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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.
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.
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.
NES games were modelled on the arcade experience, where the games were designed to be endorphin-fueled quarter-suckers. Ultimate success was having a crowd gather around as you mastered the game, publicly acknowledging your superiority.
Game developer eventually figured out this approach doesn't work when the customer was sitting home alone in their basement. There was no great penalty for failure, nor reward for success beyond personal satisfaction. So modern games usually are not very much of a skills test, and (as the article noted) more of an interactive movie where the player is 'rewarded' with plot-points and virtual trophies.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.