Do you think the big games developers are slowly one by one letting gamers down? recently we have seen numerous releases that have not reach standards a game should. Whether it be bioware and da2, cod3 shitty port, valve and the ep3 delay, total war ai still not getting better after all these years. Stronghold 3 having dogs that could climb siege ladders. Blizzard destroying lore for money. Or is it we ask to much and this is the problem for devs. While indie devs seem to be getting better. What are your thoughts? Keep it polite.
Games are more complex to make these days, but that does not excuse most of these issues. I feel its mostly the publishers pushing for profit causing most problems, it would explain why most indies seem to do better. We are at fault too for accepting all the BS and buying crap. I for one do not see why people buy a yearly cod game and dlc with barely any changes. yet its the best selling game, why make quality when recycled rubbish sells better? Apologies for any Cod lovers, but I can only accept that game as a mindless shooter. Sorry for any spelling/format issues posting from my phone PS I have no clue what is keeping HL ep3
The fault lies squarely with us, as long as we stand for shit, we will get shit. It's not that we ask too much, it's that we are among the "elite", we are the ones who were gamers back when being a gamer was synonymous with being a basement dweller, most of us started gaming as tabletop or spending to much in arcades, we were gamers BEFORE it was cool. However times have changed. There is a breed of gamers who cut their teeth on CoD and Halo who no nothing else. They accept shit because it's the "cool" thing to play, and all their mates are playing it too. Xbox spawned the new breed and since it's more profitable, we have been back benched. Indie devs however are like the old school developers, when gamers made games for gamers. This past year the finest games have all been indie titles or small company titles. Games like Bastion, Atom zombie smasher, binding of isaac, dungeons of dreadmor, terraria, MINECRAFT! Even Serious Sam, torchlight and dungeon defenders are small company or indie games which avoided the lime light which are outstanding games. Basically, we still get Stella releases, but we need to look deeper than the shit big companies throw at the Xbox crowd and port over to PC. We are in a golden age of games, but most get overlooked because of fucking Activision, EA and the likes.
I did not have very high expectations of anything, and to be honest I wasn't let down by the games that came out recently. In fact I rarely had so much trouble choosing what to play, maybe I am just a bit more positive minded. But I don't really play FPS/RTS/Sports or Platform games much anyway.
This, I play what's fun and if I don't enjoy it I don't play it. I like the options of games out there and always find something to my taste.
Too many kids getting too much pocket money from their parents. COD3 release being the saddest day in gaming for me. Not only is it pretty much a direct Port from COD2, but the kids and idiots sucked it up in the millions. further confirming that lazy development still pays. I have no doubt that the best games defined by my definition of "Best Games" and probably most people in Boon Control, will sadly be made by either Eastern Developers or Western Indy Developers. Anything made by Activision / EA will cater for the Casual player in the hope of making the biggest buck. Therefore all their games, by all their stable of developers will be dummed down and worth nothing more than a casual approach. I await GW2 and The Secret World, but am pretty sure we will all be dissapointed in the casual friendly slant and disregard for a full and mature End Game, that these 2 titles will offer as well. Most MMO's today are nothing more than a single player RPG's with a co-op function. The Good news however... MMO's are moving more towards the "Action Style" Combat system and added Dynamic events, mean that the learning curve for combat and class progression is less of a stiff ask for casuals as learning multiple trees and key rotations, etc. yet still enjoyable for the more experianced gamer. Add to this the fact more developers are learning that a Sandbox game with extensive Themepark Q's and Dynamic Events is the way to go. All this leads to the possability that a future MMO by a big Dev could break the casual themepark bullshit model we are spoon fed today, but my bet is an Indy will do it and the amount of money it makes may lead one of the big Publishers to take the punt on a Sandbox, Dynamic, Action based, PvP MMO. But for now I refuse to take any MMO seriously that is not based on a Sandbox model with player generated content at it's heart.
I will disagree with the idea that games today are complicated. In any way. Any possible way. I see praises to game designers today flying left and right and somewhere in my heart i know that, that breed of people should never have existed. "Good ol' games" used to be so good simply because they were designed by programmers. A programmer is a person who is IN LOVE with his creation. A game designer is a person who performs on demand and for the sole purpose of profit. Nothing ever created by a "proffesional" high badget, university educated, corporate inbreed pig "game designer" will be fun. It will be sub par at best. We are not at a golden age of games. What we are witnessing is a rapid decline in video game culture. Much like what happened to music after the 90's. Games today are being developed with the "Frankenstein effect". Pieces of code and media, created by different ppl, at different time and place, are brought together by a design team, who in turn, is taking orders by a marketing team and the outcome can be nothing more than badly stiched totem of unimaginative "limbs" (i realy luck the vocabulary to express my full thoughts) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_of_Magic Created in 1994, a masterpiece of depth and atmosphere if you will. MS-DOS. This is simply one of many examples of the apex era of video games. And i dont even like strategy games yet this makes a perfect example of what was right about games back then, and what is wrong today. You know why a game is called a game? Cause there are 2 possible outcomes for the player. You either win, or you lose. Not because you set the difficulty on high, but because that's how the game is by default! Sadly, in todays "games", the mass pulp pop productions sold to us as games, one cannot lose. ...sorry for my rant, it's just that i've been feeling like this about the games i play for quite a while.
Sadly I have to agree and disagree, We are seeing the decline of the production of in depth games, but were not seeing the decline in gaming. SWTOR's 2 mil subs, etc, is more of an interesting stat when you see that WoW never took more than a 100k to 150k hit on it's subs, during Dec and Jan. Which means one of two things, either WoW players did not unsub from WoW whilst playing SWTOR just in case it turned out shite, or the 2mil subs from Bioware for SWTOR include a lot of new gamers testing out SWTOR as their first MMO. All existing MMO's including Rift, etc, saw a very small amount of people leaving the game for SWTOR, so like I say they either kept their subs going just in case, or SWTOR dragged a fair few noobs into the online gaming Genre.
I would say that I believe games today are easier and modern gamers on the whole want easier games. I was talking to a younger guy at work today about games because he was all excited about the new Syndicate game. I told him that although it looks like a decent enough shoot 'em up co-op game to play for fun with some mates, its nowhere near as good as the old isometric real time tactical/strategy version of Syndicate that I am pretty sure all of us here would have played on some form of console or PC in the 90's. His answer to this was "the original Syndicate was shit.", I asked him if he played it, he said yes, and when I asked him why he thought it was shit, he simply said, "the game was too hard to be fun.". ALthough this is only the example of one person, you can't make a factual statement that games are being made easier because people want them easier, but in my opinion, I would say that the younger generation of gamers want it easier. Biggest problem people like us have (people who have been gaming since early 90's or even earlier if your KC) is that we remember a time where gaming was uncool. Gamers were social outcasts and the games were not made for a mass market. Back in the day, people who played games, PC or console, played them in what would be categorised in todays standards as "hardcore". Think about old consoles, there was no save game feature, so you would have mammoth 12hr plus sessions on old megadrive games for example trying to complete the game because if you turned it off, you had to start again. The games were so hard you could play for 10hours, die, and have to start from level 1, no autosave feature to keep noobs happy. Old games were designed to be played in a "hardcore" fashion if you ever wanted to complete them. Hell I have megadrive games that I STILL play today that 20 years after getting my megadrive, I have still not completed (Alisia Dragoon, Kid Chameleon - to name a couple). I don't consider this bad design, I consider them two of the best games ever made, I mean, 20 years of replay-ability... can you see a CoD beating that ? It wasn't just consoles, PC gamers were made for "hardcore" types too. Example: remember the original version of Counter Strike ? They had no instructions on how to get the game installed and working or how to use and of the console commands to get into games etc. etc. You HAD to have a knowledge of computers and actually be interested in computing to get that game to work and get playing. It kept the playerbase unspoiled by pre-teen crybabies who wanted everything on a plate. I don't think the devs are doing anything wrong these days with the games they are making. Times have changed. Making games is now a much wider audience that it was years ago and as such, the devs are making their games to sell to the biggest chunk of the market, to make the most money. This means for me and many others on this forum who remember "the good old days", we think modern games are shit and the devs are messing up. When in reality, they are making very smart moves from a business perspective. You have to remember, games are not made for your enjoyment, games are made to get your money. Unless you are sitting in the largest demographic, you are not going to be catered for all that often, as games that are made for you and your demographics will not make as much money as games made for the casual market or the xbox FPS fanboy market. Currently I would say that RTS is your best bet if you want a challenging game because pretty much everything else has been nerfed into the ground to accommodate people who have trouble using a keyboard. MMO games are a prime example of how the difficulty level of games have deteriorated over the last 5 or so years. Its sad, but thats what the majority of people want, so that's what will continue to get made by the big companies.
Also Aspira, Kingdoms of Amalur requires Hard mode to even be slightly challanging, I am also playing Jagged Alliance and that too is a joke on anything other than the highest level. So I expect to see a lot more games where "Normal" is "Easy" and "Hard" is "Normal" another pander to the fucktards who don't like to see the fact they struggle in a game on "Easy" mode, so lets dum down the game for their pleasure...
I got 100% on Saint's Row: The Third in 36hours (vanilla game, no DLC) on the hardest difficulty setting...... I died twice. The game itself is infinitely better than the recent GTA games, however, I would say that the older GTA games like GTA:3 or Vice City were better simply because they were harder games. Okay, they weren't hard games, they were easy too. You probably need to go back to the console GTA games to find one that is difficult, but the fact remains, even the run and gun fun games like GTA/Saints Row are being dumbed down difficulty-wise. They are still fun games, but I would find them sooo much more fun if they were a bit more challenging.
