Is gaming dead?

[SonOfVoorhees]

No. Me personally, there are less and less titles that i have interest in. But overall, there will always be people that want to game. Kids born today will be gamers of the future. An while tech changes and distribution changes, there will always be a market for it.

 

[Andy of Comix Inc]

Yes. Gaming is dead. Definitely. It is metaphorically and literally a rotting, stinking corpse, probably under your or someone you know's floorboards because the funeral expenses were unjustifiable.

Next question.

 

[RomanceIsDead]

Playing Dota 2 and loving it. It feels good to have just discovered a game that can safely fit within my top 20 all time games. I choose the path of creation. I hold games like WoW, pokemon, Metroid Prime, and Gears of War on a pedestel but I intend to become a game designer and make games that live up to that kind of developmental passion and scope of world and economy.

 

[shrekfan246]

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.

 

[Talshere]

snip

I think part of the problem is that we have been stuck in this current generation for to long. Its by miles the longest generation on record and with the controls all remaining the same and hardware not developing where are we to go? When we went from 2D to 2.5D to 3D there are fundamentally more aspects to explore because you can add more real world depth because things are possible in 3D that simply cant be done in 2.5D. This lead in a large part to the opening up of new genres.

The lack of new hardware and also engines also stagnates creativity because you get stuck with the same people working in the same engine all of the time, thus its easy to become complacent. When you look towards how steam and to a lesser extent XBLA have allowed new games to flourish it undercuts the stagnation of AAA. Games like Slender (which admittedly is DRM free), Amnesia and even Limbo have shown us how horror games can be done with new age hardware, something that has died since the PS1 silent hills really. The acclimation of games like Journey and the Walking dead are also now leading us back into more story driven play. The new Dragon Age has been given back to the original writer and developer because the action delivered in DA2 caused it to flop massively against its predecessor. We have also seen the rise of Kickstarter with Adventure games and space sims being put mack on the map by Double Fine, Star Citizen and Wasteland 2 which have become so big they effectively have AAA budgets (Star Citizen has nearly hit 10 million http://www.robertsspaceindustries.com/). We also have revivals of other dead genras comeing out like the spiritual successor to Dungeon keeper 2, Wor of the Overworld.

While all this may seem like just rehashing old games it has in most cases taken control away from publishers that refuse to try new things which will in ture, hopefully, drive new innervation. Gaming development is all about succession of ideas, iteration on the past, so this anti pub revival of older forgotten and brushed aside titles is 1) good for innovation as the new devs have 10+ years of successes and mistakes to innervate on. It also 2) shows AAA devs that these genres are worth developing for. Recently the rights for Homeworld were auctioned off by Relic. A kicksterter group raised enough money to (over 100k) to buy the rights so they could have #3 developed. They didnt win but because of that it is almost certain we will now get a new Homeworld, where otherwise the series would have just continued into obscurity.


Is AAA gaming stagnet. Yes, very much so. They still produce some nice games but they are very samey. This peak around the time of Army of 2. But new released very much in the indie/crowd funded world are exploring new ways of making games and telling stories. The money some of this games are racking in will, imo, start to bring us new games in old places from AAA devs.

 

[EzraPound]

I don't want to go too off-topic, but you don't really assert why the games from pre-2001 are actually better. It's safe to say there is a degree of homogenisation in the current AAA market, but that doesn't mean there are brilliant examples of the form therein. Plus, you ignore everything that is not in the AAA market atm. I know they don't get as much publicity, but there are plenty of weird and interesting games being produced for PC especially.

I think games now are kind of like movies in the 50s. All the big studios trying to out-do each other with massive productions that need to make massive returns to make a profit. Instead of the nuclear family they pander mainly to white, hetero men. When this system of making movies collapsed under its own weight, there followed a period where Hollywood started to fund smaller projects with more risk but which needed a smaller return to succeed and which tried to pander to as-yet-ignored demographics. This period birthed a lot of talent that is still revered today, like Scorcese, Coppola, Spielberg etc.

I'm just hoping we get our own 'Hollywood Renaissance'.

I actually did--I commented that things were better in the nineties because of a rare combination of financial accessibility and corporate finesse, and because the robust state of the economy and the constant graphical upheavals engendered far more risk-taking than at present.

And yeah, I'm actually guilty of not paying enough attention to indie game. Maybe when I do, I'll be more optimistic; however, I'm still convinced this is an awkward, transitional point in gaming's history.

snip

I think part of the problem is that we have been stuck in this current generation for to long. Its by miles the longest generation on record and with the controls all remaining the same and hardware not developing where are we to go? When we went from 2D to 2.5D to 3D there are fundamentally more aspects to explore because you can add more real world depth because things are possible in 3D that simply cant be done in 2.5D. This lead in a large part to the opening up of new genres.

And yet, the graphics upgrade offered by this generation did little to foster innovation... with each generational shift, the changes offered by graphical improvements seem to become more subtle.

 

[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.