is WWII Online still up and running? THat game was total crap when it first came out, but with a few years to iron out all the bugs and balance the gameplay better it could be really good. I agree that the idea was really cool.
Video games have a different purpose now.
It used to be people played video games for fun.
Now people turn to video games for socializing, relationships, creating alternate identities, and cinematics. Fun would be a distraction.
Games like Half Life 2 or Oblivion are hardly even games at all. There is nothing remotely “fun” about either. More accurately, they are failed simulations.
Failed, because these games are notoriously horrendous at getting across simple feelings like “running” or “jumping.” There is no sense of real motion. The only thing they simulate is what it would be like to lose most of your senses. Even old 2d games were much better at getting such sensations across. When you run and jump in Mario it feels natural; the added “sense” of being able to see yourself from the side replaces the senses you are missing in a game.
Of course, there are still some very good games coming out. There are just a lot that don’t even try to be fun, because that isn’t their purpose.
KOTOR and Psychonauts are great, Ico and Shadow of the Colossus are masterpieces, Jet Set Radio and Shenmue II are awesome if you go back a little farther.
I do think there is more that could be done in 2d though. I would love to play a new Battletoads or Wonder Boy.
I disagree with this completely. Half Life 2 was a great game, and I thought it was very fun. Oblivion not so much, but Fallout 3 (which was made by teh same people, on the same engine) is fantastic and a load of fun. These games aren’t attempting to perfectly capture motion, they’re attempting to tell a story, they’re attempting to be interactive movies. You want something attempting to capture real motion you can play Mirror’s Edge, Assassin’s Creed, or especially the new Prince of Persia which just came out (which is amazingly fun, btw)
and seriously, Shenmue II? I thought Shenmue II closer resembled an aborted fetus of the original than a proper sequel. The original was great, the second not so much.
Still I notice none of those games you mentioned do much in the way of capturing movement, particularly a game like KOTOR (which I loved, but movement was slow and clumsy) Well maybe JSR did a bit of that, btu that’d be the only one (and don’t get me wrong, I loved all the games you mentioned, especially Psychonauts and Shadow of the Collossus)
stupid time limit…
anyway, I aggree that we need more 2d games, or maybe 2.5d like Super Smash bros single player stuff, or The New Super Mario Bros, basically 3d but from a 2d perspective. I heard the new Sonic Unleashed game has levels like this, and they’re the only good part of the game (as opposed to the werehog levels which are generic beat-em-up or the hub-world where you wander around aimlessly talking to people. Seriously Team Sonic, make a SONIC game, not a game that features sonic-like play on occassion and crappy play the rest of the game. It’s not THAT hard! I don’t care if the game is only a couple hours, if it’s fun and I can replay for achievements/higher points whatever I’ll be happy!) though I gotta say, I crap my pants every time I think about Battle Toads, that game was HARD!
ETA: holy shit is this computer pissing me off
And there you are wrong. There is a solid niche for online games. And most games can have online-based content or features. But relatively few games will ever be totally online-based.
The reason is that online games require interaction in some format, and that interaction has historically not been of a very high quality, and cannot be too tightly controlled. Secondly, that interaction prevents top-quality anything. Whether it’s PK’s ganking you because they don’t care abvout death penalties and just want to ruin your day, or lines of people around the block to kill a monster, or the fact that you cannot tell a very good story or ever be a “hero”, online games are as much limited as they are open. Yes, it’s cool to go into a dungeon. But you can never claim you did something all that amazing, because 500 other people did, too. The closest you can get is to claim some other, much sillier, accomplishment, like being the first to hit level 80 or to have your guild kill a certain boss. And while some games may even reward you for it, it rather dimishes the accomplishment when everyone else gets to do it, too.
And let’s face it: given the chance to chat, even dedicated roleplayers on supposedly RPG servers will start in on their favorite mexican dishes or complain about the latest patch or discuss whether the additional DPS on a certain weapons plus active effects A, B, and C is worth trading off against the higher DPS with only active effects B but also passive effect D. Singleplayer’s killer app is what online games cannot be: about the player, and oriented to the player.
Things are just so specialized now, and there are so many extremely complex games, that it’s easy to get overwhelmed, disenchanted, or both.
I went through a period of being disillusioned with gaming right after the Dreamcast died. I loved the DC and its innovative games so much that, while I played the shit out of a few Gamecube games, I largely sat last generation out.
As I’ve gotten back into gaming over the last couple years, I’ve found the diversity and complexity out there to be pretty cool, if a lot to deal with.
I don’t much get into things like World of Warcraft (though I have tried it) or Call of Duty 4 (though I’d like to try it), but I’ve found way more than enough to keep me occupied this gen. My Wii gets plenty of play, and the DS has what may be the single greatest library in the history of video game consoles.
What I really find is that I’m less excited about the big, epic games than I used to be. But there are so many games being produced in the little niches I do find interesting that I don’t really notice.
At the moment I’m having a blast working my way through Mega Man 9.
Online is becoming less of a niche, I feel. I don’t know if single-player and mutliplayer will somehow switch with regards to how much play they get, but it could.
Not owning a DS, I haven’t really played it, but I thought it was fundamentally a 2d game, just with 3d graphics (i.e., exactly the same as Super Smash Bros.)? Watching video of it, it seemed like a shame; the visual aesthetics were kinda lackluster, even crossing over into ugly, when it could have easily looked great (and captured more of that classic Mario game charm) with some hand-drawn sprites.
The very fact that you said this means you don’t understand where I am coming from.
Think evolution. MMORPG’s are a High-Risk/High-Work//High-Reward strategy, and an MMORPG that flops may be a huge drain. It may still limp along, because as long as it covers variable costs it can contribute something to its development cost. But every game and every type of game fill niches.
What we see in MMORPG’s is that they fill a social gaming niche, with varying levels of gaming and socialization. But too many companies are jumping on the bandwagon. They will (and some are) burning out their own base by trying to fish it too heavily. Lemming-like, they try to duplicate the success of WoW or Everquest.
In fact, what we’ve seen is that multiplayer games don’t subtract from single-player games. Some people think it’s a matter of competition, and of course they wind up talking nonsense. And managers are just like them, so they kneecap good, profitable games for bandwagon online crap.
Yes, it pisses me off. How did you know.
I’d like to see some better strategy games out there. For the longest time I thought RTS meant “Rush, Turtle, Superweapon” since those are pretty much how every strategy game seems to play out.
I liked the complex resource gathering of Age of Empires II. Problem is that the trend seems to be less resource gathering and more “just build a bunch of crap and blow the shit out of each other”. That isn’t strategy, it’s a demolition derby.
Well, yes. Then I’ve got no clue, especially when you try to explain it.
Age of Empires 3 is a very well-rounded game. Halo Wars, the last game from Ensemble, is trying to simplify the economy functions and playing it out like that. That could be fun.
The thing I’m seeing is that you’re simply playing the wrong games. The games you like are less action-y and more focused on atmosphere, story, and the things that makes a game seem to me like a novel (in a good way). That said, I think there is a trend towards more flashy games, but I think a lot of that has to do with how much bigger the gaming industry is now, and the younger demographics that play games.
OP, I AGREE WITH YOU 101%!!
I touched on your topic slightly in a recent thread of mine (What Games Have You Been Playing Recently?). I just find myself losing interest in today’s games far too quickly. So many of them are just…boring…uninspired. I wish there were more games today like there were then. I’d replay some of my favorites from my youth, but I’ve already replayed them so many times that I already know the plot and its twists and the major dialog points.
From my perspective LOUNE wasn’t talking about mmorpg’s when he said the future was online he was talking about ALL games. I agree with him one hundred percent. I have always been a gamer but my interest in games soared with the creation of xbox live. Now there are very few games I’ll even give a shot if they don’t have a multiplayer component. I’ve always hated cutscenes, in between clips and attempts to move the story. I wanna play a game not watch a movie. The best part of online play is the skill level dwarfs whatever the computer can throw at you. The strategy is constantly evolving. When I first started playing COD4 on certain maps there were some killer sniper spots that good snipers ran too after the start. After a couple of weeks everyone knew of these spots and good snipers took advantage of this and ran to a secondary spot after the start and picked off the guys that were running to the old spot. I don’t play online to chat or make friends or anything of that nature, I play online because that’s where the best competition is.
Ok, here’s the simple end of the stick: I think there is a place for online-aspects of more or less any game (and it is already the case). I don’t think that online gaming is somehow going to “win”, because its very strength is its own weakness as well. It can never be about you, the player, and you can never actually accomplish anything meaningful, because it has to be open to everyone.
The other downside is that online games do not lend themselves to certain kinds of gaming, and frequently kneecap the best kinds of games. Online strategy games have been tried time and time again, and they tend to share one weakness: it becomes work, because you HAVE to get on and play or get destroyed while offline. There are fixes, but of course those tend to mess with the game in other areas. Some things you can do online. Some, frankly, you can’t, and the more connected (i.e., the more social) the game the less plain old fun it starts to become.
The “novel”-like games you describe just don’t seem to exist anymore. Maybe there are still a few, but I really stopped paying attention years ago when it became clear that my favorite type of game had become at best a niche market. I do like some kinds of sim games too – I had a serious The Sims addiction a few years back, and have spent many hours on SimCity, Civilizations, Age of Empires, etc. – but what I really loved were the old Sierra adventure games like King’s Quest, Quest for Glory (technically an adventure/RPG hybrid), and Gabriel Knight. I still break these out sometimes and play them. From the 1980s to the mid '90s there were plenty of games of this type, and for a while it seemed like they were getting better and better every year. But things peaked around 1994. It’s my understanding that the success of Doom all but killed the genre.
I don’t care to play anything of the first-person shooter variety. Never have, never will. Action-based games don’t really do anything for me, and I’m mostly uninterested in stat-building. There are exceptions on that last one, but only if there are interesting puzzles/quests and it’s pretty easy to build the stats you need to progress. The online game Kingdom of Loathing has been my preferred time waster for the past year, mostly because I like the humor. 
I had expected to enjoy Myst, but that left me cold and remains the only computer game I’ve ever owned but never bothered to finish. If there’d been any characters to interact with I’d have found it a lot more interesting. I avoided all the Myst sequels and knockoffs.
What makes a game fun for me are a strong story that takes a fairly long time to unravel, likable characters, some good puzzles, and a bit of humor. The last game of this type that I played was 2000’s The Longest Journey, most of which I liked very much but was not without flaws…like some very lengthy exposition sequences, and an ambiguous ending that left many plot threads unresolved. (I didn’t bother with the sequel, which apparently resolved very little and is said to be almost unplayable on PC.) But it was an engrossing and enjoyable game, and pretty much the only new non-sim game I’ve cared for in years.
The Gabriel Knight series was probably the best of the best IMHO. The mystery plots were novel quality, and the characters have a lot more personality than you normally see in a game. It’s one of the few adventure games where the protagonist character has a strong personality complete with flaws. Grace Nakamura is also my favorite game character ever, and may be the most intellectual major female character in any PC game. Other particular favorite games of mine were King’s Quest VI and Quest for Glory IV, although QfG4 was marred by some serious bugs. I also remember The Legend of Kyrandia II fondly, although it was fairly lightweight.
If I could find some new games along those lines then I’d buy them, but the game industry apparently doesn’t want my business.
I’ve heard this sentiment before, but I’m honestly not at all certain how it applies to most online games. For an MMO, sure, having a story where “Main Character 45,908” can feel their contribution matters is impossible. But if you’re not just looking at story, then I’m not sure how you come to this conclusion. When I’m fending off dozens of zombies and helping my teammate up as the other two in the party scream for us to get to the safehouse before the tank rips us apart… sorry, but I have done something meaningful. There are plenty of co-op campaigns where everyone is meaningfully moving toward the same story goal, with each character contributing in the story, to say nothing of the interactions between the players.
If you mean Fallout/Elder-Scrolls-type world events or malleable endings from player choices, then… well, yeah, it’s pretty hard to do that with more than one player. However, there are a great deal of awesome games released every year (most of them RPGs, strangely) that offer almost nothing in the way of branching or affecting the story. The number of games that get player choice “right” is vanishingly few, and all others have about the same results as any co-op campaign.
Again, it sounds like you’re thinking of something very specific here that doesn’t really apply to most games. Sure, there is the fact that, the longer a competitive online game goes on from launch, the more people with no lives will populate it and just roll over everyone who hasn’t spent every waking moment practicing. But there are plenty of ways around that - most of which are just to play with friends, or find servers where people of the same skill level play. Obviously, this is harder on console systems.
I will agree that, as you mentioned earlier in the thread, the producers of game studios are more and more turning to “online” as the solution to How to Make All the Money. But, when it comes to console gaming, there really is no other way.
I can best illustrate this with a few examples:
The Darkness - a solid single-player title with a rather tacked-on multiplayer aspect. Very few still play it; the secondhand market is flooded.
Shadowrun - a short mutliplayer-only title with some budget difficulties, such that it shipped with nine maps, no singleplayer content, and cost $60. The studio failed shortly after; the secondhand market quickly flooded.
Bioshock - an absolutely brilliant singleplayer experience that changes the way atmosphere and story happen in games. Zero multiplayer. Game receives universal praise, but within a few weeks, it’s easy to find used, significantly cutting into the profits of the developers.
Call of Duty 4 - great singleplayer campaign with plenty of unique experiences. Addictive multiplayer, with new maps released a few months in. Even a year later, it was difficult to guarantee an available used copy until the sequel was coming out.
Mirror’s Edge - wholly unique singleplayer game, offering mechanics and art no other game has conceived of before. No direct multiplayer and slow DLC. Secondhand market already filling.
Fallout 3 - singleplayer-only game packed with multiple endings and hundreds of hours of explorable landscapes and challenging quests. Many ways to play the game; always more to see. Very, very slow stream of used copies.
This is all sortof roundabout, but my point is this: creating a resalable game with no multiplayer content is, with few exceptions, akin to throwing money away. Gamers, especially console gamers, want an experience that will last them a good, long while. So when they’re looking at selling their games, whether it’s to a dedicated reseller or on eBay or whatnot, the titles that go first and go for less will be the ones that don’t have those dozens of hours of gameplay in them. And, sadly, the only singleplayer games that qualify are JRPGs, like the Final Fantasies, or WRPGs like Elder Scrolls. Everything else is fair game for a very quick turnound of used sales cutting into publishers’ revenue.
So, sure - maybe there’s a “plain old fun” that online-based games are missing these days, but gamers as a whole are demanding more for their money, and that very often means online-centric games are the way to go, especially if they’re not half-cocked MMOs with poor storylines.
Lamia: Do you have a Wii?
If you do, get Zack & Wiki, it’s a similar sort of game to the point-and-click adventures. I’ve not played it myself, unfortunately, but all reports say it’s quite good and quite entertaining.
I feel ya on the death of those sorts of games, though. Some of my fondest childhood memories of games were from Kings Quest or, one of my absolute favorites, Loom (Loom (video game) - Wikipedia)
I’m still not getting it, but **Miltonyz **was right. I wasn’t referring to MMORPGs really. Halo 3 on Xbox Live is the best game out there right now.
Psst. what’s your Gamertag?