Here?s a great read that I just had to post here. He really nails some of the problems with the current state of computer games, and the graphics first mentality (but mainly it?s just funny[;)]).
[url]http://www.pointlesswasteoftime.com/games/manifesto.html[/url]
I agree and disagree with this guy, Its just another rant.
IMO If you want to pipe up / moan and groan - then have a go, get into the industry and start making a change. 99% of the population can crit - less than .01% of the population are in a position to ever make a game that even began to touch on some of the ideas he talks of ( which are good ideas but simply recycled from many, many rants )
The reason why is money. Nice graphcis sells - and if you market right, you might have a chance of selling huge, regardless of whether the gameplay is great. Thats it plain and simple - for the time being.
The only people who could change this are the big guys, without a shitload of marketing, the small guy creates a fantastic and revolutionary gameplay design - and it makes him enough money to retire without even a fraction of the world knowing about it.
There are gamers that arent out there for the graphics sure - but I for one am an artist. I want to realise my dwarfs, demons and dragons in flawless polygon and sharp textured glory. Its not my job to be working gameplay & AI - I just cripple engines with phat bling.
I shouldnt think like that - but ive come to realise without money its 10,000 times harder to get your revolutionary idea built and on the shelves.
Having a rant might gather some followers, but whats the point if you dont have the funds to pay them to make something better?
Tell your followers one day " Okay now for this great cause we are all going to work together and change this for greater good! Please work with me to create an idea that changes games as we know them - i need 18 - 24 months of your time minimum and please tithe at the door on your way in every morning. " - watch the followers disperse.
Guarantee as soon as they are finished rioting they will still purchase Half Life 3 anyway - we are gamers at the end of the day arent we..... arent we ?
Weve been around to experience a fair few games now - but what about the 7 - 8 year olds that are playing with there first Ninti DS / Gameboy SP in a few years they might have there first PC and a copy of Half Life 3. WOW they are immersed in a new frantastic world. Do they give a crap about our views ? Not likely - its all new to them - give them... say... 10-15 years of exposure to the cycle and they might too be literate enough to post a rant of their own!
Another nail hit square on Hazard!
I read that article too, a few days ago now, and I had a very similar response to it.
My hope is that some people that read it get off their asses and make games that they like to play. Smaller groups making games they like to play will probably lead to more diverse gameplay types, and probably more immersive. So in other words go Indie's!
With that said I hope that one of these days I can actually start on one of the ideas that's been boiling around in my head for some time now.
This is more entertaining than it is thought provolking. It's almost game standup.
Most of the points raised are either valid but only relate to specific games (sports, FPS or platformers), not directly related to games at all (#3) or just tend to ramble instead of clearly identifying a problem.
quote:"Hey! Fix the problems with the most popular genres! But don't bother because you shouldn't be making games in those genres! Make something new! Oh, and don't make licenced games, because ALL licensed games are $55 turds." etc, etc.
Over at www.gamasutra.com there is an excellent collection of articles by Ernest Adams called "Game Designer: No Twinkie". These articles handle game specific gripes.
As for the bigger issues raised (women in games, games for women, R ratings, licensed properties VS new properties), there are plenty of Gamasutra features that discuss these problems at length. The GDC 2005 coverage, in particular, is definately worth your time.
Also, www.gamegirladvance.com offers a fresh perspective.
Cheers!
Hehe, yeah an entertaining read. Obviously this guys is frustrated with the apparant lack of creativity in the industry and starts out okay...
Item 1: Have you ever tried to write truly smart AI that appear to think anything like a human? There is a good reason some dev-teams have abandoned the whole thing in favour of multiplayer.
Item 2: Good point. All I see on the gaming store shelves at the moment are FPS's and RPG's and a smattering of RTS and sports titles. Where are the adventure games, the side-scrolling platformers and shooters, the puzzle games? 2D is not dead! There are some truly addictive games over at www.shockwave.com, and we would definitely benefit from seeing more of the stuff coming out of Japan and Korea.
Item 3: He has a point, but I still like nice graphics. What would be nice is if the gaming magazines moved from print media to electronic media - a magazine on CD where you can watch video reviews of the games in action.
Item 4: An old issue.
Item 5: If the vast majority of our dev-teams weren't dominated by males, I don't think this would be as big an issue.
Items 6 & 7: Very good points. With the current state of technology and some decent design work, really, developers have no excuse.
Item 8: This is about where he runs out of good points and drifts off into genre specific rants. Until somebody comes up with decent speech synthesis, we're stuck with prerecorded content.
Items 9-12: All one very long winded rant that flies in the face of Items 1 & 2. He wants realism, but that's kind of genre specific and AI is very difficult to make competitive within the confines of the game rules. As has already been said, immersion is a difficult thing to define.
Item 13: Almost completely disagree. Where's the fun in starting out with the biggest, most powerful gun that kills everything in the entire level with one shot right from the very start? I say almost because I think it is true that in some cases it is just a cheap way of extending the life of the game.
Item 14: Completely confused point. (Crates suck, but check out the sweet textures!)
Item 15: He has a point, but is behind the times again.
Item 16: We really are trying, but seriously, 100% bug free games? Pigs might fly...
Item 17: Actually this is a point. A games console should be first and foremost a games console. Any other capabilities shouldn't get in the way.
Item 18: An hypothetical point, but then cancels it out by saying he doesn't think it'll happen anyway.
Item 19: Genre specific rant.
Item 20: Pointless
...in the end, nothing but hot air, which I suppose is what you'd expect from a rant. The thing that really annoys me is that he offers nothing useful to help combat the problems. He just sits there and bitches.
personally i think jumping puzzles in FPS's work fine if done well. by which i mean if the gameplay/controls can support them in such a way that they are a challenge and not a pain in the arse then what's the problem? Turok made a lot of people cry with it's jumping puzzles, yet once you finally got the hang of it they were actually quite challenging. in the end the only person i got anoyed at when i failed a jumping puzzle was myself cos i knew that i could do it and it was me that screwed it up. granted, getting your skills to the point were jumping was downgraded from frustrating to anoying took a lot of gameplay (hey, i really enjoyed the game - hard mode without losing a life!), and in that respect they probably should not have been included in the form in which they were.
take Metroid Prime however as an alternative example - lots of jumping puzzels but rarely frustrating. the double jump is what fixed that i think. in fact, i dont believe you actually come up against any serious jumping puzzels until you actually got the ability to double jump. that sounds like GOOD game design to me.
hell, they put the screw attack in the sequal - a jumping item used to solve all manner of jumping puzzels as well as traverse the world - and no one complained!
regarding #18, this is actually a very interesting / important issue (although he hasn't really teased it out).
Developers and publishers are looking at digital distribution as the quick-fix for the industry (steam, real-arcade, revolution's back catalog). Downloadable bitesize content is fine, so long as it is free.
Pretty soon you'll see a game, GT5 for example, released with 300 cars. During the following 6 months, you will see "50 car content packs" released for $10 each.
Pretty much every next-gen console is capable of this, so keep an eye out as this will no doubt be a hot topic.
#17 - Additional features for consoles should be welcomed. Sure, they shouldn't cost you extra and they certain shouldn't jeapordise your gaming experience. The console that wins the next war will probably have the most shrewd additional features (tivo, hi-DVD(or whatever) playback, games on demand, FILMS on demand, free phone calls, free video chat, ad supported game content).
Do you think DVD playback hurt the PS2?
cheers
Ernest Adams has posted his latest Bad Game Designer: No Twinkie! on Gamasutra: [url]http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20050603/adams_01.shtml[/url]
Not as good as some of his earlier ones, but some good points none the less. he also has a bit of speel on crates.
quote:Originally posted by smeg
Pretty soon you'll see a game, GT5 for example, released with 300 cars. During the following 6 months, you will see "50 car content packs" released for $10 each.
Microsoft tried this with MechWarrior 4. They released packs that added additional 'Mechs to the game (two packs were released, one with 4 Clan, and one with 4 IS Mechs). They then made the packs compatible with MechWarrior 4: Mercenaries.
quote:Originally posted by mcdrewski
Seems to me this could reverse the current trend to include modding tools. If there is seen to be value in added content, then why whould you make the ability to make that content free?
Modders will not be in a position to make real money in this way. End user license agreements will no doubt see to that ("you can't make money of this game... blah"). However, Microsoft's marketplace would give you kudos dollars, or some other funny money, that you can then spend on other things.
The whole idea is that the user gets comfortable paying for content and exchanging real world money for MS funny money, and then MS reward ameteur content creators by passing on the funny money. At no point is it redeemable for real cash.
I can't find the article that backs up my funny money analogy, but i did find an interesting article looking at the marketplace and micro-transactions from a business POV. http://www.gamespot.com/news/2005/03/16/news_6120586.html
Cheers
Well any extra content is for profit is the end-user is paying a subscription fee, you're basically trying to get htem to stay on your service for as long as possible.
Plus the indie content developers could get "hired" to do content packs for real money if their original content is first rate. Just as has happened with a lot of valve groups.
quote:Have you ever tried to write truly smart AI that appear to think anything like a human? There is a good reason some dev-teams have abandoned the whole thing in favour of multiplayer.
Yeah, it is a lot easier to write local area network latency code for a fps. However, that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to address shortfalls in AI. New Xbox & PS3 are both in-order chips which isn't going to help, but we'll also have a shedload more power overall than we did before - the possibility to dedicate an entire chip soley to A.I. might actually work quite well (run the whole thing as an isolated unit, a set of state machines, feeding it 'stimuli' from the game every X milliseconds).
So we'll have more hardware support than ever before. What's the real problem here? The guy who wrote that page isn't asking for the T1000, he's asking for (I quote): "Give us A.I. that will actually outsmart us now and then."
It's not really that much to ask. An example he gives is: "Enemies who themselves have six different guns and switch up according to what the situation calls for?" Come on, don't tell me we couldn't code that up in 20 minutes. Granted some of the other examples would require a lot more work, such as AI that adapts and changes its strategy over time, but personally I'd love writing that kind of code.
I can't help thinking there'd be decent money in a really smart single player shooter too. Or am I dreaming :)
I also laughed about the comment that the whole selection of games mainly my point focusing on GTA, are all males. I was just watching the GTA SA credits pop up and wow... the Producer is female :O She is trying to get the game out there so obviously she isn't offended by it...
Well he has SOME points, but he obviously knows little about anything to do with the production of games. Saying programmers should take it back and do it again, not all programmers have uber skills and not all companies have bottomless pockets. Well nothing to say really you all pointed it out, this guy just wasted a few hours of his life typing up the review. Had a few laughs but yeah not really such a valid article, just a rant/unknowledgable opinion.
Well I?ve changed the name of this thread to what it should have been to start with: A silly rant about the state of computer games. I found it a very amusing read and thought some others here might also enjoy it. However it?s obviously not a serious game development article, just a funny rant by some gamer, which is why I posted it in the general chat forum. As Smeg pointed out, it?s more entertaining then thought provoking; its value is in its comedy.
I also don?t agree with a lot of what he said, however there are a few valid points among his comedic rant. The main thing I think, as I said in my opening post, is the writer?s disagreement with the graphics first mentality. In theory I agree, as it would be great to see more of the Nintendo style of development where innovation seems to be the priority over pretty graphics. But the reality is that graphics sell. As a gamer I lover seeing the latest graphics in my games (as does everyone), and as an artist I would like to have the highest poly counts and texture resolutions available to work with.
However the basic attitude about graphics that most people have tends to annoy me. Many times I?ve found some obscure or non-mainstream game that was extremely fun to play though didn?t have the cutting edge graphics. Almost every time I find a game like this and try to show it to friends, they instantly dismiss it as a crappy game ? just because it doesn?t compare graphically to the latest shooter. I suppose this is more of a personal frustration about society?s materialistic nature then anything (a bit of personal physiological analysis there :P), but I can?t help but feel that if people generally weren?t so caught up in how games looked and were more concerned with how games played, then games on the whole would be a lot better.
The other main issue I agree with is the AI. I realise how difficult it is to implement well, but it really is frustrating sometimes when the game AI is incredibly stupid. Sometimes it really seems like game AI hasn?t advanced much at all in the past 10 years or so. To be fair though, there are some games that do reasonably good jobs with the way the agents react. I suppose my dreams of the perfect game, and always analysing and scrutinizing every game I play, do tend to cause me to focus on the problems of games, and sometimes miss the more subtle achievements that many games make.
Still, I have to agree with davedx on this:
quote:
It's not really that much to ask. An example he gives is: "Enemies who themselves have six different guns and switch up according to what the situation calls for?" Come on, don't tell me we couldn't code that up in 20 minutes. Granted some of the other examples would require a lot more work, such as AI that adapts and changes its strategy over time, but personally I'd love writing that kind of code.
I can't help thinking there'd be decent money in a really smart single player shooter too. Or am I dreaming :)
I?m sure that a game with really advanced AI, even at the expense of having the best graphics available, would do very well.
And to finish my little rant response, here are a couple of nice quotes from the first half of the article (evidence that this article should not be taken very seriously ? it?s just comedy [:)]):
quote:
Look at the little guy. The one who's just a head. I mean, let's face it: strategy is all that guy's got going for him. He has no limbs and he's already on fire.
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Where's the game where we're a pre-op transsexual where the object of the game is to gather enough money to complete the operation?
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Wow! This must be one of those new second-person shooters we've been hearing about where you spend the whole game looking at the hero's fucking eye. Because surely from now on they'll demonstrate the awesomeness of their game only with shots from the game, right?
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Have you guys ever met a woman? Then why don't you try making just a few games that don't play off of a 14 year-old male's idea of womanhood on the apparent hope that he'll play the game one-handed?
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Imagine if your word processing program did this, refusing to let you save your progress until you typed six more paragraphs.
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Keep recycling the same mindless observations over and over again until we're pointing at our television with a shaking finger and screaming "EAT ME, JOHN! JUST EAT MEEEEEEE!"
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It was cute that I could shoot Coke cans off the tables in Doom III. But then I shoot the magazine sitting next to it and it doesn't even show scuff marks. It's 2005! Give me environments that realistically react to what I do! Yes, it matters. It's immersion, bitch!
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Isn't the world full of unemployed actors willing to do voice work in exchange for food or, you know, Heroin? "Do it with feeling this time, Cody, and I'll make the spiders in your brain go away!"
yes a good read. cant say i agree with everything in there though, like the views on imersion, i think that's a definition as hard to pin down as 'gameplay'.
funny though.