"It's not like anybody ran focus group tests to determine the viability of such games. No, it comes down to what the developers and designers and publishers think should be made. It has nothing to do with what consumers want."

...because publishers don't do focus testing to determine what is likely to make money? Developers pitch games all the time which are shot by publishers as niche.

"And since they're all so fundamentally similar, why don't they use successive iterations of the same tech, saving time and money for other projects?"

...perhaps Epic and Id should start licensing their engines. I apologize for the sarcasm, but tech reuse is huge. Sure, such titles still require programming for specialization/new features, but hardly anyone starts from scratch each iteration. Heck, many publishers see this as too risky and won't fund a title that is all new tech anyway.

I would suggest that the reason games are becoming more polarized is the cost of developing a game these days. A few years ago, 200,000 copies sold was considered a moderate hit. Now a game that doesn't sell a million across all platforms is a failure. This is a direct result of the cost of developing a game increasing; it has reduced the visibility of many genres as the dev cost exceeded the profits.

Finally, people in this thread are making a lot of judgements about the quality of games out there. Keep in mind that a game you consider rubish make be someone elses favorite title. As much as people like beating up Valve for CS/CS:Source, it is massively popular. Several of my favorite titles over the last few years probably won't get sequels because, while critical successes, they were commercial failures.

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Original post by Oluseyi I despise RPGs because there's a lack of role-playing with them and an excess of statistical/numerical obsession.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't there a number of non-statistical online RPGs where the community gets together to decide rules and real human beings interact with each other? I would have had to concede this 10 years ago, but I don't think this complaint has any basis nowadays. Why aren't you playing something like A Tale In The Desert?

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I don't play reflex games on my PC because the keyboard is an awkward device (some of you disagree, but it's really mouselook you're enamored of).

Why don't console games suffice, then? The playability of a Halo or Return to Castle Wolfenstein or Serious Sam is pretty much the same on Xbox or PC, for example. And aren't there control pads you can hook up to a serial port?

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In short, hundreds of games are released every year to critical and popular acclaim that I find to be entirely unplayable.

The problem here is that I find this to be an all too common complaint, even amoung hardcore gamers. How many people want multiplayer co-op? How many want more open-ended games? How many want a non-Medieval Europe RPG? That there are hundred of games that we both find unplayable isn't anything special.

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And the fact that all the responses so far have been dismissive on the basis of "this guy knows nothing about game development" (he's not supposed to; he's a writer, writing as a consumer) is, to me, symptomatic of the problem: insularity.

He is an ignorant consumer. His complaint is no different from all those people who whine that MMORPGs only let you do what the designers want you to do, and no more valid. The author bandies about "interactivity" as some cure all, which is laughable considering that games already are interactive. He sends us off searching for the McGuffin that doesn't exist or that we already have.

His error is in treating the computer as a magic light box and making demands on it that one would never make on a real-world system.

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As an aside, the comments on the misapplication of "mature" are just... obtuse. There's a "Mature" ESRB rating for games, which is the usage here. There is no ambiguity.

This is being just silly. The author complains about content. I cited content. Games already ARE mature unless we want to analyze the definition of what makes mature content. There's no argument here.

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Essentially, the article asked why we didn't have smart, clever, strategic adult (in the sense of "not kiddie") games that also required good reflexes.

What about all the arcade-like flight sims or spaceflight sims? What about the numerous FPS games like Half-Life which include timed puzzles and careful strategic positioning?
And don't many an RTS game exactly fit the bill of good reflexes and strategic planning, especially when it comes to rapid-fire response to troublespots, scrolling the map, selection and deployment?

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I'll be careful not to post material that asks admittedly naive questions ever again. I mean, we don't want that, do we?

You might have got a more productive response if you'd have simply phrased the question without citing a 3 year old article, dude.

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How do you determine the demand for a product that doesn't exist? It's not like anybody ran focus group tests to determine the viability of such games. No, it comes down to what the developers and designers and publishers think should be made. It has nothing to do with what consumers want.

Oluseyi, I'd never expect you of all people to make this kind of assertion given how knowledgable you are of industry's internals. At the publisher level how do you think the approval process works??? Developers propose and publishers choose, often based on heavy input from marketing, which has conducted market research and focus groups.

The game industry will swoop on any market segment as soon as some product proves it exists-- it has less to do with engineers and more to do with VPs who hold the money. Take as a perfect example The Sims: It was universally rejected by Will Wright's own company until EA bought Maxis and took a risk. And that was WITH a focus groups that claimed the playing with virtual dolls just wouldn't be enjoyable!

A VP of the game publisher / developer I used to work for had this saying: "Nobody, no matter who they are, knows what the next hit is going to be. If there were a formula they'd be mass producing it like crazy already. Not even Hollywood, which thinks it has a formula, can guarantee a hit."

It's fine to complain that games aren't being tailored to your tastes. But drawing the conclusion that its because of insularity is just baseless.

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Original post by Extrarius I think the reason we don't have many good(IMO) games (on the PC anyways, as I have no consoles) is because quality takes creativity, hard work, and lots of other things that would cost game studios more money. Since the goal is money (be it the studio's goal or the goal of their publisher etc), they want to optimize the amount of profit, which means making cost low and profit high. Since most people seem to buy into bad games (take CS:Source as a good example IMO, and CS before that), and bad games cost less money (no time 'wasted' on creativity, just take the old technology and design it over again with a few new features), making bad games is an obvious win for studios/publishers/etc.

Look at two excellent studios that have since gone out of business: Black Isle, makers of Fallout, and Looking Glass, makers of Thief and System Shock. Here you have two businesses producing content rich games filled with story, gameplay and style, yet it was not enough.

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If they cut back on eyecandy for gameplay, there is no guarantee they'd make any sales at all, while with good eyecandy they're practically guaranteed to make millions.

Eye candy and licenses are the two competitors for attention here. If you put Star Wars on anything it will sell because part of the experience of buying anything is emotional, and the aura created by a license will I believe cause a person to view their response to the game through the lense of their good feelings about the license (aka, "it's just cool...")

I tell people that if you want better gameplay you have to curb your graphics enthusiasm. If I as a developer have a choice between graphics and gameplay on a limited budget, I'm going to sacrfice gameplay for graphics. Why? Because sales is survival, a purely Darwinian process: The competitor that is created with the least amount of resources (dollars) but strongest ability to monopolize resources (the market) wins.

Now this mercenary reasoning I have to hide from my designer mind when I'm in a creative mode. Creativity needs an open ceiling where the sky's the limit. But it's a balance of bringing it back down to earth.

In organizations, that's what sales and marketing and the producers are supposed to do. Yes, it would be cool to get 10,000 players all together on one server in a massive, open ended competition where players write everything from the game's laws to the game's physics. But how much is that gonna cost?

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For that simple reason, I'm more favorably inclined toward external perspectives that are critical of gaming. For me, and people like me, there's something very wrong. And the fact that all the responses so far have been dismissive on the basis of "this guy knows nothing about game development" (he's not supposed to; he's a writer, writing as a consumer) is, to me, symptomatic of the problem: insularity.

thats like being pissed off at NASA for not reaching saturn yet

I suppose I miscalculated in attempting this discourse. There are too many inputs and too many variables that need to be specified to discuss this meaningfully. I guess I just don't see what all of you purport to see, and I disagree with your assessments.

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Original post by Oluseyi I guess I just don't see what all of you purport to see, and I disagree with your assessments.

I suspect the problem is that you're a casual gamer who deep down, really wants to play 'hardcore' games. You find the games aimed at the 'casual gamer' market shallow and unfulfilling, but you don't have the time and/or patience to learn and play the 'hardcore' games enough to get anything out of them.

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Original post by OluseyiIn short, hundreds of games are released every year to critical and popular acclaim that I find to be entirely unplayable.

Unless you play a game how do you know if it's unplayable? You've played all of the "hundreds of games released every year" that you dismiss out of hand? I'm not saying you SHOULD play them all (to the tune of thousands of dollars and hours) but your arbitrary dismissal of so many games you have obviously never even touched let alone taken the time to work out the kinks seems sort of...well...arbitrary. Some games seem simple to start or have annoying aspectss but grow on you with time. Many of course suck, but I find it hard to believe that with all the talented people making games that not a SINGLE game is any good. Your standards are impossibly high and impossibly narrow if not a single game out of the thousands out there even comes close to playable. You say all of them are "entirely unplayable" so I have to take that as meaning they aren't even in the ballpark. Further, you make this claim without having played them all. Again, not that you or anyone else should play them all, but it just points to your accusation being a blanket one without real substance.



EDIT: Added a bit to clarify my point.

[Edited by - Ned_K on November 9, 2004 9:05:01 AM]

Games now are quite different than what we had 10 years ago. Not just talking about graphics and all the goodies that more powerful computers has brought us. Todays games are putting a lot of weight on stuff like storytelling, realism, XX# of guns etc. They're also much more linear than they used to be. Games like GTA where you're free to choose what you wanted to do were more common before.

In short, what's commonly seen as good in a game now is quite different than the qualities that first attracted me to games. So i'll have to agree with Oluseyi. I find games released today to be OK at best, with a few rare exceptions.

The good "news" is that a lot of indie games seem to build on more "old-school" values. I just bought my first indie game last week, Alien Shooter by Sigma team. It was short, had rather ho-hum graphics, and a pretty lame story, but I don't think i've had this much fun gaming since i put my Amiga in a box in '94. And playing it again is actually interesting, I've played through it 3 times already.

A few things from the article:

1) He points out problems, but offers NO solutions. Saying that the interactivity could be a great tool is not offering a solution, most games have somewhat complex, if customizable interfaces.

2) He only looks at one game. He does not discuss RPG, RTS or even turn-based strategy games. These are all hugely different from his "urinating squirel" game.

3) He's a moron. This has nothing to do with the article for the mostpart... it's because he saw an ad in a bathroom and used this as a reason to buy the game. Not because it looked fun, not because it looked like a game he'd like, because he saw it in a bathroom. Sounds like the game publisher did their job with advertising, but he didn't do his job as a good consumer.

Now, on to the discussion (much better and higher quality):

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Because, by and large, we don't want both worlds (intense immersion and reactive game play) at the same time. The type of gamer (or, the current mood of a gamer) typically wants to focus on one style of game at any given time (sometimes *because* they're not very good at the other styles).

This is, by and large, accurate. It's the reason why most MMOG gamers are against the 'click and twitch', reaction based gameplay. The MMOG genre is largely highly immersive (and as a result very addictive), possibly the most immersive games. Your 'click and twitch' games are, almost by definition, less immersive. They require a certain amount of attention to detail, but not the mental dedication and emotional investment that the larger scale, character development based MMOGs (and RPGs) do. To try and incorporate both results in a game that lacks the ability to do either adequately.

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when you can win the battles based on your ninja reflexes, why bother with the careful planning?

This actually misses a potentially worse problem. When your reflexes are so bad (due to being just unfortunate, injured or otherwise handicapped) that you can't win, regardless of your careful planning, then the game completely defeats itself. Many people who prefer the RTS/turn-based games don't like the reflex-based play style. It gets worse at the higher end, where you have to make all aspects of the game more difficult, not just one or two. Then the reflex part of the game would become restrictive, against those without the 'ninja reflexes'.

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As one of the many people on this board and probably thousands of people out there who have labored to distill complex social actions into numerical systems and workable gameplay, this is an insult.

I have to agree. As I said before, this idiot played *one* game and made his judgement. That would be like watching one movie (say a porn) and then stating that the movie industry had lost all morality. Many directors, producers and writers would be horribly offended. Fortunately I'm not too offended... any more than I would be if Tipper Gore gave a review of the game industry and used Doom 3 as her only point of reference... the only thing I can think is "duh...".

(scooting back to the article for a second)

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Meanwhile, the nerds behind strategy-based PC games lack the drive or ability to design a responsive, explorable, 3-D environment or characters that move the way you want them to.

This really proves the complete and utter lack of understanding of how games have to be made. Animating the characters isn't just as simple as saying "Move the arm this way" or "bend the back that way", it's all pre-generated to some extent and building more animations just makes the memory footprint that much larger. That would restrict the number of people who could play the game to those with 256(512?)MB video cards and 2-4GB of RAM. It kind of makes me laugh to some extent. The suggestions of this guy finally justify the change from 32 to 64-bit processing that the Opteron-based processors would allow. Only then could we have native addressing of greater than 4GB worth of memory (PAE isn't quite native... it's more faking it).

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I am not a gamer. Not because I don't like games, but because I find the contemporary selection of games embody conventions that I can't come to terms with. I despise RPGs because there's a lack of role-playing with them and an excess of statistical/numerical obsession. I don't play reflex games on my PC because the keyboard is an awkward device.

This is difficult to really conceptualize. For the life of me I can't understand why you're here.

I agree with your statements about RPGs though. Everquest was the great white hope for for many RPG players, then Luclin came out and there was no longer a reason to role-play because your actions (faction) meant less and less. Before that, your actions meant something. No doubt someone will remember what "RPG" stands for and they will build a huge following like EQ did.

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Essentially, the article asked why we didn't have smart, clever, strategic adult (in the sense of "not kiddie") games that also required good reflexes.

Fortunately 2 people (myself included) addressed this above. If I'm trying to think out my strategy, reaction time should be relatively irrelevant. It's strategy. If you want quick reflexes, you should make a tactics game. Strategy is about day long, even month long planning. Commiting an order 2 seconds after it becomes necessary as opposed to 2-3 minutes after it becomes necessary should not make enough of a difference to change the course of action. If you want a tactical game, go get one of those (or make one). They're generally called "FPS" games.

That being said though, I'd love to see a "squad (platoon) leader" style game, where you run a single squad through missions, ordering your men around. That would require reaction speed and allow for some amount of thinking. You may not be the one that is performing all the actions, but you'd still need quick reflexes (or at least reactions).

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I don't think there's a computer game out that allows REAL role-playing ala Dungeons and Dragons. And even in that game, back when I was into it, almost no one "role-played". We hung out and acted like ourselves and played the game. No one talked funny or actually pretended to be a wizard.

The people who do are playing what's called "LARP". They want a higher level of immersion, D&D players are not necessarily trying to be the character as much as trying to escape to a fantasy world. Usually when I play(ed) D&D I would commonly play characters the way they would act, usually an idealized version of myself, but still not me. Sometimes they were scrupulous, but sometimes they lacked the morals. Everyone taps into a part of themselves to play the characters, it's usually a different part each time though.

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And why are all PC RPG's so freaking depressing?

You're supposed to be saving the world... if they're cheerful and everyone's happy then what the hell are you saving them from? Happily ever after?

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Why do games hide their play mechanics? To sell strategy guides?

Weren't you just the one who bitched about eh RPG focus on numbers? Pick a side and stick to it please. This statement really irritates me.

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WRITE A STORY FOR ALL PERMUTATIONS! Each with a novel-like beginning, exposition, story arc and climax!

This is actually an interesting idea. Most games have something along the lines of a 'scenario builder', but the games are idealized for a certain path. Creating multiple scenarios, where your proponent could take any number of paths, as they came to him in order to weaken the power base of the antagonist, would be great. It would be great, but more difficult to balance. I guess the challenge would be to find the 'ideal' path that would allow you to weaken the antagonist in the quickest way. So often RPGs are so linear that you are given only a limited path, almost linear.

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I think for a lot of people, the conception is "mature=boobs and butts". This isn't mature, this is teenage hormone overdrive.

That's why it's called "mature", because only adults are expected to be able to handle "boobs and butts". Unfortunately the belief that "mass death and gore" aren't necessarily mature is terrifying, if not misguided.

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Summary: Bad games result in optimal profit.

No, the summary should be: Concentrating on one style of gameplay is good for profit. If you try to be a master of all styles of gameplay, you'll fail in all, in some way.

On to my own thoughts, more a culmination.

The problem boils down to something basic:

Games can only do one or two things well without failing in all.

Why? Because when you try to do everything, you end up with the "ninja skills" problem, or a game that is difficult on all fronts and almost unwinnable. Is this bad? Yes. Player frustration will result in players not playing a game, or buying more of your games. You might gain a small, if obsessive, following. They won't be enough to further fund your projects though. While your game might be considered 'ground breaking', it won't matter in the long run because someone good at one genre won't (probably) be good at the others that you're targeting. The result is that you end up losing a good portion of your market, defeating your purpose.

On the good side, there are good ways to incorporate different aspects of the games, you just have to be very, VERY careful on how you do it.

On the downside... yeah, Oluseyi probably chose one of the worst reviews (and very old -- 3 and a half years), from a group of elitist, self-important, snobbish people (I use that term loosely for the people at The Slate). One of the worst things about self-important people is that they make assumptions from little data, as this person did.

I might play a game like that for a short time, have a laugh and set it down and forget.

Why aren't people trying to make those games no one will ever forget? I can easily forget stupid games. But after a day or so when the novelty is gone the game is awful.