Truly innovative games of the 21st century? Hmm. How about:
Achievement Unlocked
Kaizo Mario World
Desktop Tower Defense
Canabalt
(And honestly, I have very little experience with old games, so if I’m wrong just tell me)
Why? Far be it for me to defend pointless graphical glitter but 3d isn’t really that anymore. There are a lot of legitimate reasons for a game like Civ to be 3d. The most obvious being able to render at your monitor’s native resolution and being able to support all 3 common aspect ratios far more easily than can be done with 2d. The ability to zoom in and out without seeing a pixelated mess. And, most importantly, the ability to reuse animations in ways that you cannot in traditional spritework. For example you can make a standard “human” model. Which you can then modify into an “archer” model very easily. Which can then be given animation. You can then go back and tweak the “archer” model without effecting the animation. For example making an England version and an Egyptian version. And more versions for any country all the while preserving/reusing the same animation set. And many of the animations for the Archer can be reused for the Spearman, like the basic walk animation, or at least portions of it. Compare that to sprite work where all you can really do is a palette swap. Anything more than that would require completely, or nearly so, redoing every single frame of animation. You can do keyframe animation in 2d but in my experience it looks really cheesy compared to 3d or traditional 2d. And there’s really no reason to do it unless you’re on a system that can’t handle 3d well and don’t have the time to do traditional 2d.
Why can’t you render 2D graphics at the monitor’s native resolution?
As to answer your question, because 3D graphics add nothing of consequence to the game. It hogs system resources for no good reason, and I would argue often makes the game a far WORSE experience. Civilization IV, while I enjoy the game very much, has graphics that, while technically far more advanced than previous versions, are frankly not very good. The game has a washed out appearance, it’s hard to tell the difference between a lot of the units, and even on a decent system it slows things down.
In some games, advanced graphics vastly enhance the quality of the game. “Bioshock” would not be the game it is with inferior graphics. The graphics are a critical part of the experience.
I agree that this is very helpful to the programmer; it is of no consequence to the user. I don’t care how hard it was to make the little guys. In fact, if you used sufficiently clear unit symbols I don’t care if the game has little guys that move at all. Why should they be animated? They can be NATO map symbols.
The units in the original Civilization weren’t animated at all, but in terms of serving the needs of the game that game’s graphics were just as good as Civ 4. The improvements since then, IMHO, have been in game mechanics, not graphics.
Because 2d graphics aren’t rendered they’re just copied to a frame buffer. Unless they’re vector anyway. But I haven’t seen many games use vector. I think a few DS games do. In my opinion vector graphics look worse than sprite/raster or 3d for a video game.
It shouldn’t slow the game down on a decent system. Games aren’t programmed like they were in the SNES and earlier days where objects moved X pixels per frame and so slowed when the system was taxed. Now they move X units per second. So the framerate doesn’t matter for the speed the game runs at(within reason, of course). And as far as, say, calculating what the AI is doing on it’s turn the 3d graphics are completely irrelevant. I just don’t get the idea that it’s more “washed out”, difficult to interpret, or in any significant way inferior to previous Civ games. That was true of some early 3d games, like say FF7 whose out of battle graphics were a blocky mess, but hasn’t been the case in many years. Outside of handhelds anyway. NDS 3d graphics are pretty terrible for every game I’ve seen.
Well I can see where you are coming from. But most people do want their units to be animated and so it will be. As long as that is the case having them be more easily animated means there can be more variations of them which is useful in adding depth and complexity to the game. And slight nitpick it’s not at all helpful to the programmer it’s helpful to the artist. Programming 3d is a much bigger pain in the ass than programming 2d. But luckily unless you’re trying to push the boundaries of what’s currently being done the 3d code is out there and can be easily reused.
It shouldn’t, no. But they often do; Civ IV with the animations on had noticeable slowdowns even on good systems.
Shoulda, coulda, woulda; I’m talking reality.
Because it is. That’s just the way the game appears.
If you look at other mediums (movies, popular music), they went through a period of organic growth with artists trying to appeal to connoisseurs before they were taken over by commercial interests. Good movies and great records still get made, but they are drowned out by populist pap, because pap makes more money. Production values get better and better but this, perversely, results in worse movies because the real innovators can’t get any momentum or airtime. Adding insult to injury, the only innovation that does occur is with gimmicks like 3D glasses and auto tune.
To summarize,
- The mainstream industry is not interested in great games
- Great games still get made but they rarely make headlines (see #1)
Creating the perception, if not the reality, that games are getting worse.
Do you actually believe this is true, though?
Movies in the 2000s were not any worse than they were in the 1990s, or the 1980s, or the 1970s, or the 1960s. They’ve been putting out both good and bad movies for much longer than I’ve been alive.
Music, similarly, did not start out good and end up bad. How was music in 1985 any better than it is now? How was it any better in 1960 than it was in 1985?
TV today is, in my opinion, significantly BETTER than it used to be, not worse.
Your assertion just doesn’t seem to hold water.
Cable TV is better because it does not have to appeal to 12 year olds and suffer censorship so badly. But I liked games like Nobungas Ambition, Romance of the 3 Kingdoms and others like that. they seem to have died.Good RPGs are hard to find. They overload the graphics at the loss of game complexity.
My point was not that movies got worse…it’s that mainstream movies took all the attention away from the more creative movies.
In music, I think it’s much easier for crass, commercial stuff to be successful now than it was in 1960. The good stuff is still there, but it harder for the casual listener to find because all the mainstream outlets play watered down stuff for the masses. It’d be much harder for a led zep or a Dylan or a pink floyd to break out now.
I’m not so confident that my point holds for TV.
I like Pink Floyd, but I’ll just point out that the first truly successful PF album (Dark Side of the Moon) was considered by many fans to be watered down for the masses.
Speaking based on playing CivIV, though, those slowdowns are all in frames of animation and not on underlying move/action resolution speed, at least based on my experience…and if I get bored tonight, I’ll swap out my Radeon 4870 for my old Radeon X1800XT and see how Civ handles it.
i think what’s worse then the publishers telling the developers not to make risky/creative new games are people like yourself accepting crap as the new normal…
great games that have been destroyed by publishers:
great: rainbow six > rainbow six rogue spear > rainbow six ravenshield
terrible: rainbow six vegas, lockdown, vegas 2, etc.
great: heroes of might and magic 1,2,3,4
terrible: heroes of might and magic 5,6
great: supreme commander
terrible: supreme commander 2
great: hitman > … > hitman blood money
worse: hitman absolution
…
those games have been changed in game mechanics to become mainstream from before being something new that gave the player freedom in creativity.
so there is proof for what is happening.
the irony in all this is that the original games have all been succesful and the bad sequels live from their predecessor(s).
Am I getting jaded, or was this thread better the first time around?
the original Lords of Midnight has just come out on the iPad. 
Loved that game.
You fall into the same category as the 15 year olds 15 years hence.
I started gaming at about 10 or so… in 1982 on an Atari 2600. Games like the ones you mention like X-Com, Master of Orion, Civ, etc… were all games that came out while I was in college.
While they’re great games, there were great games that preceded them as well. Stuff like the Ultima games, the Bard’s Tale games, Wasteland, F-15 Strike Eagle, the original John Madden Football, et al.
I think a lot of what we’re seeing these days is a combination of two things. First, video games are a major source of entertainment these days- not only do you see TV commercials for the big ones (COD, Portal, etc…) but you see them in prime-time and during sports events. Video games used to not be such a big deal- they were viewed as primarily a children’s and nerd’s thing, so they didn’t sell so well.
Now that they’re a big deal, you have a lot more pressure to make them as friendly to the average gamer as possible, which tends to kill a lot of the really interesting and difficult gameplay and tends to channel money into things that are thought to sell- branded franchise games like Madden, FIFA, Civilization, Call of Duty, Battlefield, the various Lego games, etc… and starves money and resources from innovative stuff because it’s not predicted to sell as well. I also think that the mass-marketization tends to emphasize the whiz-bang stuff- 3d graphics, sound and cool visuals over gameplay, much the same as what’s happening in film today.
The other thing is that with so much money to be made, the signal to noise ratio just went way down- there are a LOT of crappy derivative games being made, and the good ones are more of a needle in the haystack than ever before.
Oh, and comparing great games of yesteryear to today’s and saying that today’s are better because the old ones had crappy graphics or clunky interfaces is patently retarded. That’s about as braindead as saying that “Citizen Kane” sucks because it’s in 4:3 regular definition black and white, and because it doesn’t have any explosions or killer robots.
It’s about playability and innovation and that "wow’ factor that comes from playing a really good game- that doesn’t change over time.
This topic is insane. Mainstream games (not all of them) may show some of that dumbing down effect to achieve more popularity, but check out all the amazing indie games being developed that basically take a lot of the same gameplay styles as older games and polish them or offer really cool twists.
For starters, some great indie games with really meaty gameplay that I’ve played in the last year or so:
Braid, Super Meat Boy, Bastion, Binding of Isaac, FTL, Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom
That’s just off the top of my head in 10 seconds. Download Steam (or hit the discount sites) and get a ton of games for fairly cheap (and ridiculously cheap if you wait for one of the sales). Not every one you try will be to your liking, but indie developers are experimenting with so many different game concepts and combinations now that you’ll inevitably find some that really just do it for you.
Honestly, I’ve never been more excited about the state of gaming, and I’ve been around since the Super Mario Bros. / Duck Hunt (original) NES era.
I’m about the same age as bump and I have to agree. While a lot of games are just incremental improvements on games going back decades. Every now and then, something new and groundbreaking is released. Look at games like Minecraft. Or the DayZ mod for the relatively obscure ArmA II.
What I would like to see is something new and groundbreaking in Real Time Strategy games. Something that is not just another updated and rehashed version of Dune 2 / Command & Conquer / Starcraft / Total Anihilation / Age of Empires / Supreme Commander “collect the resources and peon rush your enemy” gameplay.
Ok, this game from the people who made Total Anihilation and Supreme Commander might be pretty cool: