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Games Industry Things We Should Leave Behind in '07
MTV's Multiplayer blog has a list of nine videogame concepts we should be 'leaving behind', left to rot in the now-passed year of 2007. From the countdown clocks to Halo 3, their snarky list leaves no stone unturned: "The Phrase 'Next-Gen' - Ladies and gentlemen, 'next-gen' is now. Everyone from PR firms to development studios are still using this phrase. Please, I beg of you, stop using "next-gen" until the PS4, Xbox 4000, and the Nintendo Super Wii are slated for release. Those consoles will officially be 'next-gen.' The PS3, Wii, and 360 are the current generation of games. Now is the time to accept it."
Please?
Nintendo couldn't keep up with demand for the Wii... and it was like that for more than 9 months! Take a look at this article from Wired, but still there are few answers as to why it was so bad for so long. I'd like to vote for better supply chain management in 2008.
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Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation.
Man, I really hope they call it that.
I don't like people saying that people shouldn't get deep into the game as a hardcore player. I like the philosophy on board games: Minutes to learn, a lifetime to master.
God spoke to me.
Top two on my list: MTV (and SpikeTV, and VH1, and every other "entertainment only" network), and the idea that they have intelligible to say about the gaming industry.
It's a short article, but here are the 9 things for those of you who don't want to RTFA:
Really, I was shocked that the Xbox needed a cable running to my living room for net access. Climbing around by attic running 50ft of network cable is not my idea of a "next gen" experience. I realize that you can buy all sorts of things to overcome this, but please can we put a $5 wifi chip into so called "next gen" consoles from now on?
If you'd take your fanboy goggles off for even a minute you'd see that all 3 consoles bring something new to the table. Massive disc storage, downloadable games / content, note-perfect online capabilities, achievements, motion sensing controls, wireless everything, user chosen music, and hardware so advanced that it enables gameplay in ways that were previously limited by technology (i.e. massive streaming worlds, online coop throughout the entire game, complex physics).
Being pedantic about next-gen versus current-gen is indeed ridiculous. Assigning the title arbitrarily is even worse.
But if we stop using Next-Gen now, we won't have the opportunity to call things Post-Next-Gen in a few years :-(
"Software is like sex; it's better when it's free." -Linus Torvalds
I think one of the major barriers to the video-game industries quest for mass media acceptance is the stuck-in-the-1980s tendency to portray women as sexual objects with boys-club-only lack of shame.
Please stop putting cheap ass wifi chips (which only support WEP) in consumer electronics. I really shouldn't have to leave my network open to all comers to use your shit.
I don't see what's wrong with buying video games at 7-11. It's just a vendor providing merchandise in a new context.
Seek and ye shall find.
PS3 and XBox 360 do "add something new to the board." They add some really spectacular graphics for one thing. Now don't get me wrong. I'm not saying better graphics is revolutionary or ground breaking but it does add something do the previous generation of consoles. The increased processing power also adds the ability to create larger worlds, more interesting AI, and more accurate physics. I can't speak for PS3's online capabilities, but the way XBox live is integrated with the 360 is actually pretty damn cool and definately has a "next-gen" feeling to it. Example: I can be playing Eternal Sonata (single player) on my 360 and I can see if my friend from Houston starts playing Halo3 with my other friend in NY. I didn't have to do anything besides signing in to my xbl account. Being able to download High-Def TV shows and movies to watch on the XBox 360 is a new and sweet thing too. I don't recall having these capabilities with any previous-gen systems.
While I think the Wii is probably great fun for everyone, what has it added that the PS3, 360 haven't? A new controller scheme (that's not actually that new)?
Don't be an ass. All the new consoles add something new to the table that previous iterations didn't. If you one like one console over the other, good for you, that doesn't mean that the others "don't add anything to the table."
Abaddon: An Xbox 360 Indie game
Game Delays are some times better then pushed out carp that is not ready and feels like it is still in Beta.
If it means pushing people to work 80+ hours a week that just leads to buggy code then delay it so the game works and let QA / beta have time and alot of differnt systems to test on.
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
Honestly I'm hoping for simply "Wii HD". A fully backwords compatible Wii that will display in 720p as a minimum. There would be other enhancements of course, but I think since Nintendo went "Revolutionary" with both their handheld and console I think the next generation will be "Evolutionary".
While it may not be great, WEP is a far cry from nothing. A WEP key is the difference between random neighbor going "oh, I don't have to pay for internet!" or not. 99% of the population doesn't even know that "WEP" is a kind of encryption, let alone that it's breakable.
Games get delayed for lots of reasons. Setting aside notoriously pathological cases like DNF, games get delayed often because the development needs more time. I for one would much rather wait, and get a better game in the end, than put up with shovelware.
... so they cut two dungeons that weren't going to be finished in time. Everyone involved now admits that was a big mistake, which led to Twilight Princess' very long incubation period. Just look at the results -- Twilight Princess knocks the socks off of Wind Waker, and many people feel it took the Zelda 64 formula and perfected it.
Take Zelda. The developers learned the hard way that hitting the release date was less important than finishing the game. The Wind Waker was in danger of missing its street date
Interesting tidbit: after Wind Waker turned out the way it did, the director of the game wanted to let the series end there. This is the guy Miyamoto handed the series off to after he didn't want to be forever tied to it anymore, and he wanted to throw in the towel! (I'd pull out a cite, but I gotta run.)
Yeah. Delays suck. And when it's for a reason other than 'the game needs more time', they REALLY suck. But to just say 'there should never be a delay!' is to ignore the deeper reasons why delays happen, and that would be catastrophic.
Save points.
This absolutely retarded convention should have disappeared with the Genesis and SNES. Why is it, when I was playing Doom on my 486 back in 1994 and could save (and QUIT...you know... STOP PLAYING ) whenever I wanted, that I have to wait 20 minutes until I get to a magical spot blessed by the video game pope before I can save my game and turn off my Playstation 2 , a system that is orders of magnitude more powerful than the save-on-the-fly-capable PC on which I was fragging zombies?
Attention developers:
And sometimes I want or need to stop playing on a moment's notice. I don't really want to leave the console on eating up power and running up my electric bill, and I also don't want to lose hours of gameplay (some JRPG dungeons do last that long) because you assholes thought it would be cute to not let me save my game and do something else. Your game is not the only thing in the world I want to do for fun, and moods can change, especially after long sessions. Furthermore, I know you can do save-anywhere because SaGa Frontier, LUNAR, and Persona 2 all did it on the PS1.
Death to save points in 2008. Long live save-on-the-fly.
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Thank you, I have written about this several times. The video game industry is even worse than the film industry when it comes to trivializing and objectifying women. At least in film, women with "undesirable" figures can land parts and be leads in motion pictures... in the gaming industry, modelers and board executives create their sexual fantasies and incorporate them into the game. Damn near every female game character is some archetypal short, buxom, hyper-sexualized character to fulfill the designer, artist and players sexual fantasies. Why isn't Alyx Vance a little husky? Why is Lara Croft a sex bomb with huge breasts when her figures and career tells me should would probably be closer to flat chested and sinewy.
The video game industry is stuck being the fantasy playground of horny young males... and I don't see this terrible trend changing any time soon. Why make a realistic character when you can just model the girl of your dreams... and on the flip side, what horny male teen wants to play a game with a lead character that looks like Kathy Bates?
This is the only one which actually has a point, so I thought I'd give it a nod before moving on to the real offenders. Though even here, good luck getting marketers to quit using meaningless buzzwords.
Actually, IMHO your summary here is slightly inexact. What he demands is that they stop hyping and advertising Halo 3, and start hyping again when they release Halo 4. He has nothing against the version number, and his expecting a Halo 4 kinda doesn't imply that he sees the fight as finished. He's just tired of hearing about Halo 3.
Well, sadly
A) that's just capitalism in action. If MS thinks they can still sell Halo 3, how's that different from still advertising last year's model of car, or last year's CD of some band?
B) that advertising pays for some other things he's getting cheaper or for free. E.g., since the site name seems to imply having something to do with MTV, I'd like to see how MTV would survive without massive advertising. All those music videos are, effectively, advertising for whichever band the recording companies manufactured this year.
WTF? It's not like it even costs much to release a ROM for an emulator. But more importantly, what's _his_ problem there? It's not like anyone forces him to play or buy those anyway. Plus, being that they're ancient games, he should be able to find tons of reviews and whatnot.
Plus, here's the fun part: not everyone has the same tastes. What's crap for him and he doesn't want re-released, could be someone else's nostalgia moment. Even something like "Donkey Kong Jr. Math," well, why not? Some mom or dad might think that that's useful for their 6 year old.
Now this is truly brain dead. Those delays don't happen as some premeditated marketing ploy, they happen because people are bad at guessing the future. The fact is, even if you could know exactly how much code you'll need to write (you don't), and exactly how long it would take to _write_ it, you can't guess what bugs you'll have to fix. Therefore, nor how much time you'll spend fixing those.
Then there are the inevitable design changes. Some things it's easier to just see how it looks in the game, before you decide how you'll do it. Some things sound good in theory, but you'll find out that they suck when you sic the playtesters on it. Etc.
Sure, there are ways to make things more maintainable and reduce the surprises, but even that isn't 100% bullet proof. And good luck with getting the game industry to follow best practices anyway. Especially when:
A) you have the publisher telling you that it _has_ to be ready within X months and Y dollars, you just don't have the time or budget for UML diagrams and funky frameworks, and
B) you have to push the edge in terms of graphics and whatnot (because screenshots sell), but still have a finite budget of CPU cycles and GPU gigatexels/second, and you know everyone will moan if the frame rate is even 1 less FPS than in another similar game. So, you know, you end up doing evil hacks just to meet those constraints.
Seriously, short of hideously overestimating (which the publisher will reject from the start) or being able to see in the future, it just won't happen.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Some of the latest stuff for PS2 is quite impressive--not because of of the raw power of the system, but because developers got so good at wringing every last bit of performance out of the platform. Okami as we know it would have never been written for PS3, but the limitations of the PS2 hardware forced Capcom/Clover to do something different, and I, for one, am glad they chose to be different. A PS3-centric version probably wouldn't have been nearly as distinctive.
Horsepower leads to laziness, not just with games, but with software in general. Any time that industry experts proclaim that "it is time to move on" like the author of this article suggests, I get a bit queasy. A jump in raw computing ability though it may be, it's also usually a setback in game playability and quality. "It's time to move on" to me says "It's too hard to work within these old constraints."
"osake no hou ga, biiru yori ii" to omotteiru.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Vermifax
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Back in the day, you didn't feel too stupid saying "Super Nintendo" or "Super NES" or "ess-ness" because, well, you were probably about 10 and everyone else (all the kids) had to say it in some silly-sounding way, too. You'd have the occasional eye-rolling when someone said their shibboleth differently (for instance, I grew up around Super NES kids, and the ess-ness and--god forbid!--ess-en-ee-ess kids were laughed at), but that was how things went. "Super Nintendo" was long and dorky-sounding, and so were most of the alternatives, but I'll be damned if people didn't stick by THIER saying as the coolest of them all.
The Wii, though, can't really be abbreviated. There's little ambiguity about it being just "Wii", so everyone who wants to go buy one will probably be calling it the "Super Wii" no matter how silly they think it sounds. There's probably something to be said about the unambiguous, unifying name of the Wii standing in stark contrast to the pride-wars waged over the Super NES, and about how it reflects the gregarious character of the console.
Ah, of course, there's always the age-old "mom exception": people out of the loop did and probably will forever call the newest Nintendo console "that new Nintendo."
Hmm...
- Poor AI Coding -
Considering this generation is supposed to be the one that renders further graphical improvements irrelevent, we should be seeing more attention paid toward improving core gaming elements, such as better NPC AIs. Even if you have to sacrifice some visual quality to do it, making a fun game should outweigh making a pretty game.
- Locked, On-Disc Game Content -
The whole idea of calling content that's been on the game disc since day one "downloadable" is extremely underhanded and motivated entirely by greed alone. I agreed to pay the additional $10 per game for the next gen experience you promised me. Don't turn around and ask me for more money to access the content I already own.
- Proprietary Game Development -
We're now in an age where many gamers are just as competent about the mechanics of a game as the game designers themselves. Instead of locking us out, let us in to create and distribute our own custom content to other users. The end user could well become the best source of innovation in an industry notorious for becoming too complacent with formulas that work, rather than experimenting with untested concepts.
- Games Based On Past Wars -
While we've seen some gems such as the Call of Duty series, the games themselves are becoming a blur with one another simply because the protagonist and antagonists are always the same, just with slightly different controls. Instead, why not create ficticious battles or introduce antichronistic advantages/disadvantages to each side. (For example, a small WWII axis forces army with late 20th/early 21st century weaponry vs the allied forces armed only with time correct weaponry and shear numbers.)
- Tedious Game Clichés -
Perhaps it's time we consider putting some game play styles to rest, such as party-themed mini-games (especially on the Wii) and the ever dreaded escort mission. Why should the user have to pay for lazy game development by enduring crap that only serves fill in the total game play hour odometer.
- Franchise sharing -
Ok, the whole Mario vs Sonic argument died the day Sega killed off the Dreamcast. After we get our fill of Super Smash Brothers Brawl, I do not want to hear any more on the subject... period.
- Console Exclusivity -
Mostly referring to 3rd party titles favoring one console over the others. Instead, stop asking us to choose and just make the game for the system I do own. The PS3 owners aren't going to rush out and buy a 360 over one game, and 360 owners aren't about to do the same for the PS3. If they don't already own one, they probably never will.
- HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray -
Given that the loss of Blu-Ray in the format wars would crush Sony under the PS3's weight, this battle is unlikely to die anytime soon. One side eventually needs to conceed or else both will lose out to a 3rd choice that is more easily adopted by the traditional DVD users out there. At the moment, HD-DVD edges out Blu-Ray in this respect due to the ease of creating hybrid DVD/HD-DVD discs for distribution in one box.
8==8 Bones 8==8
Save me!
Caution though. Your question will seem more and more silly as you read on.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Then you ought to try out some other Wii games.
:)
You're correct in saying that motion controls and the IR pointing ability aren't good for all games. So it's a good job some of the saner developers realise this
Think of the IR thing as a mouse, it's really cool for FPS stuff (it's the only console I've played an FPS on that hasn't felt completely clumsy, but maybe that's my shoddy coordination when using analogue sticks), and it's really great for games where you need to point at things (like buttons).
The motion stuff is abused by most games, but it's a really neat fit in some places. It's just taking a while for some of the studios to figure out how to work with the hardware the Wii has to offer.
Example of games that I think got the control scheme right:
- Metroid Prime 3 (FPS): IR & Motion
- Super Paper Mario (Adventure/Platformer): D-PAD and buttons only
- Excite Truck (Racing): Motion only
- Brain Academy ('Casual'): IR only
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