That’s reasonable then. I misunderstood. I thought you meant that the largely mechanical process of raiding was similar to the challenges of facing a thinking and learning opponent. Organizing players is definitely a nightmare and one of the main reasons that competitive team sizes are a small fraction of the team size supported by the game. It seems hard enough at 25. 40 must’ve been nearly impossible.
Some interesting stuff here. One thing that bears repeating is that the biggest change in gaming in the last 10 years or so has been the rise of online play. Because it’s so big it’s changed the focus of mainstream gaming - it’s (mostly) impractical to schedule multi-hour sessions with dozens of other people and no fun to be killed over and over by smug headhunters while you try and figure out what’s going on, so the games have shifted from the old focused grind to a more casual easy-to-learn drop-in/drop-out style.
But it’s still a big step forward because it gets round the one thing that hasn’t changed in gaming - the single-player AIs haven’t advanced beyond Blundering Robot. My guess is this is partially because AI is hard, partially because single-player is no longer the focus of many games and partially because the AI’s job, in all honesty, is to lose convincingly.
The increased complexity of many games make matters worse, partially because it’s harder to make a good AI for a complex game than a simple one, and partially because of the shift from timing/memorisation to strategic/tactical choices as the main challenge. While this is great in theory, in practice the way to win a tactical/strategic challenge against a game AI remains what it always was:
- Find the flaw in the AI you can drive a tank through
- Drive a tank through it
- Repeat repeat repeat until you get to the victory screen
So what could (should?) have been a great advance turns into the same old grind and a general feeling of wasted potential.
To the untrained eye SF4 may look tight and balanced. But if this were true, it stands to reason the many kiddies that make up the majority of this particular game’s community wouldn’t play it. Spend some time watching any of those tournaments and you’ll find a correlation stronger than the that of matter to a Black Hole of players whoring a very select handful of characters, characters whose properties all bear a very distinct characteristic, and spamming limited rote patterns ad nauseum. Such that competitive play boils down to character match-up and the ability/ease of a character to spam rote, repetitive, hard to circumvent yet easy to perform patterns.
I’d rather leave the SF4 example there, as this would just end up in another ‘old school Vs gen Y gamer’ YouTube bitch fight! The point is, today’s games are far more concerned with ensuring Timmy Toddler is thoroughly amazed at the bright, shiny, HD graphics and can compete on a playing field he should have no right to without extensive commitment to skill development. This, instead of concentrating on refining gameplay elements, producing substantive content and satisfying the demographic(s) that are largely responsible for gaming being where it is today - the ‘hardcore’.
Moreover, on-line play may be the future of gaming - granted - but in and of itself this introduces a whole slew of problems. Latency/lag being the most obvious and skill debilitating dubious offshoot of on-line play. The focus on shallow game aspects like leaderboards, rank etc - aspects that if anything promote boring, rote, unimaginative, exploitative play styles, all in the name of accruing throw-away statistics. Filler content in the form of DLC, content that you’ve effectively paid for already. Content that’s oftentimes already on the very disk! The laziness on-line gaming affords developers in releasing buggy, glitchy (sometimes to game-breaking levels) products due to the ability to ‘patch’ titles post release. IF, of course, these games sell. Because if they don’t meet sales expectations, devs can simply ignore their mess.
No matter from which angle you approach this, the very fact threads like this exists and people like myself are bothering to post in them demonstrates a problem does exist. What’s going to happen when the kids and tweens games today are largely geared towards grow into young adults - will they still find the products spawned from this shallow gaming trend enjoyable? Will they stick with the pastime? Or will there be an automatic exodus from this entertainment medium on the basis of that age old slight ‘games are for kids’? Where will the industry be then? Games will really be exclusively for kids. Ironic this would be indeed, given this was the same snobbish dismissal this hobby was met with by adults in the past - when it seemingly catered more for this very demographic! :dubious:
It’ been going downhill since Zaxxon.
So there I was, playing Yar’s Revenge…
Probably my biggest gripe about gaming is that the problems I’ve always really wanted to see fixed, haven’t been. AI and endgames, it’s all AI and endgames. And this is something old games, on balance, were probably better about, but for bad reasons.
OK, AI. The reason I give a damn is because I mostly like single player strategy games. One example is Europa Universalis, which is notorious for crap AI, or at least it used to be. Really, seems like everything Paradox made took smarts to play, but not because the AI was any good. In EU I it’d do stuff like march an army through the Alps where most of it would die from attrition. English AI could never take advantage of good geographical position and seriously boosted leadership talent and would get its ass beat by anybody with a navy. People who really got into the game ended up playing minor nations a lot.
So, what got improved in the sequels? As has been mentioned in this thread, the graphics. 3d graphics in a dry ass strategy game, probably the driest strategy game I’ve ever played. And I don’t buy the line that stores wouldn’t stock a 2d game. I have a copy of EU III on my desk right here, and the screen shots on the back are just the map, you can’t tell if they’re 3d. As far as I can tell from the tiny white text, there’s no mention of graphics on the package. Is 3d even a selling point for strategy games?
Incidentally, I can’t run the bastard on my computer. Hmm, I wonder if that might be due to the graphics. I doubt it’s the AI.
So, yeah, but I haven’t fully explored my discontent yet. PC games should be the ultimate in niche gaming. You don’t have to buy a license, you can distribute online. People will play games that don’t even have graphics, like Stone Soup and Dwarf Fortress. I will, anyway.
So why aren’t there a lot of great indie niche games I’d like to try, say, simulating being the captain of a Napoleonic era frigate, or modern versions of Railroad Tycoon or Transport Tycoon? Or low end graphics knockoffs of some of the more recent titles I thought were interesting, like Total War?
Because AI is a bitch to program, that’s why. I asked why in roguelikes the monsters won’t get out of each other’s line of fire and a developer – I think it was the guy who did DoomRL – said it was too much of a pain in the ass. Coming up with a hundred different types of monsters, no problem! Programming simulated dwarves to not walk into a warzone to pick up pants? Apparently that’s nearly impossible.
Plenty of games that do have good AI, IMO, like Civ, GalCiv, some of the RTSs I’ve played. Civ IV AI still sucks at warfare after a point, though, so even good AI from a major franchise has some weaknesses.
Now, how could that have possibly been any better in the old days? Well, for one thing I didn’t have as much experience in exploiting the shit out of glitches. For another, games then weren’t shy about cheating their asses off. For a third, I didn’t have the internet to read up on every single exploit. Incidentally, I sometimes think that some games have let gameplay suffer in order to patch exploits. In single player, you always have the option of not taking advantage of a game breaker.
OK, so my other big gripe is endgames. Getting back to Civ, with the more recent versions I rarely finish a game. It’s always been a problem for me with the series but with III and IV once the world gets full (industrial era), turns really start to drag. Not just waiting for processing (again, pretty sure 3d graphics aren’t helping any, and are so not required but there’s no way to turn them off) but you have hundreds of units, maybe thousands if you count all citizens and specialists. And if you want to get the most out of them, you have to go through each city and at least every new unit you’ve built and at least check what they’re doing. Automated workers are not a good idea (AI again). Honestly, the AI can do a good job settling a continent, but when I let it boss my workers they decide to rip up stuff I’ve already built.
Anyway, not such a problem with the older versions because, mainly, they were simpler games and thus less crap to deal with. Not much diplomacy, no religions, rudimentary espionage-- although I do remember geeking out over micromanaging my caravans. Anyway, simpler. Faster turns, as I recall. I first remember getting annoyed with turn times with Civ III.
Another example is Rome: Total War. The early game is great, at least the first dozen times you go through it with the major factions. Achievable challenges all over the place, some chance you’ll get knocked back and have to reload. Fun. Then you notice you’ve got all the plums and your rivals are stagnant (AI again). It’s getting one-sided (maybe shouldn’t have reloaded). You’re a steam roller, no, a team of steam rollers, going north, west and east, with little steam roller teams to deal with rebels. It’s getting hard to keep track. The empire’s getting to be a headache. Hey, the people say I can be emperor. Fuck it, call it a victory, I’m not grinding this out just to see an end screen.
If games are going to have this much scope, they really need to pull back the focus. Which would suck, the best part of RTW is probably the battles. So they need less scope, I guess.
Some realism wouldn’t hurt, either, as long as I’m complaining. Praetorians were based in Rome, they were body guards, so why does every single game screw that up? After a couple decades playing games and seeing the same errors over and over you start to wonder if it’s really a hobby for smart people.
Things that are better about today’s games? Well, grudgingly, I’ll admit that modern graphics aren’t totally a bad thing, just that they aren’t required for some games and shouldn’t be allowed to get in the way. Interfaces are much better. The level of detail is often a good thing. Mods are good, except those same two suspects, graphics and AI, often screw up fan based content, so I don’t often bother with the more ambitious projects. Stuff like the BUG mod for Civ was gold, though, and you had to wonder why the original developers hid so much important information. I like the some of the motion based stuff for my Wii, but I’m wondering why I can’t get a good boxing game. I guess I’m just cursed to like stupid genres not enough people like to be profitable enough for me to get the buttload of new games I’d like.
Part of the problem with games you describe - endgame issues with Civ, etc, are, when you get down to it, just a fundamental flaw in the game design. If you give the player control over every janitor in their empire, then it becomes important for the player to control every janitor in their empire. It’s just bad design, and Civ has been walking down that road for years because people seem to think that adding more micromanagement to the game makes it better. This is, fundamentally, what killed MOO3. You just can’t scale that kind of stupid micro to the level at which these games reach.
The answer of course is just in designing this sort of nonsense out of the game, ala, say, Sword of the Stars. Instead of giving you 150 janitors and asking you what to do with them, they just give you a few sliders that dictate what you want the planet to work on. This is the same model that worked so nicely in the original Master of Orion, and I will never forgive them for forsaking it for the Civ model in MOO2.
The problem is though, that these decisions are made by developers…listening to players. The problem is that players, for the most part, aren’t actually good designers.
Stores won’t stock 2D games? Is that why games like Civ4 and HoMM5 have totally unnecessary 3D engines?
Another thing I thought of about today’s games… back in the old days, when a game was released, it was a finished product. They worked, and it was rare to find bugs in them. The prevailing attitude these days is to release buggy games, and hopefully get all the glitches worked out after twelve or fifteen patches.
Anymore, I don’t even bother with games when they first come out, just for this reason. If it’s a title I know I’ll want to play, I’ll buy the game, but it may be a while before I’ll actually play it. Hell, with Civ4 I didn’t even bother until both expansions had been released. I’ve got a copy of Dragon Age, but I have yet to play it (to be fair, I haven’t yet looked into whether it’s “safe” to do so). I’ve still never played NWN2; it and both expansions are sitting on a shelf. I tried after it had been out for a year, but ran into so many problems trying to get it installed and running that I gave up in disgust.
I wonder how many people have this same attitude, but don’t buy games until they’re worth playing? How does this affect sales?
I think I’m looking forward to Civ5, although from everything I’ve seen it appears it’s being dumbed down in a major way, in favor of eye candy. Hopefully I’m wrong about that. In any case, I’m not sure I’m even going to buy it until it’s been out for at least a year.
That’s what the people at Paradox said. I’ve no particular reason to disbelieve them.
And I’m with you on the bugs and endless patches. It’s partly an issue of feature bloat - add 50 new features and you’ve just added 2500 new interactions that have to be tested. Some of them will likely be exploits (and unless the beta-testers are experienced players of the game, they may not recognise an exploit when they see it). Some of them will likely be bugged. Some will be just plain silly (what happens when I cast “sharpness” on a mace?). All of them will give the AI more to think about, which means it needs beefing up just to stay on the same level of (in)competence.
But new features is what sells new games. Offer an expansion that is just improved AI, bugfixes and game balancing, and the fanbase will bitch like hell about paying for what they “should have” got already. Offer two new character classes, ten new skills, twenty new spells and a bunch of new items and you can get another $20 off them, even if it turns out later that you accidentally broke the game.
Oh, and Dave Hartwick, it probably is the graphics. EUIII (rather unusually) outsources the 3D graphics to the GPU (leaving the main processor free for 200+ AIs), which causes problems with integrated chipsets that don’t actually have the graphics power they claim to. Or it’s a DirectX issue.
The game does have a bunch of new features in addition to the new graphics (and the expansions added a bunch more). And the AI is improved noticably, at least on the tactical military front. Strategically, of course, it still blunders around in a fog with no real sense of direction - and it still tends to regard every new feature as a weapon for use on its own feet.
I think they’re getting better for the most part. I remember loving games like Fallout, Baldur’s Gate, and others when they were released and I still have good memories of them. I can’t really go back and play them any more because I find the controls to be way too clunky and the game play way too slow. I think some console games have been dumbed down a bit. Bioshock is the spiritual successor to System Shock 2. Bioshock is way too easy because there’s a point you reach where you realize that dying has absolutely no negative drawbacks until the last stage of the game. While the graphics of Bio are light years ahead of SS2 I found the latter to have a much creepier atmosphere and I liked the story more. Keep in mind that I think Bioshock is a great game so it’s not like I’m comparing a turd to gem. The inventory of SS2 was more sophisticated than that of Bio as well but I find that’s generally the case in PC versus console games.
All in all it’s a good time to be a gamer.
The Sam & Max games keep getting better, and I’d stack what Telltale is doing these days against anything from Lucas Arts, Sierra or Infocom. The older games were harder in general, but not necessarily more clever. And Telltale manages to get the balance just right such that all the time you spend figuring something out is generally enjoyable.
And the Telltale model may just work well for a game like Loom – buy the game now, and we’ll finish it later.
Just out of curiosity, what are the defining characteristics of an “adventure” game? i.e., what separates “adventure” from “RPG”? I’ve always been a bit confused on that point (it doesn’t help that one of the earliest computer text games was titled “Adventure” but was very similar to a tabletop RPG, and really, all of those old games called “text adventures” had mechanics that strongly resembled tabletop RPGs.
Which are these text adventure games that have RPG-like mechanics?
There were MUDs, which had interfaces like text adventures, but used RPG mechanics and didn’t have stories.
I never played the Kings’ Quest (or was it Hero’s Quest?) games, but my impression was that they had RPG mechanics. And they featured parsers. But they weren’t what are normally called ‘text adventures’.
But as to the whole sine qua non of the genres, there is no definition that is not subject to tricky counter-examples. Ur-Quan Masters has the feel of an RPG (you grind for advancement, and that helps you move the story forward), though it’s ultimately an adventure game (you figure out what’s going on in the world and put the pieces together just right to advance the plot).
The spellcasting/memorization mechanic in Enchanter et seq was somewhat RPG-like; Beyond Zork was a true hybrid, with a map and character stats that you had to get up to a certain level to advance the plot, but also some text-adventure puzzles that you had to solve.
But not a lot of the INFOCOM games really had RPG-like mechanics.
Yeah, I shouldn’t have said “all of those old games called ‘text adventures’”, since I didn’t play “all” of them (or even most of them). A lot of my impressions come from descriptions of games like the Zork series. I always heard them referred to as “text adventures”, but the descriptions sound very RPG.
Back in the day, I would have found it surprising to meet someone who liked RPGs but didn’t like Adventure games, and vice versa. But the fortunes of Adventure gaming don’t seem to correlate to those of the RPG genre. Still, there is a good deal of overlap between fans of these genres.
One problem that haunts Adventure gaming is that unlike most any other genre of game, it’s very hard to pad it out to deliver more play time. You can idle away hours shooting at aliens, and that just flies by, even if it isn’t particularly engaging. But you can only spend so much time trying to figure out what you need to do to get the Fish from the Seamstress before that extra time represents rising frustration, which is a lot harder to put up with than mindless repetitive shooting and running through sewer tunnels. But if the puzzles are easy to figure out, then the game is over in no time, so the price of the game has to be low to keep the player from feeling ripped off. Ah, but if you want to throw in modern production values into games, that’s really hard to do within a budget that can make a $20 release price feasible.
I don’t know what Telltale’s margins are like, but I haven’t gotten anything from them I didn’t find worth the money – for nine dollars you get an episode of a longer story. That episode may take you three-to-five hours to get through, and that whole time is spent productively uncovering gags and dialogue and cutscenes and only rarely being frustrated because you’ve tried everything you can think of, and you can’t get any further. It’s a good value, and their engine makes it possible to minimize production values without looking primitive. But none of that would mean squat if their designers weren’t so good. Their first revival of Sam & Max used a small number of sets very cleverly to produce a compellingly diverse set of puzzles.
So, as much as I would like to believe they’ll revive the genre, so much of what they’ve accomplished depends on being clever, something not easily copied by other companies.
No, I’m 34 and have been a gamer since early PC games first hit the scene and I was responding directly to a post claiming console gaming is ruining the game industry, console gamers have no skill and the patently false claim that most game tournaments are on PCs. In response to your more measured and sensible post I’d say the following:
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It depends on the game. While a mouse is certainly more precise than a controller that precision, to me, only excels in games where there is a ton of manipulation of tiny things such as RTS games and TBS games like Civilization. A good example is the debacle that Civ Revolution was for consoles. For third person action games I personally can’t stand using a mouse and keyboard. I just don’t feel connected to the movement as opposed to one stick controlling your facing and another controlling your movement. First person PC games don’t bother me nearly as much though.
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Obviously there’s no denying you have more buttons on a PC. But honestly, all they are used for is shortcuts to menus or weapons in most games. Don’t get me wrong, it’s handy to map your weapons, spells, etc to keys (particularly in RPGs that require tons of micromanagement) but most games don’t require this. Having a ton of keys you can map things to is extremely handy in strategy games where you’re dealing with tons of units and such or some sims. That’s why such games simply won’t work on a console.
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This one is my second biggest gripe about consoles. Mods are utterly fantastic. Aside from Little Big Planet there aren’t many games that invite modding.
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This is my biggest gripe about online console play. Although I have a PS3 and find the community a bit more mature than when I play online on my friends’ XBox. There is, unfortunately, still a fair share of douchebags out there though.
I still see none of this as a dumbing down though. Games today have better stories, better voice acting, bigger worlds, more cinematic gameplay and all and all are more immersive in my opinion.
And of course it depends on what kind of games you like but I’d add a lot more to your list of Mass Effect and Bioshock. Such as the entire Metal Gear series, the FF series, Tomb Raider, GTA, Resident Evil, and more recently Fallout 3, Uncharted 2, Red Dead Redemption, Little Big Planet, God of War 3 and AC 2 off the top of my head.
It’s at least theoretically possible for an RPG to have no puzzles and hardly any story (e.g. “you kill increasingly more dangerous monsters in a dungeon”), but if you strip puzzles and story away from an adventure game then there’s really nothing left. This isn’t all that much of a distinction though, as both types of games usually do have a specific story to tell and require players to solve puzzles to proceed.
Unlike in an RPG, in an adventure game you normally do not have the ability to customize the player character(s), and the PC doesn’t have any stats that affect his/her ability to carry out actions. There’s usually little if any combat and often no need to earn money to purchase necessary equipment. This means no “grinding” – either you’ve found the info and items needed to complete the next puzzle or you haven’t. Although as Johnny Angel pointed out above, this does mean that if you get stuck on a puzzle there’s really nothing to do but wander around.
Hero’s Quest (retitled Quest for Glory after the first installment) was an adventure/RPG hybrid series. King’s Quest was strictly adventure, at least until King’s Quest 8, which I never purchased and never played because it looked like a total departure from the rest of the series.
I think that you keep seeing sequels because it costs millions of dollars to make a “mainstream” game these days, and thus it is much safer to tap into an established market/name than take a risk on a radical new game.
It’s just a matter of perspective. Fact is, the precision of a mouse and variety of a keyboard allow you to do things on PC that really wouldn’t be fun on a console - namely, speed and complexity.
If they had Quake on a console, people would hardly be able to hit each other due to the difficulty of using joysticks to aim. Yes, console shooters are inherently harder, but as a result, in order to make them fun, they are a lot slower paced than PC shooters in absolute terms. You think a mouse makes FPS’ “easy”, but in reality, they design the games to be that much more difficult when you have access to more precise controls (or conversely, console shooters are designed to be slower and easier than PC shooters because of the lack of precise controls). Watch any high level match, or rocketjumping video and tell me that PC FPS’ take no skill. Some people really enjoy the speed that PC FPS’ can bring that just wouldn’t work well on the console.
Regarding complexity, did you ever play Starseige: Tribes? It was a frigging amazing FPS that had multiple armor types, inventory management for weapons and packs, grenades and mines, deployables, vehicles, jetpacks, “skiing”, with an impossibly high skill cap and required tremendous predictive aiming while still requiring precision and twitch skills. Such a game would be miserable to play on a console (Tribes 2 had a console version that I believed did quite poorly, and they had to implement homing projectiles just to make it somewhat playable).
That being said, I don’t disparage console FPS’ for existing. The introduction of summer blockbusters did not spell the end of artful, intelligent movies, even if the summer blockbusters were wildly more popular. There can be some fancy big budget movies that are artful and intelligent as well, much as you can have some intricate and incredibly fun console FPS’.
If there were two versions of Civ 5 being released, one with the fancy 3D graphics and one with solid but simpler 2D graphics, I absolutely would buy the 2D version. And I have a computer to run the 3D version.