The Dumbification of Gaming

[Mantonio]

Thing is, developers (and gamers) seem to think that unless your game sells millions of units in the first week, it's a complete flop. And that's just not true.

Also, why SHOULD they have to appeal to a wider and wider audience? This ties in with my first point, they don't need to to be successful, and indeed they perhaps in most cases have to specifically not do so if they want to fulfil their artistic vision free of the stifling compromise of publishers and marketing.

You try to appeal to everyone, and more often than not you end up making a game that's disappointing for everyone instead.

 

[Mantonio]

Feel this picture is appropriate:

Not sure what's sadder, the fact that FPS's have basically become hallways, or that I can run that DOOM map with my eyes closed...

Wooooow...it just hit me how true that is. I mean, that looks exactly like the progression in Black Ops. Seriously, that IS Black Ops. Get rid of all the shit around you, this is EXACTLY the same type of progression in Black Ops. Even Games like Gears or War, Halo, even Half Life 2 are formed like this. Sure, you can look into this area or that area but they just end. You've gone through this entire section that doesn't go anyway else. Best example: Bioshock. It's literally nothing but a bunch of hallways! In older game, like the original Half Life you had no clues, no hints, you just kept going. You had a bunch of different routes; their were a few dead ends, but most route either converged or the dead ends could be overcome. (sending a tram through a barricade) In Bioshock you're constantly being told where to go. To go to places you would have eventual found simply by reading the sign on a door! I mean look at this: http://www.combatsim.com/memb123/htm/2007/09/bioshock-p2b-14.jpg It looks complicated but it's just a bunch of interconnected hallways leading to rooms that go NOWHERE!!!

Edit: Oh and if there was an alternate route, you'd have to wait till a CUTSCENE to actually use it.

To be fair, Half Life 2 never endeavours to be open world. It's designed to be linear to better tell the story. Sure you can say it's just a bunch of corridors, but you could probably say the same about most games if you simplified it enough.

 

[Jumplion]

While that's obviously for comic effect, I would have to say that the current design of FPS maps are more linear but they provide more ways to approach a situation. With the old DOOM maps, as others have said, you could only enter a room with a key that was behind another room that needed another key, so you had to go in precise order and know exactly where and when to shoot (as you can do with your eyes closed ). Current FPS maps (at least the good ones) offer more variety in how your shoot something, at least.

Yes, but current maps completely killed exploration. As I said above, I'd be more than willing to accept old-style maps with the stupidity taken out. If current FPS's used the old-school design(but without the stupidity of levers, keys, ect.) they could flesh out their worlds without needing massive info-dumps. Which means less text to sift through and less people endlessly droning on about stuff.

It would give a sense of discovery(nobody told you about this stuff, YOU found it out on your own). It just offers plenty of great things.

Depending on how it's handled, sure. It's versatility vs. variety (if that makes any sense whatsoever), either have a versatile linear corridor so that you can discover new strategies, or go through a huge map where many areas will be unexplored or ignored. I think it borders on a sandbox approach, and some games just aren't meant for that. Obviously, there's nothing stopping these two aspects from merging together, they're not completely separate entities.

 

[JET1971]

I would like to mention some of the arguments and flaming that happens from a PC exclusive players point of view is sometimes in the interest of console players on the subject of dumbing down a game for consoles. it may or may not be true but I feel that publishers like EA think that console players are drooling basement dwelling mouth breathers who would be overwhelmed with a few features that PC games have had for years upon years such as a simple server lobby.

when many PC players complain and say they are dumbing down games for consoles they are not saying the console players are dumb we are saying the developers and publishers are saying that. we PC players want more features and content, or improved features we already have. and we are more than happy if console players got those same features. we are annoyed when features are removed for the sake of consoles rather than features added to console for the sake of PC. many console only players should back PC players when they complain about the dumbification of cross platform games instead of calling them PC elitist.

I guess my point is when in a forum as a console player and a PC player is complaining about the game being dumbed down for consoles, back the PC player up and demand the features too!

another thing on this topic I think developers should be doing is take a look at the game you want to make and where it should be as for player base that you want to buy the game. hardcore gamers? casual gamers? and build the game acordingly to the player base you are targeting rather than target everyone. case in point you dont make feminine hygine products for men so dont make casual games for hardcore players and hardcore games for casual players.

 

[RA92]

In fact, speaking of enemy AI, to assume that AI 10 years ago was ANYWHERE near complex as what we have today, is near insulting. To some people.

Newer games don't necessarily have better AIs. Compare the AI of Crysis 2 and Half Life 2. The Crysis AI might have more complex scripted behavior, but HL2 has overall better AI (never saw one running against the wall or circling idiotically), even though it was released around 7 years earlier.

Even more blatant is Half Life's AI. I have yet to see a recent FPS whose enemy AI tries to dominate you as aggressively (through out-flanking, suppression fire, flushing you out of cover with grenades, etc) as HL1's Marines did.

 

[draythefingerless]

In fact, speaking of enemy AI, to assume that AI 10 years ago was ANYWHERE near complex as what we have today, is near insulting. To some people.

Newer games don't necessarily have better AIs. Compare the AI of Crysis 2 and Half Life 2. The Crysis AI might have more complex scripted behavior, but HL2 has overall better AI (never saw one running against the wall or circling idiotically), even though it was released around 7 years earlier.

Even more blatant is Half Life's AI. I yet to see a recent FPS whose enemy AI tries to dominate you as aggressively (through out-flanking, suppression fire, flushing you out of cover with grenades, etc) as HL1's Marines did.

Again, a very narrow choice of examples. AIs have many formats. And yes, ive seen a lot of games that do that. post Half Life. And if you didnt notice, Marines only had THAT programming of thought. They wouldnt adopt other attitudes. Basically it was, Hes in far cover, toss grenade, hes close, melee. Also, most of the more complex fights in Half Life , were half-scripted, aka, you reached a certain part, game would tell enemies to go here or go there. Other cases of the out flanking was just them looking for cover. There was no suppression fire in Half Life. Only plain regular "imma kill you" fire. Kinda hard to have suppression fire if there is no squad/army/battalion to suppress... Half Life is a great game, but dont make it to be more than it is.

Also, i have seen cases of enemies running into walls or doing stupid stuff(oh lol let me run directly at him shooting, i wont get killed at all ) in Half Life 2. If anything, the ceph in Crysis 2 are quite intelligent(if they spot you). The way they maneuver around the terrain(completely non scripted) is quite clever.

 

[Waaghpowa]

To be fair, Half Life 2 never endeavours to be open world. It's designed to be linear to better tell the story. Sure you can say it's just a bunch of corridors, but you could probably say the same about most games if you simplified it enough.

The difference being that Half life never felt linear, and would allow you to explore to an extent, possibly finding special locations that help to tell the story of current events.

Yes, but current maps completely killed exploration. As I said above, I'd be more than willing to accept old-style maps with the stupidity taken out. If current FPS's used the old-school design(but without the stupidity of levers, keys, ect.) they could flesh out their worlds without needing massive info-dumps. Which means less text to sift through and less people endlessly droning on about stuff.

It would give a sense of discovery(nobody told you about this stuff, YOU found it out on your own). It just offers plenty of great things.

The lack of exploration is a big problem, too many fps's try for that cinematic thing which gets tiresome once it's done one hundred billion times.
The original Crysis is a good example of giving a certain level of freedom while sticking to a linear path. The environments were large enough that you could explore in order to find a different angle of attack, but ultimately led you to the same conclusion.

 

[RA92]

Also, most of the more complex fights in Half Life 2, were half-scripted, aka, you reached a certain part, game would tell enemies to go here or go there.

The single player campaign is a bad place to judge HL2's AI due to it's linear structure and scripted fights. It's better to try it out in Gmod.
Other cases of the out flanking was just them looking for cover. There was no suppression fire in Half Life. Only plain regular "imma kill you" fire. Kinda hard to have suppression fire if there is no squad/army/battalion to suppress... Half Life is a great game, but dont make it to be more than it is.[/quote]

HL1 Marines couldn't fire when they moved. The other marines used to lay down fire to support the ones outflanking you.

 

[Scars Unseen]

I blame the N-Gage-tards.

 

[Namewithheld]

I pretty much agree with the entire article...EXCEPT that SHODAN, while scary, was just a riff on Hal9000 for me. The overarching plot was a fairly simple sci-fi horror one. It was done REALLY REALLY WELL. Don't get me wrong: SS2 has one of the creepiest, most immersion filled plots ever, and the twist was awesome.

But Bioshock's plot had all of that, except the villain was actually somewhat tragic, as you see his optimistic beginnings and descent into madness and betrayal of everything that he had once believed in. And more, the twist in THAT game deconstructed the very concept of the whole FPS genera.

Yes, SS2's gameplay was better. But I still prefer Bioshock 2's story.

Now, I'm going to replay both, because they were regoddamn awesome.

 

[Zay-el]

Oh trust me, I know. The old ways are not much better. But I'd rather have them then what we have now. But of course a hybrid would be great. Or perhaps the old way with less stupidity(keys, levers, ect.).

I'd go with that no problem! Perhaps even some 'sculpuble' levels, in which if you behave badly with you weapon, say, misfiring a lot and shooting pillars, part of the level might collapse, forcing you to take another route. In case that's not available though, I could still go for simply somewhat bigger levels, WITHOUT the tedious backtracking. Let's be honest, Doom had huge levels, but how much shorter would they have been, WITHOUT keys and levers? I can accept some fetch-objectives every now and then, but only until it doesn't pad it out TOO much.

I think most devs just really scurried into the other end of the spectrum, actually, rather than finding that golden middle road.

 

[WanderingFool]

Oh trust me, I know. The old ways are not much better. But I'd rather have them then what we have now. But of course a hybrid would be great. Or perhaps the old way with less stupidity(keys, levers, ect.).

I'd go with that no problem! Perhaps even some 'sculpuble' levels, in which if you behave badly with you weapon, say, misfiring a lot and shooting pillars, part of the level might collapse, forcing you to take another route. In case that's not available though, I could still go for simply somewhat bigger levels, WITHOUT the tedious backtracking. Let's be honest, Doom had huge levels, but how much shorter would they have been, WITHOUT keys and levers? I can accept some fetch-objectives every now and then, but only until it doesn't pad it out TOO much.

I think most devs just really scurried into the other end of the spectrum, actually, rather than finding that golden middle road.

What I think would be a big step, is to keep the actual linearity of direction, but add different ways to get there. For my example, watch one of the DE:HR videos showing the different ways to complete a given objective. You want to get the job done quick? Grab a grenade launcher and blow shit up. You want to sneak in and not waste time fighting? Use stealth and sneak pastor subdue the guards, maybe cut the security connection so no alarms can be sounded. If developers were to simply add choice in how to tackle a problem, than simply telling you how you must proceed, I think things would probably get better pretty damn quick.

*Edit*

Actually, here is a video.

 

[DanDeFool]

The push for more sales really has made games easier and less complicated. It is the same reason instruction manuals have died a death. People don't want to have to read and learn in order to play so it has to get more simple.

Well, now we have tutorials. Back in the days of big, colorful manuals, games didn't have tutorials, either because there wasn't enough space on the distribution media to add one to the game, or they just didn't bother (because they were going to include a big, colorful manual).

Frankly, I kind of like the fact that games have gotten more accessible; it means I can play and enjoy more types of games. I remember trying to get into FA-18 Strike Eagle, an early air combat simulator. You literally have to learn how to fly a fighter jet just to be able to play that game, let alone finish it. I don't want to have to spend days or weeks mastering the mechanics of one game before I can even play it.

And we certainly don't need any more "Nintendo Hard" games that most of us mere mortals can't even finish.

As usual, I agree with Shamus. What we need are games with more scalable difficulty, greater depth for the players who want it, and more open-endedness for everyone.

 

[Shamanic Rhythm]

The biggest problem with the whole 'games are being dumbed-down' debate is that it tends to confuse difficulty with streamlining the interface and level design. Those are completely separate concepts which nevertheless feed back into the overall experience a player has with being 'challenged' by the game, but they're not usually the determining factors in how easy a game is. I've been playing games for about a decade now, and I don't think games have gotten any easier to complete.

An extremely complex interface contributed to Baldur's Gate II being a very challenging game to master, for instance, but I don't think complicating the player's interface to increase difficulty should be considered good design. It's like trying to play tennis with ropes attached to your every limb. Dragon Age II is a much easier game to play because the interface has been refined so it's a lot easier to find the fireball spell when you really need it, but at the same time, they've simplified the interface so much that most items no longer have a distinct portrait, taking much of the flavour out of the world. This doesn't really affect the difficulty, but it nevertheless gets lumped in with complaints that the game has been 'dumbed down'. In my mind it's more a case of lazy design.

As Samus points out, this mindset is primarily due to people having the perception that developers want to target a wider audience and are consequently making the game easier to get more people involved. I don't think that's the case, devs will always want more people to get involved, but publishers want them to get games out much faster than ever before, so they don't have time to put in complex game mechanics. Because of publishers, the dynamic has shifted away from 'huge game with 3-5 year development cycle' to 'game with 1-2 year development cycle with extra DLC'. Publishers love DLC for obvious reasons, but in developing extra DLC the devs can only really offer more scenarios for existing mechanics: they can't really make the game mechanics any more complex.

For those of you wanting something succinct to take away from this: gamers aren't to blame for the changes in design, corporatised publishing companies are.

 

[templargunman]

I actually found hard mode in new vegas pretty easy, I just had to tolerate a slightly less healthy character, it didn't effect enough of the game to be actually hard. I didn't even notice it was on most of the time.

 

[bassdrum]

I think that, at least to some degree, it's important to factor in development costs when you consider the 'dumbification' of games. Sure, accessibility is becoming more and more important as time goes on, but there's also the very real fact that the costs associated with making a game are ballooning. Back when Doom came out, games were developed by pretty small teams of people, and many art assets were still sprite based (and what true 3D elements there were were all pretty simple). Now, todays games are made by significantly larger teams (all of whom have to be paid, obviously) who are working with significantly more intricate details. This is a large part of why we're seeing more linear games with fewer enemy types in them: each branch in a path is another whole area which needs to be fully detailed and fleshed out, and must look and play differently from the other path. This takes a lot of time and money. Plus, putting a full menagerie of enemy types in involves actually MAKING those enemies, which means making the models, the animations, the sounds, setting the values (i.e. for damage, health, etc.)--even more time and money.

I'm not saying that this fully explains the simplification of games, its just that rising costs (in terms of both time and money) mean that streamlining is an effective way of getting the product out to the people who are going to pay for it sooner and at lower cost (and, as Shamus points out, there's the added bonus of accessibility, adding more potential customers, meaning more profit). Therefore, costs go down, consumer base grows, and anybody with a basic understanding of business can tell you that that's generally a good thing.

Regardless, in the end, it all comes down to decisions made by the developers which has very little to do with one group or another (you know, like PC or console gamers). In fact, in many ways it has absolutely NOTHING to do with how we play the games, but entirely with what makes them easier and more cost effective to make--for instance, I don't think that Bioware actually expected players to need (or even want) them to make Dragon Age II with only a handful of caves (which they recycle constantly), but by reusing variations of the same cave as many times as they did, they may have cut thousands of dollars and months of development time off of the game's overhead costs.

It's not a matter of accessibility or marketing to one fan base or another, it's just business.

 

[bushwhacker2k]

As the number of people who play videogames has grown, developers got the cash to make ever more expensive games. But that means they have to sell more copies, which means they need wider appeal, which means they can't aim at small markets like people who like complicated leveling systems and inventory management.

Pre-CISE-ly.

This is why I can't target any single group, because every group partially responsible for games becoming less innovative and more simple is justified in some way.

I really do hope gaming becomes more universal, then we can all go back to trying to make things interesting as opposed to accessible. I don't dislike games being accessible for the masses, but I don't want innovative games that aren't super player-friendly to suffer for it.

 

[draythefingerless]

Also, most of the more complex fights in Half Life 2, were half-scripted, aka, you reached a certain part, game would tell enemies to go here or go there.

The single player campaign is a bad place to judge HL2's AI due to it's linear structure and scripted fights. It's better to try it out in Gmod.
Other cases of the out flanking was just them looking for cover. There was no suppression fire in Half Life. Only plain regular "imma kill you" fire. Kinda hard to have suppression fire if there is no squad/army/battalion to suppress... Half Life is a great game, but dont make it to be more than it is.

HL1 Marines couldn't fire when they moved. The other marines used to lay down fire to support the ones outflanking you.[/quote]

i misstyped, i meant Half Lifes AI. Not Half Life 2s. Even then, saying The single player is a bad place to test it isnt really a supporting argument. :/

And thats pretty lame...they didnt fire to support the ones outflanking you, they fired cause they were trying to kill you. I assure you this happens by nature of the game, not by intent of the AI. Some are moving while some are shooting. If they all decide to move at the same time, no one is shooting you. In fact that happens when you have fewer enemies, or when they are entering an area.

 

[beema]

Yes yes and more yes. Excellent little article.
I think as humans we are always looking for some other group of people to blame for our problems. It exists in every facet of society and every period of history.
It's just a shame we waste all this angry energy on eachother when we could be using the energy to make things better in some way.

Feel this picture is appropriate:

LOL
that's awesome man (and yes very appropriate). Where is it from?

 

[pandasaw]

Feel this picture is appropriate:

Not sure what's sadder, the fact that FPS's have basically become hallways, or that I can run that DOOM map with my eyes closed...

While that's obviously for comic effect, I would have to say that the current design of FPS maps are more linear but they provide more ways to approach a situation. With the old DOOM maps, as others have said, you could only enter a room with a key that was behind another room that needed another key, so you had to go in precise order and know exactly where and when to shoot (as you can do with your eyes closed ). Current FPS maps (at least the good ones) offer more variety in how your shoot something, at least.

Linnearity is not always a bad thing. Saw this video on the same subject at G4tv and I agree with it 100%.
http://www.g4tv.com/thefeed/blog/post/711199/crysis-2-linear-and-loving-it-sesslers-soapbox/