Because none of those elements are necessary to make a *good *game. See the Wii.
It is true that developers now have more resources at their disposal–which is my exact point! With the current level of technology, practically any game a developer can conceive of can be realized. Sure, it may not have your ideal level of graphical fidelity but I have thing nothing to support that gameplay is being compromised by a lack of technological progression.
Some of my favorite games of a decade ago I still return to this day, and I find them no less immersive despite their out-dated graphics, on a technological level (you really do seem to short-change art design.)
And that’s where you’re wrong. You know why? Because you and me place different values on the importance of technological improvements. It’s purely a subjective matter. To be clear, I’m not arguing that having a more powerful machine isn’t “better” per se on a purely technological plain–my point is that that alone isn’t holding back games as you seem to believe.
And we’re not likely to see a jump equivalent to that unless new input/output methods for playing games are realized. If you think it’s the lack of the latest graphics card holding it back, you’re kidding yourself.
What’s the difference? If I loved driving sports cars and the market changed dramatically and not enough people bought them anymore to justify making them, could you say “your hobby is fine, you can still buy a pickup truck”?
And what PC gamemakers are you talking about? There’s valve and blizzard for the major studios that are still making PC games. Or are you counting all the console developers that make half-ass PC ports of games since it’s easy since it’s all directx anyway?
Jackbooted thugs don’t have to come into my house and blow up my computer with a C4 charge in order for PC gaming to be suffering a great decline. The lack of games in genres in which there used to be dozens of quality games, and the lesser quality across the board in games that are developed for consoles first and ported to PC later is a clear, huge detriment to the hobby.
I can’t even really see how this is in question. I’ve been doing this thing my whole life and the scene has changed dramatically in recent years. And everyone who I talk to who is in the same boat as me (ie has been playing PC games extensively for a long time) agrees.
If we’re going to play the appeal to authority game, I’ve been playing games my whole life as well. And I’ve been working in the industry itself the last four years. And ALL my FRIENDS feel the same way I do.
I didn’t say it was. Pac man is still fun. But the existance of lesser technically accomplished yet fun game doesn’t somehow mean that we wouldn’t be better off if we also had available games which were groundbreaking through their immersiveness.
You could say this same thing 10 years ago. Everyone always thinks the era that they’re in is some pinnacle. There’s that old story about the patent office closing up in the 1800s because everything that could be invented had been. I’m sure people thought the NES was the pinnacle of gaming technology and who could want more?
There’s a false dichotomy between graphical improvement and realism and art design as if one could only come at the cost of the other.
How does technological improvement hurt? It makes new things possible. But that doesn’t mean you can’t do the old things. Again, this is a false dichotomy. If modern warfare 2 looked way better than modern warfare 1, it wouldn’t somehow prevent the new super mario game from being made.
Why? What was the dramatic input/output method that revolutioned games between (in this example) 1992 and 2002? There wasn’t one.
What happened was technological development. We went from games that ran at 320x240 resolution with horrible graphics with extremely limited game worlds to games that were bigger, looked far more real, had better AI, better multiplayer/connectivity technology, had a physics system and more detailed world and object modelling, etc. All the developments between Wolfenstein 3d and battlefield 1942 were the development of CPU and GPU power. The developing technology gave the developers new ground to explore, new tools to use, new ways to tell a story, ways to create a better and more immersive world, and ways to create new and better gameplay experiences.
I already said that obviously it looks to console gamers like gaming is getting better all the time, because as I said, consoles have moved up to being shitty PCs. And if you like games that can use this extra processing power (like shooters or racing games or sports) then it seems like a golden age. But your perspective is only because you’ve gone from really shitty attempts to do this stuff (previous console generations) to half-shitty attempts to do this stuff (x360/ps3). You don’t realize (if you haven’t been part of the PC gaming world) that PC gaming has always been way ahead for these genres and only in recent years have consoles even been within the same ballpark. It’s not an appeal to authority, it’s disbelief that you’re essentially telling me that the sky is green when I can plainly see that it’s blue.
That’s great, except you keep whining about how “gaming” is being held back when what you’re really saying is that “PC gaming within the genres I enjoy” is being held back.
Gaming is doing just fine, thank you very much.
And if you believe a quantum leap in graphical fidelity is just around the corner… if only we had better video cards!.. you have not been paying attention to the business side of gaming. Developers can barely put out games with the graphical resolution they have now without breaking the bank. If you think anything more than incremental increases in graphics are on the horizon, you’re the one looking at a green sky.
Again, we seem to have fundamental disagreements regarding this, so it’s unlikely we’re ever going to see eye-to-eye. I don’t think technological improvements = more immersive. The most immersive game I’ve ever played came out nine years ago, and the graphics have not detracted at all from that experience in the intervening years. It’s like saying Disney’s animated movies can’t be as immersive as Pixar’s because they look less real.
First, I don’t believe we’re “in” the pinnacle–in fact, I believe the opposite. I never once stated however , as you seem to believe, that gaming can’t improve. I just don’t think it’s dependent on hardware improvements.
Great art design doesn’t necessarily require great hardware, though it can enable it–I don’t deny that. Neither of which really impacts gameplay, mind you.
Where did I say it hurt? My point has always been that current hardware is hardly constraining game design. Graphics? Sure (but again, I don’t give a damn about those), but gameplay–hardly.
Right, but here’s what you fail to consider. Wolfenstein was pseudo-3D, Battlefield is actual 3D. That’s the jump you’re comparing, and my point is we’re unlikely to ever see a jump of that magnitude again unless we somehow figure out how to cram a fourth dimension into games. It’s like comparing Super Mario Bros. to Super Mario 64–a gigantic leap, one of which that (I believe) won’t be repeated with hardware scaling alone, hence my “input/output” comment.
Well, yes. First person shooter games. Flight simulations. Turn based strategy. Naval simulations. Real time strategy. Realistic/tactical shooters. Massively multiplayer games of non-persistent types (I mean like 64 vs 64 player matches of battlefield 2, not WoW). Plenty of other genres. Huge genres that have had dozens of quality titles over the last decade are nearly wiped out. You’re making it sound like I have some tiny niche that’s not getting enough games - I’m saying that anything that doesn’t play well on a console (which is a wide range of genres) is dying out. And what remains is gimped.
I don’t think you understand the technical side of this. There’s a lot you can do with procedural generation, especially with new generations of graphics cards that do GPGPU work with CUDA and OpenCL type stuff. Or polygon counts with tesselators. You can create entire types of effects like walls that when blown up turn into a thousand bricks or cloth that flaps realistically in the wind because a tesselator procedurally increased the polygons without putting any more work on the artists or modellers. Or creating new and better lightning and post processing effects. Or even simply not worrying so much about having too many objects or polygons or vehicles or characters on the screen at any given time so the system doesn’t bog down. There’s a lot you can do that doesn’t hugely increase the workload of the developer (because it’s done procedurally by new technology).
And would gaming be “doing just fine” if the only PC game available was WoW, even if the subscriber base of same was (say) twice that of all current PC gamers (North American market only)? That’s two reductio ad absurdum’s in two days for me…
I understand it. I’m well aware you can do those things now or with the higher end graphics cards. The problem is you effectively limit your audience to those that have those more expensive (look at Crysis). The other problem is that it costs untold millions to make games look like that.
You keep ragging on Modern Warfare 2 for not going above and beyond its peers, but it had an absolutely ridiculous budget (Infinity Ward’s words, not mine). To make it look like you want it to would have broken the bank.
Developers and publishers (even mighty Activision) are not ready for that kind of budget committment.
Please. WoW is not the only PC game there is and even pretending it is just makes you sound crazy.
Modern Warfare 2 actually didn’t have a huge budget. Activision offered them a huge one and they turned it down.
I think you’re conflating engine technology and map/campaign/art/etc design. You can make an engine that makes everything look better relatively cheaply, and most of the costs you talk about going into this big titles are in the art and design departments. A better engine does allow for better and greater art, but doesn’t necesarily require more work - you can do a lot procedurally.
The trend in designing APIs is actually to make things easier for the developer, designer, and artist. For example, traditionally in games you typically make models for objects with low/medium/high polygon counts. When the object is far away, you load the low poly count model (both because the user isn’t close enough to appreciate the extra detail, and you can have more objects on screen if they’re lower in poly counts). At a certain distance the medium poly model pops in, and close up you get the high poly model.
But designing and making sure the variable polygon count models work well is a significant investment of a designer’s time. The tesselator in DX11 allows an artist to create one model, and then the tesselator engine scales up or down the model as appropriate for its place in the scene. This saves a significant chunk of developer time and it creates a better experience for the end user, because you get smooth transitions that allow greater detail at a distance, and you can actually increase the polygon count beyond what the artist designed and do stuff like making edges more round, cloth and hair more natural, etc. procedurally.
Putting the same amount of effort into art and design while improving the technology available would still result in a better experience. More tools, more capacity to do what you want, not being as restricted in terms of design complexity or how many entities you have on the screen at once, etc.
As for WoW, you were the one to use WoW as an example of how PC games are doing fine, and my (and his) counterpoint is that one game does not prove there’s some great diversity and the industry is doing fine.
They didn’t use the total ridiculous budget, you’re right. But if you think even the reduced budget of MW2 is reachable by any other publisher, you’re crazy.
I did no such thing. Again, stop putting words into my mouth.
Woops, it was RickJay who posted about WoW originally. Between the back and forth I lost track of who said it, my bad.
As for MW2, I don’t know what they did with all that money. Yeah, it’s pretty decent but there were almost no engine upgrades and the campaign only has about 4 hours worth of content. They added a lot of new weapons and stuff, but it’s not like they did exhaustive research at the range or anything to do it.
I don’t know what the actual budget was, but I read articles about how Activision offered them much more and they turned them down. I’m guessing it’s not all that much more (if at all) than other big budget titles like Bioshock 2 or even (on the PC side) starcraft 2 or diablo 3.
Still, you’re talking about four of the most sought after and expensive games ever produced. The only reason they even have budgets as high as they do is because they’re surefire hits. Gaming has yet to have an Ishtar or Waterworld where millions of dollars were spent and then the product bombed.
If a game budget is huge, it’s because it’ll make it back. And there’s little room to take huge sweeping chances on a game because then it might not make that money back.
Did you even read my post? I was in “what if” mode, as in what if all PC games/genres, except a MMORPG-like WoW-ceased to be marketable and thus publishable, yet WoW got c. 10x the subscribers (as in, the only PC game anybody plays is WoW or the like, but a good chunk of the country plays it to death). Would you still crow that “PC games are still fine and dandy”?
Then what is your point? Is it strictly a semantic one? Or are you really arguing that, despite the acknowledged (by you) extinction (virtual or total) of a number of formerly viable PC game genres is a good thing, something desireable?
Who said its a good thing? I merely said that gaming as a whole is doing great. And while its sad that genres that SenorBeef likes to play are slowing disappearing, that doesn’t mean video gaming as a whole is broken (which is what he’s saying).
no, what we’re saying is that your Disney animated movie would be holding Pixar back if Pixar was forced to use less-real animation to make their stuff instead of what it could be/is. how then could one claim animation as a whole was doing great when we know what it could/has achieved?
i don’t understand the defence of design over technology. one does not preclude the other.
There is no defiance–if that’s what you’re reading into this, then you’ve mis-understood my argument. I have no problem with technology progressing, I’m just rather indifferent to it at this point. My point has always been that the lack of technological progression that SenorBeef continually points to is not holding back game design to any significant degree.
but don’t you agree Pixar’s stuff would suffer if done with ‘less real animation’? i’m sure it would still be enjoyable and the story unaffected, but nevertheless