Slashdot Mirror
What is Wrong With Game Development?
Warrior-GS writes "Seamus Blackley, who has done everything from work at Looking Glass Studios to evangelize for the Microsoft Xbox, sounds off on what's wrong with the relationship between developers, publishers and their audience. Also, as part of coverage of the D.I.C.E. Summit in Las Vegas, GameSpy has chats with Miyamoto about The Wind Waker and Yu Suzuki about his gaming influences. Some interesting reading."
I've found the latest crop of games to be really great. For instance, Battlefield 1942 and Metroid Prime are probably two of the best games I've _ever_ played in my life.
I think maybe the companies put too much stress on the developers to create hits, but as a part-time developer, I think it's easier said than done to just create a smash hit out of thin air. Everything's already been done, or so it seems, so really original and entertaining gameplay+graphics is a tough combination to create.
31 people regularly point & click my G-spot
What's wrong with the video game industry is that Doom 3 isn't released yet.
They put too much emphasis on advertizing it to death and not enough emphasis on developing a quality product. Advertizing is the scourge of the free market. It doubles or triples the price of many goods while contributing nothing to their value.
Repeal the DMCA!
Money is what's wrong with game development. Someone puts it in the head of the programmers' management team that every day they spend working on a game is a day in which they lose money amounting to both operating costs and potential profit.
In fact, they seem to think that if you release a game half-done it'll make more money than a game that's complete.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
A quote from article:
Shigeru Miyamoto: For me, the most interesting thing about video games is taking the controller and using it to move something around on the screen.
Hmmm, indeed. Is everybody sure this is the actual genius behind the classics like SMB?
why run from Vincenzo?
Typically, users are queried by publishers at different levels. Sony is especially keen on this. However, most Slashdot readers probably refuse to participate on principals of anonymity. Did you fill out your registration card and return it to Sony with the games you like and additional comments? Probably not. Have you logged on to Sony's site and returned feedback on what you like, want to see, etc? Probably not. But there is a large group of people who /do/ do this and they weigh heavily in Sony's conception of what their typical user is (Sony even has a lame word for them: "Imaginator") - and thus on what games they will push for development and advertising.
I found Seamus Blakely's remarks interesting but hardly exhaustive. It seems to me that the simplest way of describing the problem with the games industry is this: "Hollywood".
As computer games have become big business, the process of creating one bears a striking resemblance to the process of developing a film idea: no-one (as William Goldman famously said) knows anything, and they're all terrified of risk.
1) Avoid Technical Risk -- don't develop new game engines. Use an existing engine and plug new content into it.
2) Avoid Financial Risk -- sequels do better than new titles, so invest in sequels.
3) Aim for the lowest common denominator -- dialog needs to be localised, so avoid too much of it. Everyone understands explosions -- so do lots of them.
4) Spend as much on promotion as development. The key is to sell a lot of copies at full price really soon after release, because if you don't, people will figure out how unoriginal your game really is and you'll be selling at a tiny margin.
And as in the film industry, most of the interesting stuff is done by small independent developers on shoestring budgets. Of course, once they have a hit they get converted into a commodity product that spawns huge budget low innovation sequels.
Is it just me or does everyone else think that the older systems, like the atari and nintendo put out way higher quality games (as far as gameplay goes)than the modern systems seem to provide?
Well, it has never been successfully tested.
Sometimes we'll sit around when we're bored and think of ways games could be better; different implementation systems and cool ideas that would just kick ass in games. Developers should just randomly show up at lan parties and ask questions. =)
I was happy to see that he pointed out that there is a fairly sizable difference between game reviewers, and the average gamer. Now, don't get me wrong, I love Gamespot and IGN as much as the next guy, and I always yank a few reviews before I buy a game, but most of their reviewers have a different philosophy than I do.
They sit there and carefully and systematically work through each game, taking notes on the sound, music, graphics, etc. They evaluate the game the same way Roger Ebert carefully picks through a movie and sees it's good bits and bad bits.
But then, every once in a while, the normal non-professional movie fan just says "Fuck it," and rents Six String Samurai.
It's the same thing with games. I mean, I loved the depth and careful construction that went into the last Final Fantasy game. I appreciate the graphical detail in the last Warcraft game. But unlike a professional game reviewer, I'll occasionally just say screw it all and toss a quarter in the Ms. Pac-Man machine in the local arcade.
The average gamer often just wants something fun. Games that start as 300 page design documents just don't sound fun, no matter how much effort went into them. Now, maybe if the game started out as a 15 page comic book.....
"Isn't that the sweetest little well-balanced undergraduate-level philosophy of life."
I am taking a game design class at school and here are some readings that you all may find interesting. I wonder whether after reading the articles below and sticking to the concepts, will we become better game developers?
. asp
_ tools_01.htm
"Game Engine Anatomy 101" by Jake Simpson - http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,3973,594,00
"Formal Abstract Design Tools" by Doug Church - http://www.gamasutra.com/features/19990716/design
"2000: Formal Design Tools: Emergent Complexity, Emergent Narrative" by Marc "MAHK" LeBlanc - http://www.algorithmancy.org
Lack of innovation, thats right, a serious lack of innovation, and too many "me too" games.
Waaaayy back in the day, the atari 2600 was the #1 console. It died a horrible death mainly because of all the crap "me too" clones of astroids, combat, and pac man clones (actually the 2600 pacman stunk like turds)
Later we got the nintendo 8-bit. OOh wow, easter eggs in mario, now every game has easter eggs and secret codes. Now everyone wants to program platform games because "If mario is such a popular platform game, mine should be too!"
Later we saw the puzzle game "me too" phase where everyone and their brother was doing some sort of "tetris" clone. Nintendo had Dr. Mario, Sega had columns, Atari came out with some shit game called "klax". For a while there it seemed everyone and their brother was trying to do some spin on tetris.
Now it's the same old crap, and game companies STILL haven't learned their lessons. Yay we have procedural textured mapped polygons on a box that can do 3gabillion vertices per second. Who cares about the game! Just look at those fill rates! Wow look it's tetris, but it's better because it's IN 3D WOW! Yeah i'm just lining up at best buy before they open so I CAN GET MY COPY TOO!
I suppose when they release the next generation of consoles, we're going to see the same old crap, but with more wizzbang graphics than you can shake a stick at.
In the words of Roddy Piper, "It's like putting perfume on a pig."
Well, that's half right, he certainly does talk a lot. Honestly, I think the main thing that's wrong with the games industry is pricks like Blackley who are more interested in acting like rock stars than in making games.
A programmer can only code for so many hours every day. It's not like turning a light on or off; programming takes time, the right moment, and deep concentration to be done right.
I love programming. It's like a cross between a fine art, such as opera, and a deeply complex science, such as molecular physics. There's a math portion of it, and there's an art portion of it. But the bottom line is that there's no business part of coding. So, when managers and the other suits try to tell the coders, "OK, well put in a good 8 hrs of coding today, and Mike and Punjab will as well, and we'll have 24 hrs of coding done today on NewGameApp v1.0." Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way.
Go read Mythical Man Month [Link]. It's all about these typical manegerial expectations and how they're blatantly wrong.
You want to fix game development? STOP WORKING THE PROGRAMMERS SO HARD.
31 people regularly point & click my G-spot
Games should be released _when they're done_ and not a day sooner. Duh. It's not just an art vs. business thing either. Releasing a buggy or incomplete game is just a stupid business decision bent on making Wall Street's quarterly earnings targets- instead of improving the long term success of the company.
Oh, and people who have spent most of their lives passionately making cool games should realize selling out to a greedy, stupid and public company like EA isn't necessarily going to make their lives better- even if they are very (very) rich.
Video games nowadays are becoming much more complicated beasts and require much larger teams... they are much more a product of their process and much less a product of the talent creating them. If the process is broken, you get crap no matter how good the individual developers are. All is not lost, though... Hollywood uses the same model. I think we will see the video game equivalent of a "Director" emerge... someone who manages the process to create something of quality. I think companies like Blizzard already do this well (although their "Directors" are fairly anonymous, I'll bet they are there).
Finally, it's being said. I had time to play endlessly long games when I was in junior high, but now in college, I just won't touch the 30 hour game (let alone the 70-100 hour group!). I don't have that kind of time. Maybe the "no-life" crew still has that kind of time to blow, but I'd say a good majority of us have outside engagements. And what's more, I'd MUCH rather play 3 excellent 10-hour games instead of one 30-hour one.
2 - No change of the storyline. As soon as someone integrates diablo2 with doom3 we will have a game everyone can enjoy.
3 - NO FREAKIN COOP GAMES. I'm personally very sick of playing Quake1 coop over and over simply becuase its the basically the only one out there. I'm sure there are others, but they've hidden pretty well from me.
4 - graphics card manufacturers. It takes much longer to port a game for multiple vid cards that it does for just one, and you get much more performance if it was just one. ATI and Nvidia need to agree on a set of standards - that would help immensly.
High-quality gameplay back in the old days was the sole focus of developing games. They didn't have the gimmicks of fancy graphics or the capabilities massive hard drives or even memory. It all had to be stored in a ROM that fit into a few kb.
The gamplay was great because it had to be. I recall seeing an interview somewhere with Nolan Bushnell of Atari fame saying as much.
The concept of FUN was a core idea. It sounds simple but the core idea nowadays is often COOL. What's cool is not always what's fun. That is a lesson that many producers need to learn. (I say producers because the developers are rarely in control of the games they work so hard to create.)
Just because you can use the latest eye candy it doesn't mean you should. I like great looking games as much as the next person, but I like great-playing games even more.
Most of ID's work could be concidered open source. ID has popped the cherry for 1000's of programers/wannabe developers.
The gaming industry as a whole allows easy access to employment if your any good. I've watched at least thirty people go from newbie to getting jobs at some of the biggest companies and still are friends with a few.
So... whats wrong with game development? Or rather, why does the games of today seem to suck compared to the ones I played when I was young?
I think there are many reasons, some off which has ben adressed by other posters. Still, beeing me, I'm gonna list up the ones I think are among the most important.
- Lack of any attemt of original gameplay. Most, or all, of todays games are simply 'more of the same'.
- Too much focus on 'eyecandy'. Modern games look the part, but often I find that too much development has gone into good looks, and too little into things like plot, levels and gameplay.
-Rehashing of old ideas. What is 'Medal of Honor'? Simply a better version of the original 'Doom'. And what was 'Doom' in the first place, but a souped up version of the original 'Castle Wolfenstain'?
Don't misunderstand me. I still buy and enjoy games... but I'm not sucked in as I was before.
The downfall of the gaming industry, I feel, began when the graphicsadaptors started becomming good enought to allow for 'nearly real' gameplay. That shifted the focus away from good games and towards games that looked good. Maybe because it was easy to describe a scene where you had to feed a 10' carrot to a mutant spacebunny as long as you had to rely on text, but impossible to do it visually. That, and while a textphraser could actually make sence out of what you wrote, a visualy based game was dumbed down to walk about and clicking on stuff.
Maybe a game like Valhalla could solve that last problem - eyecandy and a reasonable smart textphraser.
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
Saying that a 300 page game design stifles creativity is completely wrong, unless for some reason your publisher is requiring you to stick to the letter of it instead of being flexible. How do you think you get a team of 20+ people to produce a coherent game? Normally you can't see which parts of the game was made by which artist and so on, why? BECAUSE THERE IS A GAME DESIGN DETAILING HOW THINGS SHOULD LOOK AND WORK. Of course if something is not fun, you come up with a new design for that part and update the game design document accordingly.
He also seems to think that everyone can do business like Microsoft where it does not matter how much money you lose because there is always the operating system monopoly there to feed you... Saying that developers make bad games because they have to make them on a budget and a timeschedule is of course true, but not very interesting as this is likely to continue to be the case for the foreseable future...
The interactive way to Go -- http://www.playgo.to/iwtg/en/
Blackley's comments are all well and good, but will someone tell me exactly what he's done to improve things? He's been directly responsible for 2-3 games in his career, none of which were particularly earth-shattering. He seems to be most famous these days for leaving Microsoft. Is this really someone that developers and publishers should be looking towards for inspiration? The proof of any theory is in the results, and so far I haven't seen Blackley's new company spewing out anything amazing that the world should be paying attention to. All I've seen is Blackley himself using his company as a platform to complain about the industry.
Meanwhile, guys like Miyamoto - working at the largest game developer in the world in terms of sales and the number of projects released yearly (yes, bigger than Microsoft) - keep on churning out games like Pikmin and Animal Crossing, which I would consider pretty innovative. Then the guy gets derided for saying things like "what I find most interesting about games is being able to push a character around the screen with a controller." Well hey, ever think maybe the guy's onto something? He's only the most successful individual game developer and producer in the history of video games, going back to the original Donkey Kong. Again, it's the results that prove the validity of a theory, and Miyamoto's theory has always been that simplicity and innovation are what count. He doesn't go around complaining that the publishing system is broken; he works within that publishing system and continues to make great games (and games that sell quite well - when less than a million is considered a "failure", you know you've set the benchmark pretty high).
I'm not sure the system is broken when we continue to get games like Super Monkey Ball, Rez, Animal Crossing, Pikmin, Samba De Amigo, Dance Dance Revolution, and plenty of other highly innovative games that very often become popular without the name recognition that "branding" provides. And I don't see Seamus Blackley's name attached to any of these games.
I think we need to all finally agree that Blackley is not worth talking about. He's at best a footnote in video game history; one of the two guys who convinced Bill Gates to release the Xbox. But he's no longer involved with Xbox and didn't do much but evangelize it while he was. And I don't see him doing much of note since leaving Microsoft. Miyamoto, on the other hand, says lots of things that lots of people don't seem to "get" but has been directly responsible for 4-5 major hits and highly regarded games in just the past year, with an indirect hand in 20-30 others. Whose opinion counts more here?
Doom 3 and Id's idology, as well as the problems with SimCity 4 are illustrations of what is wrong.
Id has indicated that no matter what hardware the gamers have will not be enough for Doom 3, while I understand that games have pushed hardware upgrades in the past, usually it was due to new technology in the game (3D engine changes, multiplayer, etc) Id is simply making a game that is going to overwhelm almost everyone's hardware and they think that is cool.
SimCity 4 was shipped and it's slow as crap on machines twice the recommended hardware on the box because they put too much crap in there going on.
Game designers have a case of the God-complex in many cases, and I say that's what is wrong in the industry.
Now he has a Master (publishers, the market, whatever) and it's not for himself anymore. That's the problem with turning pro: in the end, the only thing you really do for yourself, is get your paycheck. I face the same problem in my job; I don't always get to do what I want. That's why it's called "work" instead of "play."
Don't like it? Quit working 16 hour days, and save some of that passion and energy for your amateur projects after you get home. The market never shares your values. If they did, they wouldn't have to pay you.
He seems to think the problem is with the middlemen, though, and that he would be happy to serve the end users (the "audience"). I'm not convinced this is really the way to happiness either (ahem, I said: the market never shares your values) but I guess he disagrees. I guess it is a fairly decent compromise to have at least a little fun, but still make a buck.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
OK, so as far as I know it's only available on the PS2, but Gran Turismo 3 is so realistic it hurts.
In GT3 you have to get different levels of licenses to drive in the different classes of races and even getting the early licenses is challenging. You make $$ from winning races (highly ghetto races to start with) and as you get enough you buy better cars and mod them. There are so many mods; I have no clue what most of them are, but the game handily gives you before & after horsepower figures (for the power related mods) in your current vehicle.
And the racing is awesome. Great graphics, great sense of speed, but most importantly every little thing you do with the controls has an impact. Some cars handle it better when you take a short cut through dirt and grass on the side of the road than others. The rear wheel drives are soo hard not to spin out. Each car is different in it's feel and road handling, etc.
Anyway, are there problems with the game industry? Yes, of course. However, it's preposterous to suggest that there are no good games out there.
And if you think there are no good driving sims, you must be playing the wrong ones. Unless you're looking for a good non-racing driving sim ("Supermarket & Back: Station Wagon III"). If that's the case I can't help you.
I'm sure I'm not the only slashdotter whose written games for personal amusement. Nor am I the only one whose distributed them to friends and gotten positive responces (I think honestly, but they might have just been being nice to me).
Now picture all those games coming unsorted through some sort of web portal. Combined with buggy games, games which only run on an SGI mainframe, games with trojan horses, over-used joke games (thermonuclearwar, the game that just pops up a dialog saying "You lose") and downright trolls (a game built around goatse.cx).
Now, I'm not saying publishers are the only way to strain this down to something acceptable. Gaming magazines can give reviews (though less than 1% of games would ever get reviewed at all); players would have favorite game authors; there could even be something like slashdot moderation (we all know how well that works -- actually, IMHO, it's one of the better forms I've seen).
I'm just saying that publishers can't just "get out of the way" -- they can only be replaced by something better.
A lot of the ideas here are based on an essay of Eric Flint's. He expounds in detail.
.sig: We go to war with Iraq to prevent them from building nukes and using them against us, destabilizing Pakistan, allowing Al-queada to get nukes, and use them against us -- oh the irony!
Sig:Why copyright isn't a fundamental human right
Same as with everything else. It's hideously bloated and aiming for shareholder value rather than doing the creative fun stuff in between once in a while.
Look at ID Soft, my favorite example: I don't like their games very much nor are they extremely innovative, but they've remained the same 15 head team since god know's when and something like twice a decade they release a game they like and their fans like. Just like it should be.
The counterexample: Dynamics and their last hit Tribes2. Great game. Best Multiplayer only game out there. I LOVE it. It rocks and still kicks UT2k3 and whatnot around the block fun and varietywise. UT2k3 will take another 2 years till they've patched the server overview to meet T2s standard.
Yet the fan base built up to slow for the VCs so they shut them down. That's what happens when you get greedy. Game developers should do just that without getting greedy: Develope games. And nothing else. Then their products would be better, they would be fewer, they would make a fine living and I as a gamer would be happier and have to spend less money on crap. And I'm shure they would be happier too.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
What is wrong with game development?
Microsoft, and even moreso: Electronic Arts.
Both are large corperations that don't practice much innovation (Honestly... Madden 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003???), but since the mid to late '90s have been running around buying out smaller developers, milking whatever profits they can out of the franchises, and letting the studios wither on the vine.
It was only a few weeks ago that it was announced that Westwood (now a subsidiary of EA) was closeing up it's Las Vegas development offices. When WAS the last time anything good came out of the C&C series? I bet it predates Westwood's fall to EA.
Westwood in particular stings ME hard, because, before EA, they used to do some REALLY cool games outside C&C. Remember the Blade Runner "adventure" game? That was one of my faves. Do you think that, under EA's flag, we'll EVER see anything from Westwood but more played-out C&C's?
Or take microsoft's assimilation of one of my other previously-favroite game developers: Bungie. I STILL dig out Marathon and Myth every so often. And who else remembers all the previews of what Halo was going to be before gates had it stripped down to become the Xbox's flagship yet-another-generic-FPS.
Back to EA... Remember Origin? Remember Autoduel and Ogre? What about the Wing Commander series? Crusader? BioForge? Remember the excellent storytelling in the old Ultima series? I sure do. What is Origin all about NOW though, under the stewardship of EA? Ultima Online, Ultima Online expansions, and a sequel to... Ultima Online!
Remember "Jane's"? Remember the excellent military simulations of the '90s. 688i, in particular, STILL has quite a following. Quite an achievement for a game released in 1997! Where is Jane's now? Electronic arts. What has Jane's done recently? Nothing since 2000.
Remember when Maxis had a sence of humor? Remember when they released some really WIERD sims? Remember Sim Ant, Sim Earth, and Sim Tower? NOW what does Maxis do? Well, they just released another Sim City... one which I'm told is STILL not as fun as Sim City 2000 was. Oh, and they do expansion packs for The Sims. Quick check of EA's site to be sure.... yup.
I'm sure there are MORE game studios that others could name that have been assimilated by microsoft or EA. The above are mostly my pet peeves in the "large corperations buying and destroying small game studios" world. But I think THAT is the problem with game development. In my experience as a gamer, studios have been so much more creative, and... well... FUN when they were independent. The big corperations seem to forget that games are supposed to be FUN. They just see a trend (FPS, RTS, MMRPG, etc.), and want to milk it dry.
cya,
john
Imagine all the people...
Story = How many games have a story tacked on ~just to explain~ why you're shooting at people or aliens or terrorists? It's not length of story, but quality of story.
Interactivity and joint Story Telling with other living people in a virtual environment. MMO'a remind me of table top pen and pencil gaming of the early 80's. Mud's and dungeon crawls dressed up in fancy gfx, but little more. Sure, there are RPing guilds in EQ, but that's not what i'm talking about.
How many game designers have stopped to actually read Aristotles' Poetics?
"There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness."- Friedrich Nietzsche
I only played this game briefly on someone else's machine, and I guess the other physics and stuff might have been realistic, but this seems to me to be a fatal flaw.
I have first-hand experience here, working on Infinity for Gameboy Color. Sure, GBC is obsolete, and we really should nuke that web site right now, since it isn't going anywhere, but a few years ago it was hot stuff.
The GBC glaringly lacked RPGs. At the time, I could safely say that the best RPG for the platform was Final Fantasy Legend 3, and that was for the monochrome GB! Infinity was going to change that. It was a game SquareSoft would have made, had they stayed around to make GBC games. Our game played a little like something between FF2 and FF3, with a full 25,000 word story. No real innovation here (except for maybe the battle system), we were simply trying to fill a nitch on the platform. For that reason, we got so many emails from gamers wondering when this thing would be released. After all, their only other choice was Pokemon. Many of them wondered if we would face a similar fate as Mythri, another GBC title that you never saw (both games were highlighed on RPGamer).
Unfortunately, Infinity never saw the light of day because we couldn't land a publisher. We sent a letter out to nearly all publishers, but in only three cases did they contact us back: EA, Nintendo, Crave. I actually flew to Washington to meet a guy at Nintendo (pretty cool place, looks just like the stuff in the pictures), only to be denied an offer. He did, however, show me a GBA prototype with Mario Kart. Sure, Mario Kart is a cool game, but I wanted to play an RPG. On the first day we met with Crave, the guy asked if we could substitute the characters with some from a movie. We tried to get them to go along with the game as-is, and we had a long negotiation period, but they ended up just stringing us along with no result. At one point, their plan was to show the game at E3 2001, but we were denied that also (I even have the 1 poster of the game we had made for the occasion, hanging on the wall behind me right now).
What I learned from all this is that publishers generally only want to take safe bets. Why go for a risky RPG when you can just make Men in Black 2? It pained me to walk down the GBC isle at stores and see something featuring the Olsen twins. How on earth do these games get published, but ours not? It is the sad state of the game industry.
In music, I think we have good case studies
now which show that it is possible to "say all
that is worth saying" within a genre. Look
at the "big band music" genre -- by the end
of WWII it had all been said, and the innovators
moved on to create new types of jazz. The
bands that play that music today do it as
historical preservation. Given a set of
instruments, and stylistic rules for
writing to the instruments, there is only
so much one can say.
Games these days cost millions to develop.
Because of this, they have to appeal to the LCD of the computer game public.
This means they have to be very dumb, at all levels. 90% of people won't "get" a smart game.
Back in the day, a game could be wildly successful with a small niche audience, because production costs were so low.
It is interesting to see that many of the best games out there (Half-Life comes to mind) are games that were not subject to milestones or budget limitations or skew schedules. Games that developers could develop on their own terms.
Publishers don't like to let developers develop on their own terms, even though the best games are done that way.
They need to be more venture capitalist minded - sure, 10 out of 12 will go bust, one might break even and the 12th one will be a big hit that makes more money then was lost on all the rest.
But they are too risk averse, so we get crap.
*sigh*
Government IS the problem.
Blackley was the "producer" for that game, and also wrote (unsuccessfully) the physics engine. "Why did physics code that was barely usable actually ship?" says Game Developer's postmortem, which names Blackley as the major problem with the project.
Blackley has since turned to evangelism and punditry, at which he's better.
I don't think so - most hard core gamers will buy Windows just to play games, and most non-hard core gamers (i.e. the Wal Mart crowd) is already running windows anyways.
Macs and Unix are still just a drop in the bucket, OS wise. OpenGL, while it mostly works, isn't the bestest thing in the world.
Anyways, a good development house will have their own video library that wraps all the DirectX stuff, making it possible without too much pain to port to another library by just linking in a different DLL with the same wrapper functions (or maybe even use the same library but just with different state flags set!). Most don't do the port cause the market isn't there, but it isn't as horrible a thing as you might imagine.
Government IS the problem.
They sit there and carefully and systematically work through each game, taking notes on the sound, music, graphics, etc. They evaluate the game the same way Roger Ebert carefully picks through a movie and sees it's good bits and bad bits.
That's only one thing that a game reviewer is supposed to do. They are also supposed to review the game as a whole. More often than most would care to admit, there is nowhere near that level of attention to detail when conducting a review. How many times have we seen so-called reviewers exposed for being nothing more than fanboys on the take from publishers (bribes, junkets and payola)? Or even worse, how often do they write reviews without ever seeing or playing the game in question (fraudulent reviews)?
As long as the publishers know that they can manipulate reviewers by the carrot --bribes, junkets and payola-- or the stick --threatening no review copies of games or no access to staff for interviews-- they know that they can get away with just about anything when publishing games. Is there any wonder why 95% of games published don't make a profit?
At Geartest.com we have faced the latter problem, where publishers will not send us the actual products, even when we occasionally request them.
They send us press releases, screenshots, more PR about promotional offers, bundle discounts and contests, but they rarely send the software.
Maybe it's because we have repeatedly told them that we won't publish non-news, and we won't publish features without direct access to the game in question and/or the staff who made the game (in the case of interviews/features).
Meanwhile, you get self-proclaimed 'journalists' like Marc Saltzman who carve out a cottage industry for themselves while doing nothing to advance serious, legitimate, journalistic or critical coverage of games.
There are an endless number of Web site and so-called 'game press' that are happy to publish PR and advertising and call them articles or features. As long as there are gamers who give these sites and magazines their traffic and pay for this type of PR content, the game companies, their marketing agencies and the publications themselves have no incentive to stop pimping, whoring and publishing lousy games.
I see all the claims about "lack of innovation" in the gaming industry, and while I can't wholly disagree, I think many of the complaints come from simply taking too narrow a view.
What we have is akin to an evolutionary process. Good ideas (easter eggs, puzzle games, platform games) get copied shamelessly, until you have hundreds of games that fully explore the design space. First we had simple games like Breakout and Galaga, because that was really all that computers were equipped to handle. Then when the hardware was sufficiently beefed up, we got scrollers like SMB and Metroid. Within that one genre, a lot of new ideas were incorporated. Just look at how much evolution happened between Super Mario Bros. and Super Mario World, despite sticking to the same "run/jump/scroll" formula.
The way you describe it, Tetris was the only "real" puzzle game, and the rest were merely wanna-bes. That's a difficult assertion to make, since Tetris wasn't even the first puzzle game (Q-bert, for example, preceded Tetris by three years). All that can really be said is that the success of Tetris led all the other game publishers to see the potential of the genre.
It's especially strange that you dismiss Dr. Mario as "just another Tetris clone." Its conceptual lineage is blindingly obvious, but I would say that it was just as playable and addictive.
Ideas get stolen, rehashed, reworked, combined, pushed to the limit, and distilled back down until they're nearly unrecognizeable. What you need to understand is, this process actually strengthens the gaming industry. Sure, it sucks when some company decides to dash off a half-hearted clone of Warcraft. But if a great game spawns ten paint-by-numbers clones and one mind-blowing twist on the original formula, gamers are better off than they would be if nobody had copied it for fear of being "derivative."
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
Wow, a lot of that stuff is just the opposite of what I like in a game:
...
He feels that more of a focus should be made on the mass-market consumer
So, basically we already have the entire entertainment industry boiling products down to the *lowest* common intellectual denominator, and this guy proposes that games design be further trimmed down and be based even *more* on more consumer polling data??? Great.
Yet we make games that require 10, 20, 30, or more hours for the gamer to fully enjoy
And I thought that we already live in an instant-gratification culture that has reduced our average attention span to below 10 seconds! And now we need more ego shooters and mario clones that don't require your brain to be used *at all* because having something esoteric like a story line (or any kind of in-game development process, for that matter) is taking away too much of our time?
Well, that's all not what I think the direction of games development should be. Computer games are becoming a more important social factor every year. Soon, they may take the place of television in the areas entertainment and education, especially for children. I don't care what marketers say, the nature of the games we play *does* reflect and even influence the state of our society. And please, I'm not talking about sex and violence here. But we should think hard about if we want to align our entire society by the lowest common denominator. I think not.
A realistic driving sim models:
a) tire temperatures/wear curve/slip curve
b) aerodynamic drag and downforce (very important for simulating slipstreaming effect)
c) weight distribution (shifting fuel load, engine placement and ballasts)
d) suspension geometry (camber and toe changes, caster angles, and the effect of anti-roll bars)
e) suspension dynamics (damper rates and spring rates)
f) powertrain
g) drivelines (differentials, gear ratio, clutch)
The parameters listed above are not reserved for some pie-in-the-sky simulation program written in the academia. Every *realistic* driving simulation games have had those parameters modelled, and in some case user-modifiable, since 1998.
Here is a list of realistic driving game:
1) Grand Prix Legends
2) Nascar 2003
3) F1 2002
4) M3 mod & GTR2002 mod for F1-2002 (free)
5) Viper Racing
6) NetKar (free and add-ons)
7) Live for speed (free during beta testing)
8) Racer (free)
My personal favorite these days? M3 mod for F1-2002.
Blackly said:
Though design documents can be useful tools that help organize a team's efforts, Blackley feels that often times they're a hindrance to creativity. Design docs help publishers set milestones for the developers, which shifts the focus from making a novel game to reaching a milestone to ensure payment. He also noted that the documents themselves have become bloated pieces of work that inhibit innovation. "A 300 page design document is not a very good way to be creative. Design documents actually discourage quality," says Blackley.
What a load of crap. I would think just about _every_ project has milestones...it's the damn _schedule_ that forces early shipping, kills innovation, etc.
As for discouraging quality...if the document includes QA design, then it is quite the opposite.
What a moron this guy is.
Queens of the Stone Age - they rule
The two games that illustrate the differences the best (IMO, that is) are Descent and Carmageddon.
In the case of Descent, you had an original game good graphics and exciting game play and well balanced weapons, tactics, and phenominal AI.
Descent II came out and was heavy on the "WOW" factor, despite growing pains with places to get stuck and problems on 1 or two boss levels, but the result was a much Improved game, despite dated graphics (why they never put out a 3dfx version I'll never know).
Descent III: Modern graphics, excellent game play, better AI, more interesting enemies and levels that were just plain awesome.
The formula stayed the same, and the gameplay as well with improved graphics/AI.
Not much changed, but it is the reason I'd probably buy Descent 4 when/if it comes out.
Now, Carmageddon OTOH is a slightly different story.
Carmageddon I was *truely* original as well as *shocking* when it first came out. Running ppl over? Smashing into other cars is ?allowed?, nay, **ENCOURAGED**?
Know what? That game fscking ROCKED!
Hours and hours of mindless fun, mayhem and high speed.
Carmageddon II (carpocylapse now):
Better (much better) graphics, same gameplay, and a little bit better AI. But, the introduction of special missions annoyed me to no end.
If it were not for a skip level code, I'd probably never played the rest of the game.
Not much changed except for every four levels was and annoyance/inconvenience/challenge.
Carmageddon TDR 2000 (CIII, essentially):
OMFG!! What did you *DO*!?! It's ruined, totally ruined. Yeah, you can run ppl over (no points/time awarded), yeah the same powerups are present with some slight differences, some better {coff*NOT*coff} graphics.
You wan't to know what made me uninstall it after 40 minutes?
Suddenly Carmageddon was about *racing*.
(insert choking sound here)
What bright bulb thought *that* was a good Idea?
I doubt I'd ever buy another game of the Carmageddon series unless the only improvement was graphics/gameplay/weapons/enemy AI.
What I honestly thought the next step would be, was, the ability do disallow/remove some powerups (the annoying ones) or more level variety.
I suppose it is sort of like coming into a position of responsibility/power;
Rule one: Don't change too much.
Rule two: Don't change too little.
Speaking of game development, how's Duke Nukem Forever coming?
(I'm gonna burn for that one)
Have you read the moderator guidelines? Well, have you, PUNK? (and I want a Karma: Gnarly option)
The biggest problem with the game industry is that it harbors many phonies, who in turn hire other phonies. By "phonies", I mean people who are unqualified for their job titles. Because game's sucesses and failures are essentially unpredictable, when a game becomes successful through a combination of luck and hard work, the politically aggressive people are the first to take credit and get promoted into positions of higher power by executives who are not quite sure why the product was successful and are too lazy to dig into the details. Once you get into the "senior executive" title, it seems like no amount of your own incompetence can dislodge you.
...as a VICE PRESIDENT for XBox marketing at Microsoft!
A case in point is Sega's former executive, Peter Moore. Moore was a former professional soccer player from the UK who got an MBA and worked at the athletic shoe company Reebok. When Bernie Stolar was CEO at Sega, he hired Moore as the vp of marketing. In a political fight just before the Dreamcast launch, Stolar got thrown out for insisting on the inclusion of a 56K modem with the console. With Bernie fired, Sega filled in his position with a "temporary" executive from headquarters in Japan. All eyes were on the advertising campaign Moore had put together up for the launch date called "Inside the Box". Dreamcast sold very well in its first few months after the initial launch -- thanks to the groundwork that Stolar had laid down before. Flush with the huge sales, Sega promoted Moore to President.
This was the moment where higher executives demonstrated that they had no idea why the initial Dreamcast sales were successful, and promoted the wrong guy.
As the year went on, the Dreamcast sales flagged. Despite Moore's best marketing attempts, which were ill aimed and ineffectual, the numbers grew bleaker and bleaker. Moore spent money like water, creating elaborate sets at E3 where professional roller skaters did tricks on ramps to promote "Jet Set Radio", renting out the entire Great America amusement park for one day for the Game Developers Converence attendees, and getting Sega to sponsor the MTV Music Video Awards to promote "Space Channel 5".
All for naught. Within a year, sales were so bad that Dreamcast was discontinued. Despite all of the failures, Sega allowed Moore (clearly out of his element) to stay on as CEO, as Sega branched out to support other platforms.
But look what happened: Last Christmas, Moore thought that Sega's football game could beat EA's football game if Sega continued to throw money into advertising. It was once again Moore's theory of spending money like water.
How much money? Almost all of the entire allocated budget for the year 2003! Moore's plan failed badly, which punched a huge hole in Sega, a hole so large that the company began looking for a buyer. Eventually Sega wound up with Sammy, the Korean pachinko manufacturer, which was posted on Slashdot a few weeks ago. Moore announced his departure from Sega, and three days later, he resurfaced again...
If this story doesn't illustrate the illness of the game industry, I don't know what does.
Three years later, frankly I wanted to kill myself - or never play another videogame as long as I lived, whichever was easier. Luckily I got the chance to move out of games and into movies (but that's another story).
I'd been playing arcade games since the Seventies, had most of the computers that were around in the Eighties and the consoles in the Nineties. And as I got older, I realised that the more advanced the technology became... the less fun the games were.
Don't get me wrong, there have been games I've enjoyed playing in the past few years - Halo, the original Tomb Raider, Goldeneye, Crazy Taxi, MGS, Unreal Tourney (once all the Futurama mods are put in). But these days, the 'big' games just require too much of an investment of time for too little reward to be worth it. I was talking to a guy I used to work with who's now on an Xbox mag, and he told me that a senior designer at one of the majors had admitted that his company doesn't bother spending too much time on game ending sequences "because hardly anyone can be bothered to play that long". Chicken or egg?
Certainly, the only big game I've played through to the end in the last few years has been Halo, and even that had some infuriating bits where I was very close to putting it down forever. FFVII I gave up on when I got stuck fighting Barrett's ex-mate and had to keep sitting through five minutes of exposition before getting killed again. MGS - getting blown up by Metal Gear Rex for the fiftieth time was just too much. Even something like Jet Set Radio Future's skyscraper stage... life is just too short!
I actually get more fun out of a quick blast on MAME or Frodo or Spectacle, or Robotron on GBA, or 30 minutes of Crazy Taxi on DC, than any of the so-called megagames of the moment. I have no interest in committing 70 hours of my life to some game (which I know is going to frustrate me with the die/retry trial-and-error loop that designers still think is *soooooo* clever) when there are other things I could be doing.
Not even Miyamoto is infallible - I couldn't be arsed to play through to the end of Ocarina Of Time, simply because I got caught in a die/retry loop and decided I couldn't face playing through the same section yet *again* just to reach the next checkpoint.
The idea of the 'short, sharp shock' seems to have all but disappeared from modern designers. But right now, those are the only kind of games that I have the time (and patience) to play. I've seen everything already - there hasn't been a new gaming genre for years, and nobody seems to even be bothering with new twists on what's already been done. (After three years on an N64 mag, I'd rather eat my own toenails than play another 3D platformer with a cartoony hero. Oh look, the ice level! The volcano level! The minecarts! The jungle! The haunted house! FUCK RIGHT OFF AND DIE, YOU UNIMAGINATIVE SHITEHAWKS!)
The only problem is, nobody's developing games that are designed for a quick 10-15 minute blast, because the focus groups want FMV and level bosses. I couldn't care less about FMV if the game's playable, and I *hate* level bosses, so that's why the big, bland game companies that thankfully I don't have to deal with any more aren't getting any of my money...
You must think in Russian.
Open Source developers unite! We are not bound by the $$, so we are free to create any game we wish. Forget about cool programming techniques, think about a great game idea - the game you've always wanted to play - then check out sourceforge to see if anyon'e building it. If they are, join them. If not, start it yourself and finish it.
Then we can see if we can produce some unique, high quality games.
The biggest problem with the game industry is that it harbors many phonies, who in turn hire other phonies. By "phonies", I mean people who are unqualified for their job titles. Because game's sucesses and failures are essentially unpredictable, when a game becomes successful through a combination of luck and hard work, the politically aggressive people are the first to take credit and get promoted into positions of higher power by executives who are not quite sure why the product was successful and are too lazy to dig into the details. Once you get into the "senior executive" title, it seems like no amount of your own incompetence can dislodge you.
...as a VICE PRESIDENT for XBox marketing at Microsoft!
A case in point is Sega's former executive, Peter Moore. Moore was a former professional soccer player from the UK who got an MBA and worked at the athletic shoe company Reebok. When Bernie Stolar was CEO at Sega, he hired Moore as the vp of marketing. In a political fight just before the Dreamcast launch, Stolar got thrown out for insisting on the inclusion of a 56K modem with the console. With Bernie fired, Sega filled in his position with a "temporary" executive from headquarters in Japan. All eyes were on the advertising campaign Moore had put together up for the launch date called "Inside the Box". Dreamcast sold very well in its first few months after the initial launch -- thanks to the groundwork that Stolar had laid down before. Flush with the huge sales, Sega promoted Moore to President.
This was the moment where higher executives demonstrated that they had no idea why the initial Dreamcast sales were successful, and promoted the wrong guy.
As the year went on, the Dreamcast sales flagged. Despite Moore's best marketing attempts, which were ill aimed and ineffectual, the numbers grew bleaker and bleaker. Moore spent money like water, creating elaborate sets at E3 where professional roller skaters did tricks on ramps to promote "Jet Set Radio", renting out the entire Great America amusement park for one day for the Game Developers Converence attendees, and getting Sega to sponsor the MTV Music Video Awards to promote "Space Channel 5".
All for naught. Within a year, sales were so bad that Dreamcast was discontinued. Despite all of the failures, Sega allowed Moore (clearly out of his element) to stay on as CEO, as Sega branched out to support other platforms.
But look what happened: Last Christmas, Moore thought that Sega's football game could beat EA's football game if Sega continued to throw money into advertising. It was once again Moore's theory of spending money like water.
How much money? Almost all of the entire allocated budget for the year 2003! Moore's plan failed badly, which punched a huge hole in Sega, a hole so large that the company began looking for a buyer. Eventually Sega wound up with Sammy, the Korean pachinko manufacturer, which was posted on Slashdot a few weeks ago. Moore announced his departure from Sega, and three days later, he resurfaced again...
If this story doesn't illustrate the illness of the game industry, I don't know what does.
The real title should be along the lines of what's wrong with Non-Sony game development.
I'm not talking about PC vs. Console flame wars, nor PS2 vs. XBox, but it is important to point out that the first article mentions NOTHING about Sony and it's relationship with developers. Or, for that matter, the sales of PS2 gaming consoles and games vs. those of X-Box and Nintendo.
It's not contested that Microsoft and Nintendo need to get their act together. PC makers have it the hardest, given the wide variety of hardware out there (and the combinations thereof).
But Sony isn't exactly hurting in this economy. In fact, they quadrupled their profits just last year.
Plus, Sony wants to eliminate any charge for development on the PS3, adding a freedom that PC developers have enjoyed for some time.
The Playstation 2 is technically inferior to the GameCube, XBox, and most modern PCs, yet it continues to net a more than substantial share of the market. This alone, if anything, is a sign that graphic/hardware superiority in games isn't "all that".
All rebuffs/criticism welcome.