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Are Games Worth Complaining About?
A few days ago, the Opposable Thumbs blog ran a piece titled, "In gaming, everything is amazing, but no one is happy." The thrust of the article is that discussion about modern games focuses almost entirely on flaws, which are often blown out of proportion. "Every game is too short, although we never finish the games we play. Every game is too expensive, although we demand ever-increasing levels of interaction, graphical fidelity, and length. The same people who claim every game was 80 hours and a masterpiece 10 years ago are 10 years away from saying that today was the golden time, once they have the distance needed to scrub the bad games from memory." Today, gaming site Rock, Paper, Shotgun offers counterpoint, saying that video games need active criticism for the industry to improve. "Everything is amazing, and sometimes people are happy. That’s how it will always be. And we should probably make the most of it, and then strive to make it better."
And my life will be complete. Why is this on slashdot?
God spoke to me
Are Games Worth Complaining About?
Billions of sports fans can't be wrong.
Everyone expects everyone to be better than it is. "If only..." has become the starting phrase for many a musing on games, programs, books, movies, cars, girlfriends, boyfriends, wives, husbands, houses, pets, plastic models, ad infinitum. If people would just realize that what you have right now is the best that it can be in this moment, then we would have a better world. In actuality, Satisfaction == Reality / Expectation. Expect less and your satisfaction will be higher.
Successfully condensing fact from the vapor of nuance since 1998.
Are politics worth complaining about? Is THE WEATHER worth complaining about? Is complaining worthwhile? No. It isn't. But move past that. People will complain. People LOOOOOOOVE to complain. Why should games be any different than anything else. People derive enjoyment from them, so let them have their say. Opinions are like assholes. Everyone has one, and believes that everyone else's stinks.
Where does the signature go?
Everything is worth complaining about on the internet. What a dumb article...
n/t
Outside of the indie developers, most game developers simply don't get what it is about games that makes them good. With the increase in graphical capability, people are making games that model the real world too closely, which then makes people complain about how the game didn't model certain parts realistically.
You don't hear people complaining about Super Mario Bros. not being realistic enough, or any of the NES games, because there is an understanding that the games aren't trying to be realistic.
Because people are constantly complaining about the realism in the current day games (either too much or not enough), though, that is constantly what the big developers tend to waste so much time on. They need to divorce themselves from realism unless their game is specifically focusing on that and get to the point of making their game unique, interesting, and (most importantly) FUN.
you haven't played EvE online, the game made for complaining
You only remember the titles from 10 years ago which where good but not the 90% of crap in the shelf. Not you look at the shelf and wonder why there is 90% crap.
Gaming is at the worst low that it's been since the console days of the mid-80s where E.T. made us lose faith in gaming forever.
Today there's too much focus on graphics and not enough focus on gameplay. Controls are glitchy, imprecise, or just downright terrible. Camera for many 3d games is just terribly bad. Too many non-interactive cutscenes, too linear gameplay, DLC pay-to-play garbage, and other atrocities that would have (and in some cases, WERE) laughed at back in the 90s (remember how we laughed at the abundance of FMV in games? How is the fact that it's now prerendered rather than live-action make any difference that we're just watching a movie rather than playing a game?).
The difference, sadly, is that today gamers have been trained to overlook bad gameplay and enjoy games for all the wrong reasons. They enjoy games because they are like movies, and they are "art", and other such nonsense. Games are *games*, not pieces of art, not movies, not anything like this. They should be played, and enjoyed, and be focused on making that game experience the best it possibly can.
What's sad is that I will have to post anonymously because I know modern gamers are going to mod this down because they think it's a troll, or wrong, or something. They can't face the truth about what gaming has become.
And no, it's not about some sort of nostalgia or anything. I was an adult in the 90s, so any "nostalgia" I would have had would be about the Atari 2600, and clearly I don't think very much of E.T. and 2600's Pac-Man, the games I should have some sort of "nostalgia" about.
So yeah, you're damn right I'm not happy, and that we should criticize modern games. The idea that modern gaming is flawed and that "no one is happy" is true because modern gaming is in a crisis. Maybe people just don't want to admit it and are hiding it behind some sort of self-delusion about modern games. All the more reason to continue to criticize, so that maybe people can finally admit it.
The RPS article is worth the read if only for the hilarious comments following the article.
[Text goes here]
If you don't like games, don't buy them. The gaming industry will definitely respond to that.
I am officially gone from
If everyone stopped complaining, nothing would ever improve. Think about it: if you're a video game exec and people just shut up and bought anything you put out, why would you bother investing in better graphics, better narrative, better design? People think it's bad enough now with CoD17 and Madden2200, but it can get much worse. Without constant complaints we would see a race to the bottom, with even more unoriginal ideas and simplistic gameplay. Dissatisfaction drives innovation and change. Companies aren't going to fix what their customers don't see as broken.
Anecdotally, when I was younger, I was never able to finish video games. Now, I finish the majority of console games that I buy within the first day or 2, with the exception of sandbox games like Red Dead Redemption and Fallout. Either the games have gotten shorter, or they've gotten easier. Either way, something's wrong
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
where everybody hates the things you like...
How many of today's games will get replayed as much as the good old games. Back in my day games were designed to be played for hours and were still enjoyable after you beat them because the levels were hard even if you knew what to do. These games today are weak and once you figure out a trick to beat the bosses or look up how to beat them they are boring and the "good" ones with online play won't be very enjoyable in 10 years when no one plays them. And one more thing get off my lawn.
Knowledge = Power
P= W/t
t=Money
Money = Work/Knowledge so the less you know the more you make
then it is worth complaining about.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
I played through every good game, some even more than once. I even play some really old games now (like Baldur's Gate) or remakes of old games (like King's Bounty). And follow FreeOrion, ScummVM and similar efforts to recreate old, but good games. The present "game industry" is not targeting me any more, so I rarely find good games nowadays, I have to resort to play the same old games.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
Seems like these arguments are based on games that are single player. The most popular games are online and interactive with other players. Sure, there are many single-player games being produced, but they don't make the recurring revenue from the consoles' online services. Why put money into a one-time transaction when you can hook players into a monthly fee?
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
This is why I don't buy new games much anymore. I stick to my DOS and Windows 9x games the most. I enjoy the lost art of having to use your brain to get through a game, not just blowing crap up ala FPS or just building a base and attacking the opposing players ala RTS. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy those types of games occasionally but the formula and rhythm to them get stale after awhile. My biggest peeve these days is the graphics quality of a game take priority over story, control or length of game.
Games are all about delving into someone else's concept of an alternate reality and controlling the parameters in said reality within the constraints set by the creator. Too many constraints and the game is too linear. Too few constraints and the game has no direction and there's essentially no point in playing. Just like life, games wouldn't be worth playing if we got exactly what we want all the time or never got what we wanted. Complaints are inevitable in a world where we live with many people whose points of view differ from our own. Complaints are inevitable within games that have to cater to many individuals with differing tastes and points of view.
This site is terrible. The user-generated content (comments) used to be worth something, but those are now complete shit as well.
Sadly true. One day soon I shall close my Slashdot tab and never open it again.
But is it worth complaining about?
For one thing, games have gotten easier because they're more expensive to produce, and therefore the developer wants the player to see all the scenarios that the publisher paid the developer to produce.
For another, seeing the credits doesn't mean you've finished the game. Case in point: one can "finish" an Animal Crossing game in a half hour a day for a couple months by just farming foreign fruit and fish, and then taking two weeks to keep the weeds at bay to get the perfect town. But 100% completion, including having caught all fish and all bugs, touched all types of furniture and clothing, maximized the appeal of one's interior design, etc., will take a lot longer.
it's just about stupid shit.
Bukowski said it. I believe it. That settles it.
Once something has been done well, the expectation becomes that all future products will continue to do it that way. Of course, in some cases what people consider the correct way of doing things might be entirely opposite of what others believe, which further fuels the fire of complaints. It's also why every MMO released in the past few years gets compared to WoW. Enough things done right and that becomes the minimum standard, and all future products are either above or below spec in areas when compared to it.
Even "Yahtzee", who is perhaps one of the most brutally honest critics I've ever listened to, takes the time to point out specifically what things a game has done right. The stupid criticisms seen of DXHR did nothing to stop my personal enjoyment (well, of course I didn't read anything about it until winning). Hell, I actually liked the black woman, I thought she added some flavor, and political correctness be damned. I'd rather see something in a game that could be somewhat offensive than have it be entirely bland and unpalatable.
Fear is the mind killer.
There's a long list of games I love and play over and over to the point of digging out emulation software or nursing along ancient hardware to play them. None of them are perfect, but they are good enough for me to love. To say that games today are amazing but no one is happy is a long stretch, IMO. Maybe I'm too distanced from mainstream gaming nowadays, but there are several games that are both modern and successful. There will always be detractors, especially when a game is widely praised. That doesn't mean "no one" is happy.
ASCII tastes bad dude.
Binary it is then.
If you are interested in something at a level above 'neat' then you will complain about its flaws, because you care about it. If you don't feel something is important enough to you to complain about, you don't care about it.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
In almost any kind of software other than games, the stock response to "If only" is "Patches are welcome." But for some reason, games as a whole tend to be more resistant to free software principles than other kinds of software. I've written a couple reasons why that might be.
What's really frustrating about this is that the author, and everyone engaged in this debate, are all missing the real point. Everything is *not* amazing - not even close, but most of the people who are complaining are complaining about the wrong things. The issue is that we have an extremely immature medium that has exploded into a cultural rock-star status way too quickly. In short, it has no idea what it is and what to do with itself. We use the term "video games" as a blanket term for simulators, toys, puzzles, interactive fiction, movies where you just have to press A every few minutes, and some actual games. The issue is that very few people in the industry, it seems, have a solid understanding of games to begin with. "Every game is too short, although we never finish the games we play." This statement is just chock-full of incorrect implications about the nature of games. Games aren't something you "finish". Games aren't linear. Games don't have a "length" in the way that's being espoused here. A game is a system of rules in which one or more agents compete by making decisions. The problem is we're building games as though they were movies, and there's a deep cultural problem behind this, which I call "game shame". Games are not considered to be on the level of other mediums, and so developers and gamers think that by emulating other mediums, games become more legitimate. We need to look at the fundamentals of what a game is. Only then will we be able to improve in a significant way. I wrote more in depth about this on this post: http://www.dinofarmgames.com/?p=219
That's why I mostly go to Ars for interesting web reading now and I come here for laughs. ;)
I think Fallout 2 was content-wise far superior to Fallout3.
I think Baldur's gate II was the most profound RPG ever.
If you don't agree and you think some games form 2010 can rival these I'm really interested in your suggestions.
I don't think games and getting worse, I just think the focus has shifted in a way I don't like. The aim is to seduce the wider audience possible, and it is very hard to accomodate this with taking risks is the design or satisfying the hardcore gamers.
In some genres it's easier to do than in others, and for instance SC2 is as good as SC. FPS probably didn't see much change either appart from greater graphics.
But for adventure/RPG the shift is massive and I find it damaging. (although this is just my opinion)
I think that a lot of the complaints mentioned in the post apply more to large commercial games than to Indie efforts. I love some of the large commercial games like Red Dead Redemption, but felt that I expected more polish out of such a major effort, while I've played some indie games that felt nearly perfect (Braid, Limbo). Perhaps the issue is that a lot of the larger commercial games are repeats of an old concept, while many of the indies feel fresh. When you've already experience a mechanic ten times over you become free to pay attention to some of the minutia.
Those who know, do not speak. Those who speak, do not know. ~Lao Tzu
My favourite all time game is commander keen, it's fun, it's awesome and it's graphics really push my Xfire 5830 setup. I never complain about games, if you buy a game then play it, beat it and be done with it.
It's possible that people overstate cases. These are *gamers* we're talking about, after all; not the most rational bunch. If you're not emotional and quick to react, you aren't a gamer and this doesn't apply to you anyway.
The answer is: Anything worth money is worth critiquing. Never forget that. If it's not worth critiquing, how could it be worth buying? Do game manufacturers really want to go there? So yes, games are worth complaining about. QED.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Back when Medal of Honor: Allied Assault came out, the world freaking changed.
Now new games have incremental improvements in look and equipment, maybe a little tweak to gameplay, but they're no longer revolutionary, and it takes revolutionary to keep the niggling from dominating the culture.
Especially when the thing you're niggling about keeps getting you pwned.
lol "in 10 years"... I can't even play online with half the games I own from less than 5 years ago. Even worse some new games come out and die withing months of release... to never be played again... ever.
I am happy to see people complaining in what can be approved in games. Complaining about trivial matters is a luxury. I personally don't play games that often. My own complaints are more related to software related matters, which are not trivial to me as software development is my main source of income.
roguelikes are currently the only games that are worth being hooked on ...
If someone wanna port a roguelike into an open source muliplayers lan or mmorpg, I will accept to make a donation and help with ideas or more if possible ...
Nothing could beat Nethack, only a better Nethack would !!!
This has to do with the attitudes of modern developers now. I was working on the guide for a particular game, and some of the team was watching me play. I ended up using a trick I'd found to skip a large portion of a level, and one of the artists asked me afterward if I was going to put it in the guide. I said of course. He then asked me if I could not, because he spent 2 weeks modeling that area, and he wanted people to see it rather than just skipping it.
Because game developers now are trying to give the player an 'experience', and because costs are so high, the idea of having content be unavailable to players, whether that be because of lack of skill, or because of alternate ways to play, is frighteneing to them, so you end up getting a first playthrough where you really do all you're supposed to do, and see most of what you're supposed to see.
The same people who claim every game was 80 hours and a masterpiece 10 years ago are 10 years away from saying that today was the golden time, once they have the distance needed to scrub the bad games from memory
Second, only delusional twits could argue that every game was a masterpiece 10 years ago. Everyone will admit that shitty games come out in every era if you remind them of some random title names from their perceived Golden Age. I think today's jaded gamer is absolutely right, however, to argue that the number of truly great games coming out has taken a massive nose dive in the last 10 years.
Between 1997 and 2001 we got Fallout, System Shock 2, Deus Ex, Baldur's Gate, Planescape: Torment, Half-Life, and countless other games I'm probably forgetting. All of them were, truly, masterpieces. And they're not just fond-memories masterpieces; you could release the same damn games today, with era-appropriate graphics, and they'd get a 9.8 out of 10 all over again.
In the last five years I can't think of any AAA title I'd call a masterpiece; I stopped within an hour of the endings of Mass Effect 2, Bulletstorm, and Crysis 2 because they just weren't compelling enough to bother with their endings (and I should have stopped about two hours before the ending of a lot of other games, particularly Human Revolution). Bioshock is probably the closest thing to a great game I can recall lately, and it's inferior in gameplay to System Shock 2 even though it's better in art direction and comparable in story.
That's the problem. Good AAA games have become slightly less common, and fantastic ones basically non-existent, despite the vast increase in the number of games published. So yes, games are worth complaining about until publishers get the ratio back up, and not just for the abstract reasons that constructive criticism is always good or whatever.
Oh, and on a second rant topic: maybe Ben Kuchera could tell developers to get some new ideas before anyone whines at us anymore about not being happy. We're tired of World War 2, we're tired of self-indulgent space opera and we're tired of cover-based action games. We're *really* tired of games that comprise more than one of those.
No, back then you had a ton of free time and were willing to sit around playing repetitive games, while these days you have other interests and priorities and so you see games as not worth the time. There are plenty of people though, who have the time right now and are playing these games over and over and over.
There is too many Game, too many Movies, too many Songs! Too much of everything, that's why we get bored very easily. I've seen and played it all at one time or another. When a new game comes out it's another remake of something else.
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
Rant Finished.
I come to /. for the discussions, not the news.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
The constructive way to "complain" about games is to refrain from buying or demand a refund. Commiserating about frustrations with games in blogs and sites like Slashdot is also technically complaining but isn't likely to be very constructive unless you can form an angry mob of gamers with pitchforks. Short of that it's the publisher who calls all the shots if you keep handing them wads of cash.
Not everyone is complaining about the good old time. Starcraft II is much better than it's predecesor, who was itself a super great rts!
yeah, slashdot links to articles on other sites and people discuss/debate them (despite not actually reading them). That is how the site has always worked, what are you complaining about?
Anyway, I read the original article on Ars a fews days back and basically decided I won't be reading anymore gaming articles on Ars anymore. The article itself was fine, but the author's reply to some of the comments really made it clear he was just trolling. In fact, this seems to be a trend at Ars (they go out of their way to post anything to do with Global Warming for example). Anyway, I appreciate Slashdot linking to the article at RPS, which I may have missed since it and it's comments are worth reading.
We should still criticize games, no matter how good they are, because pointing out problems is how things improve. Nothing is perfect, nor will it be, but we should always strive for perfection. To talk about Deus Ex, since the first article mentions it, the endings are something that need improvement. It doesn't make it a bad game, heck it doesn't even reduce it from being a great game, however it is not up to par with the rest of the game. It should be pointed out that it needs improvement.
However I will say they are right that many gamers need to shut the fuck up and stop whining. There's a difference between offering some criticism of things that could use improvement and crying about small things as though they ruin everything.
Again to use the Deus Ex example I saw a number of people online just slam it for having shitty graphics on the PC. That was odd, since supposedly they worked on making the PC version higher end, but then maybe that was all marketing. Then I get the game. No, it is just people being assholes. The game is beautiful. Not the best graphics EVAR or anything but very visually appealing, better than many games. I can't see how it would ruin the experience for anyone, at least to the point of being all pissed off about it.
What gamers need to do is offer suggestions for improvement, not cry that everything isn't perfect.
Yeah seriously...the Web 2.0 crowd of websites should be emulating Ars, not worrying about them. Journalism with copious links and un-moderated (or actively moderated) comments beats two-inch, poorly-sourced summaries, coupled with user-moderation verging on group-think, any day of the week.
I come here because it links to interesting things without being RSS and because the nesting system makes comment conversations easier to follow, not because slashdot isn't my worst source for news or because the average user here is anything but a self-righteous, techno-libertarian looney.
Yes, games were great 15 years ago. it was gameplay first, rest second. now its either overblown 3d graphics with mediocre gameplay or ... well. there is nothing else.
pump up marketing around sequel to successful game of 15 years ago every year, give extremely pumped up graphics, and sell it for $60. thats what is happening.
Read radical news here
You would obviously complain about graphics, gameplay length for big titles because they hardly take any risks. But compare that to more ballsy risky games such as lugaru, brain, amnesia, starcraft 1 or even mirrors edge (debatable for some), then you will obviously start focusing on the positives.
Debbie downer....
my site of misleading and incorrect information!
Less than five years? Try one year. I bought Left 4 Dead 2 last Christmas; that would have been barely over a single year since it's release, and it was already difficult to find a match of the map and difficulty setting you wanted. I tried to play a month ago and the user base is already basically gone.
The coming Thanksgiving week will be its second anniversary.
Anything that you care about is worth complaining about. If you something is bad and you don't complain about it, it will never improve. Games are a 10 billion dollar industry, of course they are worth complaining about. At least to the people that care about them.
I only play games I like :) /runs xbill
The more you pay for a product, the more justification you have for complaining if it doesn't meet your standards in certain ways. When the companies decided to "up the ante" as a rule, selling new PS3 game titles for a pretty standard price of $55 each, for example? They asked for harsh criticisms at every turn.
The argument that "players demand ever improving graphics quality and soundtracks, and more intricate level design" is largely bogus, IMO. Rarely do I hear people bemoaning those issues. Actually much more often, I hear the opposite sentiment; a lot of reflective commentary on the "glory days" of gaming, when a game was simply fun and addictive to play DESPITE relatively simple graphics and a basic premise.
The whole "improved graphics" thing is largely a function of basic expectations that software will make use of the currently available graphics power of the hardware of the day. A fun game is a fun game, period ... and if you're sucked into it deeply enough, you'll cease to really notice the details in the graphics anyway. (I remember, for example, comparisons being made between Bioshock in Wndows on a Direct-X 9 capable setup and a Direct-X 10 capable one. They were bragging about the better looking ripple effects in the water and so forth, but it made me realize how much of a NON-issue the whole thing was! If they hadn't captured the scenes as frozen-in-time screen shots to look at while I wasn't playing, I wouldn't have really noticed or cared about the improvements!)
Nobody really wants to spend a bunch of money on a new machine, only to discover every single piece of software they buy runs no differently than it ran on their OLD system. So in that sense, yes, expectations increase. But not because gamers specifically demand it, with a mentality that the game can't be any good otherwise. The tools being used to MAKE the games improve in power with time too, so compile times vastly decrease and animation tools increasingly simplify design of animated scenes. All of this should balance things out for developers.
I think it's also worthwhile to step back and ask oneself what TYPE of game we're dealing with. If you're talking about a SIMULATION? By nature, that calls for doing everything possible to make it seem as much like what it simulates as possible. Sims are historically some of the most demanding programs out there for computers. Since the early days of the PC, the "Flight Simulator" game from Microsoft served as a benchmark test because it was so complex. Most of today's sports titles really come under the same heading. They're attempting to simulate a live sporting event. I'd argue that most of the 1st. person shooters have reached a simulation status of sorts, too. While the game-play may be far from "true to life", the virtual environment and movement of the characters as they interact with items in the world are attempting to simulate reality.
Traditional arcade games really never attempted to achieve "sim" status. Cartoonish representations of everything were plenty suitable, and basic ideas of gravity were good enough (no physics engine ensuring particles fly out from explosions in accurate patterns, etc).
I suspect many publishers may not necessarily want that many replays. They want to sell new games not have players stuck on the old ones. Treating games as an ephemeral activity, like watching a movie only once, is a shift in attitude of both players and publishers. If a game does have replayability then the devs want to use downloadable content that you pay for rather than just an open ended fan based modding.
"The food here is terrible!"
"I know, and the portions are so small!"
See also, Louis C.K.'s bit on technology being amazing and us appreciating nothing.
Entire genre's of games have pretty much disapeared, this is true in the PC world in particular.
Point and click adventure games are pretty much gone.
The simulation field has dried up. From space sims, flight sims, to mechwarrior type sims. While I racing has brought something new to the table, the other sims have largely been ignored. I would have figured by now that there would have been plenty of high res cheap HMDs on the market leading to a resurrgence of sims, but it hasn't happened. Heck, you had low res HMDs for Flight Unlimited and mech warrior 2 back in the mid 90's!
CRPG's don't have the depth they used to. Fallout 3 didn't have nearly the same content as fallout 2.
Bring back the old version of slashdot.
While those who game.... are gaming :)
- http://www.milkme.co.uk
Just like it has done with all other forms of entertainment, the internet has given angry gamers a platform to complain. The more time you spend online the more you see people bitching. So I guess the question is this: were people just as unhappy about games 10 years ago and we didn't hear them, or have gamers become more critical as they spend more time talking to strangers about games?
Gamers of the same complaints and demands as everyone else in every other industry.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The author missed about a million flash games targeting casual audiences, and many of them are pretty damn good. Whoosh, the article doesn't even remotely apply to those.
Also there are plenty of "normal" PC/console games that are universally praised without nary one whit of criticism. Not every game can be counted among the best.
Lastly: everything is *not* amazing. The purpose of games are to be FUN, and fun has nothing to do with the state of current technology and more than you can give someone more expensive paint and expect them to magically become a better artist.
The problem is that people complain but continue buying these games anyway. People are more concerned about pleasure than they are principles. Because if they were truly unhappy with the state of gaming they'd stop buying until developers produced what these people want. But evidently tired old first person shooters with hackneyed, b-movie storylines and yearly regurgitations of sport franchises is what most gamers want.
I'm convinced that the vast majority of triple A games that get lavished with praise no nowhere near as good as claimed; these games sell well because of massive marketing budgets and herd mentality. Almost every single time I've played one of these games, I've found some glaring problems to be overlooked in the gaming press. The storylines are almost uniformly awful, not even on par with your average Hollywood summer blockbuster. Glitches are far too frequent for a big budget title. And gameplay in general is cumbersome or awkward. But I do admit that often times the production values do impress. It's eye candy and not much more. But then that's why I almost never spend money on games like these.
That said, gaming is better than it's ever been at any point so far. The selection of gaming is endless. From flash games, to iPad gaming, to PCs and consoles there are far more options than we've ever enjoyed before. The problem is that the vast majority of the money continues to go to big budget crap.
It has always been like this, and good riddance. I wonder what part of your ego made you tell us as opposed to just not showing up anymore?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Not really. Baldur's Gate I replayed a dozen times. One of my favorite game series. I played Mass Effect 2 a year ago. Once. No intention of ever replaying it. It too is one of my favorite games. Why? Because I remember it from the story and the characters, like I would from a movie or book, and not as an experience. In BG/BGII I remember the addictive D&D gameplay and the writing/music/environment. In ME2, for example, Aria was only in the game for a period of minutes... but I can visualize perfectly both encounters with her. Same with many of the crew encounters and cutscenes.
I like SC2, I play games as they come out, playing crysis 2 and waiting on Elder Scrolls V, I play a game I can never beat and just variate off it, the problem is too much free time namely for kids here in America. Drive by a school if you don't have kids, imagine the #### pounds of fat in the play yard, these kids go home and put in 8 hours of video games on weekdays and 16 on the weekends, no shit every game is going to suck lol. There is a always a niche in every market of hardcore zealots that will just never be satisfied, in most cases this is healthy to industry growth, but here's the deal... we actually need worse video games or interactive video games like Wii fit that encourage people not to die of heart attacks and cancer.
Let's take FPS games;
* Now you can get into vehicles!
* Now you can do slo-mo!
* Now you can hide behind stuff!
* Now you can do guns *and* spells!
* Now with BIGGER monsters!
* Now with better AI!
Which are all icing on the same-game-cake. Push buttons, find objects, solve puzzle. Every other genre is like this., too. RPG's to me haven't really changed since Ultima. Oh, I enjoy them, but remember that we're at the stage where Starcraft 2 isn't that different than Starcraft.
'Back in the day', games for the 8-bit home computers were astonishing in their variations, and this was back when a lot of publishing houses were a lot smaller than they are now. Because the market has fallen into repeats of the same formula, people expect to be entertained more - and since that's what's happening, you can't whinge when people start quibbling over smaller and smaller issues with each game.
I love video games of just about any genre. It's bullshit to say people won't ever be happy. I write plenty of reviews on Amazon good and bad. Lately game developers have been getting plain lazy. For example, Navy Seals SOCOM 3 came out, I snatched it up because I loved the second SOCOM. In SOCOM 2 the maps were pretty open and you had to really think about your plan you couldn't just run through blasting away and expect to survive.
I was furious at how ridiculous the third game was. The details aren't important but the developers essentially stripped everything out of the original version and replace it with crap. It didn't even have Navy Seals in the game...how the hell can you call it Navy SEALs SOCOM without any damn SEALs?
On the other hand I'm playing Dues Ex Human Revolution right now and loving every second of it. I consider it a good game because there are a ton of options, and you aren't punished for being creative.
If there is no God then free will is an illusion.
Think about it though. The more free time you have, the less picky you are about the games you play. So those of us that have little free time now have to decide carefully what to spend our precious little free time playing. It's all about the value you're getting out of the game, where value = enjoyment/time. But as time progresses aren't games supposed to be getting better and better? If games really were better than they were back in the days of our youth, then our perceived value from those games would have stayed the same. But it hasn't. With value = enjoyment/time, if time goes down, enjoyment must go up in order to maintain equilibrium. At the very least our drop in free time has outpaced the increased enjoyment from games, lowering perceived value below an acceptable threshold.
I still play games in my free time, but I'm damn sure pickier than I used to be back in middle/high-school. Hell back in high-school I would buy a new game almost every week, I was beating them so fast. I wasn't picky about quality or even enjoyment as I had free time to burn and games were how I chose to spend that time. Once college rolled around, and then a career, I started playing only the most enjoyable of games; which is the expected response. However a funny thing has occured as I have gotten older. When I was younger it seemed that a large majority of the games out there were 'above par'. Even if I decided not to play them, I didn't expect that actually playing it would make me want to shoot myself. However these days it seems that there are far fewer diamonds amongst a much larger rough. Games have always fallen into three groups for me: Must Play, Good if I Find Time, and Holy Shit Keep it Away From Me. Back when, it seemed like most games fell into the first two groups with a spattering in the third, probably close to a 20/70/10 split. These days it seems more like 10/10/80. This shift seems to be much larger in magnitude than one would expect from an aging gamer; you would expect a person's standards to rise over time, but the shift appears disproportionate. So while I agree that there are 'winner' games out there that are very popular and heavily played, the industry as a whole has taken a huge nose-dive. Which is probably why people complain so much and pine for the 'Good Ol' Days'.
Cool post bro, highfive \o
Well reviews are essentially opinions so you need to take them with a grain of salt. Still there a few truths I never quite got over that I feel cover the entire industry such as. 1.Games on optical platforms (CD or DVD) will be cheaper because of manufacturing cost. 2.Optical platforms will be better because they can hold more information. 3.Load times will be gone in a few years. Having said this am I disappointed with the industry as a whole? No I have played some incredible games some of which got lousy reviews you just have to think about what pleases you I am not saying stop reading reviews but look at more than one and think about what you like.
Chris Sheppard
you played a lot. i stopped 1.5 hours after i started playing it. same old rehash with dumber player participation and pumped up graphics.
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I think a major part of the problem is the game review system. The economics are poor for professional game reviewers... and therefore little perks add up to a lot for shoestring reviewers (i.e., tainted reviewers... or worse: corrupt game review sites). So the lack of a real economy for game reviews leads to cheap, shoddy reviews, or crooked reviews, and the good reviews get lost in the shuffle. So good games get lost to the marketing of poor games, and vice versa.
Also the major game labels (e.g., Activision and EA) don't do the public any favors by buying successful talented developers and shuttering them after a few years when their games are good (or even great) but the Return On Investment doesn't match the goal of the month. (Think: Blur.)
So the gaming public gets short shrift in the current console situation. I think that's one reason that the iOS (iPhone and iPad) games are so popular. They're fresh and not as committee (and suit) designed. The public can appreciate the difference.
I'm a tech news junkie, and Slashdot is the best for this. Now, I keep seeing these opinion posts which seem to be better geared on a site like Reddit. Anyway, facts = good, opinions = derp.
i've been more active on the WoW Blizzard forums and sometimes WoWHead lately. why? i pay $15/month for my subscription. it's not like they aren't making fixes to the game so why not complain? although i'd love to make my own epic game, i don't have a few million dollars lying around to quit my day job and build my dream game. until then, i'm gonna bitch.
I'm not happy with modern games. It's not amazing and I complain. It could be because I'm THAT guy who was born in the middle of the 80's and through the golden age of gaming. I grew up watching video game genres and conventions being defined. I grew up watching communities add value to games through a legitimate moding scene. I grew up enjoying rocket jumping, saving princesses, uncovering conspiracies and saving the world from destruction (sometimes destroying it too). Now that i've grown up I see gaming genres getting mangled, removing features like a selection of 10 weapons down to 2 because you can only control that many with a controller or adding unnecessary RPG elements so that my gun can fire more accurately. Modding communities disappeared and all the small fun things replaced with DLC or micro-transactions. Now all the guns just fire bullets at different speeds and spreads, no more interesting things like firing rockets out of a crow bar or scientists out of a shotgun. Instead of working my way to 3 different endings I'm just offered the choice at the very end by pressing one of 3 buttons. Gaming is good now, it's just not as great as it used to be.
[FUCK BETA 2.6.2014]
Speak for yourself.
I (almost) always finish the games I buy. I can't possibly be the only one.
I consider some games too short, but if a game gives me 30+ hours of gameplay, I consider it fair.
I'd argue that the ideal situation is to be able to see the flaws (and point them out) but still enjoy what you have. At this point I can find flaws in every single game I play, but still rave about how good some of them are.
And if enough people complain often enough, things can improve. Only the crappiest console to PC ports don't have save anywhere these days. Even Square, king of the lazy-ass random encounter mechanism for RPGs, has mostly given them up. Mass Effect 2 took every bit of complaining about Mass Effect 1 and used it to craft a huge improvement in the gameplay (for most people, I know the move away from slower RPG mechanics offends some).
For instance, one thing that really needs to go is Boss Fights in Every Game. They're great for some types of game, and even games that are nothing but boss fights can be fantastic (Shadow of the Colossus), but they've seriously hurt several otherwise fantastic AAA games like BioShock, Arkham Asylum, and most recently Deus Ex: Human Revolution. And enough people are pointing out why it's a bad idea that one of the DX:HR guys sounded rather defensive about putting the boss fights in, and Ken Levine is out and out apologetic about it for BioShock.
But I'm still enjoying the hell out of DX:HR even while I can see where it's not perfect.
Star Wars edits aren't worth complaining about but millions continue to nerdrage into the net against.
Always complain, always demand better. This is part of how progress is made. The other part, of course, being the actual work of making things better to perhaps, this time, shut up those damn complainers.
I want to complain.
You want to complain? I've had these shoes three weeks and the heel's worn right through.
No, I want to complain.
When you complain nothing ever happens, so why bother.
*SLAM*
I'm sick and tired of this office.
Has not played Warhammer
Anything I spend money on I have a right to complain about, otherwise I'll take my money elsewhere.
The foremost example that comes to mind is Ubisoft and their big brother DRM. I used to be a huge fan of Ubisoft but since then I am no longer satisfied, I complained and took my hard earned money elsewhere.
Another example is the horror show that was Modern Warfare 2 and it's following sequels. I was completely dissatisfied with the consolitis and the fact the target audience is leaning toward 13-year-old-zit-faced gamers thus really bad gameplay, and so I haven't bought a Call of Duty game since CoD4.. to bad it never had any sequels (obligatory reference to XKCD).
The old proverb "Beggars cannot be choosers" applies in reverse as well.
because the average user here is anything but a self-righteous, techno-libertarian looney.
Anything? Does that mean we have pedo-cannibalizing transvestigial mule-fornicators coming to /. as well?
Here's to hot beer, cold women, and Glaswegian kisses for all.
I have played (and finished) Dragon Age: Origins and Dragon Age II (on the Mac, thanks) several times each. A play through for me takes from 100-120 hours. I simply LOVE these games. There are only a couple of valid criticism of either IMHO. I consider them the best RPGs I have ever played.
The pursuit of absolute tolerance leads to the most rigorous and ludicrous intolerance. - REX MURPHY
and most modern games are elaborate plays on addiction biology. world of warcraft being the prime example.
not the good games. like when i was a kid. get off my lawn.
"Every game is too expensive, although we demand ever-increasing levels of interaction, graphical fidelity, and length."
Actually, I don't. To me, the lengthy, high-tech, and increasingly detailed and realistic games are like blockbuster movies. in the case of the movie, all too often the focus is on the special effects, so the plot and acting go to the way side. A movie that looks gorgeous but has no plot (or worse a dumb plot) and terrible acting quite simply sucks. Same with games, if the game looks gorgeous, but is buggy, or just plain not fun, that game is going to suck. Simple as that. For movies, plot and acting trump special effects. For games, a game that is fun, good game mechanics, and for games that have one good plot, trumps having the latest and greatest technology every time.
Plenty of great movies do not blow huge wads of cash on extensive and expensive special effects, but are plenty good. Same with games, some of the best games have not pushed the state of the art. This isn't just recent either -- even back to the old days of the early 1980s, something like Asteroids was not pushing the capabilities of the Atari computer, but was plenty of fun.
So sure I can see complaining about games. I mean, movie -- they spent all that money and came up with THAT? So, a complaint in the same vein for some of these games.
... the article is a lie. Especially if you've been following PC games and the games industry (console and PC) in general when it comes to developers and publishers.
Let's take a look at what happened to First person shooter games after Halo 1 (with regen shields) duke nukem forever was just released not too long ago and what do we find? A game chained to halo style 2 weapon + regen shield... I mean it's 2010 and many gamers are just saying "WTF happened to games?". Developers jumped way too hard on the 'accessibility' bandwagon when they saw how much money Zynga was making and they all of a sudden got scared of games with lots of stuff to do in them. They threw out you being in direct control and made the computer do more and more stuff so all you had to do at some point was navigate (FF12 and most MMO's).
Problem is bad things happened over the last 10 years -- Casual First person shooters came to dominate followed by World of warcraft MMO feeding frenzy most developers went on when they saw the mad cash WoW was raking in and caused good single player RPG's to on the PC to pretty much vanish for almost a decade outside of a couple low budget games and RPG's that aren't really RPG's (fallout 3, Mass effect). Not to mention the rise of facebook games that prey upon stupid people like Zygna and get them to waste money on virtual item garbage.
Developers and newbie gamers like to pat themselves on the back but lets be serious for a moment. There has been a significant decline in game quality over all as development costs and team sizes have grown since most of the resources go towards the graphics part of the game so the content or actual gameplay inside the game (things to do) isn't as fleshed out. Many game companies cannot create great games with lots of content at modern budget sizes. There was a sweet spot in the mid 90's to early 2000's that we passed in terms of how much content developers could pack into their games (Diablo 1+2, and starcraft being among the pinnacle of the era).
Truth is most developers have lost the passion of what it means to be a gamer you can see how EPIC failed with Unreal 3 after the amazing UT2004, they took a giant step into console land where gaming tastes are largely worse then on PC.
Then there is the tools, lack of maps and features that are just broken or unfinished. Supreme commander 2 had modding disabled at the request of publisher to push "DLC". I mean it's a real time strategy game FFS you need mods to keep a game like that alive over the long term. Just so many stupid boneheaded things are done all the time in the industry and devs and publishers are often oblivious.
Imagine if the filmstock that movies used was deliberately designed to decompose within five years. How much would have been lost, forever? Games of today seem to be heading that direction. Decades from now, there will be a huge gap in our cultural history because of that.
It seems to me the author of this article is just speculating on what goes through people's minds without actually having asked any real gamers. Personally, the thing I find lacking in most games today is good gameplay. Developers are so caught up with putting in fancy graphics and realistic physics and all this other dumb useless shit, when all that really matters is the gameplay. I can list dozens upon dozens of games from the NES/SNES era that I love and re-visit from time to time because they were truly fun to play, but nowadays it seems eye candy is the main focus with the gameplay being a distant afterthought.
There are still some good games being released these days, but it's honestly hard to find many titles I am willing to spend money on. Most companies don't do anything original anymore because they are scared to lose money, but playing the same, slightly different game for the thousandth time gets stale. The author seems to discredit people's complaints simply because "EVERYTHING IS AWESOME IN GAMING RIGHT NOW OMG", which is just sad. Everything is NOT awesome in gaming right now; there are many reasons to be dissatisfied with the overall state of the industry, particularly big-budget titles.
I am honestly more interested in indie titles right now, simply because of the risks they can afford to take. There are a lot of platforms for indie games at the moment and practically anyone can get in on it; the entry barrier is relatively low. Granted, there is a lot of crap there too, but the one thing you will see more of is innovation, which to me is what its all about.
I always finish games that are worth playing. If it's not worth my time, why the hell would I bother wasting more of my time just to finish it? A good game is like a good book, it draws you in and you find yourself having trouble putting it down every night even though you need to go to bed and wake up early in the morning.
Some things are not difficult to implement, but developers seem to waste a lot of time on useless bullshit. Old PC FPS's (DooM, Duke3D, Blood) had endless replayability simply because they shipped with or otherwise offered free level editors and the community was usually very lively, meaning you could go online and download thousands and thousands of user-made maps, thus extending the length of the game. I suppose there will always be those people who cry about graphics in games, but honestly developers should just stop worrying about them so much. If the graphics aren't realistic enough for you, GO OUTSIDE. The rest of us want to play a game that is FUN, not some artist's wet-dream imagining of a virtual world. The graphics should be just good enough to convey the information needed by the player to play the game (mood may be important as well, but you don't need a multimillion dollar budget to accomplish that!) Interaction is easy to implement, even Duke3D had a lot of it! You have a 'use' key, usually, so just add different actions for different objects in the game! This is not rocket science!
I think it's safe to say most developers have lost sight of what game development should be about. The big companies are at odds with themselves; you just can't have that many people working on a game without a myriad of conflicting interests and ideas, but ultimately it is going to boil down to money and what some bean counter has convinced the higher-ups of being most profitable for the game. Thus, they reallocate their resources and you get what we have today -- a bunch of overpriced crap and some idiot writing an article about how people should stop complaining because gaming is SO AWESOME today. Barf!
I had a frank discussion with someone at EA regarding game quality, when I was working on Medal of Honor: Rising Sun (not the epitome of greatness, but it paid well). Anyway, he said basically all you have to do is make the first 15% of the game interesting (as most people only play about the first 15%) and the last 5% memorable (those that play to the end - which is not all that many, you want to leave them with a good experience and they'll buy the next one). That 80% in-between was just nothing but filler. Nothing really spectacular, just to keep you occupied so you feel like you've had good value for money.
So, spend the production money on the first 15% and the last 5% and put all the junior designers on the middle 80%.
games that aren't very demanding of hardware, and don't change much over time. Card games, copies of classic arcade games, etc. are like this.
Which leaves a big hole in the middle: games that are "not very demanding", in that they could probably run on a phone or netbook or ten-year-old PC, yet aren't implementations of a tabletop game or clones of an 8-bit-era non-scrolling arcade game. I for one have been harassed in comments here on Slashdot for having too many clones of an 8-bit-era non-scrolling arcade game in my online portfolio. Is there a Free counterpart to, say, SNES/PS1/DS level stuff? For example, where's the Free counterpart to Street Fighter II or Spyro the Dragon or Pokemon? If not, what keeps it from happening? Is it something akin to the "complexity wall" that's been discussed on NESdev.com?
Gamers don't want to play something that's at the level of an early-2000s game when they can play a cutting-edge game instead.
Wii has a GPU comparable to a Radeon 9000. Is the only reason that gamers play Wii games the fact that the games have characters introduced in the NES and Super NES era (e.g. Zelda, Mario, Metroid series)?
If the author has ever heard of consolization?
Games today suck, they're picked apart because they're mostly craptastic games that are highly focused around a very specific target audience. Instead of making a game just to be good, they make them to scoop up a certain type of player. Essentially it's a bloated experience designed to attract players into buying their product rather then actually delivering on it.
Keep in mind this doesn't apply to all games, just most.
I agree with the poster above that said it was about addiction. Veteran gamers, especially the ones old enough to have played 8-bit games, played some shitty games in their time. Games with horrible control, obnoxious sound, maybe even unrealistic difficulty, that required investing a considerable amount of time into the game just to make any real progress. Why are these gamers even looking forward to sequels they'll hate so much in the first place? But after hoisting a series onto such a high pedestal with such expectations a little disappointment is pretty much inevitable. Then some get into the strange habit of lingering around games long after losing the ability to enjoy anything. Consider the Final Fantasy fans who thought part 4 was the pinnacle of the RPG experience and that FFVII was the series jumping the shark. Yet for many, FFVII was an exciting introduction to the franchise. As games get better and better at doing it for the game, it becomes harder and harder to outdo those magical experiences. Much like a startling loud noise being less startling if heard again not too long after, or a druggie needing stronger goods to get his fix.
People buy shit they don't need or don't really care about, but buy it nonetheless out of advertisement or social pressure, and try to persuade themselves they like it, but in the end they know they didn't really like it in the first place then they bitch about their frustration.
Guess what, don't buy that overhyped jungle console fps or military simulator if you know it will be worse than quake 2 even before playing it. Stick to worthwile games or do something else with your time and money.
Most of the complaints I hear are that most games are too expensive, and/or are just rehashes of older games. Plus Game consoles suck! One of the most fun games released in recent tears is Smokin Guns, A free FPS type game set in the wild west. Its graphics are not super-hi-res, but are good enough. Realistic period weapons and settings help a lot. While a single player can play against computer charactors, the real fun is in gatting several friends together to play over a network. Internet play is possible, but for the server setup is complex.
My name is Nonya F. Biznes
Email: nonya@nonya.org
Address: 123 Nostreet
Notown, FU 77342-090
I don't buy games much anymore, and even when I was a game junkie I knew better. Most average people will walk in the shop and plunk down however much for the newest and greatest thing, cause the TV told them to.
I actually spend a lot of time deciding on what games I will buy, as a kid it was murder nickel and diming my way up to 50-60 bucks and there was no way in hell I was going to waste that months on end earnings for doing crap jobs on something like freaking bevis and butthead the (almost completely broken) game.
My parents thought me to be a smart shopper, and the value of a buck, and honestly I dont complain about the games I own. I knew what I was getting into and what I was to expect before ever walking into the shop and I stand by my choices.
The problem with commercial games is they stopped innovating. They want to churn out as much polygons as possible in as little times possible. Look at most games these days, it seems like the management just told the developers: take the Unreal/Quake/whatever engine, change the models and the backgrounds, add a few triggers and release it. Bug testing, bah, we'll just charge them for some DLC to fix the major bugs. Next year we'll just release a complete patch with a few new levels and call it BoringGame 2.
There are of course the few good ones - Blizzard until they got taken over by Activision released nice commercial, playable games. They continue working on it before and after release. Not that they're currently all bad but Activision seems to put pressure on them to release games like Diablo III without offline gameplay and even the SC2 content is being released staggered at full price per expansion pack.
A lot of indie games are a lot like the old games, they don't have access to the latest frame rate generator so they have to do something that makes their story or gameplay stand out. Minecraft looks like crap, Trine is a 2D scroller but in the end they're fun to play, bring unique game play and even if you don't like them, it's not like you lost $50 or $100, sometimes the investment is as low as $5, even if the game sucks or is too short, you can buy 10 games and you're bound to have 3 or 4 good ones.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Apparently you've never read MichaelKristopeitN++'s posts
Most gamers you hear are young and probably closer towards being spoiled if not spoiled outright so of course they bitch about things. A lot of older gamers are still pretending they're not gamers and hiding the fact they do it.
I think that is because despite all the improvements gamers are still lacking in story and dialogue and there is no care about quality. No one talks about a buggy book let a lone a buggy book that sounds like it was written by a 12 year old.
Meanwhile, I play Dwarf Fortress, Project Zomboid or Minecraft, and I find those games quite excellent in gameplay and re-playability, and guess what? The lower graphics don't bother me because those games are actually quite fun. Maybe these big gaming companies have a lot to learn from these little guys, because honestly, paying $49.99 for a game that has beautiful graphics but gameplay built for a disabled midget with mental problems filled with insane copy protection schemes isn't going to be something I'm gonna enjoy.
My biggest gripe with these games is that they're literally ignoring/removing features that used to be there in many previous games and then hyping up their game as revolutionary because they added some fancy graphics that is literally meaningless for a game when the game play is stupid.
I don't understand what the big deal is about having an FPS with over 100 players in it doing all kinds of things in the world and extremely modifiable. I was playing Tribes and Tribes 2 and those two games are at least over 10 years old and people loved it that they're still playing it today, with 100 plus player servers with very little lag. Now they can't even give us multiplayer games with over 8 players because apparently it's such a big deal now and now it's totally impossible to modify these games now (ie. Battlefield Bad Company 2).
I also don't understand why they can't make RPG's with Coop support, what's the big deal? Why would you take out multiplayer coop support in previous games that had it? (ie. Dragon Age using the NWN engine). What the hell is the big deal?
Whatever...
I've been on the other side of it as a beta tester. We have offered suggestions to the game makers to improve games in the past and have been basically stone walled. A few games I've been on were simple online play games and a suggestion of "random spawn points" would help game play LARGE was stone walled because they had a deadline or just were too lazy to fix it. How fun is an online game with 5 spawn points? Not very good due to spawn campers. The developers get in their head what they want, how they want it, and do it, screw everyone else. It's almost like the developers themselves don't play the games they are creating or even that gene of game. I know as a Dev the 1st order of business would be fixing stuff I personally hate in the game, yes I'm looking at you COD series.
Maybe better graphics doesn't overcome expensive, short, overly DRM'd games that haven't improved on AI or presented a new story line in 15 years. Considering the graphics can be explained by improvements to graphics cards, this means game makers have contributed 0 improvements in 15 years.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
..."of excellent quality". I would agree that, in many ways, these are the "Salad Days" of gaming potential. There are more bells, whistles and gizmos to make gaming experiences mind-blowing than ever before.
In contrast though, I think that the myriad pressures that studios are under against their parent companies, publishers and, to some degree, their customers, are forcing them to take less time and care to put the aforementioned bells, whistles and gizmos to proper effective use.
To a large degree, it does seem like simple market pressures are to be most clearly blamed for this. Eventually though, you've just got to call a spade a spade and accept the fact that overall gamequality is demonstrably lower than it could be.
Some large publishers and parent companies will hopefully understand this appropriately at some point and stop scaring the crap out of excellent studios with the proverbial "Sword of Damacles" that is quarterly profits (or whatever internal economic pressures; or simply greed) constantly hanging over them.
An example, which I'm sure everyone is sick of, but that I will cram down your unwilling intertubes anyway:
I was in love with Fallout 2. I believe that game was superb. A 2D, isometric view game, "dated" many people would call it now. If you go back and look at the graphical and audio assets for that game; set scenes, item art, character art, atmospheric sounds, musical assets, etc. It created an amazing "piece" in and of itself. Truly, the difference between a labor of love, and the spectacle the Fallout 3 became.
I bought Fallout 3, I played it through, I didn't even have any exceptional beef with it. But it's lessened nuance (Studio and creative staff differences notwithstanding) was a little dissappointing. With all of the 3D makeover, etc., I mean, it was quite a feat, and I enjoyed it on those levels; but it didn't have the same impact.
The artwork for weapons, ammo, and incidental items in Fallout 3 for the Pipboy and merchant interactions were monochrome, many of them generic. Just compare that aspect alone, if you've got a working copy, to the, still exquisite renderings of the items for Fallout 2, or Fallout Tactics, for that matter.
Forgive me for beating that particular dead horse, but it's a just a common example of my point. You should consider tempering the "shock and awe" of your new techonogies, with richness and playability. You could have the "perfect storm" a "Platinum Age" of gaming, if you really wanted it...