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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"
Um. The Wii controller is really a leap forward. Even with inferior graphics it is still a huge step up! Pretend you have a choice between a 5 ghz machine without the ability to have a mouse and a 3 ghz machine with a mouse. It really is apples and oranges. Sure, I would love to see more realistic gameplay (easier deaths) and more novelty. But, to say that consoles don't matter, isn't exactly true right now.
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
I watched someone play one of the next-gen football (US) games at Fry's, and I was horrified when they scored a point and for a full-on 5 seconds or so a Toyota ad was covering the entire TV screen. Personally that worries me more then anything, because I play video games to get away from advertising-soaked broadcast TV.
Meet new people, and kill them.
It's not a myth. There are very few designers in this world who can crank out a fun, deep and somewhat novel gameplay design almost every single time. There are, comparatively, thousands of programmers who can make something look nice with the right middleware and thousands of artists who can model nice 3D stuff. I hear you can get trained at tech schools for either these days. There aren't a whole lot of really really good AI guys(basically next to none) or multithreaded DSP guys, but there don't have to be, just enough for the middleware.
Those designers are worth a LOT, and you can probably name them by name, not by company. EA has one, Nintendo has one, etc. They're all proven guys too, so they actually have clout in their respective organizations. They're roped into franchises in at least an advisory capacity, sure, but all of those are pretty golden.
So, most of the industry rips off it's predecessors for the gameplay, maybe adds a very slight twist or two in a "wouldn't it be cool if" brainstorming session and passes it off to the grunts. You have to have *something* to differentiate your game, so you pump everything into graphics and if we're lucky style. The cost of doing this is so high that you can't take many if any risks on or with unproven designers, so they never get to prove themselves. In return, while your gameplay may very well be solid, it's either something a competitor did, or something that's straight lifted from the pre-2000.
Insomniac made a name for themselves continiously tweaking Mario 64 with guns, and now combining two FPS cliches into one. Blizzard gets by by being high polish. Jaffe's a goto guy for genre kings. None of this is bad, but it's not what I consider excellent gameplay any more so than I consider a typical summer blockbuster excellent film. Or rather, it's not new gameplay, it's good gameplay I've played before with a new coat of paint. The differentation is the graphics, level design, and presentation.
You also have the fact that if the gameplay is golden, you don't need the graphics. Just enough to represent what you need to represent and whatever else you want to pump into it. It only matters for the first 15 minutes anyway.
The key to the enjoyment of pop music is to replace any instance of "love" with "C.H.U.D."