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Gaming Clichés That Need To Die
MojoKid writes "The PC and console game industry is in desperate need of an overhaul. With skyrocketing costs to develop games, consumers aren't going to accept $80-$100 game titles, especially not with mobile game prices in the 99 cent — $4.99 range. Not to mention, how games are designed these days needs some serious rethinking. This list of some of the industry's most annoying gaming clichés, from scripted sequences to impossibly incompetent NPCs, and how they might be solved, speaks to a few of the major ailments in modern gameplay with character and plot techniques that are older than dirt."
You want them to make games much more complex--with completely destructible environments, near limitless borders, better AI, more complex NPC's, etc.
But you also want them to be CHEAPER? Okay.
And you complain about how long it takes to develop a triple-A title, so I guess you also want them SOONER too, huh?
Perhaps you would also like to have them hand-delivered to your house by Natalie Portman in a bikini? Hell, sure, why not!
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
I'd say that burning too much time and money on graphics, sound, FMV, and voice acting at the expense of mechanics, plot and bug-freeness has become a cliche in and of itself.
Obviously the solution is to go back to text-based gaming. OK, fine, EGA and the PC speaker.
Like Nethack!
Nethack is free!
Nethack will be available twenty-five years ago!
Go Nethack!
All joking aside, roguelikes exhibit this kind of complexity, yet it takes quite a bit of time for them to develop that complexity (tangent: are roguelikes gaming wine?), and that's with ascii art. Once you have graphics, you lose the justification for "use your imagination" and have to have different graphics for the 9000 different objects in the loot table, etc.
Also most people don't really have the time for that kind of game unless it's the only game they play.
That said, I wouldn't mind!
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
It costs money to avoid unskippable cut scenes?
How about this, let me skip all the bullshit logos at the beginning of the game and we can call that already a huge win. Then you go look at halflife and see how you can not have cutscenes. The Portal series would also be good for you to check out.
Show me a $5 mobile game with the depth and length of a good AAA title, and I'll agree there's no point in spending $60 for games (where did the $80-$100 figure come from? Only collectors' editions cost that much, and even they are often less). Also, it has to have good controls. Not "well, this is pretty good for a mobile game", but actually good. I've bought all of five games on my iPhone. Two were terrible (Scribblenauts, Angry Birds), two were ports (Chrono Trigger and Vay), and one was a decent time-waster (7 Words). Certain types of games can work pretty well on a phone or tablet, but it's a small subset of what works on PCs or consoles. And, unfortunately, the games that work well on mobile devices don't seem to be the same games as the ones I actually want to play.
The first poster did a good job pointing out that the added complexity the article wants will cost more, not less. I would like to point out that these cliches aren't universal, but there are problems with trying to "solve" them. I'll use "mandatory missions" for my example, alongside the article's example of Wing Commander.
Wing Commander allowed you to progress through the story while failing every mission. Your ending would suck, but that should be expected. It was a neat idea. There were a two major problems with that, though. Orion discovered that most people never saw the "failed" paths, because people would restart missions until they succeeded. People want a sense of accomplishment, and failing a mission doesn't give that. The other big problem was the added complexity. When they set out to make Wing Commander II, they wanted a much larger, more expansive plot. It became much too difficult and costly to create all the possible branching paths, cutscenes, and script if they followed the same formula as Wing Commander. So they cheated. There are less branching paths than in the first one, but the result is a game with a better-structured story.
There's also a side issue with allowing players to fail missions: You can game the system. If you just want to see the good ending of Wing Commander, all you have to do, IIRC, is play four missions. For every other mission, just eject as soon as you have control of your ship. Want to see the bad ending? Just eject on every mission! You can finish the game in just a few minutes, this way.
I also feel like allowing a failed mission takes something away from the experience. It's more realistic, but what's the point of beating that really hard level if you can just fail it and move on to the next one?
In the end, as I mentioned earlier, and as others have as well--I'm not sure how adding complexity is going to somehow magically drop down the price of games, or make them shorter to develop. I would also like to point out that games right now are cheaper than the SNES or N64 days. Heck, even NES games retailed at $50, and that's before you take inflation into account. I'm not sure where this "gaming is too expensive these days!" myth came from.
If you can't convince them, convict them.
from scripted sequences to impossibly incompetent NPCs, and how they might be solved
You must be under the age of 30 to say that. The original NES, the first major standard ever created, thrived on making games that were cheap, painfully difficult (Battletoads, anyone?), and wasn't advertisement supported. The reason the industry is suffering is the same reason everything turns to crap: Money.
Producers have gotten the notion in their head that they don't just expect profit, that it's an inalienable right. Take linux for example; There are hundreds of command-line based programs that are there, for free, that can be combined and manipulated to perform almost any basic function. In the windows world, I'm expected to pay $30 for an application that can rename multiple files at once. It gets worse when they see dollar signs in advertising revenue.
Imagine Super Mario Brothers if it were made today; The entire first level would be a tutorial where it cheers everytime you press 'A', gives you an 'achievement unlocked' after you stomp 10 goombas, and at the end of the level asks you to 'upgrade' to a Premium Mario that would start every level in 'fireball mario' mode for only $9.99. Especially in MMOs -- microtransactions now mean you can buy levels, gears, whatever you want. Some guy who slaved through all the levels gets no respect when some 14 year old with daddy's credit card comes in, curb stomps him, and then steals all his hard-earned equipment, which he just drags to the trash anyway, because hey, I can just buy it with real money. ha ha!
Good games are about personal achievement, and being difficult enough to be a challenge without becoming tedious. Good games are intuitive and don't require a three hour introduction, and they are immersive experiences; You're thinking about your next move, not wondering if there's any way to unlock that next level without spending a weeks' worth of groceries on upgrades.
No... Money is what ruined games; Businesses don't look at it as providing entertainment anymore, it's revenue, it's eyeballs for advertisers.. they aren't selling a product anymore: You are the product of the modern game. And it shows: The quality of modern games is shit.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
DLC is fast becoming a gaming cliche and needs to die off. Everytime you buy DLC you tell developers.....
I want to pay more than 60 dollars for my game.
I want to buy something that I will never own. I will pay for content I cant trade, sell, or give away.
I want my games chopped into small pieces and sold me to seperately over the MSRP price of the main game.
I am fine with paying for a inferior product because DLC is never as good as the original.
I want to pay for something that more than likely wont be availible to me in 5 or 10 years if I want to go back and play it.
I want features sold as dlc. Like how tecmo is selling a difficulty setting for ninja gaiden 3 as dlc.
I want endings sold as dlc. Like how square is selling the ending for final fantasy 13-2 as dlc.
I want content on my game disc I paid for to cost me extra. Like how capcom sells on disc dlc as extra.
I want content on day 1 that should be a part of my game I bought. Like how bioware put content out on mass effect 3's first day.
Every single time you buy DLC you are telling developers and publishers that. Now DLC is almost expected for everything and becoming its own cliche.
People seem to forget, or never learned, that the gaming market has crashed before; in the 1980s, to be precise. And why? Because loads of shovelware titles were being released to capitalize on gamers' increasing willingness to buy them, while development costs were skyrocketing, and every other game was a ripoff of another title that came before it. Sound familiar?
Eventually all the bloat collapsed in on itself and the market for video games nearly died.
Personally, I'm of the opinion another video gaming crash may not be such a bad thing. The price of games is already many times over that of other forms of media (would you buy a typical book or movie for $60?), while development costs are starting to outpace even most big studio movie productions. Ingenuity and creativity are among the casualties, while developers and publishers are trying every way under the Sun to extract as much money as possible from customers, from activation limits, to invasive DRM, to serious considerations to kill used game sales (a first sale right that extends to every other product on the market, yet gaming companies seem to think they, somehow, should be a special exception). Financially, the market is booming, while creatively, it is dying.
Without the gaming crash of the 1980s, we never would have had Nintendo. I'd like to see what major boons would come out of another crash.
"incredibly dumb article"
^ This is the most accurate thing that can be said. The article was the dumbest thing I've read about gaming in a long, long time. The thesis: "Games are too expensive so you should add exponentially more complexity to make them cheaper" is obviously a non-starter. And yes, the indestructible objects item was a low point:
"Ideally, let's just get rid of invulnerable structures, period... Giving players the freedom to re-shape terrain does create certain challenges, but not as many as you might think. There's a reason why soldiers in the real world don't go around firing rocket launchers inside of buildings or hurling blocks of C4 at the opposing side.... At the same time, destructible environments open up more avenues for players to experiment and have fun inside the game."
Translation: Players must be able to blow up literally everything, including entire buildings. It's OK because even if you spend the colossal effort to make it possible, players won't do it because there are drawbacks. Except that players definitely will do it because it's fun.
Totally incoherent.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
From my experience, the unskippable logos at the beginning are actually there because the game is loading and they're nicer to look at than a progress bar.
That'll be why the disk light stops flashing while it's playing the 'We paid megabucks to license the Whatsit Engine' video and why the game loads much faster when I can skip through those videos.
How about overly short paragraphs interspersed with lots of pictures spread over an unholy amount of pages, simple to get more pageviews for ad driven revenue.
Game clichès that need to die that are not mentioned in the article:
- The US are the good. The <insert other nation here> are the evil.
The linked article misidentifies the problem. If you look at the greatest games of all time (e.g. Ocarina of Time, Wind Waker, Final Fantasy VI, Chrono Trigger) they often use the "cliches" mentioned in the article. That is because these cliches are a necessary part of a well-designed game, especially if it is an action adventure or a JRPG.
The problem is a monoculture of game genres. Just as hip-hop has pretty much taken over music to the exclusion of everything else, so have two specific game genres (FPS and MMORPG) basically colonized the entire PC/console gaming industry. These were never very good genres to begin with, and they're totally overdone and worn-out now. I, personally, will not play any game that has a first-person perspective because I simply can't feel comfortable or get used to it. Good 3D games need to have a third-person camera angle.
Does anyone actually believe this? It gets repeated over and over, but it makes zero sense. There isn't a single gamer that can't recognize the difference between the complexity of a mobile game and something like Skyrim. I get the feeling that this statement is just being repeated over and over in a lame attempt to brainwash people into believing it.
Instead, we have people making all new engines every year, copyrighting their code so nobody else can use it, locking up their assets and IP in restrictive licenses
Part of this is that the system libraries of the video game consoles are licensed in a way that is incompatible with copyleft licenses. For example, the requirement of Installation Information in GPLv3 and the corresponding requirement of "the scripts used to control compilation and installation of the executable" in GPLv2 pretty much require a console to be completely open to homebrew. This issue forced a recall of Pajama Sam for Wii: Atari and Majesco apparently wanted to release the ScummVM (for Wii) source code but Nintendo wouldn't let them.
If you are allowed to skip the crap at the beginning of the game, it'll make the game less cinimatic.
Imagine Super Mario Brothers if it were made today; The entire first level would be a tutorial where it cheers everytime you press 'A', gives you an 'achievement unlocked' after you stomp 10 goombas
Let me guess: you saw that on Zack Hiwiller's site.
For the record, people who play games the way you described shouldn't get a say in how AAA titles are made. Shooting random stuff for no reason is called space invaders. Its fun, go play it a while.
The only reason I play most video games is for the story and progress through an actual plot. When the game becomes a fragfest, its just silly and no different from going back to Quake 2.
If you reduced any modern RPG to "kill those things, stand here. Now stand there. Now shoot those things, now stand here" (eliminating the rationale and story), it would be dull and suck pretty bad. Sure, there are bad cut scenes, and there are terrible plot elements in some games, and in a lot of books too, but eliminating them is not a good answer for most games.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)