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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?
Man, I really hope they call it that.
It's a short article, but here are the 9 things for those of you who don't want to RTFA:
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.
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".
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.
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