What Happened to Gaming?

I think it's because people may have run out of ideas.

 

Xenoblade Chronicles (2010) and Skyward Sword (2011), I think are some of the most inventive and ingenious games of all time and are both really recent. Skyward Sword is just about the only game that would suffer from the lack of motion control. The way that they actually do things impossible and a standard controller and sheer magnitude of techniques you can use with the sword makes it more than just another Zelda game. That and Ghirahim is awesome.

 

It's ridiculous to say that gaming isn't moving forward at the moment, whether you like the direction it's going in or not.

 

I really like Xenoblade. My Mum walked in on me playing it once and she said "Haha, wow the graphics are terrible! Looks like a Nintendo 64 game." I can see what she means, though. I absolutely love the landscapes and the opening title screen. It's beautiful. I haven't played on it in a while, I got stuck on one of the bosses :bang:

I also agree with you about Skyward Sword. It's truly amazing. Haha, Ghirahim, that sassy man :lol: (!)

 

AC1, really? Creed 2 was exponentially better than the first one. I liked the high middle ages style (although Renaissance was pretty pimpin' too ) and death monologues of your targets, but the first game was fatally flawed.

I agree with your list though. All on the list deserve heaps of recognition for "better than good" quality, and a few get the rare honor of transcendent greatness. Some like KotOR and Morrowind aren't only cool games, but go beyond into real life and broaden your perspective of the world. And Minecraft? It's the only game so far that can be so wholly immersive that people begin to dream in blocks. It's that damn good.

For every Edgar Allan Poe though, there is a number of Stephenie Meyer's. Being shitty doesn't stop some literature from being lucrative, and the bottom line is that games need to make money. So rather than waste effort and dollars on genuine greatness, they'll settle for "gorgeous graphics and fun for 5 hours." Hey, if you can make as much money with Madden XX as you can with Mass Effect, why not?*

*Personal ambition notwithstanding. Some people are just born to change the world, and I wish there were more of them.

 

Haha, Xenoblade does look a little goofy at times. It's successor though... wow does that look beautiful.

And yes! Ghirahim's sass is forever unmatched.

 

Gaming is sort of at war with itself right now. The Call Of Duty games rule the market but some great games still make it through. The Bioshock franchise is a good example.

As for Valve, they are working on something big. Back in November, Gabe Newell announced that Valve is making a whole new engine. They were waiting for something big to come along to make it for. (Episode 3?)

 

Umm.. you forgot to add all 3 bioshock games to that list, just saying
My favourite franchise of all time.

Omg I love everything in that game. That loading/constructing of the city animation... amazing. But, ofc, the best thing is the story. And the details of the maps and the walls.. i couldn't believe so many polygons could be processed at a playable rate (ok, it's mostly rectangles and stuff, and only your surroundings are being computed, but still, for an open-world game, it's pretty cool).

 

Amazing non-sequel games that have come out in the last year or two:

Telltale's The Walking Dead
The Last of Us
Journey
Xenoblade Chronicles
Katawa Shoujo
Dear Esther
Fez


And those are only the ones off the top of my head.
There are tons of great sequels that came out recently, too.

Amazing games are still around, you're just not looking hard enough if you believe they aren't.

 

WHY IS PORTAL NOT ON THAT LIST?!

[/rant]

 

gta 5

just you watch

 

I think it's just the fact that the best selling games these days are shooters, for whatever reasons, and as a result developers are just trying to get into that FPS market (which is probably the biggest). We just have to treasure the games that do come out, and there are still many gems that are truly amazing, whether it be gameplay, design, story that will continue to enthrall us gamers.
Oh and Skyward Sword was amazing, and Assassin's Creed 2 is one of the best games I've played. And I've been playing the Last of Us, that truly is an amazing game. We just have to look for the exceptional games.

 

The issue is graphics. There is too much of a push for good graphics. The better graphics get, the worse gameplay has to be to accommodate it.

 

Exactly, they spend too much of their money paying graphic artists to make the game visually appealing, and not enough paying story writers. It all comes down to this, when most people buy video games they judge them based on the graphics, how it looks, than the story. The developers can show people how awesome the graphics are and grab their attention far easier and faster than if they showed them all of the little things that make a game awesome. They spend the money on what makes you buy the game, not on what makes you enjoy it.

 

As the saying always went, you can't put gameplay or music or dialogue on the back on the box... you can only use graphics to advertise.

The time that needs to be spent on graphic development increases exponentially as the graphics get better. The easiest example is something like having a character pick n object up off a table: something like the Pokemon handhelds that just have tile based sprites require absolutely no extra effort to display this - your character simply stands next to the object and it disappears.

The next stage was something like the original Alone in the Dark, with its rudimentary 3D graphics. You couldn't just have your character stand next to an object and then have it magically disappear and move to their inventory without it looking silly - so they implemented a sort of vague bend-and-grab animation that was basic but required much more development time to implement.

It progressed on like this until you've got what we have today: photorealistic graphics (or near enough). Because the graphics are hyper-realistic - which already takes a fair amount of time to produce on its own - you've got to make everything else hyper-realistic to match. That means your "picking something up from a table" animation has to have the character look at the object, put away whatever they are holding, reach towards its exact location, grasp it, and then put it away somewhere. Just this one tiny thing probably takes more time to do than was spent developing an entire game in the early '90s.

And that's just one minor thing - there are hundreds of thousands of identical situations that require the same treatment when graphical standards advance.

That's the problem: if you have a standard for good graphics, then everything has to be at that standard. Instead of bringing everything up to that graphical standard (which would be very very difficult and I don't blame anyone for not doing it) they instead just remove gameplay features so there are fewer things to do. They can't just lower the graphics standard because as you said, graphics are what sells games. This is why we end up with 'games' that are gorgeous, but are really just movies with a few quick-time events where you have to press a button at an opportune moment.

For example, Half Life 2 was supposed to have the striders able to move more dynamically and be situated outside of the very specific instances that there actually were, but that had to be scrapped because it was too difficult to display convincingly.

There's a reason why Dwarf Fortress, the absolute epitome of interactivity and complexity in gaming, has 'bad' graphics.

 

People don't want games. They want movies that pause on occasion so you can earn merit badges.

That's what I blame, cutscenes and unlockable achievements. Which were about the most awesome things ever when they started showing up. I mean hello, not to make myself feel old, but Goldeneye 64? The sense of pride you felt when you finally unlocked and beat the egypt level the hard way without a game shark?

I mean unlockables can still be great when they're done right. But mostly they just figure "okay so we'll put some real game in here and then pad it out with a bunch of fetch quests and get people into replaying levels for hours on end".

Although even then if the level is actually hard, replaying it for hours on end, hey I'm cool with that. Just that's the other thing. People just plain don't want hard games. They want games they can win.

I agree with graphics vs gameplay too. It's always worthwhile to be one console behind.

Although I will say one good thing about modern games: modding. User created levels are always just the best things in the world.

I just so bad want them to make another metroid game to make up for that one with the four bounty hunters that didn't feel like a metroid game. It has been so so long since prime and echoes.

 

Oh. My. Gosh. That's just what I always think, there are not very many of "those" games any more. :icon_sad:

---------- Post added 4th Jul 2013 at 08:10 PM ----------

Here, allow me, a very proud gamer to be of assistance to you, if you would like to know some games that I find wonderful, ask me. Maybe I should set up a twitter, or a facebook or perhapse a tumblr with my reviews? Feel free to contact me, I have been gaming since I was 5 and have never stopped.

 

You're not looking hard enough.

Apparently you've missed most of the whole indie gaming thing, not to mention all the kickstarter projects being developed at the moment.

Sooo many great games come out over the past year or 2, sooo many on the horizon.