Plus ca change, plus c''est meme.

500

It''s age. Today I sit and think of my favorite games of all time and immediately say Mike Tyson''s Punch Out, Tecmo Super Bowl that let you control a team in a season first of its kind, and Super Mario Kart. I think they''re only memorable because I played em at endless amounts and with friends and enjoyed them so much. Games today I still enjoy but who''s to say now that I won''t be looking back at them in 5 years trying to reinstall them?

Ask anyone in the gaming business today what the business has become and they will all say it''s like movies or Hollywood now. Full motion videos fill games and all try to become epics rather than just entertaining games. I think games that refuse to do this are more successful. For example Counter-strike where it''s simple kill shoot bomb win repeat. We grew up on Arcade games that you played quickly and repeated often and the games today are more like movies where you either really like it or hate it. Just imagine a blockbuster with a big budget with no story or point of seeing it, think Waterworld.

I still enjoy some of the old school classics like any of the Super Mario Bros games, the many Mega Man games, etc. I still play them from time to time (on my SNES and on emulators). They're still fun (not as much as they used to be, but more so than a lot of the games coming out now). I think part of the reason the old days are considered good is that there were less games overall, and thus it was easier to find the ones you liked. With the billions of games coming out daily that there are now, its more difficult to locate quality work. Also, because of hardware and software advances, technology seems a lot more important to game making companies than it used to be. Graphics seems to be the number 1 consideration right now, with gameplay coming in nearly last. Game companies seems to spend 90% of the time getting then engine and art done and 10% of the dev time turning it into a game (see id software). There are very few companies that have different priorities. Valve software seems to be one. They made a great game (imo) and put in some new technology, but they didn't have a problem using a base made by somebody else. They didn't have the need to show off their "1337 skillz" by making a better graphics engine from scratch, they just took a good base and added a few things and then used it in a nice game.

[edited by - Extrarius on February 23, 2003 12:34:31 AM]

look up the following term: "hindsight bias"

Implied Veracity. It's a problem for us old-timers. Game worlds are having a more difficult time spellbinding a lot of us because of the complexity to managability ratio of the game environments and gameplay. Simple worlds make you expect less, complex worlds more. Most modern complexity comes in the form of graphics, but without corresponding interactivity.

The amount of things you can do, places you can go, or creativity/ingenuity you can employ is becoming more limited in direct proportion to how realistic the game worlds are becoming, compared to old games.** This is because the mounting expectation of veracity (the gaming cousin to suspension of disbelief) requires more and more development time as the game becomes more "lifelike."

Example: Civilization. Tiles, icons, menus. Flat, relatively easy to draw, probably a 50-50 balance between assets and coding expense (if that).

Now look at Civilization III. Isometric rendered tile world with dozens of variations on the tiles. Units with ambient animations (sneezing, looking around). Faces and clothing for different cultures, leaders and time periods. Facial expressions, soundtracks for each time period, and cut-scenes.

I'm not saying this is bad, I'm saying that veracity is a silent killer. It siphons time, money and energy that could be spent on gameplay. Gamers expect prettier worlds. Designers, knowing they must be competitive, have to keep up.

The core problem lies when those worlds are pretty but empty(what I call "bimbo syndrome"). It's not enough, for instance, to have a city in a game. We want things like people, telephone booths, and buildings we can enter because this is what a city would have.

As the world increases in graphical realism we subconsciously expect it to increase in affordance or usability. If there are realistic looking people, we expect to be able to talk to them. If we can, we then expect they should respond in a spoken voice. If they have voices, we then expect little or no repetition in voice or what they have to say. Every time we don't get what we expect, our "suspension of disbelief" is jarred and we are dissatisfied.

And so it goes, an economic nightmare that is only going to increase as games become more beautiful and lifelike.




** = Take Starflight (1982?) for example: 200 stars, 800 planets, dozens of creatures, 7 species with dialog and pictures, RPG aspects, and special items, all in a cosmos with a progressing storyline (on 2 floppies). The equivalent demand in veracity would probably make such a game done to modern standards utterly impossible, because the expense of doing every one of the above elements has exploded geometically. Hence it's more profitable to do tightly contained, scripted, level based game worlds which are easier to put together, easier to design, and easier to test / debug.

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Just waiting for the mothership...

[edited by - Wavinator on February 24, 2003 3:26:31 AM]

Following MadK''s post concerning expectation:

Its all very true. When you play a game one of the big factors is interaction. If a game has more avenues of interaction then players expect more. I dunno. I suddenly lost the will to post.

ICO (for the PS2) is a wonderful game. Only lasted seven hours but it is truely wonderful. It is also artistic. I am glad I played it. ICO also did not have "a whole lot to it" and I didn''t expect much from it either but it is a good game.

Videogames are about discovery for me (explorer type) and the internet helps us discover games even before we play them. DOOM was the first surival horror game I ever played but I didn''t know it was a surival horror game. Being younger I described it as: "Your this guy in space and all your buddies died! There are these monsters and everything is really messed up!" But also in this discovery of games a lot of charm is lost. Installing Monkey Island based on namesake alone was a trilling thing. What sort of game was it going to be?

There are plenty of classic games out there still. You just have to look beyond the "big games" of the month. Alpha Centurai got a 98% from PCGamer and was wholely ignored by most people a month later. People are fickle.

I don''t know what I am writing! Ok. Sum it up. ICO good. Games good. Some bad. Play what you enjoy. Don''t sweat the small stuff because games aren''t really going anywhere. Quality will not wholly abandon an industry. Compatition creates further demand.

???

quote:

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Original post by Wavinator
Implied Veracity. It''s a problem for us old-timers. Game worlds are having a more difficult time spellbinding a lot of us because of the complexity to managability ratio of the game environments and gameplay. Simple worlds make you expect less, complex worlds more. Most modern complexity comes in the form of graphics, but without corresponding interactivity.

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Does this mean you think games should all be more abstract? There are advantages to both and people do still make some very abstract games. I believe that there are still games being made with the "complexity" (which can be deceiving in a more abstract game that''s lacking details) of Starflight, even if they don''t have the same physical distance, if you looked at the explorable space in a game like GTA3, Morrowind or Freelancer it would be

I also really don''t believe the common opinion that graphics are destroying gameplay. You can argue that graphics (and other features like more complex AI, 3D sound, scripted sequences and writing, etc.) are making development times too long or development costs too high, but I really don''t see how there is a direct correlation between quality of graphics and quality of gameplay. In the "good old days" you had smaller staffs, and games took less time to produce. To keep up with technology, art, and content developer''s hire more programmers, artists and designers as opposed to removing current gameplay oriented positions. Also, contary to popular belief, writing a pretty renderer is not necessarily the most difficult task associated with game development and is definitely not the majority of the code even in a graphically impressive engine like Unreal or Doom III.

Also, just because the quality of graphics gets better, doesn''t mean the time and manpower needed to write the renderer increases at all (in fact it may even decrease.) A programmer capable of writting a good renderer is not necessarily a good game designer or good at writing gameplay oriented code.

Better graphics do not necessarily affect art and content either. Although the art gets more detailed, a lot of artists find it more difficult and time consuming to do a good low polygon model or even a 2D sprite than to do a higher polygon model that looks better. Note, that the programming and art comparisions work for games with maybe, 10 yearold technology at the oldest. If you compare NES graphics and content with PS2 graphics and content then of course the NES game will be a lot less resource heavy.

One thing that better graphics and more content do hurt is innovation. If you have to spend more time and money on a game you don''t want to experiment with it because the chances of ending up with a game design that just isn''t fun are a lot higher. In theory, if your engine is robust enough, you can develop technology that can build a wide variety of different games and is easily tweakable (hence the appeal of scripting languages.)

Do you really believe that going back to making old style games with NES graphics would lead to better gameplay overall, especially with todays hardware, programming languages and APIs? Chances are you''d just end up with a lot of (at least 10 if not 100 times) more games than there are now and a lot of them would be very, very bad and highly derivative (think atari crash times 100.)

I do not believe graphics are more important than gameplay, and I love (and often play) older games. I just don''t think that graphics are destroying the game industry (although I''m not so sure about scripted sequences) and I definitely don''t agree with the opinion that older games are superior to current titles (not that current titles are necessarily superior to older titles.) In my opinion it''s like movies, there are good older movies and good new movies, you need to look at them at a title by titles basis and not just group them by release date.

I definitely wouldn''t mind seeing graphics go backwards a little (not back to the NES, but back to Quake 1 wouldn''t bother me much) __IF__ it would mean other fields would get more work done on them, like AI for game agents and worlds that are truly interactive (GTA3 was not a free world imo, it was a standard RPG minus stats and items plus the ability to hurt the NPCs). I''d love to see an RPG where the NPCs had as much understand of english as the SHRDLU program. It would be fun to talk to NPCs and gain allies and be able to take some off and build a kingdom brick by brick(ok, maybe wall by wall, but not just a generic prefab castle model) instead of clicking the "make castle here button"(Which doesn''t even exist in many games). It would be nice if it was hard to tell the difference between NPCs and PCs because the NPCs could send messages via text just as well as human players and could parse your response almost as well.

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Almost typo-ified using Extrarius'' AUTOMATIC Typo Generator, but I decided to be nice =-)

Just to comment on a (relatively) old game that''s still loads of fun - Thief: The Dark Project. It was my favorite game for the longest time, and I recently played it again for the first time in about 4 years. I still love it. It''s an amazingly atmospheric, scary, huge, fun game. It''s also a good example of gameplay/graphics, because it came out at about the same time as Unreal, and its graphics are way more primitive...but it''s a LOT more fun

Oh, and guess where my handle is from :D

-Tim

I think that the magic is lost. Computer games are so common, so "old" these days that just doesn't surprise us anymore.

Do you remember yourself playing pac-man and time-pilot at videogame galleries for hours? (before the personal computers)

And then the commodore, colleco-vision, pc arrived and WTF! Look at this! I think that emotion will die with us, the ones who *lived* the difference between a world without and with computers.

Or something like that

[edited by - xaxa on February 26, 2003 2:46:38 AM]