Poll: What is holding gaming back, as an industry?

[johnnnny guitar]

I would say just consoles but its a mixture of consoles and the xbox 360's DVD only format for games

 

[Jack and Calumon]

Big budgets.

Nothing like creating an entrance barrier the height of Taipei 101 for people to make games like they see everywhere. Want to get there with the big boys? Tough, now get out of here with your crappy indie games!

Seriously, need to find a way to make games in a more affordable manner. I mean, modern technology sure isn't helping.

Calumon: Controllers that are bigger than me. T.T

 

[Kahunaburger]

Second, the Nuke scene alone has changed the way we look at gamings use of inevitable death - the post fallout poisoning scene is one of the most powerful gaming moments in terms of the subversion of ou instinctive reaction to taking damage but still being alive in a game - that being that there is a way to fix this, and to take shelter, even as we just keep on dying, thus mirroring the desperate struggling of a man dying in the wake of a nuclear bomb.

Shade did it a decade earlier and did it better.

 

[Calcium]

One part of the resulting discussion interests me: that being that the current hardware of consoles is holding back games by holding back AI.

Now, this just makes me think of Age of Empires 2 VS Empire Earth. Both (initially at least) PC games with the "power" of the PC. And these games are both real time strategies, arguably at home on the PC. But how did the developers approach them?

Age of Empires 2 used AIs which actually played like a player (at least on the Easy/Standard/Moderate (possibly Hard) settings): they didn't cheat and used only what they knew.

Empire Earth on the other hand which was released later, used hopeless AI. Seriously, I remember changing the options in a custom scenario to disable AI cheating and in the resulting match the AI which normally pummelled me didn't even seem to recognise it had run out of a resource and refused to reassign it's villagers to collect said resource.

The point I'm making here is that developers can have the power to do something, but can just go "meh" and take the easy route. And this was a genre were AI is arguably more important than graphics.

But to be on topic, I'm not going to vote any option as I don't feel any one of them is holding back gaming.

 

[Patrick Buck]

Gamers. The community. If people buy deeper, story based, or well designed origninal games, the companys will be force to make bigger, better games.

But if we continue to buy games like call of duty: the fiftyth, gaming culture will stagnate and rot like a dead badger at the side of the road.

 

[RJ 17]

I'd say the community. As a specific example to point to, look at how the community is snuffing out innovation and risk-taking.

We piss and moan when we're handed the same bland, cliche format or story or ending, yet when the industry tries to give us something new we say "Holy shit what the fuck were you guys thinking you're ruining my game that you all made!"

We need to be more open to new ideas and not just say that we are.

The thing is that people want something new and good, not just something new. Dragon Age 2 wasn't disliked because it almost did something interesting with an unreliable narrator, it was disliked because it was rushed and poorly written. Metroid: Other M wasn't disliked because it did something new with the Metroid series, it was disliked because it was sexist, badly paced, and badly written.

And that's kinda what I'm talking about. Personally I thought DA:2 was quite well written and drawn out, but most people couldn't get past the copy-paste dungeons which, I fully agree, is a massive negative towards the game. And those that could get past the mechanical issues would likely take issue with the storytelling itself, and this is what getting more towards what I was talking about.

At least from what I've seen around these forums, most people hated the narrative style. They didn't like how it was so intensely character-centric, showing the "day-to-day" life of Hawke and telling the story of how he/she rose from being a refugee to (possibly) ruler of Kirkwall. They believed it had absolutely nothing to do with DA:O except for a few loose tie-ins here and there, and as such it was not a worthy nor proper sequel. They say the plot meanders around and has no central focus (which simply isn't true). DA:2, to me, was an experiment in story-telling, one that it seems the majority of the audience completely missed.

But I'm not hear to argue DA:2's story, I've already done that in one of the first topics I made here.

The thing is that people want something new and good, not just something new.

Now this is more indicative of what I'm talking about. Game companies are getting too afraid to try anything new for fear that it won't be good. So we get they stick with what's safe, what's been working, and we get games like CoD: The Fourth Reich, Halo: Reach For More Straws Because We Still Haven't Quite Beaten The Death Out of This Horse (aka Halo: RFMSBWSHQBTDOoTH), Generic JRPG That's Trying Too Hard To Just Be An Interactive Anime, Generic WRPG That's Just Retelling LotR, etc.

 

[Kahunaburger]

I'd say the community. As a specific example to point to, look at how the community is snuffing out innovation and risk-taking.

We piss and moan when we're handed the same bland, cliche format or story or ending, yet when the industry tries to give us something new we say "Holy shit what the fuck were you guys thinking you're ruining my game that you all made!"

We need to be more open to new ideas and not just say that we are.

The thing is that people want something new and good, not just something new. Dragon Age 2 wasn't disliked because it almost did something interesting with an unreliable narrator, it was disliked because it was rushed and poorly written. Metroid: Other M wasn't disliked because it did something new with the Metroid series, it was disliked because it was sexist, badly paced, and badly written.

And that's kinda what I'm talking about. Personally I thought DA:2 was quite well written and drawn out, but most people couldn't get past the copy-paste dungeons which, I fully agree, is a massive negative towards the game. And those that could get past the mechanical issues would likely take issue with the storytelling itself, and this is what getting more towards what I was talking about.

At least from what I've seen around these forums, most people hated the narrative style. They didn't like how it was so intensely character-centric, showing the "day-to-day" life of Hawke and telling the story of how he/she rose from being a refugee to (possibly) ruler of Kirkwall. They believed it had absolutely nothing to do with DA:O except for a few loose tie-ins here and there, and as such it was not a worthy nor proper sequel. They say the plot meanders around and has no central focus (which simply isn't true). DA:2, to me, was an experiment in story-telling, one that it seems the majority of the audience completely missed.

Sorry, man, you're not going to be able to convince me that a game that features "I like big boats and I cannot lie" (lifted, I believe, from Eragon of all things), "there's always a catch! Life is a catch! I suggest you catch it while you can," "boneless women," a reprisal of the "Enchantment!" and "swooping is bad" jokes we just couldn't get enough of in DA:O, Merrill, and a pathological hatred of choice & consequence is well-written.

(Also, Recettear did the same slice-of-life thing, did it better, and was universally loved. Dragon Age 2's problem was not that it tried something new, it was that it failed miserably at what it tried to do.)

The thing is that people want something new and good, not just something new.

Now this is more indicative of what I'm talking about. Game companies are getting too afraid to try anything new for fear that it won't be good. So we get they stick with what's safe, what's been working, and we get games like CoD: The Fourth Reich, Halo: Reach For More Straws Because We Still Haven't Quite Beaten The Death Out of This Horse (aka Halo: RFMSBWSHQBTDOoTH), Generic JRPG That's Trying Too Hard To Just Be An Interactive Anime, Generic WRPG That's Just Retelling LotR, etc.

That's not really correct - the indie scene (likely joined by kickstarter) is supplying an absurd amount of innovation. Incidentally also demonstrating that gamers love new things (World of Goo, anyone) as long as they're new and good.

 

[Something Amyss]

Consoles. 'Nuff said.

You mean the biggest reason why videogames are so popular and why dev companies have such huge budgets?

Yeah, consoles are definately holding gaming back.

Stop being logical, dammit! My elitism transcends logic!

 

[Casual Shinji]

Nothing is holding games back.

And that's the problem.

Games have become too bloated and saturated with their own "epicness".

 

[RJ 17]

Sorry, man, you're not going to be able to convince me that a game that features "I like big boats and I cannot lie" (lifted, I believe, from Eragon of all things), "there's always a catch! Life is a catch! I suggest you catch it while you can," "boneless women," a reprisal of the "Enchantment!" and "swooping is bad" jokes we just couldn't get enough of in DA:O, Merrill, and a pathological hatred of choice & consequence is well-written.

As I mentioned, I'm done trying to defend DA:2's story and as such won't get into it here. I've already done my best for it ad nauseum in other various topics and don't want to get into it here. All I'll say is that we'd essentially end up talking about 2 different things, as I'm not saying all of the above isn't true.

Edit to fix quotes:

That's not really correct - the indie scene (likely joined by kickstarter) is supplying an absurd amount of innovation. Incidentally also demonstrating that gamers love new things (World of Goo, anyone) as long as they're new and good.

Well then this raises the question of "Why is the indie scene the only place with innovation?" To which I'd suggest the answer is "Because (as mentioned in my original response to this topic) gamers have terrified the mainstream developers into (mostly) giving up on trying new things and innovations." Why is it that when the mainstream tries something new, 9 times out of 10 the response they get is "OMG WTF?!" yet when an indie company tries something new, 9 times out of 10 it's "ABSOLUTELY BRILLIANT!"? Seems to me that more and more gamers are becoming like a bunch of hipsters that don't like games made by big companies purely BECAUSE they were made by big companies (and no, I'm not saying the faults they pick out of games aren't valid).

 

[Kahunaburger]

That's not really correct - the indie scene (likely joined by kickstarter) is supplying an absurd amount of innovation. Incidentally also demonstrating that gamers love new things (World of Goo, anyone) as long as they're new and good.

Well then this raises the question of "Why is the indie scene the only place with innovation?" To which I'd suggest the answer is "Because (as mentioned in my original response to this topic) gamers have terrified the mainstream developers into (mostly) giving up on trying new things and innovations." Why is it that when the mainstream tries something new, 9 times out of 10 the response they get is "OMG WTF?!" yet when an indie company tries something new, 9 times out of 10 it's "ABSOLUTELY BRILLIANT!"? Seems to me that more and more gamers are becoming like a bunch of hipsters that don't like games made by big companies purely BECAUSE they were made by big companies (and no, I'm not saying the faults they pick out of games aren't valid).

Players don't mind innovations by big monolithic corporations when the innovations are, you know, good. See also: Portal, Catherine, and that one series where you run around Renaissance Italy shanking people.

You can make a very good case that we tend to see more innovation in the indie scene for two major reasons:

A) Lower budgets mean that the game can afford to take more risks. You don't have to convince some suit that people are going to want to buy your game about building 2-D structures out of sentient balls of goo.
B) To get noticed at all, an indie game has to stand out somehow, generally through innovative mechanics. For every Braid or Limbo, there are ten pretentious puzzle platformers we've never heard of. AAA games don't work this way - they get noticed through marketing. So the subset of indie games that we notice at all tend to, unlike the AAA games we notice, be slanted towards the most innovative ones.

 

[RJ 17]

Snip

So indie games are more likely to innovate 1: Because they can essentially say "screw it" due to having a smaller budget and thus can feel free to take bigger risks so that they can 2: Get their game noticed in the midst of the AAA games. Fair enough, I can accept that. But are both of those things (small budget/lack of attention) REQUIRED for good innovation? I'd argue they're not. I'd argue that if DA:2 had been made by an indie company, people would have found the story-telling format to be very intriguing (and they likely would have also excused such horrible mechanical features such as the copy-pasted dungeons as "Well they were working on a tight budget") and not something to condemn. Course there's no way to prove this hypothesis, it's just my thoughts on the matter.

 

[Coldster]

I would say its a massive combination of things, but right now I think its mostly the focusing on the FPS genre. I like Call of Duty and love the latest Battlefield games, but now everyone is copying them to get a cut of the millions and millions of dollars that they make. That needs to change if this industry wants to go anywhere. I also realize that large corporations like EA are kinda behind this because they are the ones that fund those games in the first place.

 

[Kahunaburger]

Snip

So indie games are more likely to innovate 1: Because they can essentially say "screw it" due to having a smaller budget and thus can feel free to take bigger risks so that they can 2: Get their game noticed in the midst of the AAA games. Fair enough, I can accept that. But are both of those things (small budget/lack of attention) REQUIRED for good innovation? I'd argue they're not.

I agree with you - the Assassin's Creed series is pretty innovative (parkour through historical architecture, blend into crowds, listen to convoluted conspiracy theories, and shank historical figures who died mysteriously during the game's time period!) and it's got a massive budget.

I'd argue that if DA:2 had been made by an indie company, people would have found the story-telling format to be very intriguing (and they likely would have also excused such horrible mechanical features such as the copy-pasted dungeons as "Well they were working on a tight budget") and not something to condemn. Course there's no way to prove this hypothesis, it's just my thoughts on the matter.

DA:2 would probably be considered to have high production values for an indie project, but even fewer people would have given the writing the time of day if it were done by someone other than Bioware, Masters of Storytelling.

 

[Kristian Fischer]

Well, among other things, the image of videogaming as an immature passtime for sweaty mouthbreathers who live in their parents' basements. This is not being helped by whining nerd ragers like the so-called "Take Back Mass Effect" morons.

 

[Quesa]

Segmentation. The fact that there are exclusives, regardless of the platform. That the best way companies can find to fight segmentation is to dilute every element from input to content. If the end result of this is putting a hat on and getting that 'I win' rush on one setting and an orgasm on the other, I'd rather stick with DOS games, personally.

 

[More Fun To Compute]

What holds the industry back is the myth that at the heart of games is something called "the games industry" that is a very important and valuable thing. More important than people playing games, making games or talking about games. All because it has things like serious careers, conferences and people talking in very flowery language about how important they are and how their revolutionary concepts that can move the games industry forward are being unjustly held back just because nobody likes them.

 

[RJ 17]

DA:2 would probably be considered to have high production values for an indie project, but even fewer people would have given the writing the time of day if it were done by someone other than Bioware, Masters of Storytelling.

And this brings me right back to this point:

Seems to me that more and more gamers are becoming like a bunch of hipsters that don't like games made by big companies purely BECAUSE they were made by big companies (and no, I'm not saying the faults they pick out of games aren't valid).

For full disclosure: I graduated with an English major and a minor in Creative Writing, so to me story is a huge part of whether or not I like a game. I'm not trying to qualify myself as some kind of expert on game writing, just give you perspective as to where my opinion is coming from. Personally I loved DA:2's story and, in particular, the story telling style while others would say that both of those are actually two of the biggest negatives for the game.

People didn't like Bioware trying out this format of story telling strictly because it's Bioware, and what they did was outside of their norms. Which brings me back to what I had just said before: I'd argue the opposite, that if DA:2 was an indie game, people would have been more appreciative of it's story telling than they are now. But again, there's no way to prove this hypothesis.

 

[Dandark]

I wouldn't say gaming is being held back, although I voted Big corporations like EA and Activision because although the crap they pull isn't holding it back by much, it isn't exactly urging it forward either.