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Bungie Vs. Miyamoto - Fight!
Last week Gamehead's Geoff Keighley interviewed Shigeru Miyamoto, and the well-known designer tossed off a mildly controversial comment. Keighley asked him if he felt as though he was losing touch with the American audience as a result of the popularity of games like Halo. GameDaily reports on Miyamoto's response: "I could make Halo. It's not that I couldn't design that game. It's just that I choose not to. One thing about my game design is that I never try to look for what people want and then try to make that game design. I always try to create new experiences that are fun to play." Bungie took exception to that, and Frank Connor retorted in his interview with Joystiq: "Yeah, well. I just want to go on the record and say that Bungie is hard at work on a side-scrolling platform game featuring some plumbers -- I'm not going to say what their ethnicity is, it's none of anyone's business -- but we took that as a gauntlet, a sort of glove slap, and we're going to respond in 2D scrolling style. That's all I'm saying." We discussed that article, along with several other pieces of Halo 3 coverage, this past Saturday.
All the game companies are good at certain things, it's just that the markets are reflective of what each company is basing their priorities on.
Microsoft was intialy trying to make the X-Box into a platform to try to force the convergence of console and PC gaming. Later when it became clear that they were really on to something with X-Box Live, they switched tactics and focused on providing top shelf online content (although the latest half hearted attempt to bring Live to Vista bodes poorly for Microsofts learning abilities).
Sony on the other hand has always been focused primarily on graphics performance. Yes they had some good games, but nothing ever revolutionary, but pretty and often fun. The primary hallmark of the Playstation platform is a shotgun approach to game development. They make as many games as they can, throw them out there and see what sticks. This approach can lead to some very good games, but also leads to some very very bad games. The primary failing of Sony is in not providing any new innovation in the latest generation of consoles. The Playstation 3 was positioned to be a multimedia convergence device, but so far the market for said devices has proved to be rather poor, and what little there is is primarily dominated by inexpensive PCs. The good news for Sony is that historically the Playstation consoles really only hit their stride after a year or two on the market, so it has the potential to outperform the competition in terms of raw power. There is also some rumbling of Sony taking online content more seriously, although whether or not they can provide a credible challenge to Live remains to be seen.
The last player on the market, and the most relevant to this article is Nintendo. Nintendo realized a long time ago that fun games, and innovative systems will out sell fancy graphics. A clear cut example of this is the origional Gameboy versus the graphically superior Gamegear. The Gamegear had a color screen and more processing power, but was more expensive, slightly bulkier, and was much more demanding on power (which resulted in it eating batteries left and right, I should know, I had one). Nintendo has always been middle of the road in terms of graphics and processing power, but what has set them aside has traditionally been their willingness to try new and innovative controls and games. Sometimes this has hurt them, and they have made more than a few products that failed spectactularly (Virtualboy anyone?), but on the other hand they have released a number of products that show some genuine innovation. I think the relative failure of the Gamecube served as a wakeup call to Nintendo, they realized that they weren't able to compete on graphics and if they were going to survive they needed to embrace the creative aspects of their game and console design more fully (prior to the DS and Wii most Nintendo products were less daring in departure from the norm of console gaming). It will be interesting to see if Nintendo can pull off the online portion of the gaming puzzle (which will be critical for all three consoles) sufficiently to keep Wii ahead of X-Box 360 and Playstation 3, of if they will fumble it and have to settle for second place.
Curiosity was framed, Ignorance killed the cat.
I never said all, I said most. I think it's more than reasonable to say that most people who love Halo have had limited or no experience playing FPS games previous to playing Halo. Of course there are exceptions, but they are in a severe minority. It's pretty obvious from talking to people who like Halo that their love of the game almost without exception increases with their ignorance of the genre. I believe an objective study would back this up and I'm prepared to undertake it if someone wants to fund the project.
It's also a possibility that they just have no experience playing FPS on a PC, where basically all good FPS games are released. Either way, it's a lack of perspective on the history of the genre that allows them to make the ridiculous claim that Halo is good, let alone great or groundbreaking or any of the other absurdities they use.
This phenomenon is almost identical to that surrounding the FF7 fanaticism. At least in the US, and probably Europe as well. I'm not sure what can account for the Japanese obsession with it, since they clearly should know better (and do given their preference for Dragon Quest), but I'm not sure anyone is really supposed to understand Japanese tastes even some of the time, to say nothing of all the time.
The Farewell Tour II
Well, of course Miyamoto could make Halo. It's an FPS. Follow them back to History. getMisterIKnowMoreOldGamesThanYou(). getOldestFPSInMemory() and trace them forward through Wolfenstein, Doom, Quake, Unreal, and Halo, and you can pick out a fairly predictable evolutionary pattern. More graphics, "cooler" weapons, advance the engine a bit, make it more badass, good, print it, you've got a new FPS. That's not how Miyamoto does things.
Of course, if he were to make an FPS, it'd probably wind up with an engine that supported jumping puzzles in a non-intrusive way (somehow he would; I'm not the design god here). And have a quirky sense of design, not the normal "I R SPACE MERC I KILL U" layout. And the weapons would be strange and unconventional, requiring more strategy than "get the biggest gun and kill things fasterer". And...
Hang on a sec. That might rock. Miyamoto, please do design an FPS! That might be interesting!
Demanding constant attention will only lead to attention.
I love how the whole context of the comment has been lost. This chain of comments gives the perfect example.
First off, it's cute, using the statistics only for America. How about we re-run those numbers on a global market? Custom-designing your game to appeal much more to a narrower demographic is always going to give you more spectacular results. Try this one instead*:
http://vgchartz.com/worldtotals.php
Note how the Halos now have their asses kicked. Sure, they're still big sellers... but note how *most* of the games coming before Halo 2 are Miyamoto games. (this is where I'm getting back to the point)
What Miyamoto's saying is that by concentrating on making really awesome, original games he keeps pumping out great games. Sure, he has the skill to make Yet Another Game, but so does every other game developer out there with two and a half brain cells to rub together. The top of the line pop studios (id, Bungie, etc.) do have better success rates, but they still have to compete with other plain-jane studios. He's saying that he's not aiming for the cheeseburger market. Sure, it provides a big hit or two... but note how most of the big hits are those revolutionary games. Even on a strictly numerical game, he's winning hands-down. Why don't more studios do that? They can't or they won't. He never actually insulted Halo-- only that Bungie was pursuing a saturated market.
(*Also, how did Metroid Prime only ship 120K units in Japan? That doesn't seem to make a lot of sense. How accurate are these numbers?)