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The Games Industry's 2007 Resolutions
Gamasutra has a piece up from earlier this week, with some late New Year's resolutions for the games industry. Their frequently-done 'Question of the Week' series pulled in comments from game developers and designers working right now, with their hopes for the best in 2007. From the article: "Now that 2006 is over can we finally stop worrying about who's going to win the console war and start focusing on the games? Arguing about which next-gen system is the best is as silly as arguing about which five-star restaurant has the finest china and silverware. It's the food on the plate that matters to the customers after all. With any luck we'll see delicious games with plenty of innovation on all of the platforms this year! - Patrick Curry, Midway Games"
More in-game Advertising. Ker-ching!
"Why did they cancel my favorite Sci-Fi show? I downloaded ALL the episodes!"
FTA:
Stop using wooden crates in games!
-Anonymous
Uh... How about metal crates?
-Game Industry
The enemies of Democracy are
The console wars really do get on my nerves. Sure, the Wii's graphics aren't quite as good as the Xbox 360s or the PS3s, but Nintendo makes products based on a philosophy to make game systems that are affordable and fun. Family-ish type. there are SOME violent games for the Wii and Gamecube, but its mainly Mario Party type stuff. PS3 and Xbox 360 are very similar. I say whatever you get, fine. I'm jsut ready for the console arguements to end. I can understand if you want to defend your platform, but sometimes it goes a little far.
I love my Wii - I think its a fantastic addition to the world of gaming as a whole; my grandparents now understand why its fun to play!
but lets not forget that more 'serious' gamers need more serious games; with mature themes. Why is everyone's first thought at the mention of Doom, Quake, Gears of War, etc just "oooh but the children..." - sod the children that's what the ratings and parental controls are for!
Just strikes me as weird that there can be this dualism to it all - and a total inability for people to draw parallels between films with their ratings systems and games (even though it was video nasties everyone was complaining about 20 years ago...)
</rant>
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They mention mature games, but I think as gamers, we should all be grateful there are not an abundance of games with mature themes. Most games can be fun without having to focus on putting the most blood/nudity/swearing into the game. The moment we have a segmented market for pure adult games I think we will see much worse games. But that might just be my inner cynic talking.
Meet new people, and kill them.
Stop bitching when better graphics come out. Yes, gameplay makes the game - but good graphics can enable new gameplay and at the same time improve immersion. Even if someone produces a content-devoid shiny-graphics game to show off their new engine (Doom 3 anyone?), having a better engine is still a good thing and there's nothing stopping someone making a good game with it (Quake 4 anyone?).
In short: stop bitching. Vote with your wallet, and realize that game companies that don't want to develop their own engines will also vote with theirs.
It's not exactly rocket surgery.
Spend more time developing depth of gameplay and backstory, universe/world development and so on.
I think we're at a point where we don't need to be pushing every last little bit of power out of our CPUs and graphics cards, and can lessen the pressure on that a bit while devoting some more resources towards games that are more immersive, interesting, and most importantly, fun!
Honestly, the graphics in games today are pretty damn amazing. I know people have been saying this regularly over the past many years, but we all know that games are getting amazingly realistic, to the point where people can easily mistake game screenshots for actual photographs of scenery.
The areas where games are NOT so impressive are primarily in the areas that require a lot more than just throwing $$$ into a bigger team of programmers - storyline, artificial intelligence, creativity not limited by conservativism (or the whole "Lowest common denominator" issue), and fresh ideas.
Unfortunately it's easier said than done, and when all the smaller more creative companies are being bought up immediately by larger companies like Take Two, EA and so on, unique talented individuals are made to work on games devised for the purpose of sheer profit, rather working towards the goal of some creative producer who could very well change the industry with his/her ideas.
It's amazing how often this myth is repeated. There is no such thing as a tradeoff between graphics and gameplay. They are two different things, written by two different groups of people, and the group of gameplay programmers is typically much larger than graphics programmers. If a game has good graphics and terrible gameplay, it's because of the attention to detail of the people who made it.
I think it's the other way around. It's mainly children who buy games for their "mature themes." A survey I recently read on Kotaku.com seems to come to the same conclusion: Children prefer the "mature" consoles.
Survey: Children Prefer PS3 Most, Wii Least
This fits my personal experience. Adults never have an issue playing games like Super Monkey Ball, while kids complain that it's too childish. I think it's quite simple: Kids want to be like adults and thus prefer "adult" games, while adults already are adults and can stop pretending and start playing what they actually like.
In other words, Mario Kart is more mature than Doom. It's the Xbox that has childish games, not the Wii.