AAA titles are disapointing to say the least lately, and the "hardcore" or more experienced gamers are certainly being neglected (not to mention how the current, technically underwhelming gen of consoles has caused technology to become stagnant), but gaming has expanded such that they are a lot less relevent. If you step back and look at the bigger picture you may actually agree that there's a lot more freedom for indie developers.

Mobile and casual gaming has exploded onto the scene, giving game developers and gamers (both this newer 'casual' breed and the traditional type) different kinds of games to toy with, completely differently to what they've previously experienced. Games can be produced, published and become virally sucessful for a couple of hundred dollars. This scene of casual, handheld games demands innovation. Yes the titles are short and sweet, and the games are almost always simple but the sucessful ones are also usually unique, clones simply don't make it big. There's also a better scope for more heavily targeted games, it's suddenly become conceivable to develop an android (or whatever) app with dark or adult humor without having to censor it to appease the publishers because the initial investment is so low and there's a profitable market for that product.

The only thing mainstream games have truly advanced in and continue to is graphics. This is pretty much the only area where they compete against each other today, to dress up and look the prettiest to get the most customers. You know who also does that? Street hookers.

It seems that few, if any, even bother to compete on that front. Since crysis set the benchmark however many years ago, the only games I can think of that looks like it made an effort to be standout pretty and visually immersive is battlefield 3 (which, as I'm sure anyone who tries to play it will tell you, is at best poorly supported) and farcry 2 (which proved that even though people claim to want something different, anything that is a little too unfamiliar will be relentlessly criticized for it's ambition).

 

[dills2]

its a matter of opinion frankly there's no way to measure how good it is to be a gamer in a time period so there cannot be a golden age

 

[Antari]

Golden age? ... This guy literally was born yesturday wasn't he. With the lack of creativity and constant copying, games have been in the dark ages for over a decade. And with the rule of EA and Activision it doesn't look like its going to be ending anytime soon. Its unfortunate his comments are right inline with a salesman. And not someone speaking about something they have passion for. He just wants you to fill his wallet. Nothing more.

If you stick exclusively to AAA games then not seeing any creativity is your problem. The indie circuit is where all the cool stuff is going on, and they have a lot of cool stuff.

Ya 2d scrollers are SO ground breaking and creative. Most of the stuff indies are releasing these days are carbon copies of games that were available in the late 80's early 90's, with just enough content change to avoid copyright violations. That may be creative legally but on the game front not so much. And ya graphics have improved, game makers aren't the ones advancing it. You can thank Nvidia and AMD for that.

And I don't stick to AAA titles. Infact I go out of my way to find companies who aren't on the front lines and support them to spite the AAA publishers.

 

[Antari]

Golden age? ... This guy literally was born yesturday wasn't he. With the lack of creativity and constant copying, games have been in the dark ages for over a decade. And with the rule of EA and Activision it doesn't look like its going to be ending anytime soon. Its unfortunate his comments are right inline with a salesman. And not someone speaking about something they have passion for. He just wants you to fill his wallet. Nothing more.

That seems a little harsh. Sure, AAA titles are disapointing to say the least lately, and the "hardcore" or more experienced gamers are certainly being neglected (not to mention how the current, technically underwhelming gen of consoles has caused technology to become stagnant), but gaming has expanded such that they are a lot less relevent. If you step back and look at the bigger picture you may actually agree that there's a lot more freedom for indie developers.

Indies can do whatever they like, but they don't. The main problem I have with both parts of the industry right now is the complete lack of risk. Its the only industry that seems to be able to operate that way. They only go with the sure bets. And thats why they are all making the same game right now. Back in the day (Nostalgia Glasses Included) there was about 80-90 times the variety there is now because there were no set business boundaries to follow. The game makers made the game they thought would be cool. It wasn't about researching the market to see exactly what demographic they wanted to exploit.

Creativity in general has been murdered out of the industry by greedy CEO's pushing deadlines past the point of being viable as a product. You can disagree with me or not. But I've been watching this go on for alot of years. And its plain as day to me.

And yes my reaction is harsh. But considering the introduction of DRM. I really don't hold back on game companies. I'll attack the ones that blindly support it at any opportunity, either through word of mouth, or by not buying their game, or not pirating it. I don't want them thinking its a success on ANY front.

 

[targren]

Indies can do whatever they like, but they don't. The main problem I have with both parts of the industry right now is the complete lack of risk. Its the only industry that seems to be able to operate that way.

If you expand the bubble of "the industry" from "the video game industry" to "the entertainment media (Movie/TV/Music/Game/Books) industry" then you're spot on.

And the thing they all seem to have in common is the middle-men: Publishers/Distributors/whatever they're called for the given media, they're the same thing. Suits and bean counters holding the purse strings. That's nothing new, of course, but what we have now is the same big groups buying up more and more of the developers/creators/smaller publishers, so you get the same putzes with the same narrow vision holding the money for more and more of the sources of new content.

It's a lot like Bob said in "the Big Picture" last week (I think it was last week) about the toy licensing. As long as they can say "I dunno why it bombed. Everyone loved Call of Duty/Harry Potter/Game of Thrones/Survivor, and this was just like it. It's not my fault it failed!" they're more likely to green-light it.

 

[draythefingerless]

havent bought a 60$ game in ages. and i have over 100 games on steam. all pretty varied from Terraria, to L4D. oh and btw, with CoD and Battlefield, at least theres only those 2 franchises, and they do the modern realistic warfare thing pretty damn well(specially battlefield), but theres really not that many clones copying them...FPS genre, sure, but thats a genre, and compared to the old times, where you would see dozens, i mean dozens, of differnt IPs, all copying mario, sonic, or those racing games all done in the same style...it was pretty abysmal compared to what we have now. oh and btw, those rpgs you see during the 90s...theyre all lifted from DnD modules. not entirely, but dont go saying theyre entirely creative or some bullshit like that.

 

[beniki]

Nah not really. Yes games are better, but even movies and comic books are better these days. Golden Ages are when the long running characters and icons are created. In gaming terms, Mario, Sonic, perhaps even Master Chief for those Xboxers.

Now we're getting more elaborate rehashes and more interesting story lines and techniques, etc. Maybe we'll even get games deconstructing traditional games tropes.

So Silver age verging on Neo-Classic era.

 

[Frostbite3789]

We never had it better? We never had it worse either. Golden age was from 2001 to 2007 IMO.

The mid 80's would like to have a word.

 

[theultimateend]

Of course, there seems to be no agreement on exactly when said things used to be better.

Really?

I thought this had already been settled on.

The mid to late 90's. Period.

Basically every major title or highest rated release for a series was during this period.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1996_in_video_gaming
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1997_in_video_gaming
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1998_in_video_gaming
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_in_video_gaming

Thanks Wikipedia, making my job easy.

Edit: Heck, If we are going for a decade then the 90's in general.

Edit Edit: Dear god, the more I look at the lists from 90-99 the more I miss the 90's for gaming. A nice chunk of these titles are still really fun even in my new 2010's jaded body.

We never had it better? We never had it worse either. Golden age was from 2001 to 2007 IMO.

The mid 80's would like to have a word.

I think that would be more the golden age of nintendo. not that I mind, I like their stuff.

 

[Atmos Duality]

I think that would be more the golden age of nintendo. not that I mind, I like their stuff.

You'd think differently if you weren't developing (or trying to develop) for anyone other than Nintendo around that time. While Nintendo revived the game market and launched their own cultural phenomenon, they also implemented and exercised very ruthless business tactics.

Be thankful that all of these publishers at least have each other as competition; an oligopoly is still better than a monopoly.

 

[theultimateend]

I think that would be more the golden age of nintendo. not that I mind, I like their stuff.

You'd think differently if you weren't developing (or trying to develop) for anyone other than Nintendo around that time. While Nintendo revived the game market and launched their own cultural phenomenon, they also implemented and exercised very ruthless business tactics.

Be thankful that all of these publishers at least have each other as competition; an oligopoly is still better than a monopoly.

Considering I'd be about 1 years old I'd be probably wondering why all these big people want me to slap plastic squares with letters on them.