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Dvorak Trashes Modern Gaming Industry
oskard writes "John C. Dvorak recently posted a PCMag.com rant trashing the gaming industry, predicting a complete market-meltdown in the near future. Titled 'Doom 4: End of the Game Industry?', it was interesting to see how the 3D Realms Forums reacted to the article. He claims that 'games have hardly changed since the invention of the first-person shooter.' His kids have obviously showed him too much Halo 2, and not enough Half-Life 2." From the article: "The business is going to attempt to sustain growth and creativity by making game players buy newer and newer machines. Computer gaming has always been sustained by never-ending improvements in resolution and realism. But once we get to photorealism, what is going to sustain growth?"
If you want to see exactly how inane this is, go out and rent the brain-dead Paul Verhoeven film, Starship Troopers.
Poor use of an example there, being that Starship Troopers is a oft-misunderstood anti-war satire.
Mod article +5 Ironic
Anyone interested on modern FPS engines sould check this Quake Family Tree.
/me...Looking forward for Quake 4.
This pict how actually most people its on modding already existing engines. Valve its even forward, modding his how mods ( Counter Strike: Source ).
-Woof woof woof!
Dance Dance Revolution. Has a built in work out program, and its addictive gameplay encourages people to wear themselves out.
face the world with eyes of fire.
But honest, anyone heard of a productive video game concept?
America's Army is a recruitment tool for the United States Army.
Granted, these are all halo 1 inovations
Bullshit. See Tribes (1998) for all but the last item, and Tribes 2 for the last.
And hell, Tribes may not have even been the first...
Halo wasn't inovative, it was mass marketing at it's finest.
EXCEPT OF COURSE, the BOOK isn't anti-war. The book is a fictional examination of an experimental form of government. As well as an exploration of the "humanity" of the enemy. BOTH of which the movie missed.
Food not Bombs is a nice platitude but it breaks down when you notice that the Bombees are usually well fed
So true.
Don't tell me that 70,000 people we're playing Counter Strike on the crusty old Half LIfe 1 engine because of the graphics. Gameplay sustains a game's life after the initial buzz, look what happened to Doom 3, all flash no substance. And on the other hand you have Gameboy's Tetris, what a graphical nightmare, but still a strong classic few didn't enjoy for a long time.
Yes, HL2 also had hints to a story, but actually nothing more than hints. After I finished the game, I still had no idea what the heck 'combine soldiers' were and where those aliens came from and how/why this guy teamed up with them.
Of course, playing a straightforward shooter like UT2k4 can also be fun. People just don't always have days to spend to get immersed in the complex world of a game. But I bet playing onslaught would be just as much fun if everything were still rendered using Quake I graphics.
None of these things are halo 1 innovations. They have all been done (with the possible exception of auto-recharging shields - but there CERTAINLY have been shields) in prior FPS games. Mods for half-life included vehicles you can get in and out of before halo came arouund. Melee attacks have been around since doom or so. Nades have also been around for ages, though not sticky ones. Motion trackers are definitely old.
This is not insightful. Halo is just another FPS. I'm sorry if it's your favorite game ever, but it's still the truth. Very few FPSes have really pushed the state of the art significantly. The first three are all ID games, which makes sense since they effectively defined the genre; Wolf3D, Doom, Quake. Quake2 and 3 are really not important from the standpoint of driving the industry. Half-Life is another important point in video game history; You could argue that Unreal is as well, if only because it managed to do huge outdoor spaces well, but I won't really try to make that point.
Repeat after me, Halo and Halo 2 are just more first person shooters. There are zillions of them out there; I've played quite a few and I've probably played less than a quarter of them. Halo deserves notice only for a> being successful and b> having a control scheme that is workable on a console.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
A new console runs roughly $300 every 5 years. Think about what was a nice computer system 5 years ago:
Pentium/Athlon 850mhz or so
256MB of RAM
20-30gb hard drive
Geforce DDR graphics card
You're not going to get 90% of newer games to run on that system, and it'll cost way more than $300 to get that machine upgraded enough to play current games. Even then you're going to have the headache of keeping up with drivers and worrying about the game being compatible with your particular setup.
I personally still play some PC games (Warcraft II I was the last one I played), but I've found that the console was generally a much more hassle free experience, and by not worrying about having to keep my system upgraded constantly to play the latest games.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
And then, you can work on realistic physics, and AI. After that, you can work on better stories, non-linear plots, etc.
There's a million directions that technologies can improve in for games. I don't see the world ending when graphics get to be photorealisitc (and that's not going to happen any time soon anyway - compare Pixar level graphics to today's PC, we're many years away from having the processor power to do that in realtime.)
bzzzt, wrong! people think that deaths and gunshots and things look as sanitized as they do on tv. A little more realism, I think, might be a GOOD thing.
Hate to break it to you, but real gunshots are usually not as gory as Hollywood's depiction, which isn't to say that reality can't be horribly gory and disturbing. IMO, the most disturbing part about violence for me is the real human suffering and senseless insanity rather than the actual blood and mutilation.
I would think most doctors would agree with me.
In Europe the church lost a lot of influence by the end of the 17th century and even before then books forbidden by the church were widely distributed north of Italy. Take Galileis Dialogon as an example.
Anyway, 200 years ago there were already a lot of scientific publications. If I am not mistaken Nature and Scientific American were first published arount 1830.
Back in the pre-CG days of the 1930s, Warner Brothers was constantly fielding complaints over the level of violence Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig Daffy Duck and the immortal (Lucky for him) Elmer Fudd were constantly portraying. After all: Seeing Bugs put a finger in Elmer's hunting rifle and having it blow up on Elmer with the only result being soot on face, a flower petal looking gun barrel and no problem for Bug's finger was only encouraging our youth to take similar actions...
As the saying goes: Nothing new here, move on.
- Minutus cantorum, minutus balorum, minutus carborata descendum pantorum.
Nope, it's tatsujin. Means "master", as opposed to tetsujin's "iron man".