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A Look At How Far PC Gaming Has Come
Bit-tech is running a feature examining the progress PC games have made over the past couple decades. The article highlights aspects of modern games we often take for granted or nitpick, and compares them to earlier games in which such features were implemented poorly or not at all. Quoting:
"Doom's legacy is still being felt today in fact and it's a fair bet that you can take any shooter off a shelf, from America’s Army to Zeno Clash, examine it, and list a dozen things that those games owe to Doom. Things like the wobble of the guns and the on-screen feedback that tells you which direction you are being shot from — these were things that id Software invented. On the other hand, from a story perspective, Doom was absolutely rubbish. You start in a room, no idea what’s going on and you are surrounded by demons. You have to read the manual and supporting media to get a grip on it all — something modern games would get heavily slated for doing. Yet the idea that plot was optional caught on and the same flaw was replicated in other games of the era, such as Quake and (to a lesser extent) Duke Nukem 3D. There were years and years where the lessons of early story-driven games were forgotten and all anyone really cared about was having as many sprites or polygons as possible."
That line is ripped from John Carpenter's They Live, and some others are taken from Sam Raimi's Evil Dead. Homage or plagiarism? You decide.
Circumcision is child abuse.
MMORPGS came from MUDS in the 1980's which came from tabletop RPG which came from Sci-Fi writers like Paul Anderson's 'psychodrama' stories from the 1950's. The idea being that grown ups act like they are something they are not and interact with each other through roleplaying. That would be an interesting article to read, not some 20 some year old who can't bother to at least Google a bit further back than his comfort zone.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
A quick google turned up this:
US PC Game Software Sales
1998 - $1.8 billion
1999 - $1.9 billion
2000 - $1.78 billion (84.9 million units)
2001 - $1.75 billion (83.6 million units)
2002 - $1.4 billion (61.5 million units)
2003 - $1.2 billion (52.8 million units)
2004 - $1.1 billion (47 million units)
2005 - $953 million (38 million units)
2006 - $970 million
I dunno. You're absolutely right, and yet... I think DOOM! was probably the first time I perceived a PC as a proper gaming machine.
I mean, Wolfenstein was impressive, and in retrospect (I didn't play it much) a great game -- but it was very much a matter of "well, we've got this PC for business apps, I can make it play this game". At that time, if you had games in mind when you bought a computer, you got an Amiga. Or a console.
Prior to DOOM!, most decent PC games were available for Amiga / Atari ST, with better sound and graphics. Wolfenstein looked like a poor Amiga game.
DOOM! though, came out just as VGA was becoming mainstream, and sound cards were becoming available and affordable. Most PCs didn't have a sound card, and you'd add one as an afterthought, often to improve your DOOM! experience. It looked *amazing* in comparison to an Amiga game, and that was a first.
OTOH the article's author should still consider the 25 years of non-PC videogaming heritage leading up to DOOM!.
OK, he lost me there. The entire idea of DOOM was that it was an incredibly technically advanced shoot-em-up. Being able to run around in the levels and shoot realistic-acting guns was great. All that you really had to know was to shoot the demons - the player has no other way to interact with the world other than shooting. Who needs a plot? That always baffled me about the old Japanese Nintendo games...they always had these incredibly convoluted unncessary plots that I read the first few lines of and then forgot it and went on to saving the kingdom or whatever. And I was a manual-reading completist.
When, exactly, did computer game snobs decide it was cool to call DOOM 'rubbish'? What happened to computer game snobs being polygon and FPS guys? What makes this guy look down his nose at something that he doesn't understand and apparently has no desire to understand?
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
It's an old but true quote that story in video games is like story in pornography. It's expected to be there, but really only the flimsiest pretense of setting is necessary. Many early video games got on quite well with a handful of paragraphs in the manual.
I can recall playing Sonic 3 in 1994 and thinking it had a great "story" for a platformer, as in addition to the manual paragraphs, it used in game "cut scenes" to advance what shred of a plot there was. Interestingly, the game told its micro-tale without using a single word of text. The on-screen actions and emotions of the characters were like those from a silent film, without the captions.
Nevertheless, I did and still do consider the "story" in that game to be more than sufficient and moreover very suited to the type of game it was. I imagine it's similar for other games like Doom.
The watershed for storytelling in video games was probably Metal Gear Solid in 1998. After Hideo Kojima blew everyone away with his storytelling, developers started offering ever more elaborate and "cinematic" storylines in their games which ate up ever larger portions of the budget. The trouble came from two important flaws
1) Hideo Kojima never made a "cinematic" game. The resulting end product of MGS was a very different form of entertainment from a film. People focused too much on the cutscenes,(which were still quite different from raw film) and missed out on the wider package offered. It became usual to see ever more pompous and over produced cut scenes strapped on to games that never lived up to the "epic" tone set in them.
2) Most directors are not Hideo Kojima. This was probably the more pertinent point. Developers wanted to make epic (action)storylines in the mould of Metal Gear Solid, but simply lacked the writing ability to pull it off. Even Kojima himself managed to foul this up in MGS2. The end result is a pretentious and overbearing plot that gets in the way of the game and severely reduces enjoyment and playability.
I think a good example the benefits and pitfalls of story in games is given by the juxtaposition between Gears of War 1 and 2 on the Xbox. The first game has a minimalist story. Characters are barely introduced and have almost no development, detail on the setting is shamelessly scant, and where the plot is not entirely one dimensional, it contains gaping holes. Yet it works in the context of the game that Gears of War is, and I would argue works very well.
Gear of War 2 by contrast, suffers from an overblown and overproduced story that makes a mockery of the proceedings. Attempts to develop characters are almost comically absurd, the setting is wildly different tending towards the spectacular, the plot is incohesive and convoluted throughout and leaves loose ends everywhere. The end result, while eye candy laden, detracts significantly from the game. People just wanted to play as Marcus Fenix and shoot aliens; instead they ended up unsatisfied and confused. The developers desire to create an "epic" story instead created an epic farce. Smaller was definitely better in this case.
Obviously, the same rule does not hold across all video games. RPGs require a significant story. But even here, overproduction and poor writing can create an epic farce that taints the whole game. The prime example is Final Fantasy VIII; Your characters are all teenagers attending assassins' high school, and you fight the sorceress who was actually your matron in the orphanage where you grew up, who was actually being controlled by another sorceress, so she could rescue another sorceress and cause "time compression", and when that failed you simply allow the second sorceress to take over a party member who happened to be yet another sorceress so that they could go back in time to allow the third sorceress to cau
May the Maths Be with you!
Agreed, that's why when Half Life came it was so nice. Story in the game flow. I still remember the first time I loaded it up and didn't touch anything when the cable car was running through mesa, and knocked the mouse by accident, wow I started already?
I'm sure you've seen it; even played it, but perhaps not enough attention has been given to it yet:
http://www.springrts.com/
The guys started out with the Total Annihilation game, built an open-source implementation of the engine so you could play it with the original game-packs, and then went on to 'generalize' the engine somewhat so that you can create other 'games' for it.
In one word: AWESOME. All that was good with TA (gameplay) and all that is good with modern graphics (3D, shaders, realistic water, nice explosions, deformable terrain.. etc).
Check it out, if you havent yet.
(ofcourse there's linux binaries)
Indeed, I feel old. But wait - actually on the first page, he goes all the way back to Wolfenstein!
I also love this ill-defined statement that he starts the
The father of modern gaming is, I hope we can all agree, Doom.
So like, any game before Doom is too old to be "modern", but any game after Doom isn't the "father", as it didn't come "first" (it's an "Apple first" - first, except for all the ones before it).
I presume he means the first FPS, though he's still wrong (e.g., Wolfenstein).
One could just as easily declare Quake to be the father of modern gaming. Or I don't know - Civilization or Alien Breed 3D.
He goes onto say:
It took us from the age when games were monochrome, squinty affairs played by people with milkbottles for spectacles, to a time when it was actually cool to spend ages hooking up a modem connection between two PCs
Complete nonsense! Why does someone who obviously has no idea of the history of computer games (as if he was in his mid-20s, as you say) get to be a tech writer? By the early 1980s, games were leaving the monochrome era.
I don't know about that. Sure Doom was nice, but it was the original Quake that had everybody I know crowded around a monitor going "oooh!". From the awesome graphics, to the soundtrack by NiN, to the fricking huge levels with lots of secrets to find, Quake was the one that had all my friends rushing out to buy PCs and Voodoo cards.
So while Doom got many folks to try a PC for the first time, in fact I got my first Intel PC from a guy who had last year's top o' the line P-100MHz and gave it to me for the $150 he owed me because it would only run Doom "stock" and gave him an excuse to get a tricked out gamer rig, It was Quake that had folks running out and shelling out what was serious money at the time for gaming PCs. Hell I would say that Quake and the Voodoo is what created the whole idea of gaming PCs, as a stock business rig just wouldn't give you the "oooh!" factor in that game.
And look at how far we progressed thanks to everyone wanting the "oooh!" factor. In a five year period I went from that P-100 to a P233Mhz, a PII-400MHz, a P3-650Mhz, a P3-733Mhz, to a P3-1100Mhz which I still keep around as a Nettop. Lets be honest-Windows and the office apps of the day certainly didn't use anywhere near that much juice, and even today that 1100Mhz with Win2K and MS Office 2K makes a good little Net appliance, but of course if you want to game it just don't cut it, hence the dual core AMD with 8Gb of RAM and another 1Gb on the GPU I have for gaming. And that can all be traced back to Quake, which even today is still damned fun to break out. While Doom may have implanted the idea of 3D gaming in the heads of the masses, I would argue that Quake drove that idea home with all the power of a nailgun and made it a "must have" for the masses.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
41 and started on a VIC-20 myself. Remember when Shatner had his TJ Hooker hair and was touting how the VIC was "more than just games"? While I admit I though the original Doom looked nice, it was Quake where I went "There is NO WAY that is running in somebody's house. That is like....some sort of super arcade machine!". And of course then came one kick ass after another, but I'll never forget everyone dropping their jaws over the original Unreal. That opening screen with the 3D pass over the castle...wow. We just sat there letting that thing run for a good 5 minutes just watching it.
Of course to show my age the first game in the arcade that really made my jaw drop was when I went to see Return of the Jedi in theaters and there was the original wire frame Star Wars machine, complete with Obi Wan telling you to use the force. I thought back then that we would NEVER get anything that good in our homes, and sure enough it was over a decade before we saw that kind of 3D in the comfort of our living rooms, and that was thanks to Quake making 3D accelerators mandatory. Like I said, any halfway decent office machine could play Doom, but to get the "ooh" factor in Quake you HAD TO get a 3D gaming card, and thus an industry was born.
Remember how quickly after Quake that reviews were talking about how a game ONLY had software acceleration, with the reviewers looking down their nose at anything that didn't hit the GPU? To me that is what changed it from something you could do on an office box during lunch break to something that had to have decent gaming hardware to run. And of course by making 3D acceleration affordable to the masses we now have some truly insane hardware for cheap. I remember when a hardware DVD decoder would seriously hurt your pocketbook, and now 3D surround sound, hardware video acceleration of multiple formats, hell we just take these things for granted now. My first game of Doom was played on an office machine from Compaq, but my first Quake? I had a Voodoo and a Soundblaster stuffed in there and the machine Oc'ed just so I could squeeze out every FPS while still getting the "ooh".
To me that was really the turning point, and really caused gaming to explode and become its own industry, when you couldn't just throw the game onto an office machine and expect it to run decently.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
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