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Silicon Knights On Gaming Consolidation, Standardization
Thanks to 1UP for their interview with Denis Dyack of GameCube developers Silicon Knights, as he discusses former product Eternal Darkness and forthcoming conversion Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes. Dyack advances the theory that "...you'll see more collaborations, you're going to see a lot of mergers with developers... When they standardized the movie camera in, say, 1950, all the movie companies that told good stories became dominant, the major players that we know now... The same thing is going to happen in our industry." He further suggests that standardization of gaming hardware platform is "inevitable", saying "commoditization of technology" is coming to games, and comments: "Nintendo as a group has always emphasized the content of games, because that's where we think the value is, and we think that's what will become dominant."
A game is only as good as it's content. Therefore standardization of the underlying technology makes sense.
Then again, if everyone ends up using the very same technology we'll have a monopoly, which is a whole different thing altogether...
.: Max Romantschuk
[...] content is going to become the dominant influence in the industry.
So if I understand this correctly, he is saying that games with a good storyline will sell/be better than those with a not so good storyline. And that "in the future" other companies will "buy" the "technology" (read: license the graphical engine) and create their own games around that...
My cats ate my karma. They also wrote this comment.
Bottom line is basically, "Sega had the right idea and expect Nintendo to do the same."
In all fairness, I love Nintendo's games, but don't care much for its hardware. Microsoft has very few games I care to play, but the hardware is (grudgingly) the best. As a guy who owns all three systems solely out of the desire to play good games, I'd love to see "commoditization" of gaming hardware but don't reasonably expect to see it for quite some time. Besides... commoditization of gaming consoles would basically create a situation similar to the GBA's dominance over the handheld market. The market is saturated and anyone who wants a piece had better go in with a bang or get forced out just as fast.
"Why Subscribe?" Good question...
Standards are good, but not until you get to the point where new things are not being made. If all game developers had standardized on the Atari 2600 and never left, where would we be now? There isn't the power there for most of the games we play. Likewise every ohter platform to date that sold a lot (NES, PS1, and so on come to mind, but you likely have your own favorite memory)
SO, is the PS/2/XBOX/Gamecube hardware really where we want to be forever? Or would a next generation be a good idea? If so where do we stop?
I can't answer that. I agree content matters most. Thats why MULE(1982) and Star Raiders(1979) are still played by atari fans, and similear games keep the C64 scene alive. The latter could benifit a lot from imporved graphics, many of the alien space ships should get more details and the like, but what it really needs is a custom controller with buttons for all the options that it uses the keyboard to select. The former would look nicer, but I don't know that it really needs help.
Shouldn't Denis Dyack be working on MGS:Twin Snakes instead of reading and replying to slashdot forums? Get to work, Denis!!
Just kidding. It's actually good to see that he's clarifying his point of view.
"When they standardized the movie camera in, say, 1950, all the movie companies that told good stories became dominant"
I'm not a big fan of movies from the 40's and 50's, so I don't know whether the above statement is true. Regardless, this statement represents the lynchpin of his argument. I do know that special effects have become a commodity today, and we blame them as the primary reason that we don't have good stories in movies these days. Technology has become a crutch.
Why would it be any different for games?
It doesn't seem that much different now. I think a lot of the XBox's early success was due to this fact. Now that there are several games worth playing it has changed but, early on, they didn't need content. The technology sold itself.
I bought Eternal Darkness when it came out. I figured if Nintendo liked what they saw so much that they invested heavily in the company, it's got to be a good game.
As a story, Eternal Darkness is great. As a game, it's terrible. Almost every puzzle is about as difficult as a game of Rock/Paper/Scissor where you opponent draws first. It's all matching red, green, and blue. Sometimes it's match the same color, sometimes it's match the color that defeats that color. Combat isn't very hard; just attack the head of everything. Once you get the life recovery spell the challenge is gone completely.
The 100% linear gameplay kills it though. The game is barely playable once through; unfortunately you need to play through 3 times to get the full ending.
There are some people that play a game solely for the story. I'm sure they'd love a game like that. But for most people, the deciding factor on whether to buy a game or to play someone else's copy is how replayable the game is. A game isn't worth $50 if you're only going to play it once. (Side note: ignore RPGs, lots of people only intend to play them once. But outside Japan, people who like RPGs are greatly in the minority)
If you make a linear game and intend on the story to sell it, then you better make the gameplay really damn good.
I'm convinced Zelda: Wind Waker didn't sell as well as expected due to the strong story. The story required the order you major events to be fixed. Even when the gameplay didn't. Towards the end of the game, it really feels like the PHB came in at the end of development and said "No, non-linearity bad!" and made the order of stuff at the end get fixed for no other reason. I know about 4-5 people that would've bought GameCubes and Zelda until they saw how linear the game was.