Slashdot Mirror
Vanishing Game Genres
turpie writes "CNET's Gamecenter is running a story about dying game genres, their arguments seem valid for some genres like Flight Sims, and but are stretching it a bit for others like RTS (StarCraft) (they may not be too original anymore but I wouldn't say they're dying.) I'm also wondering what this leaves us apart First Person Shooters (ala Dooom & Quake)?" For that matter, since the first person shooter, I don't feel like a new genre has really appeared in awhile.
Half-Life had the alien planet, yes, and it sucked royally.
Too much console-style gameplay (jumping puzzles abounded) and it was just dumb.
The vast, vast majority of people I know either hated or stopped playing HL when they got to the alien planet. It was just that bad to lots and lots of people.
I was always of the opinion that they should have come up with another few areas of the complex to explore, or some underground, or something. ANYTHING but the crappy alien world.
You all are going to laugh, but, yes, there have been new genres that have gotten very popular. The most notable is dancing games. This started out with such PSX games as PaRappa the Rapper. Now, accessory 'dance mats' for the very popular Dance Dance Revolution are easily available, and gaining in popularity. This falls into the category of 'All the rage in Japan' and actually involves exercise, something most gamers could use. COmpanies are tryign new genre's all of the time. Someone only need to think of the money Tetris brought in, and it should be obvious game companies want BADLY to bust a new genre open. For example, there is a four seat racing game at my local arcade. Sound normal? Not quite. It horse racing. You play jockey on the horse, and the movement of your rocking and the movement of the horse's head determines your speed, not to mention looks really funny to onlookers. WHat about Silent Scope? Maybe you would just call it a 'really, really First Person Shooter', but thats a crock. You could call it 'A Gun Game', but comparing this to Operation Wolf isn't even fair. I feel Konami should be praised for this game, because it was original, well played out, and damn fun. Don't pigeon-hole yourselves. A lot of people don't see the inovations because they stick to what they know they like, such as RTS, RPG's, FPS, etc. Keep your eyes open and see the new stuff, and give it a shot. Besides, if *YOU* can come up with a genre that hasn't been tried, but would be addictive, Let me know and we'll sell it for a ton of cash. Toodles
Toodles D. Clown
I have to disagree with you. Adventure games are -NOT- dead. They just don't look like they used to.
Run out and get yourself the game "Deus Ex", and play it for a while.
Yes, it is in the first person perspective.
Yes, you can shoot people with guns.
But, it has an adventure plot and action. You can play the entire game without killing a sole! And there is multiple solutions for multiple types of characters.
The game was developed by like 3 programmers, and 12 writers. It was made like an adventure game.
I'm gonna stop sounding like a Deus Ex salesman now. My point was... adventure games haven't died, they are just adapting to the first person perspective, which is the popular thing now.
-- "Almost everyone is an idiot. If you think I'm exaggerating, then you're one of them."
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
1) The adventure games are dead becuase kings quest, space quest, and the like SUCKED I mean has anyone actully played them, I used to on my old tandy, and Im sorry to say but a crappy sentance based interface and a story line in which you die every few seconds made these games playable to only a few die hard freaks. As far as myst goes yeah the graphics were awsome but then you have to think that the only people who could play it are those who arn't die hards (die hards never bought a new computer they were to damn busy playing police quest). Now myst on the other hand was to damn easy for us, becuse after we got over the inital shock of its awsome graphics, we realized you could beat the dam game in under 5 min (if you still havent figured this out im not taking the time to explain it now). So we have a bunch of die hard freaks who are content with crappy games and dont buy new computers that can handel todays games, and a bunch of people with desecnt computers who dont like the games cause though pretty they arnt all that fun...
2) What makes a combat flight sim? REALISM! What kills a combat flight sim? REALISM!!! What we did is we created games so real they became to hard for the average use to play and have fun with. Face it were obviouly not all qualified to fly the moden jet fighter, so why try when its not really fun. Anyway these REALISM games replaced all the actually fun games, for example Pacific Strike, this game was awsome, it wasnt too hard but challenging...but more important it was FUN!!!
So realism killed the fun games, and the realistic games wernt fun enpught to keep the average user intresteding the genre. Thus it died.
3) RTS games now this is an intresting one, What I think killed this genre what CRITICS, every game that came out was over critisized, resulting in low sales and thus underdevelopment of the genre. Take Force Commander for example, look for reviews and you'll find 100 bad ones for every good one. If you ask me I like the game, but these people just see all these bad reviews and get scared to say anything else good about the game. Todays rts's are reasonably fun, however predictable ai, but have fairly good graphics. SO as I said I think critics killed this genre.
4) Space combat games are far from dead, Just the best one I can recall was tie fighter, It just had better features than its sucessor x v t. Then you can take a look at the Home World series, this is actully a spaced based rts. The usings actully pull strafing runs, and the graphics are prettry cool too...Anyway i dont care what cnet says this genre is still out there and if another decent game is made it will have high sales.
5) War games have siply become the other genres, so yeah I guess cnet actully got this one right.
Anyway my point is that the future for video games is just as bright as ever, just keep in mind people play games for fun if a game isnt fun people wont play it.
Jainith
HALFLIFE IS STILL KING
Since the first person shooter came of age (arguably with wolf3d, more realistically with doom), we've had several genres arrive. RTS, while marginally existent starting with Dune (1990) really didn't take off until Warcraft. While technically not an original concept, the MMORPG games are realistically a new genre as they take their MUD origins to significantly larger scales.
Arguably, team based FPS is a new genre as well, arriving on the scene significantly after the original FPS. First person "sneakers" (as somebody else coined previously) are also radically different from the original "shoot everything that moves" FPS.
While the C-Net article describes some symptoms of shifting awareness, it's probably very premature to declare any genre as dead. Flight sims, for instance, are a relatively niche product that appeal to a distinct audience. If somebody doesn't mind not selling a ton of units, then they will find an audience for a good flight sim. Further, I think that in the future you'll see a lot more cross genre games as the gaming worlds become for fleshed out. Having a FPS RPG game where you can climb into the cockpit of a helicopter to reach some objective is probably not too many years away.
Unbreakable toys can be used to break other toys.
there's a form of games that they've not mentioned, which is continuously *gaining* in popularity...
... retro gaming!
It's certainly where I spend all my gaming time these days. Who needs games that require a supercomputer to process, when the gameplay is lacking. With MAME and my ROM collection, I can keep my gaming urges satisfied for years to come:-)
"Give the anarchist a cigarette"
A little planning goes a long way...
Which is that nobody wants to play them any more. Supply and demand is at play here. If people still wanted flight sims companies would be developing them.
Since obviously nobody wants or plays many of these types of games, I have to ask - who cares?
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Jon E. Erikson
Jon Erikson, IT guru
What about the graphical MUDS, like everquest (called evercrack here at work for its addictiveness.) there deffinatly gaining popularity. ultima online didn't seem to do as well as everquest. but go on e-bay and you can find players selling there everquest items FOR REAL MONEY. and with upcomeing starwars rendidtion of the game they will get even more popular.
Gentleman, you can't fight in here, this is the war room..
who sez death can't be funny....www.endlesssorrow.com
...combat and peacetime alike: Some of us prefer nth-degree realism, even if it means the sim costs upward of $40 per and it's a cast-iron unforgiving bitch to learn how to operate properly.The trade-off, though, is that the sim better be well documented and thoroughly debugged. I snuck a look at the resource page for Falcon 4.0, and from there I went to Reviews. One of the knocks on F4.0 was that the air-campaign module was buggy. A misbehaving feature-laden sim is less enjoyable than a bulletproof if relatively unsophisticated one.
"How many light bulbs does it take to change a person?" --BMcC-->
Some would argue that games involving stealth are in a genre of their own, and not merely first-person shooters (Thief, Deus-Ex, etc.).
I used to enjoy playing some games once in a while, and I enjoyed keeping up with the latest releases.
Then Doom, Quake, and RPG/Strategy games appeared and that was the end of my gaming years.
I play games to relax and have fun. I want to be able to play a game that will last a few minutes, and not, literally, days or weeks.
I miss the good old platform games and all those other games with simple plots and simple goals. I even wonder if many of today's high school kids have even played those types of games.
Innovation drives the gaming industry. The problem with the flight sim genre is that it's been overdone. From A10 Tankkiller to Wing Commander to (gulp) MS Flight, there's only so much you can do. Shoot, turn, shoot, loop, turn, crash into a mountain.
Today's gaming climate blurs the lines of definition between genres. Look at Half Life, Asheron's Call, BattleZone, Metal Gear Solid and Spyro the Dragon. Only games that give us more to explore and kill actually make it.
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Wooden armaments to battle your imaginary foes!
Most notably, the War Games catagory. Hello? http://civilization.gamestats.com! Firaxis and Activision are duking it out to create the next generation of Civilization games.
I don't think most people would consider Civilization (the board game or computer games) to be proper wargames -- they are turn based strategy games with a military/conquest element, but that's about it. "Real" wargames (tactical/strategic simulations) don't have roman phalanxes that can destroy an offshore battleship, or planes where a single bombing run takes two years of game time.
I've been marginally interested in wargaming for about two decades, and in all of that time it's been a niche market with a very specialized audience. You really have to have an interest in military history to enjoy grognard-style wargaming. Most people I've encountered who are serious wargamers are extremely specialized in the types of games they like to play: the Boer wars, or the WWII North African Campaign, the Roman Conquest of the British isles, etc. These people want to know the armament and insignia of every division, the personality of the commanders, etc. It's really not for everybody (for my part, I'd be happiest playing maybe one or two nights a year of serious wargaming, using a game system where I can learn all of the rules in half an hour or less -- I'm not a serious grognard).
There may be an interesting parallel between wargames and flight sims here: in both cases, the target audience is much more interested in detail and realism than in mass-market playability. The difference being that as computers get better and better, building better flight sims requires more money and effort to design something that makes use of all of those resources (and it will be a LONG time - if ever - before they make a flight sim that is realistic enough for the truly hardcore). Flight sims will always be around, but they may start costing a lot more, and be harder to find through mass-market retail. The future may be better for wargaming, since you don't need millions of dollars and a whole development studio to design a wargame - the target audience mostly only cares about historical accuracy and a good AI. The latter can be tricky, but there are still lots of good wargames being put out by small, independent software companies (I've heard good things about Tac-Ops, for instance).
There ARE new genres, just not in the west! Japan has created many new genres in the mid-late 90's. Witness the social sim, like Tokimeki Memorial. Witness the Rhytm Game like Parappa, and its natural extension the dancing game, like Dance Dance Revolution. Hell, Japan has created games that are based entirely on interaction with sound. One game (I forget the name) didn't even have graphics, just a blank screen while you interacted with the sound. I'd love to see some of these genres here but the market here seems to simply prefer generic FPS's and sports games. Oh well. :-/
Hell, not a SINGLE Social Simulation has been released in the U.S. (No, Thousand Arms doesn't count. It was horrible and didn't include very deep social segments.) The Sims sorta is like that but it was more an external "ant farm" simulation rather than one that put you into the social context.
Check out Japanese games sometime. Not the ones that are popular here, check out the releases you DON'T see talked about here. You'll find some VERY interesting games.
In one sense, yes. I thought Wolfenstein 3D was an amazing game at the time. But the superiority of Doom's gameplay is fairly evident -- today, over 6 years from its original release, I still go back and play the odd game of Doom now and again. I can't say the same about Wolf3D, no matter how much I liked it at the time...
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
I'd agree to that to a certain degree...heck, even top-selling "Civilization" (and all its varients and sequels) are still basically based on the old "Empire" engine, which was running perfectly well on unix and vaxen boxes before PC's were around. Civ just added the "theme" of history, and features there-of, based on the science development model in its A-H boardgame namesake.
M.U.L.E. still rocks as probably the best PC game ever, IMHO.
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
Besides, is 100 FPS really that much better than, say, 40 or 50?
Actually anything over about 30 fps is pretty much wasted. Unless you're very exceptional or highly attuned to these things, your eye won't notice much of a difference in performance once you get over 30 fps. Any differences in frame over that would likely be imperceptible. Every human eye is a bit different, but the general cut off is somewhere around 30 - 60 fps.
So, if you're buying some super hot vid card to get 100 fps in Quake III, you're wasting money. Buy one that'll get you 40 fps and you won't notice the difference in playing the game.
Just be sure to wear the gold uniform when you beam down -- you know what happens when you wear the red one.
> Remember when the gameplay was what really mattered in games?
Yep. But now all that matters is what "features" you can pack into the boxtop description. Games are suffering from the same inappropriate feature race that almost all other software is.
Kind of like movies, that pack in the special effects and forget the things that once made great movies great. Never mind whether the fx contribute to the movie or detract from it; the trailer serves the same role as the games' boxtops. Bait the buyer; that's all that matters.
Whence all the superficiality?
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Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Also, the Thief series, while it's based on first person shooter-like engine, it's different enough to qualify as an original genre in my mind - the "first person sneaker", if you will. And the melding of adventure games, shooters, and putting it in the third person (a la Tomb Raider, Heretic II) is a fairly new concept as well.
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yes!
I have been looking for a good sidescroller for years! The amiga had one -- R-type I think -- that was absolutely brilliant. The C64 had Delta I think it was. Both kicked serious butt.
More rencently, (like three years ago) I bought (one of three software packages ever purchased) battlegirl, which was totally kick ass. As soon as I get my hands on another mac, I'll dust off the zip disk it is installed on. It had a top view 360 scrolling action, with 100s of levels, and best of all, separate fire and fly controls (like Bolo for the Apple II).
Does anyone have any good 2d shooters to recommend?
Vinyl sounds better. But to get a decent turntable, needle, and the vinyl itself you're going to spend a lot of money. CDs are cheap hifi, but they don't approach the richness of an analog recording on a killer turntable.
Of course that vinyl degrades quickly, even with lots of care and a well-balanced needle. CDs are literally orders of magnitude cheaper in the long run and they do sound quite good, despite the infamous clipping of the "inaudible" frequencies.
There are still a lot of people that buy new turntables and vinyl. They spend lots of dough on the stuff... they are the same people who buy vacuum tube powered (sometimes liquid-cooled!) amplifiers for $10,000 + a pop.
"Free your mind and your ass will follow"
It's not that games aren't fun.. They are. It's not that games aren't sexy-lookin. They are. Most games that have a decent development team, and a good QA team to make sure it works properly, are good games and they are great fun.. Did you sense a "but" coming? Indeed, because here it is..
The problem as i see it is that they are fun, but only the first few times you play em. Why is that? Well, replayabilty just isn't there anymore for many new games released. I sure hope some game developers actually get to read this because with almost all of my friends and my gaming community buddies, we complain about the same thing. Lets examine some games that have made it, and others that haven't.
They say that the combat flight sim is dying. Well, i might tend to agree, and for a few reasons. Complexity is one, they have that much right, but if you get people into the genre, that's not enough, if you want to sell more games of the genre later on, you have to keep them there, and that's where replayability comes in. To see the same formation of enemy aircraft or ground vehicles in the same place at the same time every time you play the game really makes it boring. I used to be a fan of this genre, and the last game that really tickled my fancy was Gunship 2000. Simple graphics, nothing terribly complicated, but every map you played, even though there were only perhaps 5-10 maps that the game just kept selecting from seemingly at random, the location and configuration of your targets changed every time you loaded the map. That kept me playing that game for a couple years.
Something more recent? How about Quake(series), Diablo, TFC? Now many might say that its just the multiplayability of these games that made them good. Well, they're right, but probably not for the reasons they suspect. How many people do you know that sit there and play the single player QuakeII game over and over? It's not especially thrilling anymore, and not many people bother. Yet there are still thousands of people playing QuakeII multiplayer every day even after 3 years. Why? New maps come out on occaision but its not that. Its that the people you play against make the game like-new every time you join a server. Same with diablo. Diablo had an interesting concept, but it became one of the most popular games in years because different monsters, items, and indeed even the levels you played changed everytime you loaded the game. Same game, but replayability was high.
The real cause of the death of all games, not just PC games is misdirected focus in development. Most games are being directed toward making better more intense and real graphics thanks to the intense graphics competition out there. New hardware means new capabilities, but really, i don't want sexier graphics if it means after i buy the game and play it once, i don't want to play it again. Maybe the game reviewer's themselves are contributors to the apparent stagnation in innovation. Development companies do pay attention to the reviews and suggestions they make, and when was the last time you saw a category in a review for replayability. Its all about graphics, graphics, graphics. Sure they review playability, configurability, stability, and a few other standard review items -- all important, no doubt. Yet they consistently overlook what is going to keep you coming back for more. I think it's time the developers took an objective look at what made those games of yesteryear great, and take a step back from replying on the technological developments of tomorrow for sales.
As a programmer and electrical engineer I have to disagree with your generalization. I think the problem is a sign of a systemmic problem with American computer games. Many games focus on complex and precise details, but fails to deliver good gameplay. When I come home from work I don't want to study a 200 page manual on how to get started, and then another 20 pages on how to get it configured correctly (I do that enough at work already). I want to just want to pop the game in press start and have a fun time.
The Japanese may not be the most innovative when it comes to games but they create games that are fun and enjoyable. I would prefer to play a well crafted Playstation game at 320x200 resolution that garunteed to work than a 1024x768 resolution PC game with the latest technology that lacks in gameplay.
Play Chrono Cross and you'll see what I am talking about!
I do let gameplay slide for some games like Nethack because they are extremely fun and interesting when you get into it.
Sacrifice looked to be the most well-crafted game at E3 and a lot of fun. It's ludicrous to eulogize the RTS as "dead and buried" while praising the very fresh and playable Homeworld and eliding upcoming games that are actively reinventing the genre like Sacrifice, Black and White and Halo. Gamecenter's eulogy for the RTS convinces me only that they dislike some recent RTS games so much that they've become jaded on the subject.
As I see it, there are two types of games out there-- those to make a profit, and those because the designer was having a bit of fun.
The problem is that companies are trying to get the most profit that they can. For a flight sim, they've got to get everything right, or some anal retentive bastard's going to bitch that the lever to control the landing gear's in the wrong place.
It's not so bad with fantasy games, where you can make up whatever you want, and well, that's just how it is. [which is why Halflife starts getting lame when you're on alien worlds -- it's so much cooler to see how well they got the human reactions and such]
Some games are fun in a more nostalgic way... I'll go back and play Quake once in a while, or Duke3d, when I'm in the FPS mood, but QuakeII....I don't think so. Sometimes, I'm in the mood for a good game of C&C or WarcraftII. [Although, after playing it for so much, I guess I have to admit that AOE and AOK aren't bad games, either]
You still get people working on text based muds....not for the profit, but for the fun of it. [okay, and I know a few that are just there to be fascist bastards, but that's another story] People still work on NetHack. I think I remember seeing on slashdot a while back mentioning Trade Wars. Hell, there's even a sequel to Dark Castle coming out.
Good games are still out there, even if they're not coming from the companies who can afford the multi million dollar ad campaigns.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
--Quote-- Myst's idea of interactivity involved sparse clicks followed by hours of skull scratching. And text adventure involved vast amounts of typing followed by hours of skull scratching. --Q Off-- Both of those generes involve a TON of head scratching. But the difference is that unlike in Myst (or Riven or and Myst-esque game) There is no involvement with the player. It's like you're a body strapped to a pole wandering around a extremely detailed quake 3 map at 2 frames a minute. Text games had a flavor and style to them that drew you in to the story. But this is not even the worst. What about the death of some great generes like the side scroller? You will never see another game like Super Mario 3 or (Super) Metroid or Alex Kidd or Actraiser (I really loved the action scenes, but the sim scenes were good too). Games have become more bland and will continue to do so as the technology favors the 3-d game. With every NVidia GeFarce card that people buy, they are saying to developers..."Make us Daikatana.... Make me Quake.... Make some bimbo and let me stare at her ass for hours on end." If you notice, the 3-d card is a really awsome processor, it's probably more powerful then the Pentium or Athlon you've got in your system. but it limits the creativity of the people who program for it by forcing them into the 3-d mold. Rant off Rave Off Hasta, Steve Toth
I'd dispute the suggestion that Wolfenstein 3D was truly original. Plenty of RPGs had used a first-person viewpoint while wandering round a maze before, while the gameplay wasn't really more than a gauntlet clone. Viewpoint alone does not a new genre make.
Looking across at my shelf, I'd have to suggest the inclusion of Dungeon Keeper, though. It'd seem just as original as Lemmings to me.
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
Outlaws was my favorite pre-true-3D shooter, and I still play that once in a while, but when Quake and the various Quake-alikes came along, Doom was off my HD, never to be seen again.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
There is also the sub-category of squad-leader type turn-based games, like XCOM and Jagged Alliance. I wouldn't mind seeing more of those. Jagged Alliance 2 would have been excellent if they got the artist from XCOM, and fixed all those *damn bugs* that keep the game hanged for 15 minutes while the enemy "thinks" about what he's going to do.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
> "Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American Public." - Rupert Murdoch.
Actually, H.L. Mencken said it first.
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
> Baldur's Gate started the current flood of RPGs
Baloney. There were plenty of CRPG's being published immediately before BG, like the Might and Magic series, Fallout, Fallout 2 (Black Isle sure helped revive the genre, I'll give it that), Lands of Lore. BG just happened to sell well. BG is barely even a RPG (but boy howdy is its combat cooler than Diablo) since the main character basically has no identity, and the NPC's are wholly interchangeable and play no part whatsoever in the story.
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
This guy is right. The popularity of a given genre rises and falls like the tide. For example, RTS games were huge just a short while ago. Before then narrative adventure games were big. FPS games are just what happens to be big right now, it doesn't mean that genres are dying. Soon, the focus will shift to some other gaming arena, and pundits will start saying that FPS games are dying. For an interesting perspective on this, read some of the articles in MaximumPC, the gaming column (can't remember the name though.)
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
...the real world is motion-blurred.
The human eye can only detect about 30 FPS; each light sensor basically adds up all the light that hits it in 1/30th of a second and presents that as a "pixel" in that "frame" (which is why things like raster scanning monitors: your eyes' natural motion blur at work!). However, games render views as still-frames. So if you're moving fast enough that the world would be a blur, instead you get what is effectively random garbage on the screen. That is the rendering engine breaking down under conditions it was not built to handle properly; much like when you walk right up to a wall in Doom and walk sideways (ooo, look at the squares!).
Running extra frames faster than the eye can see creates a fake motion blur. The higher the frame rate, the faster things can move and still look okay. For games like Quake, the necessary speed for effective blurring tops out around 200 fps. I imagine very high speed racing games could benefit from even higher fps rates.
However, if and when rendering engines start to incorporate true motion-blurring (which nobody seems terribly inclined to bother with, since the fake blurring looks just fine, and is probably cheaper and definitely simpler to compute), 30 FPS will be just fine.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
The amount of nostalgic distortion on this board is a bit disturbing. Many seem to suffer from the all-to-common phenomenon of distorting the memories of a past. People talk about how the game designers of old really knew how to make a game, and that modern day designers need to study human psychology.
I've got news, many of those early game designers also didn't know thing 1 about technology. They were usually the geekiest throwbacks from their graduating class.
The truth is that the new games aren't intrinsically worse than these mythical games of old, rather we have become jaded over time. Old game features no longer appeal to us because we are used to them. We know how to solve puzzle X, even if it wears a different face.
Then of course there's the graphics.
Implicit in these statements is the implication that if I were to take one of the new games back in time to 1985, the lucky gamer I gave it to would eventually stop playing and go back to his C-64. Frankly, I can't imagine that happening until the game was well played out.
We're jaded, we're the old men sitting on the porch saying "these kids don't know what a good game is!".
I for one refuse to believe that game design studios with multiple developers and multi-million dollar budgets cannot outperform a high school kid with a few hours of free time per day. These *are* good games we're seeing, some of them at any rate.
-Illserve
As long as there are people around, there will be games. How long have Chess, Go, and even Gambling been around for ? For over a 1,000 years, or more.
;-) Old games don't die, they just become less popular. I see the same thing in the retro-gaming scene.
It's true, a lot of games are just "the same game with nicer visuals". i.e. How far have driving games progressed? From Atari's Stunts up to the latest EA's "Need for Speed".
Now I don't see too many people playing Quake 1 CTF / ThunderWalker / Team Fortress / Mega-TF because the "majority" of gamers have moved onto newer games (which may or may not be better
What new games ARE doing are becoming cross-genre experiences. e.g.
Majesty is a nice mix of Sim, RTS, and RPG.
Dungeon Siege is a sweet mix of RPG+Action. Even Drakan is a mix to a limited extent.
Part of the problem that we dont' see more new genres, is because of sales. When "gamers" snap up 2 million copies of Diablo 2, which is a just a rehash (allthough fun game!) of Diablo 1, what incentive is there for smaller developers to create a "new" game, when sales can barely even reach 100,000.
i.e. Thief was a interesting twist and great innovative game, but that didn't help Looking Glass Studios from running out of money.
We'll continue to see new games. It's just getting harder and harder to do.
If innovation is key, as GameCenter suggests, then all genres of PC game are dying, including Action and First-Person Shooter. Diablo II is certainly nothing new... even the original Diablo had little innovation. Quake 3 is the least innovative game that Id has ever released. Yet few people would actually come out and say that Action or FPS genres are dying out. Personally, I don't think innovation is nearly as important as having good, solid gameplay... and keeping out the bugs doesn't hurt. This is mainly what has been killing genres: developers who are too interested in flash than making a game that plays well. Even if it's something we've seen before, if it's well done then people will play it.
"Prejudice is wrong; you should hate everyone the same."
As a coder on a very old text-based role playing game, I've seen this happen firsthand. There is no way that we can compete with the blood splatter of Unreal Tournament, or the graphical experience of Everquest. So instead we've tried to focus on the strengths of our dying genre.
People cannot play Everquest from work, while sitting in a programming lab, or other such locations where they find themselves with free time and a firewall that lets them telnet out. Most of our players are people who play these newer games like UT or Icewind Dale, but they don't always have access to that computer. Or people who don't have the computing power and budget to support buying the latest big name game. These people are our target audience at this point, but it is an audience that is slowly shrinking. When we used to use mobs of people in our game's various hangouts and bars, we now consider it great to see a mere dozen.
Many of us are oldschool pencil and paper role players, and chose to play on the text based online game because it allows for a greater level of role playing then EverQuest or Ultima Online. I've tried most of the MMRPG's, and found them to be either giant deathmatches or painful affairs of watching a blue bar grow while staring at a spellbook. I can stare at a spellbook screenshot if I want to get the EverQuest experience. I, for one, would rather spend my time role playing where imagination and text are your only tools.
As much as the genre is dying, there is one benefit from the other games seducing the players away. The only people left on the text based role playing games are those that really want to role play. Otherwise, they'd be booting up Quake 3.
Shameless plug: If you are looking for a great text based online role playing game, check out CyberSphere.
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
I'm sorry, the game industry (before I got sane and got out.) I worked in or near it for 10 years
Some catagory is always being pronoucned "dead". 5 years ago it was RPGs. Look at all teh activity now. Any catagory that remains unchanged people gte broed of and it 'dies". (And yes, 1P shooters are abotu due for that dsitinction.) They stay "dead" until some group bucks this preception and comes otu witha new slant on it that "magicly" re-invigorates the genre.
This is an ongoing pattern. There is nothing new under the sun, but there are new twists and thats all people really want. (The 1P shooter really isn't new, its just a new twist on the basic 2D shooter.)
I'd dispute the suggestion that Wolfenstein 3D was truly original. Plenty of RPGs had used a first-person viewpoint while wandering round a maze before, while the gameplay wasn't really more than a gauntlet clone.
;-)
Hmmm. Interesting point. Maybe some of the games in question weren't so much "new" as (can I say this without getting a bad taste in my mouth?) "innovative". Taking existing concepts and improving upon them.
I'd have to suggest the inclusion of Dungeon Keeper, though.
Dig Dug plus SimCity plus Dungeons and Dragons. It works both ways.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
...when people are more impressed with squillions of polygons?
Its no different with music/films/books/hifi equipment. Its all shit now compared with 20 years ago (10 years ago in the case of hifi equipment), but much better marketed, and if people dont see the old good stuff, then whos going to know the difference?
Now that I am married and have a newborn child my free time is segmented in fifteen minute increments. as a result I try to get a "quick Fix" where ever I can. Gamespy to me is a lifesaver, I can get in a few frags with just a few moments of free time.
I don't have the luxury of a lot of disposable time to dedicate to the learning curve of a new game, so I have a tendency to stick to what I know, in my case Quake and a handfull of real time strategy games
I'd like to add that the Mod community has added a new dimemension, extended the longevity, and ccontributed to the popularity of FPS games like quake I, II, III... It would be great if other genre of games would "open " themselves up to the same community.
A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human history - with the possible exception of handg
The only truly original computer games I can remember were Lemmings and Wolfenstein 3D (the precursor to Doom). Both were truly original (at the time). Even a game like Tombraider is basically a platform game in 3D: jump from platform to platform, collect stuff, open doors...exactly the same as all those games on my Acorn Electron 10 years ago. Except looking a lot better.
Which is obviously the problem at the moment: all games seem to focus on looks and not on gameplay.
While I don't think the PC is dead as a games platform - it does need some more imagination.
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Ignore reality - there's nothing you can do about it.
I'd contend that being innovative has absoultely positively NOTHING to do with fun. Look at Trespasser. Look at Quake 3. (actually I dislike both but I'm going on majority 'opinion').
I loved War2, I loved C&C and I still love Starcraft. Being a sheep dyed in many colors isn't a bad thing as long as you still enjoy the game. I mean we play games in real life with balls all day long! Football, soccer, baseball, basketball, foosball, ping pong, etc. These are getting tiresome? No. They only get boring for people who live on quick fixes.
I suspect RTS's are more prone to 'get old' more quickly to these non-die hard players because of their repetitive nature. Instead of reveling in the intricacies of the gameplay and variety of offense and defense they merely see a battle to control resources and kill the other guy.
The Gamecenter editors are clearly playing favorites and trying to create controversy with their mentioning of the RTS and subsequent omission of FPSs. Playing 'god' editor is a pretty quick way to lose ALL respect from anyone who is a hardcore gamer at heart.
Fsck cluebie moderators. I'll say what I want, offtopic or not. And fsck having to qualify every bloody statement just
To me, modern games just don't have the 'playability' of the old games like Pac-Man, Space Invaders even Colossal Cave.
Those games, to me, had the 'have another go' factor - you've just passed level 9 on Pac-Man, therefore you know you can do level 10 but you've got to make sure you can do it perfectly...
Colossal Cave and the ever popular Lemmings had a different playability factor - they needed the player to actually think and anticipate the results of their actions - in Doom you just blast anything that comes across and hang the consequences (okay, I'm over simplifying here, but that's the 'basics').
I've just got old of a copy of the IF (Interactive Fiction) archive and an old copy of Chuckie Egg - all free, and I've been playing them a hell of a lot more than any others games in the last 5 years.
Richy C.
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If you think you've seen everything there is to see in gaming, you're wrong - if you haven't tried out The Typing of the Dead, that is. Sega has created possibly the weirdest game ever, a title that's so unexpected it defies logic when one tries and figure out the frame of mind of the individual at Sega of Japan who said "Hey, we'll make a typing game, and make it fun." The Typing of the Dead is the kind of game that, like Dance Dance Revolution and Beatmania makes people look on as you play, and with good reason: you're killing zombies with precise key strokes! Who wouldn't be intrigued at the prospect.
from: http://dreamcast.ign.com/reviews/13515. html
. . . . . . .
may u!sh 2 sm!le at dz!z bad nn.!m!tat!ion
Maybe the lack of innovation is because of the myopic view of the audience: Video games are still, by and large, made for 8-to-25-year-old guys. And, not surprisingly, game companies then focus on things that young guys (supposedly) like: Babes, gore, cars, science fiction, martial arts, militaria. And then you get stuck in a rut, 'cause there's only so many ways you can mine those stereotypical male interests (which, frankly, probably are only truly the interests of a small minority of guys).
I know there were plenty of failures when game co's tried to reach out to the girls' market ("Let's make an educational game about sitting around and talking about our feelings in a garden!" Seriously, that was the premise of "Secret Paths." No wonder Purple Moon went broke) but that too had a lot to so with stereotypes. OTOH, lots of male reviewers commented on the gender-inappropriateness of them enjoying a domestic-management game like the Sims, but they enjoyed it!
Think about the success of the Sims, That's due in no small part to women buying and playing the game. How many other games can you imagine your whole family playing? If the market wasn't so narrowly focused and segregated on one demographic, maybe we'd see less of the same stuff over and over again. And with more potential game players, there's a bigger market and more room for interesting and bizarre niches for everyone to discover.
Ah, the irony:
The rights to Paranoia were recently licenced by one of the more innovative (text based) commercial mud companies around...
Skotos has the info in this press release.
Also of interest is the text mud The Eternal City www.eternal-city.com, as well as others listed in the MUD-Dev FAQ
Text muds may not be the same, but they're hardly dead... and the best ones are emerging as hybrid graphical/text muds.
-- Still waiting for the Nike endorsement
What a shame. These developers spend huge bucks writing a complex flight sim for Windows that models reality so well, only to find that the users don't want to learn complex things. It's too easy to get shot down, they want to play Starfox.
If only they could find a market, some community that seems to take delight in learning complex systems. If only there was some computer platform that was widely used by the kind of geeky people who get off on learning how a F/A-18s threat warning system works, and are willing (even enjoy!) taking the time to build skills.
Oh well, such a group of people certainly does not exist.
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Why can games only be succesful if they are picked up by the mainstream? Turn based strategy games have been around since the Eighties at least (I didn't have a computer before then so I can't comment on exactly how long they were around).
The thing is strategy games have always been for the niche market. It doesn't matter what the mainstream think about them, since there will always be someone interested. Development costs don't need to be huge. Graphics can be simple, sound need only be a few samples. The only difficulty is the AI, and getting a well balanced set of rules that don't allow you to use a strategy based on putting all your resources into one thing.
Yeah, that was back when the internet was all smart people, when music was all original, and when kids used to respect their elders.
Whatever.
Videogames have ALWAYS had cheap, crappy games outnumbering the well-made game by 5 to 1. There were lots of cheap Pong knockoffs, and it only got worse from there.
There is a whole lot of nostalgic rambling going on in this thread, and it's all bullshit. I'm a lifetime gamer, and I honestly don't think that there has ever been a year in which the benchmark for videogame quality has not been raised. It used to be a faster curve, perhaps, but that only stands to reason. People needed a while to figger out what these computer thingies could be used for.
There are LOTS of good games being produced now -- the best games ever made.
The nature of the improvement has changed though. It's not about coming up with completely original gameplay, though this still happens. It's more of a process of refinement. Of learning over time how to improve a base genre to make it even better.
It shouldn't be surprising that there aren't as many new genres. People have been searching for, and have found fundamental game structures that WORK. "But everything is just another FPS now". Well geez, no kidding. Playing a game where you're seeing a 3D world from a first person perspective is NEVER going to go away! You're there! You're in the world! It's immersive and it's a fantastic way to transport someone into a different world. And people aren't going to get tired of guns, they're pretty fundamental to most people's notion of excitement and adventure. So games combining the two are here forever. The improvements will come incrementally, as people learn how to improve this basic formula with better technology, better design, better multiplayer collaboration, and better storytelling.
This is not a bad thing.
OK, I understand now.
I think the problem with Myst is that it gets lumped into the "adventure game" genre when it's a bit skewed from the norm.
When I played Myst originally, I was drawn into it. I felt like I was part of the game, from the very first room. I thought the story was very compelling, and it made me want to read each of the books.
Now, why we each have a different view, I'm not sure. Maybe the writers have one type of brain, and you have another, so that the things they found interesting you yawn to. But judging by the success of Myst, I know there are many many people who agree with me.
The great days of Sierra's Space and Kings and Hero quests had some great games, and you don't see anything like those coming out today. I think the games seem less sexy and exciting to people who don't remember the gameplay from before - there's few explosions, and the action is mostly in the mind. It takes time to get some sort of payoff from the game... unlike most games today which offer almost instant gratification as soon as you start.
Course, the travisty of the last 2 KQ games couldn't have helped the genre (one mouse command? ONE?)... poor poor Sierra.
dinosaur comics
Every games company seems to be trying to stuff in 3d into their games at the expense of playability.
When I load up pacman or asteroids (2 examples of incredibly addictive but non-visually stunning games) so I really want to fly around a 3d scene rotating and using mouselook with 15 keys bound to control my player?.
Games like Quake3 are more suited to a FPP viewpoint but the games deveopers have to realise that some are not. Personally I found Mario 64 visually better than the older mario games but at the expense of the playability. Cameras swinging around you as you go near walls make it difficult to know which way you are actually moving.
This is why emulators are so popular with ppl. There simply isnt some game genres available today like there was over 5 years ago. Sure we all like great grapihcs and sound but only if they contribute positively to the game. Give me pacman with hi resolution graphics and 3d sound effects and I'll play it. Give me the same game with a 3d engine pasted on top that needs a Geforce 2 GTS and I'll get annoyed with it after 10 minutes.
I actually enjoy those wonderful side scrolling adventure games. I know that the genre was rather tired out in the 80's, but there have been some rather awesome resurrections of it (see Neverhood series). Earthworm Jim is a great game. Another genre I've missed is the overhead shooter (I'm looking down on a plane that's being forced forward and shoot everything in sight; simple mind-numbing game). Now, don't get me wrong. I love StarCraft-style games. I've been hooked on Total Annihilation for what seems like years. But some simple self-competitive gaming is somewhat lacking these days. *dusts off old 486 and loads up Megaman*- --
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the amazing bc
latin/funk flugelhorn & trumpet
webnaut, music junkie, sysadmin from hell
the amazing bc
just another guy doing IT
webnaut, music junkie, holes-in-head
Whenever I play I seem to play the same game all the time now. The only game for me is Counter-Strike. It's the most advanced mod I've ever played, has the most realistic weapons, and has the best modes of play. It doesn't matter to me if no good games come out for other genres as long as there's a good following for my favorite FPS.
By the way, go back and play Super Mario 2. That's a freakin' game!
Every time I see a mention of "games" I get excited and think it's an article about games. No such luck. It almost always turns out to be an article about COMPUTER games, which are mainly of the "twitch and bitch" variety.
I want to see some discussion of games like board games, card games, classic games of strategy and tactics like chess, or go. Games for which the rules can be learned in a short amount of time and mastery requires effort. Compare this to most computer games, which have extremely steep initial learning curves that devolve into one uninteresting template for play for everyone. Which takes more skill, to win at Quake against a variety of opponents or to win at Go against a variety of opponents? Which game really offers greater variety, more possibilities of play?
Of course, those games don't interest the public any more. They're not splashy enough, with too little noise and a lack of das blinken-lights that users so love. The games require thought, an unthinkable proposition in the current era. Much easier to click madly and then winge about how the lag killed us, or the machine wasn't accepting our commands, or missing key strokes.
Heresy, I know.
This demonstrates well the utter bias of Slashdot towards PC games. Have people here never heard of Playstation or N64? Of beat-em-ups and platform games? Do they not realize that console games outsell PC games 10 to 1, or that the games industry (the *console* games industry, that is) is bigger than the movie industry?
I guess not; Slashdot has never been huge on reality checks.
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It's a
-- Danny Vermin
Rock on. I really liked the first Zelda for the Super Nintendo. It was a game where I could lounge in front of the TV for a day playing this game and truly be caught up in the action. I have yet to find ANY pc games that match this playability and enthrallment that I found with Zelda.
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Sig it.
Okay, I can see the argument for the death of RTSs. I don't agree with it, as they, along with traditional turn-based strategy (board and electronic) games, are at the top of my list. But what about a new genre? The FPS, contrary to the impression that may be given by the /. story, is NOT to be mistaken with a new genre; Wolfenstein 3d, anyone? But what would "The Sims" qualify as? Is it still just a 'sim' genre game, or is it some odd take on role-playing? Or could it be considered...new?
I think the genres will rotate eventually. I think right now the gaming hardware is at a point that you will start to see hybred games. Eg FPS/warcraft/flight combat, or FPS/Adventure/RPG.
I would like to see a de-cetralllized system of game serverlists for games like quake and unreal. (maybe use irc but the 'users' would be links)
Maybe even a 'generic game engine' that could be modified on-the-fly depending on what site you hit (like a web link or 'modifiers' for the UT literate)
Don't forget the advantages of cable/dsl connections. You will NEED one!
make Linux, not Microsoft. sin(beast) = -0.809016994374947424102293417182819
What's really stopped me from MU*ing is that the places I used to go became horribly lagged, and then many of them died due to circumstances ostensibly beyond their control.
I used to play on AmberMUSH. Had a lot of fun. Wasted a lot of time there. Then the lag became oppressive and I stopped going. Last time I checked in on it (which, admittedly, was years ago) it was still painful.
Then there was BtechMUSE, which was a whole lot of fun. Doing Battletech on text hex maps and keeping track of your heading, speed, and who's in your field of fire was an exercise in strategy and brainpower, like piloting a submarine. It was pure exultation when you managed to pull a Death From Above on a mech and take it out. I even had a really slick character because I joined a house early on. Then, again, the lag went psycho and I gave up on it.
Finally, there was FurryFUCK^H^H^H^HMUCK, which was a really slick place to while away the hours, with a full (if difficult to navigate) world. Furry was always kind of lagged, but it was the kind of place where that didn't matter so much. Then it started dropping me, and getting slow to boot, and the communities changed and people I knew stopped going, and suddenly it wasn't as fun any more. So I stopped going there, too.
Now I fulfill my chatting desires with Irc, I mostly play UnrealTournament and the occasional game of CounterStrike. I stay away from the text-based places because what happened to all the places I used to go. I have a bad taste in my mouth about it.
Hopefully, we'll see a resurgence of pencil-and-paper gaming. I've been playing a little Warhammer 40k here and there. I get plenty of online community time between Irc and /. and don't really need to make a commitment to a MU*. I certainly hope that they stay around for a long, long while for those people who still get flushed over killing the troll with the nasty knife, though.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
There is indeed a PC version of Driver. Driver is not a unique concept, but it was done fairly well, except for the way you can fall through building and get stuck, or wander off the map. Maybe they should have had a function to detect if you were OBVIOUSLY off the beaten path and reset you, or end the map.
It would have been nice to see the physics not go COMPLETELY cartoon once you left the ground, too, or to have curved roads. In fact, that's my number one desire in a sequel; I'd like the maps of cities to be based on actual maps of cities, not vague resemblances.
In any case, Driver was a fairly fresh look with good framerate at an older concept. Maybe I'll go fire that up later tonight and see if I still have the touch to get greater than two minute times on Survival in SF. Too bad I can't find a way to ditch the supercops in Miami... I'd like to see how far they launch off those little bridges.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Remember when the gameplay was what really mattered in games? Remember walking through dungeons, which pretty much lacked animation? It was the gameplay that mattered. Nowadays, companies try to make their product as graphically impressive as possible and compromise gameplay. Another problem is development time - since the companies focus so much on graphical content, their development time is vastly increased, and by the time the product ships, it is no longer graphically pleasing [cuz technology has moved on] and the gameplay is unsatisfactory. All this does is make for horrible games.
Many gamers out there still enjoy non graphical MUDs, since all that matters is the quest and the emotional involvement in a created world. Graphical MUD type games are the thing of the future, and games in general are completely becoming online based. The new era of gaming includes other real people, and this all started with the emotional involvement in games that was created by Doom. I'll never forget those first times I got to chase my friends around and kill them...hehehe...you know what I mean.
So lets move gaming technology forward not simply in graphical content, but game companies need to do more psychological studies on what gamers need and what they desire in their gaming environments. This is where the true advances can take place.
-=MeMpHiStO=-The FPS came along because the technology warranted it, before DOOM and Wolfenstein (and what ever clone you want to dig up) we were confined to 2D settings for our games, when 3D Technology eventually evolved, it inspired the FPS. Now, we are still riding that wave, waiting for the next big thing in gaming. No we don't want another vibrating joystick, or pretty T&L rendering, we want something new. 5D (counting time as the 4th) games anyone?
I can see it now...
"The object of Hyper cube, is to take the dissasembled hyper cube, and then re-assemble it before the evil aliens take over your homeplanet and kill your family!"
But remember, Quake is here to stay. =)
-Fred
"Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American Public." - H.L. Mencken
The way to combat this is to make cross-genre games. Dragon Force (Sega Saturn) was a beautiful real-time-strategy RPG game in which you sent your armies around the map, did empire management every "week", and fought battles in a real time management overhead, fighting duels or fleeing when your troops (which, unfortunately, had to be all the same kind of unit) were exhausted.
Let's not also forget games like Panzer Dragoon which was a neat shooter, or Panzer Dragoon Saga which seemingly used the display engine from Panzer Dragoon but was an RPG with a unique semi-realtime combat system reminiscent of Final Fantasy. (Wait for that meter to charge...) The difference was that your positioning was all-important, and you could pick hit locations on anything bigger than a breadbox. Boy, was that fun to play through, even if it only lasted about twenty hours.
There are always new kinds of games to be made.
You don't necessarily have to invent a new genre to make an interesting game.
What really counts is that the developer is a gamer, and makes a game that is the kind of game they'd like to play.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You've got to admit that the gameplay in something like Quake III Arena (single player, even) is a whole lot better than from Doom. The run-around-and-bash-the-spacebar-looking-for-secre ts aspect of Doom, Doom II and Quake was never very appealing. The bots in Quake III are a much more challenging kill than 10,000 screetching demons.
Also, games like Civ:CTP && Diablo II blow the old turn-based strategy games like the original Civ/Master of Orion/Master of Magic away. Well, ok, not Master of Orion... That game rocks. =) Anyways, that's only about 7-10 years ago. 20 years ago, Nobody even had PCs. And except for rouge-likes and wumpus, what computer games were there that people could play?
---------The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.
Did these guys actually look at the sales figures for Starcraft? It was in the top 10 continously for *two* years for crying out loud! Saying its in trouble is a stretch to say the least.
Of course then you have crap like Tiberian Sun, but saying the whole genre is dying is rediculous, unless it happened very recently. Starcraft should prove just how popular it can be among the people who find FPS games boring.
Gamecenter seems to want insane amounts of innovation, but thats not how things work. The best way to do it is to add a few new things, but to stick with what works to make a fun game. Its more important that the game be fun and playable then cutting edge.
(besides, by the standard of innovation, the FPS genre is more then dead, fancier graphics are not innovation)
Most of the other ones seem to actually be in trouble, but I'm not worried about RTS games. Well, I *am* worried about Warcraft 3 sucking, but thats more of a problem with Blizzard lately (Diablo 2 is nowhere near as good as it should be, and with the constant change in directions Warcraft 3 is taking, I'm not even sure if they know what they're making anymore).
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Some of the missions in Battlezone were pretty damn hard, like the one where you have to follow the patrols (How long did it take to figure out the patterns of that one?) or the one where you hopped from pinnacle to pinnacle taking things out before your convoy showed up and got decimated. The play wasn't too tough (If you had a wingman warrior anyway) but figuring out the paths you had to walk (fly) could be a nightmare, and sniping with a joystick was pure pain.
It really was a breakthrough in gameplay, though. I'd definitely like to see a lot more of that. For some reason giving orders to bots in UnrealTournament just doesn't do much for me.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
They're part of the same real world they're reacting to, and thus not quantised either.
The real world is quantized (hmm... how did that go? [something] mechanics. It'll come to me...). The human nervous system is quantized (not globally synchronized to a fixed clock, but definitely quantized). Neurons fire or don't fire. The light-sensing mechanisms of the eye are connected to neurons, which they cause to fire or not fire periodically. There are definite limits to the speed of transmission and firing rate of neurons, whether they've been measured 100% accurately or not.
there aren't any pixels,
Rods and cones. 'nuff said.
Running extra frames doesn't really create any sort of motion blur unless you specifically render that motion blur
If you consider motion blur to be a psychological effect rather than a mechanism, it creates motion blur. It should have been clear to the most minimally adequate mind that I meant this from my opening statement, "the real world is motion-blurred".
The bottom line is that 30FPS isn't just fine.
Go ahead. Tell me you can distinguish individual frames of a TV signal. 30 FPS is fine as long as you make your camera (or rendering engine) act enough like a human eye.
The whole purpose of improving rendering engines is to recreate the quality of a competently recorded video display of a real-life scene. To counter a claim that a certain method is sufficient for this with the argument that the purpose is insufficient for the purpose is submoronic.
I hate people who play with semantics and insist on taking the literal meanings of expressions and then attacking this straw man when the language is inadequate for literal discussion.
Arguing that explaining the theory used to justify the FPS rate of recorded video is a mistake because, despite the fact that it has yielded useful results, it may yet be proven false by some new test in the future, goes beyond pomposity... but I can't think of a word low enough for someone who utterly rejects the description of a practical model because it's not Certain Eternal Truth ("skeptic" doesn't have the bite it should, having long since swallowed its opposite meaning).
Why didn't you just save yourself some time and reply with "knowing nothing, we can know nothing"?
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
I read the RTS analysis, and skimmed 1/2 the posts, and was surprised to not see the comments I'm about to make :)
The basic argument of the article, which you reiterate, is, "most of these are clones of games which have been around for years."
If recycling ideas lead to the death of a genre, then the entire entertainment industry should be radically different than it is now. The past 50 years alone in the U.S. show that cloning ideas is the way to *make profits*, not die out.
Another aspect to consider: those of you who have been gaming for years (decades) and are tired of same-old same-old may very well give up gaming. But it doesn't matter, because there is a whole new generation of young-in's who have never seen these ideas/concepts before, and to whom they are fresh and innovative. And they will buy these games.
It's the same for movies. I'm tired of "Arnie" flicks. I go now for more 'intelligent' movies. I'm also about 30, and have been watching action movies for 15 yrs (at least). But there's a whole new group of teens & college students that are not yet tired of mindless action flicks.
And so the trend continues.
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http://movies.shoutingman.com
ShoutingMan.com
One of the things that pisses me off the most is the time it takes to cast a simple spell in many newer RPGs. I was watching my friend play FF8 the other night, and it was just plain horrible (the spells). Note to all game developers: we do most of the casting in battles, where we want to see action. That's right, ACTION, not five-minute CG sequences. Stuff like that will only alienate a bunch of customers (I'm one) and hurt the genre.
Washington, DC: It's like Hollywood for ugly people.
I've noticed that the PC game industry really lacks creativity in many ways. This causes a kind of cycle.
Very often, new games are copies of successful, groundbreaking, original games, and some particualar types of games become a "safe" choice to produce. Game devlopers and publishers want to make money; taking risk doesn't guarantee you profit. For instance, Diablo has many copycats. Baldur's Gate started the current flood of RPGs. Doom made first person shooters popular. X-Wing did the same for space flight sims.
I read in a recent interview with John Carmack that the concept of first person games was as an enhancement of existing top-down games at the time. Diablo is similar in many ways to old games like Rogue. I don't think any gaming genre is really dead... it may be unpopular for a few years, but eventually someone will think: "Remember _________? That was a fun game! Let's remake it, only make it better!"
Then, if the game's a hit, it starts the cycle all over again.
i'm sorry, but the game mags are:
1) terribly myopic
2) stupid
3) looking to bump up readership
when they proclaim a genre is dead - the computer game biz moves in cycles that last years - look at ww2 flight sims. back in the day of the 80286 there were tons of them out there, lucasarts had their finest hour, secret weapons of the luftwaffe, plus there was aces over europe or somesuch, don't remember the name, maybe someone can recall. but then, there were no flight sims about ww2 out there for YEARS. during that time, everyone said "henny penny! henny penny! flight simgs are dead!" then, a year ago christmas, we had like three of them on the shelves. since then, nothing. but b17 is coming, and there are probably more i just don't recall.
just note which genres they say are dead and watch them for three years.
Yes, my first reply was pompous (I freely admitted that), but I did manage to avoid an outright ad hominem response. You didn't, but I'll reply anyway.
Yes, neurons fire or don't fire. How they get into that state depends on a whole lot more voodoo, depending on the stimuli feeding into them (neurotransmitters and their reuse, or photons, for this argument we really don't care). There are certainly limits to the speed with which an axon can transmit such a response, but since we're talking about a continuously developed perception that really doesn't matter much here (it would matter if we were talking about a minimal perceptible signal, but that kinda thing only happens in psych experiments). Any such limit is lost in the processing noise as your moving picture is built and rebuilt.
Rods and cones aren't pixels any more than CPU registers are (though I deplore the whole analogy). Visual perception - especially time-based scene perception such as you're describing - takes place throughout the eye and brain, and it isn't swayed by what happens in one rod or cone. The digital computer model of perceptual and cognitive processing went out of style in the late seventies, and for good reason.
Motion blur isn't a psychological effect. It's a filmic effect, and you've assumed that you can argue from what a camera does that you understand something about what the mind does. You can perhaps make a useful abstract model that way, but you've extrapolated from it too far. So says this minimally adequate mind. Likewise, a camera acts like a human eye as far as the retina / film / CCD / whatever, but that's as far as it goes. Knowing that tells you nothing about the bizarre equipment that interprets all that information in the visual cortex and beyond, and you cannot pronounce on what it does or doesn't require without knowing that.
You already know that recorded video actually varies at 60fps, so that can be left alone. More importantly, 24fps film and 30fps/60 fieldps recordings *aren't* sufficient for a lot of people. I know people who don't go to movie theatres precisely because a 24fps quantised image pisses them off. I also know people who get a headache from watching TV, though I suspect many more than that are bothered and never make the connection. For me (and presumably you) it works fine, but for them it doesn't. So clearly Eternal Truth isn't what I'm looking for here - but the Pragmatic Truth you were aiming for with "just fine" really had the same ring. The point isn't that some new test may "disprove" something, it's that *no test* is sufficient to make such pronouncements, because all such tests are more an expression of the current state of cleverness in testing than the thing they seek to test.
That said, I am sufficiently pragmatic to avoid "we can know nothing". But I tend to aim a hell of a lot higher to avoid our own ignorance, especially where digital media are concerned.
Shoulda just had another oatmeal stout.
-- Life is short. Forgive quickly. Kiss slowly. ~ Robert Doisneau
On one hand, large envolving games, Ultima Online & EverQuest, take too much time and are a burden on the gamers that don't want become that deeply engrossed in the game. I knew a few guys that would take turns playing the same Ultima character around the clock. They did it just so they could advance the character quickly. I doubt the masses would purchase a game that required that level of commitment. This is where the adventure and the flight simulators reside.
On the other hand, games that are quick to learn and master cannot hold the interest of some gamers for more than a week. They become bored with it. They beat it and then...that's pretty much it. They don't want to pay $50 for a game that won't see them through the week. Again, the masses would probably play a copy their friends gave them because they were bored with it instead of buy it themselves. Here you can find the space combat games and the real-time strategy games.
The sucessful games are the ones that find the middle grounds. Blizzard did fine jobs with Diablo and WarCraft/StarCraft games. They tried to keep things relatively simple, but allowed for a little of the deeper game play. IOW, you could take the game to the level that you are comfortable with. But even so, I felt that Diablo was not complex enough while at the same time some friends felt it took too long to play.
Can both kinds of gamers be pleased with the same game? I believe it is possible. Games could be made that are very simple and quick to play in the small scale while at the same time can be very complex on a large scale. For example, a virtual world where people interact with it in different ways all at the same time. One person would be in FPS mode where they run around a la Quake style blasting things, another person could be runing a SimCity like game where they are building a city all the while the quake dude is running around in it. Someone else could be flying a jet over the city in their flight simulator perspective. While all of this is going on, someone has an overhead realtime strategy view where they build things in certain places and try to influence the others to take certain actions. Battles could involve all participants. The gamer in the flight simulator could drop a smart bomb on the quake guy. Then a gamer in a tank/mech could shoot down the jet. The gamer in the real-time mode could tell the others where the tank/mech was so they could blast it. Of course, this game would be MASSIVE. At least the server would be. The more CPU's the better. Definately an internet game. It would probably cost so much to make that you could never expect to gain a profit from selling it. Oh well...
If you haven't seen it already (or if it hasn't been posted here) check out GarageGames.com They are a group, founded by many Dynamix game designers, who are looking to cultivate the untapped masses of Independant Game Studios. Being an "indy" myself, I'm very pleased to see this.
.sig is a Porsche.
I don't think gaming is dead because the people aren't buying, I think gaming is dead because the publishers are killing it. Game publishers are notorious for "sticking" with safe concepts and ultimately flogging them to death. As a result they don't give many game shops a chance with genre-creating games, thus stagnating the market and making people tired of playing "just another Doom Clone on graphics crack."
Think about it. Would "The Sims" have been published if Will Wright hadn't already had a name for himself? (and the money and contacts to make it happen?) No. His ideas would have been discarded because they don't contain the words "Frag" or "300 giga-polygons a nanosecond".
This is a real threat to the gaming industry, and a hotly debated topic in the development circles. Hopefully with GarageGames and their ilk, we'll start seeing a lot more new concepts, some good, some bad, from the teeming masses of under appreciated indy studios.
My other
Vulgrin the MAD
I sig, therefore I am.
The first person shooter is taking over, yes. But variation on the FPS leaves us with RPG-FPS like UlitmaIX, and Everquest, Adventure-FPS like Deus Ex (if you haven't played Deus Ex yet, you are REALLY missing out)
Agreed - when I first looked at this game I thought 'another FPS'. But I load up the demo (both levels) to have a quick burn and quickly discover that this is a pretty well thought out game. The graphic technology may not include all the whizzy shaders of quake 3, but the mere existence of a plot and various hinted-at sub-plots is unusual in a game today. And even better, Loki Games is almost certainly working on a port of 'Deus Ex' for Linux - it was spotted at LinuxWorld in their booth on a Linux machine. Keep eyes peeled for announcements and don't buy that Windows version!
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
Text based MUDS are on the decline.
There are more of them now, MANY more potential players, all having faster network access, and yet the number of players per mud have dropped.
There used to be a catagory or role-playing games where you bought a rule book, a suplement or 2 and played. Then, along came the collectable cards gaming idea. Yes, you can still find and play the rule book games, but new 'gamers' are playing PokeMon not Paranoia.
And, well, face it. After you (or your program) has typed in backstab orge 10+ times, you have mastered that particular skill and can move on.
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
"If people still wanted flight sims companies would be developing them."
This is false so many ways it's not even funny. To pick one off the top of my head: For low amounts of demand, there may be no supply. What if there were only 1000 people in the world that wanted a flight sim? A software company wouldn't survive on that for long. But a good portion of that 1000 people are probably here on Slashdot. So "who cares"? Slashdot readers.
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Some games have taken a rather unoriginal genre basis and turned into a great game, System Shock 2 and Deus Ex are a thinking mans Doom. SS2 is one of those few games that really frightens you, you hesitate to open doors for fear of what might be on the other side. Dungeon Keeper was a excellent take on RTS, I mean a Dungeon Simulation, only from the people at Bullfrog. Another quite interesting game i've been playing lately is MindRover, a very addicting game that makes you think, alot. Half-Life showed what could be accomplished with a FPS if done correctly, and all the modifications that are based on it make it a delightful game to play (mmmm... Counterstrike). Team Fortress 2 will rock the socks off of everyone, it'll be a great game (hopefully, but the boys at Valve have yet to let us down). There's also some pretty interesting games out on the horizon, like Black and White and Halo (provided Microsoft doesn't give us the shaft).
Flight Sims and War Games might be dying off now, but they've always had a dedicated fan base. People who like to blow things up from a Falcon will continue to do so, and companies that don't cash in on this are losing money.
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Want a reason why every game manufacturer is going for pretty polygons? Castlevania: Symphony of the Night wasn't as big as it should have been because people passed it over because it was 2D and "2D games are old" (yes, every gamer that deserves the title wants to pummel these people). Although I never had the cash to plunk down to buy it, I did play it with my cousin on his PSX and it has the chance to be the last truely great 2D game. Even RPGs have gone 3D, and they're the ones who need it the least!
Last time I fired up a Final Fantasy game was FF5, I've been playing FF5 a lot more (30 hours on the current game) than I ever did FF8 (3 hours total). Why? FF8 is a light show, FF5 is a game.
From the people I've talked to many want a new Metroid, however most say that if the new Metroid is 3D they won't even bother to look at the box. Too many game manufacturers are ruining perfectly good series by turning them into light shows and not concentrating on game play... and they're making money because of it.
If you think education is expensive, you should try ignorance -- Derek Bok, president of Harvard
Casual gamers killed adventure gaming, and Myst made them do it.
OK, their argument is that text adventures are somehow more immersive (I guess?) than Myst was. Umm, where do these guys get off? I know there are some people who don't like Myst and Riven, but how in the world did it make users kill adventure games?
Myst's idea of interactivity involved sparse clicks followed by hours of skull scratching.
And text adventure involved vast amounts of typing followed by hours of skull scratching.
Maybe they should go back to the drawing board for this article, and fire the present author before starting again.
Basically, Myst took the adventure game and wrapped it up in a pretty cool environment. I for one think that environment was very immersive. I mean, compare it to any other games from that time period. And after all, the puzzles in Myst were no different from any others anywhere, they just happened to be done in very pretty graphics.
I think if adventure gaming was killed just because Myst was so pretty, that must mean there are just a bunch of really lazy adventure game designers. I mean, Myst sparked at least three books, and there's still a webring on D'ni sites that actually get updated. Now that's an adventure game.
I would have to agree with most of this assessment. But, I think that the blame can be placed squarely on the Video/Sound/CPU manufacturers. After all, if games were just fun to play and didn't include the latest whiz-bang features, then how would they sell their products? I think developers are getting swamped by trying to create games which utilize these new features and not spending enough time making games which are fun to play.
:) )
.02c
TheJet
That is one of the reasons why I was actually pleased with Blizzards Diablo II release. Yes, it was late, yes it has problems, but YES IT'S D@MN ADDICTING!! They didn't worry about making the latest-greatest-fancy-schmancy-graphics. But look what happened, the first thing you heard from everyone (after "f'n Battle.Net") was one of:
"These graphics blow!"
"Why is this at 640x480?"
"How come I can't connect to Battle.Net?" (OK, I had to throw that one in
My point is that gamers are _never_ satisfied, and I think this is largely due to the fact that 3dfx/nVidia just convinced them to buy their latest vid-card, and they want to get their money's worth.
As someone who wants to break into this industry, I just hope that there are some good companies left when I get there. It seems like the good companies are dying faster than they can be created (***lamenting LGs death***). People aren't interested in good games, they want pretty ones.
My
The "Top 10" Reasons to procrastinate:
The "Top 10" Reasons to procrastinate:
10.
The original that is (UFO Defense, i believe). That game really did it's own thing. Combined a lot of elements from a bunch of different genres to come up with something new that was more than the sum of its parts. Highly addictive and scary as hell when you're playing it at 3am with all the lights out. I dunno if X-COM should count as its own individual genre, though. Same thing with The Sims. How does a game become a genre? If there's just one, it's "original" but once a bunch of rip-off games are made, it becomes the progenitor of it's own phylum?
-a
When it comes to new genres, I'd have to say that Tribes is the beginning of a new style of 1st person shooter. In previous games like Quake, Halflife, etc... there really wasn't a strong amount of strategy involved. Then came Tribes. This was a game that required strategy to suceed. You have to spend hours figuring out the best spots for turrets. Hours on defensive strategy and hours on finding the fastest and best paths to enemy flags. Sure it was still CTF, but you couldn't just leave 2 guys back to guard the flag and take the rest of your team out to get the enemy flag. You need to have a plan.
:)
To me, that seems to bring a whole new demension to the 1st person shooter. We no longer can play online games without Roger Wilco. We need to communicate to every member what is going on at all times. With Tribes2 on the way, we will find that teamwork is even more important. Then there is the promise of Halo. If you haven't seen the game, go to this site. Graphically, it is the most impressive game I have ever seen. (Good enough reason to buy the Nvida GTS Ultra
http://halo.bungie.org
I suggest watching the E3 trailer. Keep in mind that the trailer was done completely in-game using the Halo engine.
Many games today are just a bunch of eye-candy or they get to be too drawn out and convoluted, or both. Many game genres ARE dying because they either don't have enough substance or they require too much time and resources. When I play a game, I play it to get away from the real world for a little while and relax. Lately it seems all the games that have hit the market (i.e. EverQuest and Diablo) were made for the opposite reason-- I should go back to the real world to escape and relax from playing a game!
Now I can't even play a console without being forced into an uninteresting world that, if I put down for a few days, I could completely forget where I was and therefore need to start all over again (or else buy the strategy guide). Case in point-- FF8. I was hooked on FF1 (and still play it), enjoyed FF2 (though the plot was a little too strict), loved FF3 (because the characters were a lot more interesting and gameplay was a bit more innovative), and then FF7 came out ("Doh! Well even Squaresoft misses every now and then.") A sheer glimmer of hope drove me to buy FF8, where I find that the most fun in the game is that card game! If I ever pick that piece of crap back up (and I haven't beaten it yet) it will be purely for the card game!
I feel that the biggest downfall of most games is the attention to detail. Companies aren't seeing the forest because the trees keep getting in the way. There should be a return to the basics of gaming. There should be more fun and less seriousness (I want to laugh, dammit). More freedom to screw around with the basic plot and less stringent storylines. I'm tired of the game trying to lead me by the nose to the next step. I want to have a game for the escapism again. But most importantly, I want be able to accomplish beating the game in my leisure time in less than a month!
This probably isn't all I wanted to say, but it's beginning to get a little long and at least I got this much off my chest.
Back in the early '90s I must have played every flight sim I could get my hands on. Falcon, Falcon 3(4?), Chuck yeager's combat sims, Heros of the 357th(insanely hard), etc.
I almost miss those games, but I realized I wasn't a good dogfighter.
Among the WORST of the flightsim games I played was Birds of Prey. Extremely dull, even with the selection of jets. The hardest? Jetfighter 2. In a dogfight the guy always was behind me, to the right, and slightly higher.
The most fun? Chuck Yeager's combat simulator.
My favorite types of MUDs were (are) the Tiny's (TinyMUD, TinyMUCK, and TinyMUSH), where you were more involved in socializing and building than you were killing monsters and boosting stats. Of course, most of the Tiny's are used for roleplay, which are still human-moderated for the most part rather than the Diku or LpMUD-style games.
It would be fun to see that sort of game/community make the leap into the Everquest-type technology. If you got a simple sort of building interface (say, like a virtual Lego set) a simple scripting language, and maybe a way to tie into other Internet technologies (be able to pull up a web page within the virtual environment). I think you'd start to see something an awful lot like the "cyberspace" that cyberpunk authors of the 80's envisioned.
I've looked at some of the open source 3D engines out there... some do seemed aimed at this sort of environment, but it looks like no one has put thepieces together.
Police Quest, Space Quest, King's Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, Quest for Camelot, etc., etc. Sure they had EGA and VGA graphics, but they rocked! What true geek amongst us doesn't get watery eyes thinking about those games?
I see the Police Quest, King's Quest, and Leisure Suit Larry collection packs at Sierra's store, but what about Space Quest, and all the others? I'll probably buy all these up (it would be awesome if they actually came with original manuals, but they probably just come with some lame PDF these days). I guess that's why we have "AbandonWare". These games should be in American history books some day.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
I know the core geek audience dislikes 'em but the sports genre chugs along at a decent clip every year, helped by better graphics and also the great detail allowed by web updates. Viva Madden!
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OliverWillis.Com
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There are more of them now, MANY more potential players, all having faster network access, and yet the number of players per mud have dropped.
Well, I code on a MUD, so I feel I should stick up for the Old School. :) There may be many more MUDs now, but most of them suck. Some k1dd13 downloads a mud base, manages to get it compiled and running, and suddenly he is 1337 with his own MUD. Except that there's 1000 copies of the same game running elsewhere.
The MUDs that have been around for a while and have a good theme are doing OK. I don't want to name names in case they get Slashdotted, but the MUD I play on has a 24-hour average of about 120-125 players, peaking at over 200, and there a some MUDS that get a lot more.
Also, a good MUD is not a static thing that you can 'master' and then move on. New areas are always being added, new commands, new quests, new guilds, etc. We have had people playing for 6+ years. Yes, they have very high skill levels and can kill just about everything, but they still play because there is almost always something to look forward to.
Another reason they stay is for the social aspect that you don't get on other games. I have more friends thanks to the MUD than I ever would have otherwise, and I have met a lot of them in real life.
Another nice feature is the fact that you don't have to shell out $30-50 to be able to play a MUD. :)
So, I don't think MUDs will die soon. Oh sure, they might get pushed into some little corner of the Net, but that's where they were anyway. :)