Is gaming dead?

[EzraPound]

Pokemon Red/Blue < Pokemon Black/White.

Wowowowowow....
Ok, opinions and everything, but if I was going to argue the case of something better than Red/Blue that was released later it would be Ruby and Sapphire. Black and White struck me as the worst pokemon games to date really.
A couple of interesting concepts, but designed around what I can describe as nothing more than gimmicks that really make me hate the game.
As an example, that city that is a circle. WHY FOR THE LOVE OF GOD. Its a pain to navigate, poorly laid out, the perspective is slightly confusing, all to say "We can do circles". And the bridge. That freaking massive bridge that in Red/Blue would have had some battles on it, some interesting things to do, some team Plasma plot or something [Or more likely been a large cave filled with Zubats that, whilst annoying, was fun to explore], but instead its a large, empty bridge that exists to say "We can do pseudo 3D, and curvy walking paths". So much that could have been interesting, could have been fun, could have made me like the game... but no. And another fire fighting starter but lets not go there...
Really, I want to like it, but I honestly can't. It does some things right but... God, the things it gets wrong just piss me off to no end, and are a big part of IMO one of the most important parts in a Pokemon game - the world you explore.
And that I'd say hit its peak in Ruby/Sapphire with not only a good looking world with varied environments that were well designed and interesting, but also with a variety of different things to explore with - like diving as well as surfing - and a couple of fun minigames that made it a joy to play.

I agree with you, but from a technical and mechanical standpoint there's really no denying that Black/White are better than Red/Blue.

Granted, I'd say the actual peak was HeartGold/SoulSilver, because they took the awesome world of Gen II and combined it with the much better graphics/gameplay later used in Gen V. Gen III was really good, but the combat is still far more sensible after the DS games.

To get a little back on-topic again: A few months back I tried playing Sonic Adventure 2 again after it launched for the PC, because I played the hell out of it when I was younger and had really fond memories of it.

Except for the Sonic/Shadow levels (which make up a grand total of 1/3 of the game - Less if you count the Chao Garden), I absolutely hated it.

I've tried multiple times to get into the "classic" WRPGs like Baldur's Gate or Morrowind, and every single time I either get so frustrated with the obscenely obtuse UI and unintuitive controls/combat or just bored out of my skull half an hour in. It took me three separate attempts to actually finish Liberty Island in Deus Ex. Diablo II isn't nearly as fun as Diablo III. The first Starcraft has rather abysmal unit pathfinding, and combined with the strict limit on how many infantry units you can select at once makes it pretty difficult to effectively micro even after hotkeying 'squads'.

I always see a lot of people conflating complexity with depth, but that's not how it works. "Modern" games might not be as complex as they were fifteen years ago, but there's a lot more depth behind them once you look past the sight-seeing-tour games like Call of Duty -- Depth beyond just skill trees or insane amounts of inventory micromanagement.

Yeah, but WRPGs are one the few genres that have actually improved since the millennium (most have declined), and even at the time of its releases Sonic Adventure 2 was a bit iffy gameplay-wise.

This is a fact: most acclaimed games today are just shittier versions of games that came before them

Internet debating rule number 1. opinion equals fact.
All kidding aside, are you sure you know what the term "fact" means? Because you are using it very wrong.

Basically all your posts just say: "I liked gaming better fifteen years ago". You rephrase that as if it were facts, and to prove those "facts" you state your personal opinion of some games over the years, again as if they were facts.

There is just no way good or interessting discussion can come from that, especially because you do not once give examples why you think all those games of old were better than they are now

I've actually given specific examples repeatedly. And no, I don't think this is just 'subjective'--most lists of 'greatest games ever' disproportionately feature games from the fourth and fifth generations, and about one-third of the people on this thread have expressed a similar discontent to the one I'm describing. So evidently, this phenomenon isn't confined to me.

Some games are objectively better than others--it's not a very effective or thorough response to just claim everything is relative...

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

Never has an image before been so exactly appropriate.

But yeah, I think you just might have a case of extreme nostalgia goggles, that don't allow you to see the huge amount of unique, creative, quality games that are succeeding today.

Hehe "Council of Real Arstistic Pronouncements" = CRAP.
That comic is spot-on. It's a wonder I never saw it posted in any of these threads.

 

[nexus]

Not even close.

1996-2000 was absolutely phenomenal in terms of quality games. Thing is, games were just going into puberty then.. so they didn't have much to measure up against. Games are still incredible today though... I still play them non-stop. I'm ready to bring back 'difficulty' and complexity though, and I'm starting to see that with FTL: Faster Than Light and Don't Starve. Bring it on.

 

[Auron]

Never has an image before been so exactly appropriate.

But yeah, I think you just might have a case of extreme nostalgia goggles, that don't allow you to see the huge amount of unique, creative, quality games that are succeeding today.

Boy is this right or what?!

Anyway OP, have you recently played these older games? I know I have played some of them and while the design holds a lot of it in place the graphics are terrible some gameplay decisions are asinine when looking from today's perspective and it goes on. I'll take one of your examples and say that if you don't see improvements in Human Revolution over Deus Ex then you must not have played Deus Ex in the last 5 years. It is awesome, Denton is awesome but the gameplay was terrible, there's a ton of really bad voice acting throughout the game the early 3d that you glorified is extremely ugly and the shooting mechanics were basically Doom with scopes and a terrible system that failed at simulating realistic shooting. While the themes and world are very closely related and it's still the best game ever made it's not exactly right to look at HR and say it's worse. I say the same for most other sequels you slammed, you can't just say "well it's better but it should be because 6 years." in the end opinion regarding art is very subjective even though the technical aspects can be impartially judged.

I've tried multiple times to get into the "classic" WRPGs like Baldur's Gate or Morrowind, and every single time I either get so frustrated with the obscenely obtuse UI and unintuitive controls/combat or just bored out of my skull half an hour in. It took me three separate attempts to actually finish Liberty Island in Deus Ex. Diablo II isn't nearly as fun as Diablo III. The first Starcraft has rather abysmal unit pathfinding, and combined with the strict limit on how many infantry units you can select at once makes it pretty difficult to effectively micro even after hotkeying 'squads'.

The combat was basically just virtual D&D in the old CRPGs, it's actually coming back big time with Kickstarter a lot of people enjoyed it, don't think the UI was unintuitive particularly.

Diablo III was pretty good evolution regarding the skillset and not being locked for ever in a bad build by accident or rushing to copy the viable builds which everyone did anyway, I agree on that.

Deus Ex I already talked a bunch about above in the other post, most of it's systems were not very good indeed.

Now Starcraft achieved the perfect balance for high level play and was being played until Blizzard made an effort to kill the korean tournaments to promote sc2. While you can say that RTS today is generally more comfortable I'm not so sure about being better. It was hard but not impossible.

 

[Dreiko_v1legacy]

There's things beyond merely AAA or indie games. There's lots of in-between treasures. Games like the walking dead or persona. Not quite super super powerful graphics-wise but still not quite the unpolished indie games you present.




There's just much more crap nowadays and it's all samey so it leaves that aftertaste of all games being like that. Don't be decieved. It's just an illusion.

 

[verdant monkai]

Yeah pretty much no one does it any more......

Seriously though did you really just ask that question on a GAMING website? Maybe the kind of gaming you like is gone but there's still loads of games coming out and people are still having fun.

 

[Clowndoe]

There's something I think is missing from the comments on this thread:

Gaming today can crash, but as long as there are good games being made somewhere by someone, it can't die. That's because we have something the 80's didn't have, which is a slew of free internet reviews and community feedback. Back then, the torrential storm of shovelware (shovelware which managed to have an even worst standard than today) meant that if you picked games at random like you had to back then, odds were 1000:1 against you getting a good game. Today, even if all the bloated, poorly managed companies stopped making good games, all you have to do is go on Google and search. Those compnaies that maintain a certain standard, or at least successfully appeal to the masses will survive, the rest won't be missed.

 

[GonzoGamer]

I get that the current generation of AAA/$60 titles has become somewhat homogenized but at this point I don't see any sort of big crash.
First of all, every rumor about the new consoles would have to be true. So true that hardly anyone bought them. If that happens AND all the AAA publishers put all their resources into making games for the new consoles; okay then we might see a crash.
But they don't seem to want to do all the things they were rumored to want to do so I don't see a crash coming.

Besides, every generation was like this. You get a trend that takes hold; in the NES era it was side scrolling platformers trying to be the next SMB, this gen it's FPSs trying to be CoD. Also, for every generation, you see a lot of crap and maybe a few good games; that goes for all media really.
I'm sure your classics game is very entertaining OP. I like my Genesis classics disc too. When in the future, someone sells the Bethesda "Classics" from this generation, it will also be very entertaining...provided they don't constantly crash my Google Goggles.

 

[EzraPound]

Anyway OP, have you recently played these older games? I know I have played some of them and while the design holds a lot of it in place the graphics are terrible some gameplay decisions are asinine when looking from today's perspective and it goes on. I'll take one of your examples and say that if you don't see improvements in Human Revolution over Deus Ex then you must not have played Deus Ex in the last 5 years. It is awesome, Denton is awesome but the gameplay was terrible, there's a ton of really bad voice acting throughout the game the early 3d that you glorified is extremely ugly and the shooting mechanics were basically Doom with scopes and a terrible system that failed at simulating realistic shooting. While the themes and world are very closely related and it's still the best game ever made it's not exactly right to look at HR and say it's worse. I say the same for most other sequels you slammed, you can't just say "well it's better but it should be because 6 years." in the end opinion regarding art is very subjective even though the technical aspects can be impartially judged.

I played Deus Ex and Human Revolution within the past couple of years. While Human Revolution was great--and yeah, you're right about a lot of aspects being improved--I thought it had a number of weaknesses that made it worse than the original, i.e. repetitive level design, a narrower range of gameplay possibilities, a worse storyline, a linear augmentation path, lame boss battles, etc. Actually, while Human Revolution was better than Invisible War, Invisible War didn't have a couple of the abovementioned problems.

 

[shrekfan246]

The combat was basically just virtual D&D in the old CRPGs, it's actually coming back big time with Kickstarter a lot of people enjoyed it, don't think the UI was unintuitive particularly.

I know what it was. Perhaps if I actually played D&D I would've been able to appreciate it, but as it stands it pulls me out of the game far more than I like.

But this?

That's a pretty clunky UI.

Honestly, I'm hoping that Project Eternity and the new Torment won't be plagued by the same issues that pull me out of old CRPGs, because I love Knights of the Old Republic which basically uses the same rulesets, but tweaked slightly and given a Star Wars paint job.

Now Starcraft achieved the perfect balance for high level play and was being played until Blizzard made an effort to kill the korean tournaments to promote sc2. While you can say that RTS today is generally more comfortable I'm not so sure about being better. It was hard but not impossible.

I didn't say it's impossible, and I'm pretty bad at RTS games anyway, because I didn't grow up with them. I'm only just playing Starcraft for the first time and I'd certainly say I think it still holds up today. But the fact remains that, within the game as it exists independent of its sequel, a lot of things could stand to be vastly improved along the lines of AI pathfinding and the ease of micromanagement.

 

[CloudAtlas]

Never has an image before been so exactly appropriate.

But yeah, I think you just might have a case of extreme nostalgia goggles, that don't allow you to see the huge amount of unique, creative, quality games that are succeeding today.

I can only wholeheartedly agree.

I would even say that games are becoming better and better. Not at a constant pace, perhaps, but still.

The OP mentioned Baldur's Gate as a great game that has no equal. Now I loved Baldur's Gate II back then, but would I want to play a new game like this today? Hell no. Obtuse interface, bad balancing, lame combat, a story full of clichées, godawful graphics (for modern standards), no voiceover.

Is it fair to compare graphics of 1999 with 2013? Perhaps not. But technical improvements are improvements nonetheless, and not just because it looks nicer. Well-animated faces are good for conveying emotions, even very subtle ones, and I'm excited what future games can deliver in this area. Lighting and fog is good for atmosphere, and also areas where great improvements are possible. So are far landscapes with great vistas. High polygon counts and hi-res textures enable developers to tell the player more with the visuals. And the list goes on.

The same is true for sound. Full voice-over (if the voice actors are good) can just convey more emotion than written dialogue. A soundtrack consisting of countless hours of music played by orchestras, choirs or whatever is just not the same as the (admittedly iconic) 8-bit sounds of old.

Gameplay, in technical terms, just got smoother and smoother. CoD is not only successful because all buyers are mindless sheep, but also because they refined their combat gameplay more and more and more (and I'm saying that even though I'm not a fan of the series). Perhaps the reason it got stale is not because of lazy, uninnovative developers and whatnot, but because They pretty much perfected this kind of gameplay?
And a game like Tomb Raider (2013) just, I don't know, it just... flows. For me anyway.

Storytelling, well, I don't know if things are looking that much better in this area than they did previously. But looking back, and thinking of the stories of the games I played 10 years ago or so, I have to say that many weren't that great either. Many clichées and other stuff that people will complain about when they see it in a modern game. And, yea, I can think of a number of newer games that told good, engaging, interesting, deep stories (for a game) too.

Well, at least that's my opinion. I don't think gaming are dead, I don't think games are getting worse. And there are plenty of relatively new games that I liked as much as the first games I played, despite me being less impressible than I was back them.

Edit: And I was even just thinking of AAA games here. On top of that you have the indie scene too. I don't know if they're really that much more creative than the AAA industry, seeing that many of the most hyped indie games are just recycling old ideas and tapping into nostalgia. But then again you got games like MineCraft too...

 

[Lilani]

-snip-

Short answer: no.

Long answer: nooooooooo.

The great thing about gaming journalism is that more than ever, gamers have a pretty good idea of where games are going and what causes them to go places.

The bad thing is that at times, all perspective is lost. The only aspect of games that has "declined" at all since 2001 is the AAA industry, and only in a few aspects, and certainly no more than one can say Hollywood movies have declined in the last couple of decades. The way I see it, we're damned near a renaissance. Kickstarters are going strong and lending power to indie developers, new markets are starting to cook up around the world, and mobile games are adding lots of jobs and lowering the bar of entry for professionally making games.

You tell someone that soon a certain business practice is going to bottom out and fall out of use, and they read that as ZOMG TRIPLE-A GAME CRASH IS ON THE HORIZON AAAAAAAAAAH!

No. That isn't what's going to happen. They will change if they're pushed far enough, and maybe a few companies will go under, but it isn't going to "crash." If you think there will be some massive gaming "crash" then you clearly misunderstand the circumstances that cause a crash. A crash is caused by all of a market's eggs being in one basket, and that basket failing. There are two things about the current AAA market that are going to prevent this from happening. First of all, our eggs aren't in just ONE basket. EA and Ubisoft are big, yeah, but they don't have total control over the entire games market. They may have quite a bit of power on consoles, but PC and handheld gaming would live on and mobile/kickstarter/indie games would be virtually unaffected.

And secondly, there are enough smaller companies waiting in the wings so that even if EA or Ubisoft failed, there wouldn't be an unfillable void left behind. Another aspect of a crash that makes it so devastating is that since all the eggs were in one basket, the void left behind cannot be filled by any other entity because it controlled so much of the market. But in games there are plenty of smaller distributors and developers that would be able to buy up the IPs and workforces and such left behind by the demise of even a company like EA. There would be no power vacuum because there are plenty of candidates out there that can fill the void. It'll be different, and the transition might be a bit rough, but EA and Ubisoft are not by any count irreplaceable.

So please, if you don't mind, get a bit of perspective before writing about this again. I'm trying really hard to not be belligerent here. It seems every three days we get somebody predicting a gaming apocalypse, and it's only getting more and more frustrating.

 

[kypsilon]

I'd like to see a complete AAA industry game crash. Nothing like a little armageddon once in a while to shake up the worst aspects of an industry and force some change...or at least a slow crawl back to the status-quo. That being said, kids today love the games coming out. They aren't saddled with the games of yesteryear in the same way that gamers who've had decades of great titles to fondly remember can be. I think the industry is being lazy, but my young niece just thinks the games are awesome. It's kind of weird to think that she'll look back on a certain set of games that I find repulsive, boring and uninspired as really awesome games. Perspective is everything here.

 

[briankoontz]

Since I was about twelve years old--in 2001--gaming has visibly been in a state of decline. ... And--of course--what do you guys think?

I disagree with much of what you wrote.

The AAA games market has been shitty ever since games became a huge industry in the 1990s. It may or may not have gotten worse in recent years but one very important positive change has occurred - the AAA industry isn't so relevant anymore.

Back in 2001, or in 1998 to reference your list of games, cheap games (Steam), free games, cell phone games, casual games, amateur games, pirated games, indie games, and the like barely existed relative to now. AAA games are now a minor, rather than a major, player in the games industry.

It's as if your post is from the year 2005, when a case could be made for what you're saying. We now live in a brave new world of gaming, noone has a complete understanding of where we are now much less what's coming next, but we're going to find soon that the AAA game industry can't keep doing business as usual if they want to remain even a minor player in the industry.

Some of the best games I've played in the past few years, games like Kingdom Rush, Bloons TD 5, I Wanna Be the Guy (and sequel), Fancy Pants Adventure, and Desktop Dungeons, are some of the best games ever made, as good as Dishonored or Dark Souls for a fraction of the budget (ok maybe not as good as Dark Souls).

A lot of gamers are biased against low budget games, but once you give them a chance you find how amazing they can be.

 

[ThriKreen]

So with the mainstream game industry in a ruinous creative state, and indie designers failing to fill the void, the new question becomes: whereto from here?

I don't think indie games are failing to fill the void, if anything they're just bringing the dev process more out into the open.

In the AAA space, you only hear about cancelled projects that were previously announced, but never the tons of unannounced projects that were cancelled, never to see the light of day. I should know, I was part of one ... a year of promising work down the drain. =(

With indie, we hear of a lot more ideas get pushed forward and advertised, since obviously they have to drum up support and funding with support sites like KickStarter and Indiegogo. So even poor ideas could get enough funding to push to release, then we see it do badly.

What would have normally been a behind the scenes evaluation where it gets stopped there, instead now it gets further along in dev process to release, giving the perception the failure rate is much higher in the indie scene, when it's most likely the same percentage as AAA (obviously there are some exceptions).

It's like user generated content in games like Neverwinter Nights and the MMO, Little Big Planet, TF2 maps, etc. We'll always end up with content following a bell curve of quality of bad stuff, average stuff, good stuff and a very small percentage of the truly excellent stuff.

Just that with normal pro development, you'd normally have a filter and should only see the (hopefully) above average to excellent stuff.

And shows how crucial good design and internal review can be.

 

[FalloutJack]

SNIP

Ah, so then what you believe is that gaming is climbing and climbing a hill of where it will eventually just drop off?

That's silly.

It requires you to be able to predict when human creativity will run out, and that is impossible to know. The MOMENT where that happens, humanity is dead anyway. We need diversions and things to strive for, so you'd best be hoping that imagination isn't quite as lacking as you believe.

 

[Manji187]

Opinion/ possible nostalgia goggles aside...there is definitely a case to be made that the quality of games has declined. Contemporary games are, on average, shorter (single player: 5-12 hours), less replayable (in terms of content/gameplay) and, for better or worse, more "streamlined" in their mechanics. Sure, on the other hand, the quality of things like graphics and voice-acting has gone up...but that's an improvement in breadth (technology), not depth (design).

 

[Auron]

The combat was basically just virtual D&D in the old CRPGs, it's actually coming back big time with Kickstarter a lot of people enjoyed it, don't think the UI was unintuitive particularly.

I know what it was. Perhaps if I actually played D&D I would've been able to appreciate it, but as it stands it pulls me out of the game far more than I like.

But this?

That's a pretty clunky UI.

Honestly, I'm hoping that Project Eternity and the new Torment won't be plagued by the same issues that pull me out of old CRPGs, because I love Knights of the Old Republic which basically uses the same rulesets, but tweaked slightly and given a Star Wars paint job.

I don't know I actually like the model, I think the feeling gets pretty close to real D&D. the actions are pretty simple overall excepting for magic users, other than do away with the menu buttons on the left it's probably going to be similar. Neverwinter nights and KOTOR were good as well though so I don't really have a general problem with it either way though.

Now Starcraft achieved the perfect balance for high level play and was being played until Blizzard made an effort to kill the korean tournaments to promote sc2. While you can say that RTS today is generally more comfortable I'm not so sure about being better. It was hard but not impossible.

I didn't say it's impossible, and I'm pretty bad at RTS games anyway, because I didn't grow up with them. I'm only just playing Starcraft for the first time and I'd certainly say I think it still holds up today. But the fact remains that, within the game as it exists independent of its sequel, a lot of things could stand to be vastly improved along the lines of AI pathfinding and the ease of micromanagement.

The pathfinding could have been better perhaps, especially the more clunky units like Dragoons, the Micro stuff was a design choice far as I'm aware(C&C was already done with unit limits a few years before sc.) and it really raises the game's skill roof. I'm actually fonder of the simpler more modern features in sc2, but sadly a lot of amazing tricks in the old engine were lost in the process.

I played Deus Ex and Human Revolution within the past couple of years. While Human Revolution was great--and yeah, you're right about a lot of aspects being improved--I thought it had a number of weaknesses that made it worse than the original, i.e. repetitive level design, a narrower range of gameplay possibilities, a worse storyline, a linear augmentation path, lame boss battles, etc. Actually, while Human Revolution was better than Invisible War, Invisible War didn't have a couple of the abovementioned problems.

Not so sure about the worse storyline, though I'd like a bit more integration and at times Jensen's a bit hapless in the cutscenes, my only real gripe with it was the "boss" stuff which they are fixing exclusively for the wii which sucks BIG TIME. Invisible War was a mass hallucination let's just agree on that.

 

[LetalisK]

No, it's fine. I mean, it has problems, but it's certainly not dieing. And your preferences, your opinions, are not fact. However, it is a fact that the gaming industry has been significantly growing in the last decade at a rate that puts the rest of the economy to shame and that 71 out of the top 100 best selling games are from 2000 and on[footnote]Even when omitting Wii Sports for obvious reasons. http://www.vgchartz.com/gamedb/[/footnote]. You don't have to like how it's grown or the products birthed from that growth, but you can't claim it's dead just because the games you like aren't being made as much anymore.

 

[Lilani]

I'd like to see a complete AAA industry game crash. Nothing like a little armageddon once in a while to shake up the worst aspects of an industry and force some change...or at least a slow crawl back to the status-quo. That being said, kids today love the games coming out. They aren't saddled with the games of yesteryear in the same way that gamers who've had decades of great titles to fondly remember can be. I think the industry is being lazy, but my young niece just thinks the games are awesome. It's kind of weird to think that she'll look back on a certain set of games that I find repulsive, boring and uninspired as really awesome games. Perspective is everything here.

Yeah, there's nothing like tens of thousands of people losing their livelihoods because a few games have come out that you don't like.

Seriously, come on. The past generations were as full of as much shit as the current generations. Of course only a handful of games are going to be remembered decades from now--how many movies can you recall from several decades ago, compared to how many were actually made?