Are games getting worse, or are we just getting jaded?

The Game Room
81

This is among tyhe single stupidest posts I have ever witnessed by man. Do not make the (incredibly moronic) mistake of assuming that “pointlessly hard and miserable grinding” is the same as “immersion”. No MMORPG has ever used immersion better than World of Warcraft. You’re completely blinded by the idea that crappy grinding makes a game good.

Is it immersive to have to build actual lines of adventuring parties to go off and kill Gods in EQ? No. Is it immersive to go out and grind for days to kill random monsters to maybe get a few crafting items which will mostly be ruined to make junk you throw away so that someday you might be able to craft something of value? No. Is it immersive to have a wide range of abilities, none of which are adequately exaplined, and all of which do something different from what it says? No. Is it immersive to have characters designed to be played in certain ways, but nothing ever explains how the hell you do it, so that the game itself in fact points you down the wrong path or fails to point out a critical but absolutely neccessary ability/item/talent/whatever? No.

You disgust me. You’re just another elitist jerk who thinks that having a spare thirty hours a week to burn on his pet MMO makes him better than everyone else. Go back to EQ and spare us your blather.

82

[hijack]

Paradoxically, the finer you parse a post the more likely you are to be accused of taking something out of context. Better to just reply to the whole thing in one shot. My rule of thumb is never more than three quote boxes in any post, preferably two and ideally one. I used to post-parse like a motherfucker until I realized the only person who read them was the one person I was replying to. They’re very exclusionary. The insults creep in because the format lends itself to repetition, which is condescending.

My response here addresses multiple distinct points of yours, but the very act of crunching them all into a single paragraph with a single quote box makes it more likely to be read by others. (Generally speaking, nobody ever reads what’s inside quote boxes anyway. I know I almost never do. Having a bunch of them is just clutter.)

[/hijack]

83

Mod note: This is way out of line in the Game Room. Tone it down or take it to the Pit. No warning issued, but failure to comply with this will result in a warning.

Mil0 - if you wish to reply to Smiling Bandit’s post (or at least the parts that were directed at you), please open a pit thread to do so.

Gukumatz
Game Room Moderator

84

No I didn’t. My point was that very few shooters contain any noteworthy defining characteristics, besides the obvious point and shoot.

At this point, hardware is not the limiting factor in game design.

Why are you so hell-bent on something being objectively better or worse? I never made that argument and never have, because it’s an impossible argument to make. Nothing mentioned in this thread thus far can be “objectively” better or worse than anything–it’s always subjective. And since I have less fun playing modern games I used to, they are worse to me.

Sure it does; I had less enjoyment, so the game wasn’t as good, subjectively, to me (please don’t make me continue to have to type this–if any words follow my screenname, it’s safe to say it’s an opinion).

It was a facitious “too good,” so no epeen comparison is necessary.

Good for you; I disagree.

I would still be notable to me, and that’s the only thing I’ve ever argued. (though I really don’t understand why anyone would argue Half-Life had “little narrative” considering that it encompassed practically the entirety of the experience.

Which makes games worse because they’re not repetitive and dull. I have my other reasons too, such as the relatively recent emphasis on telling story, which almost always detracts from their interactive nature (for me!), the muddy color palettes many “realistic” games share, the convoluted controls of many modern games, and the emphasis on presentation versus anything actually fun in the game itself.

I could go on (such as the complete lack of level design in open-world games), but I feel that covers a lot of my displeasure with modern gaming.

85

The “not” shouldn’t be there. :smack:

86

And what do you define as noteworthy?

Why is that? The basic input hasn’t changed all that much in decades. The areas that have changed (larger harddrives more processing power) has seen the logical improvements of graphics and things like voice acting. There were explosions of new genres early on when each hardware generation opened up new ways of doing things but as time passes this will have to decrease until something completely new comes along. Also for every new type of game that is successful and spawns copies there are several that dry up and vanish. So evolution takes place and the strongest survive.

Perhaps we are interpreting the OP differently. I read it as Jaded vs Worse. Which to me means a fairly clear line. Jaded involves changing expectations and attitude where ‘worse’ is an objective measure. If the OP was just ‘do you like games better now or 10 years ago?’ we wouldn’t be having this discussion as it would be pretty clearly all about opinion.

How loosely are you defining narrative here? Half Life was full of great moments and it did make you feel like you were caught up in something bigger then you which was special for the time. It put games like Doom and Quake to shame. But Bioshock, Half Life 2, Portal have as much if not more. You of course may not have gotten as much out of it but its still there and it’s more complex then what Half Life offered.

I too get tired of brown landscapes but there are plenty of games that don’t suffer from this and I think that it reaches the point where you start to look for the brown and it becomes a positive feedback thing.

As for controls I’m not sure what you mean. It seems to me interfaces have consistently gotten simpler and simpler over the years. Maybe we just play different types of games.

As for open worlds I’m curious what was the pinnacle of that for you? This is a genre I don’t really play often. I always get bored with them for some reason. The only one I played to any extent was Vice City and that was just to try to see what the fuss was with Grand Theft Auto. It’s a genre I think I should enjoy if I found one that fit me better (and had decent PC controls).

87

Mechanics of interest. Point and shoot is the baseline of what’s expected out of a shooter, and few do much more than that to make them feel interesting or unique in any way (imo, as will every statement by me as follows).

Actually, it has. Between the DS’s touchscreen, the Wii’s motion controls, and the inbound Kinnect and Move devices, more has changed in the last 6 years from an input perspective than in any period since the industry began.

And we’ve reached a point where practically any game you can imagine can be produced; current hardware merely limits how good a game can look, not how well it plays.

Many consider the DS to offer some of the most interesting, unique, and fresh games of this generation, and it’s using hardware no more technologically capable than consoles released 15 years ago.

Strongest=Best Selling and not necessarily “Best,” hence why fantastic games such as Beyond Good and Evil can flounder while people still buy Madden year over year, despite the minimal improvements.

I feel like that’s splitting hairs. It’s basically two ways of asking basically the same question. And by what objective measure would you measure “worst”? I am very much of the belief that one doesn’t exist.

Being more “complex” doesn’t automatically make something better. I find some of the best narratives are also some of the simplest. With that said, Portal was fantastic in practically every way, but it’s not a shooter–it’s a puzzle game. When I mentioned Half-Life, I was comparing it only to other shooters that I’ve played, and by large which I still consider Superior to. Aside from the opening moments of Bioshock, I thought that game was a sloppily told story largely reliant on the crutch of diaries (which Doom 3 did years before), combined with repetitive environments, and basic gameplay of which I just wasn’t a fan of.

As for Half-Life 2, while I rather liked it, I deem it categorically inferior to its predecessor, especially in regards to conveying a compelling narrative I cared about.

Wii games have. But I personally detest picking up a game and having to wade through the instruction manual or ‘control options’ screen in order to figure out which of the dozen+ buttons does what for many 360/PS3 (and even some Wii) games.

I get bored with them too. I feel like they’re mostly sloppily designed and are only “fun” when I dick around in the environment and ignore everything related to the main story mode. But I usually exhaust myself out after an hour or so and am left with a game I don’t want to play. As such, there really is no open-world game I like, at least based on how the term is commonly used.

88

I agree with Ellis Dee. This is an interesting thread. Boredom creeps in with those point by point posts. My eyes gloss over and I just hit page down. Full paragraphs with arguments make for much more interesting reading.

I got out of playing games for an awful long time. Part of it was because of economics, and part of it was because my favorite type of game, LucasArts style adventure games, had died on the vine. When GTA3 came out I was drawn back into the fold. The sandbox style offered a view inside a fantastic little city with citizens and quirks that I couldn’t get enough of. I am glad that it has engendered quite a few clones. Some of them awful copy cats with noting redeeming, but other surprising gems that made good use of the paradigm.

While I have been back enjoying this generation’s games the adventure genre has come back again. Both with the telltale games and LucasArt allowing some of their games to be updated as special editions. I would love for a publisher to realize that both the adventure genre is popular, and the sandbox style is as well. So, combine the two. Create a GTA sized city were you can go around and solve problems and the violence is not front and center. Not much of a possibility of that happening but it would be neat.

Another thing I like about the today’s games is that they have made serious efforts to create good games when they have access to pop culture icons. While it is still almost certain that a game based on a movie will be bad. A few companies have been able to make superhero games that have risen above the atrocious things that were made in the past. From what I can remember it started with the sandbox style Spider-man game from a few years ago. The apex of this superhero video game revitalization was last year’s Batman Arkham Asylum. Not only was it “good for a super hero game” in some people’s minds, including mine, it was the game of the year.

89

[QUOTE=Gukumatz;12775833Mod note: This is way out of line in the Game Room. Tone it down or take it to the Pit. No warning issued, but failure to comply with this will result in a warning.r[/QUOTE]

Well, I was out of line.

90

Games have definitely become more shallow since the pastime became mainstream, around the arrival of Halo methinks. Whereas once upon a time it was about challenging the gamers’ skills - whether this be cerebral, twitch-timing based or otherwise - today it’s all about ‘accessibility’ and dumbing games down enough to appeal to the new dominant market demographic, the less discerning gaming consumer - the casual.

Where once content in games was something substantive you could acquire through skilled play as an unloackable or via difficult-to-procure secret codes, today it’s about milking gullible gamers for piddle and crap downloadable content (DLC) that’s oftentimes already produced as part of the game proper’s development, if not already on the retail game disk itself!

In the halcyon days of arcade gaming, video games were made to fleece one of as many pennies in the shortest time possible. Thus, inherently games were more demanding and their home counterparts naturally followed suit. This had the auspicious offshoot of forcing gamers to develop certain skills they otherwise likely would not have - a redeeming aspect to an otherwise frivolous pursuit. But the with the death of arcade gaming and the advent of on-line play, it’s all about pretty graphics, leaderboards and oxymorons like ‘Achievements’. It’s becoming harder and harder to sift through all the ‘junk food’ gaming out there to find something that’s worth investing one’s time into.

Although it’s a good thing that gaming has become as ubiquitous as it has - it keeps the industry alive and evolving - the fact this longevity seems to be coming at the expense of game integrity/quality calls into question whether the trade-off is to the entertainment medium’s long term benefit. Keeping in mind that if we’re rearing a generation on a brain-dead diet of first-person shooters and the like, what future are we leaving the world? Global warming might be the least of human civilization’s dilemmas!
EDIT: No. I don’t believe it’s that I’m becoming jaded, as I still play quality games. It’s just that my standards are higher than ‘hold left trigger > mash right trigger > press guide button > check leaderboards > gloat to tween on other end of mic’. A standard I’d hope the industry would cater for more.

91

(After writing this post, it seems kind of rambly and pulled out of my ass more than a little. But what the hell, I like what I said.)

Agreed that games simply aren’t Nintendo Hard these days. I’m not convinced that that’s what makes a game good, though. Plenty of games these days are challenging without necessarily being punishingly difficult to slog through, requiring only the ability to play an intricate game of Simon as you learn the impossibilities of each new section. Rote memorization is not a skill I consider terribly useful in day to day life, and training muscle memory, while not useless in the abstract, is only directly applicable to the task you’re training the muscles to do.

To digress from the path I was on, the reason games are no longer like that is because the arcade model simply doesn’t work any more. You’re not feeding quarters into a machine for every lost life; you’ve already paid $50 up front. That kind of payment model is more compatible with a game that may or may not be challenging but is ultimately winnable through something other than sheer bloodymindedness. Whether or not that’s a bad thing is up to the individual, I guess.

The skills I see necessary in most games today is less rote memorization and muscle memory and more tactical and strategic intelligence. Logistics/resource management, the ability to formulate an overall plan or goal, and the ability to execute small-scale maneuvers to accomplish that goal. This applies not only to real-time or turn-based strategy games, but also to FPSes, RPGs, survival horror, puzzle games (and other casuals), and multiplayer games in general.

Those skills are more generally applicable across many different games, whereas rote memorization is only applicable to a single game (if you tend to be conservative with money in one game you’ll probably be conservative in other games, but knowing exactly when to jump and when to attack to get through level 2 of Ninja Gaiden simply doesn’t translate to anything else). Because of that, games tend to be easier to learn, IMO, and easier in general, because you already have a strong measure of the skills necessary to do well at it.

If you want difficult, though, the ultimate source is PVP and other multiplayer games. I don’t share LOUNE’s general principle that if a game doesn’t have a strong multiplayer element it’s nearly worthless, but working against and with other players is where current games shine. You want hard? Go try to capture the flag from a team of players just as smart as you are, or try to coordinate 25 players into performing disparate roles efficiently within the space of less than 10 minutes to bring down a raid boss. That’s what’s difficulty is these days.

92

Lets be serious here:

FPS games are spawn fests.

RTSs are tank rushes that are so far removed from their base formula -chess - that there’s barley any strategy in them at all save for who can spam units fastest.

RPGs are grind-athons that are only now starting evolve from the dull, turn-based Japanese model after a quarter of a century.

MMO games are interactive social networks for the socially awkward - you pay to get ahead in those game!

Puzzlers are fine - good ones can be taxing (though Bejeweled is far cry from Tetris)

Survival-horror is about atmosphere more than difficulty, but a diminished difficulty factor can influence the quality of the experience also (*see RE5)…
Point is, what your saying applies in theory, not in practice. Like I alluded to, because games are churned out with process line-like regularity nowadays, expansions dressed as a sequels after expansions dressed as a sequels, the quality of the products has naturally waned. There simply aren’t gaming vehicles to support the kind of skill fostering gameplay you’re referring to.

Couple this with the fact that quality players, even with the world at your broadband fingertips, are hard to find - most are kiddies who play only games that let them win, the rest are stats whores who care more about ascending leaderboards than anything involving skilled/strategical/team-based play (hence why Gears fails so hard in this respect) - and the issue of ‘accessibility’ and the preoccupation with “lowering the learning curve” (ie, a euphemism dumbing games down) to cater for the new dominant consumer demographic, and you have yourself the ingredients for an industry that produces half-baked games and a community of halfwit gamers!

The “rote” skills you cited aren’t what I’m talking about. My genre of choice was in fact the fight-game genre. A genre that is highly competitive, heavily twitch-timing based and real time strategically centric. It’s in fact an exemplar of what we’re discussing here - the decline of the Street Fighter series from hardcore fighter to a mash fest every Downs Syndrome sufferer and his poodle could be competitive in is but one example.

You’re partly right in regards the fact we’re buying games outright almost exclusively now and that games cannot reasonably be ‘80s arcade hard’ when one’s already forked over as much dough as they’re going to (DLC aside of course). But the home versions of the Marios of the world had to be purchased also… and they weren’t dumbed down gameplay-wise. Why is it that cutesy visuals and themes were enough to sell games then, but now the gameplay must follow suit also?

My answer: The target market is dumber.

93

Well, there’s the answer to the OP. We’re just getting more jaded. What a dismally negative view that is.

94

In order:

2004
2000
2005
2001
2008

It’s a little worrisome that only one of those was released in the past 5 years. ChuChu Rocket only makes it into this DECADE if you don’t count the fact that the Japanese release was in 1999. Yes, some of them have sequels, but a sequel is non-innovative almost by definition.

I don’t think anyone here is foolish enough to argue that we have shed a number of genres in the past 10-15 years. That is bound to frustrate the people who loved them. Examples:

Turn Based Strategy? Uhm, I guess there’s Civ, but that’s more of a turn-based empire builder.
Spaceflight Sim: Basically died after Freespace 2.
The aforementioned Submarine sim.
Adventure games as whole: Now making an extremely modest comeback. We’ll see if they can last.
2D fighting games were rescued from the brink by Street Fighter 4.
RPGs of all sorts are pretty thin on the ground at this point too, leading fans of the genre to be…concerned. (Though these seem to be doing well on handheld consoles, which is a very interesting case study all by itself, and tends to point to this genre being ‘killed’ not by lack of interest, but by high development costs.)

Some of those were niche genres in their heyday, but most were not. Ad I’m sure there are others I’m forgetting. Have we generated new genres to replace them? Maybe. It depends on how tightly you define “genre”. Is Guitar Hero really that different from DDR? Is Left 4 Dead really that different from playing another FPS cooperatively?

That said, good games are still out there. And they’re still on both the PC and on consoles. Different games, mind you. I think that they become harder to find though - as gaming becomes more mainstream, the amount of hype surrounding the “Greatest hits” makes it harder to find the games that you might, as someone who has been into gaming for a while, actually want to play.

Here’s my thought on the subject - gamers who have been into gaming for a while got into gaming because they liked what was going on in gaming at the time they started playing. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have gotten into the hobby. Gaming now is much more mainstream. There are a lot more people playing it. Which means that what was once the focus of the industry - and the fun for people who got into the hobby years ago - is now a niche market. Couple this with skyrocketing development costs, and that niche feels a lot of pressure because while you used to be able to crank out a game and have it do just fine if it moved, say, 10k copies, now that’s nowhere near enough to support the amount of time and money a ‘modern’ title requires… so those niches feel the pressure. I think this is why we are seeing JRPGs moving off of traditional consoles to handhelds - it’s a TON cheaper to develop them there, since the graphics are so much less expensive to develop. No hugely expensive graphics engine licenses to offset the need to spend even MORE building your own. Which means that the developers can afford to spend their time and money on the content of the game. Also, this is probably assisted by the fact that you don’t need to get voice acting for a handheld title, meaning that it’s OKAY to have tons and tons of text, since text is cheap…while voice acting is expensive.

So are games less diverse than they were? Maybe. I don’t think anyone in this thread is going to put in the time to give us a hard and fast answer to that, even if the real data were available. Are games catering to a different set of interests than they used to? Absolutely freaking yes. For some of us, we may like (some of) what the industry offers nowadays. Other people will look back and say “But I liked X-com and Wing Commander and Ultima. Where are those nowadays?” and will obviously be dissatisfied. I don’t think that means they are jaded - I don’t think that’s fair at all. The game industry simply isn’t serving their needs any more. Probably not even because the people making games wouldn’t like to, but simply because it costs too much to make a game in the genres these people would like, when set against the number of people who would buy it. These people are then justified in railing against the constant pressure for better graphics, because, in essence, the cost increases created by that pressure have killed their favorite genres.

So no: Games are not worse, but neither are we jaded. Games are different. They may not appeal to people who liked X, when now most games are Y. And unfortunately, games are awkward, in that you’re never guaranteed to be able to play them, unless you keep old hardware around. Tools like Dosbox and sites like GoG.com help, but there’s always going to be something someone looks at and sighs wistfully because they just can’t get it to run.

95

Sablicious is right in that developers have realized some players are terrible and need to be boosted. This resulted in low skill caps and players automatically getting stronger after time sinking. It’s pretty much the same message in both posts. I think games are harder on average now. In the past, more games were at the extremes of difficulty (or ease). The low skill caps and forced progression puts new gamers on par with those with 20 years experience. Honestly, I think the apparent changing difficulty of games would need to be its own thread. It’s fairly complex, given the rise of storytelling or the death of the hardest genre: arcade ports.

Bosstone is right in that old games were generally hard for stupid reasons. Either they were too obtuse, controlled poorly, or required reactions so unrealistic that you basically had to memorize the game. The games that didn’t have these things were easy. I haven’t played SMB3 in like 5 years, but I’m sure I can pick it up tomorrow and finish with 99 lives because it isn’t hard at all. The whole middle of Bosstone’s post is wrong. You can just 1a2a3a your way through the campaign in every RTS and rail shooters are ridiculously slow by twitch standards. Bosstone is 100% right that player against player competition is where the only good gameplay is now. I might even agree with LOUNE that a game without a strong multiplayer experience is worthless, but I think some games have good stories or fun simulations and most of his examples are as ridiculous as the claim that 25-man raiding is some how comparable to a competitive game.

Sablicious is wrong in that enough exceptions exist to this sorry state and enough players are playing them and the communities are large enough that you can enjoy a life of high quality gaming. There is no reason to ever slum. I’ve been loving this stuff forever and I find to easier than ever to find a match and more game choices than ever before. Frankly, if anything is a problem, it is that it is getting too big and commercialization is taking over.

I don’t think the performances in all of the major fighter tournaments over the last few months support the claim that the SF series has declines at all. HDR and SF4 both seem tight, balance, and tactical.

96

Going to back you here. For all the whining I hear about (S)SF4, as best as I can tell as a long term fan of the genre, it is extremely well constructed, about as well balanced as can be expected, and rewards skill. I know I’m pretty bad at it, and I can still beat mashers and flowchart players, but at the same time, anyone who identifies my patterns (and boy do I have them) will thrash me, as will people who are just better than me, or people who adapt enough that I can’t follow what they’re doing. Sure, every once in a while I feel cheated when I play a round well and then get nailed by a lucky/blind ultra, but shame on me for letting that happen.

And holy cow, am I totally in over my head trying to learn how to really play BlazBlue:CS. :eek:

97

Dude, Parappa the Rappa is exactly the same game as Guitar Hero.

98

There’s a reason good managers are worth a lot of money. The ability to organize and direct large groups of people is an uncommon one and a skill that MMO raiding cultivates. I know you’ve got your own opinion on it, but stepping away from WoW, in EVE a good director is worth more than a hundred, ahem, “bads.”

Fighting games have definitely always undergone a steady refinement, other than the few bouts of lunacy Capcom and SNK are prone to.

He kept editing his post while I was responding to it. I didn’t see that he’d mentioned Parappa at the time I posted.

99

I’d like some commentary on either Deus Ex or Myth 2 from either side. Do you think those games show that games are generally worse now, or better now?

I think both are absolutely fantastic games that haven’t been replicated since (to my knowledge), but I don’t game enough any more to judge.

100

I still well remember EQ. I loved played EQ. There was a lot about it that was fantastic. It was also horribly flawed in about a thousand ways and its design was, in many respects, just flat-out stupid. It was buggier than a swamp, dog-slow, user-unfriendly in the extreme, and continually harassed the customer to upgrade their computer. They lost the MMO war to World of Warcraft for a reason; EQ is an inferior product by an order of magnitude.

And frankly, I didn’t think EQ was really immersive at all. For one thing, its world was dead; mostly empty buildings, few NPCs, and despite its name, few quests. It felt like much of its world was abandoned.