The Decline of Fiction In Video Games

Speaking to Eurogamer, art maestro (and visual design director of upcoming stealth/action game Dishonored) Victor Antonov put into words what many gamers have been feeling about the gaming industry of late: "It's been a poor, poor five years for fiction in the video game industry. There have been too many sequels, and too many established IPs that have been ruling the market. And a lot of them are war games. And they're great projects and great entertainment, but there's a lack of variety today. So, when you step out of this established genre, people cannot grasp it, or the press tries to find a match. ... We were always waiting for the next generation of great worlds or great graphics. Well, great graphics came; the worlds that came with these graphics are not up to the level of the graphics. ... Games should sort of split up and specialize and assume that there's such a thing as genre, and they shouldn't try to please everybody at the same time and try to make easy, diluted projects. Let's go for intensity and quality."

Comments

Indie games!

[wikthemighty]

The last few years have been a boom for indie developers, especially on the PC: Humble Indie Bundle Indie Gala Indie Royale BeMine ...not to mention the Indie packs in the Steam Summer Sale!

Re:Indie games!

[alen]

A lot of them don't have any killing or violence so they don't count

Real games you have to kill

Re:Indie games!

[Sir_Sri]

unfair share of the dollars spent.

Unfair is probably the wrong word. I can like a lot of different games, but I know what to expect if I buy a call of duty, fifa, the sims, wow expansions, Battlefield etc. I'm willing to shell out money for those, in many cases more money than I otherwise would, because even without playing them I have a fairly good sense of what I'm going to get. Some of those big titles make a lot of money because they have huge production quality. If you want 200 hours of voice acting (think Star Wars the Old Republic) that's going to cost an astronomical amount of money, or full motion capture, licensed images (vehicles items etc.). Going with that is huge advertising budgets, if you want to sell your game that you spent 60 -100 million dollars to make it's likely to pay off to spend 200 million on advertising because people need to know when your game is going to be out, you want them to buy it day 1 before they can pirate it etc. etc. etc.

Kingdoms of Amalaur, which I just finally, got around to finishing, was a new IP, with a relatively overall standard fantasy setting (partly because they hired people who have defined the fantasy genre lately). But it still only sold about 1.5 million copies. That would be a good title for some people, but not for the production quality and tools they had, and the business risk Shilling was taking, and so they're out of business and on the hook for significant debts. The game was well reviewed, it plays reasonably well, it has good production quality, in all respects it is objectively a decent game, but it still didn't make enough money.

If you want to innovate the place to do that is mobile. The barrier to entry is very very low, since apple and google don't have onerous rules like sony and nintendo, but even in the mobile space odds are good (really good, like 90% or more good) that you'll not make any money on a particular title. Indie PC titles are the next step up from that, but you have to be big enough to get listed on steam to have a chance, and then the next step up from that would be the PSN/XBLA type stores (where your sales may not be better than Steam, but you have to go through the Sony/MS certification process which is much more stringent than Steam).

Either way, as with the movie business, there's always some innovation in the games business, but a lot of those plans fail to make money unless you engage in the well oiled machine of hollywood accounting (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting). Tera online seems to managing to hold it together for the moment, but no one really wants to end up like 38 studios and Curt Schilling, so the only serious risks taken are in small titles where if you loose 90% of your investment you're out 20K and you aren't out everything for the rest of your life. It's a down economy, no one wants to risk large amounts of money when you can't make any good predictions on sales. SWTOR which is probably the biggest trainwreck financially in the games business lately still sold something like 2 million copies - they just can't seem to maintain big subscriber numbers, but they got good opening sales, which I'm sure they were reasonably able to predict based on the KOTOR franchise and so on.

If big publishers had more risky games on the side, where the big projects funded more risky ones it might appear more 'fair', but that would cost them a lot of money.

BS

[geekoid]

there have been many great stories. And there is no reason a sequel can't also be a great story.
Skyrim, Uncharted, Max Payne, Portal, Portal 2, Half-life EP 2, Dragon Age. ON and on.

Re:BS

[jhoegl]

Some people are chess players, yet others play checkers.

Re:BS

[MrHanky]

Translated into English: Look at me! Look at me! I've got an opinion!

Fixed URLs...

[wikthemighty]

Humble Indie Bundle
Indie Gala
Indie Royale
Be Mine

Re:Fixed URLs...

[Lotana]

Far Cry I with AI that would flank

This!

I remember the first time the soldiers in front of me were laying down suppressing fire as two more were rapidly making a wide pincer move to get to my flank. I was crying the tears of joy! After all the useless, pointless bots that only knew how to run towards you and died in the hundreds, I finally had a game where developers actually focused on AI. Fear had good AI as well unfortunately you couldn't get the full appreciation of it because all the environments were so closed in that there wasn't much area to show off manuverability. Hell, the reason Half Life 1 was so damn awesome was because of the AI of the grunts.

And then... The focus on AI died as if it was a brief fad. FPS returned to being fancy graphical demos with gameplay equivalent of Quake 2. Worse: Quick Time Events just became extremely common!

I just can't comprehend why. Is it because the focus now is on casual gamers and they compain about the extra difficulty of the AI? Surely you can just add dificulty levels that adjusts damage and health of enemies instead of removing all the intelligence altogether!

Re:Fixed URLs...

[hairyfeet]

Man, wasn't that nice, to have bad guys that weren't tarded without having to deal with online cursing little shits? While Fear 1&2 were more buttoned up you should try the expansions for Fear 1, they had some nice levels where they could really get behind your ass if you weren't careful. the rooftop was a good example, where the Arma troops had 4 different ways they could go and would lay down fire while one snuck around to cap you in the back, just damned good.

Here is a little title by a little company you've probably never heard of but if you like a challenge, and I don't mean that lame "all grunts take more bullets than the terminator while having perfect aim" crap look up a little game called "Nosferatu: The Wrath Of Malachi" or something like that, I always just called it Nosferatu. Its 1901 and you have to go into a castle to rescue your family from a hoard of vampires.

The cool things about this game is 1.-Forget memorizing jack shit as EVERYTHING is randomized. A room that may have been a ballroom with a servant might be a bedroom with a hellhound the next time, it even randomizes between saves so you might have to reload a time or two if you respawn knee deep in the shit! 2.- How do you think that YOU, a normal human, would do against a real vampire? Welcome to Nosferatu where you are NOT a 6 foot 300 pound linebacker but an ordinary man. with the holy water and the cross or 6 shot you can fight off a minion, it'll be a decent fight but it can be done relatively easy, but you walk into a room and there is some Masters in their coffins? Your ass had better be able to sneak in there, get them lids open, and drive those stakes before they wake up because if not? Its your ass Mr Postman as they are wicked strong and if you drop one awake it'll probably be due to luck and will make you feel like you just won the game because it is HARD to do.

But I know what you mean, without decent AI so many of the games are just terrible, I mean who cares how it looks if the guys all stand in a straight line to be shot? don't buy Fear 3 BTW, the AI is fucking TERRIBLE, I don't know how many times all I had to do was fire a round or two and they would duck behind cover and just sit there while I walked up and knifed them, fricking knifed them, or worse they'd just go back and forth between two different covers while i just stood there right out in the open, they didn't even shoot. After 1&2 it was enough to make me want to fricking scream, just terrible.

Oh and did you read what the guy below you posted as a list of "good shooters" for me? Its online, online, online, online aaaaaannnndddd online. If I wanted to deal with "LOL I play this 16 hours a day noob bitch ass mofo" I'd be playing fricking Halo. ONLINE SUCKS ASS and is NOTHING like having a decent AI, its campers or guys that have no fricking lives so they just learn every trick and memorize every map so that you'll spend all your time respawning...wow, what fun. Big difference between having AI that will try to suppress and flank and some guy that has figured out there is a tiny section of wall that will let him scope a large area of the map without being seen so he can just pick off players and rack up his kills. And I can't believe he suggested TF2, for someone that likes a traditional FPS that thing is TERRIBLE! Its the classic case of spending weeks learning a single character because you can NOT just hop in and play that game and expect to get anywhere at all,and more than half the maps are fricking sniper heavens.

Looks like someone...

[xavdeman]

hasn't played enough games outside of the best-sellers. There's lot's of games with well written stories and intriguing worlds that were all new IPs. From the top of my head:
-Bioshock
-Bastion
-Portal
-Braid
-Alan Wake
-The Secret World (just released!)
And that's just the big, well-known titles. I'm sure if you start reading a quality gaming blog like Rock Paper Shotgun you'll be up-to-date on some great indie titles as well in no time at all, sir. (also take a look at things like the Humble Indie Bundle, sometimes these bundles contain really well written adventure games (and they always contain games with Linux support)

We've also seen the resurrection of franchises like Fallout, and Deus Ex, while not having extremely well written dialogue (with the possible exception of Fallout: New Vegas, which was made by Obsidian instead of Bethesda), they are still worth playing for the world and the story the players themselves can write through their actions.

Re:Looks like someone...

[icebraining]

Portal is set in the same universe as HL, but you can only tell by small references here and there (like in the Still Alive song). It could set it in a completely different universe without changing almost anything: all the characters, sets and gameplay are original.

How about gameplay?

[heptapod]

One of the bad aspects of modern gaming is games becoming interactive DVDs. Press X, beat the bad guy and earn the privilege of watching a half-hour cutscene that tells you to press O to defeat the next boss to watch the next cutscene.

Create games that are engrossing with gameplay and don't require much of an investment on the behalf of the player.

Re:How about gameplay?

[UnknownSoldier]

You can blame that model on JRPGs -- freedom of choice is taken away because like to pretend their narrative is supposed to the focused -- but they forgot the first rule -- you are making a fucking game, NOT a movie.

As Chris Hecker recently said
  "It annoys me when people focus on the linear content in games, rather than the gameplay. We are always going to be shitty movies if we keep emphasizing that direction."

http://kotaku.com/5923134/weve-got--jonathan-blow-the-witness-braid-and-chris-hecker-spy-party-here-to-answer-your-best-questions

Where was the rise of fiction?

[Darkness404]

Where was the rise of fiction in video games? We look at the previous generation with rose-tinted glasses by ignoring all the crap games and just looking at the gems.

Every generation complains about the same thing: too many sequels, not enough original properties. I mean, 5 years later we will be looking back and looking at this generation with longing.

The myth of the story.

[senorpoco]

Games today have abandoned story and character development for fancy graphics. Gone are the rich and nuanced tapestries of MarioKart and Gradius. The complex character development of super punchout and the beautifully crafted narrative of Earthworm Jim.

This is cyclical..

[ArcadeNut]

Happens to every platform of gaming. Arcade Games, Consoles, PC's, etc...

In the early days of Arcade Games, every game was unique (Asteroids, Donkey Kong, Pac Man, Robotron). As games stood out as top money makers, they started emulating them. Why risk a new idea, when an existing one is close to a sure thing? The longer the platform is around the less unique the games will become. Go into any modern Arcade (that is still open), and you're going to find that 90% of the games fall into Drivers, Fighters, Shooters. With maybe a couple games outside of that.

I can't agree, Victor

[idontgno]

"It's been a poor, poor five years for fiction in the video game industry...."

Nonsense, Victor. Gaming magazine reviews have raised High Fantasy to an unprecedented new art form, and DRM has been more gruesome and compelling than the best Horror gaming.

Non-fiction Art Games

[Sponge Bath]

Three games that blew me away that are non-fiction and novel are Flower, Limbo and Journey. All three are more imagination, dream and a reflection of life.

Is it any wonder?

[bearded_yak]

I'm not surprised by the state of the industry. The decline began a few years ago when a new generation of players chose war/battle/FPS games over First Person Action games (What's FPA? Think Myst, kids. If you don't know what that is, you know where to look).

In my opinion, war-like gaming appeals to a base survival and agression instinct and can indeed be involving, but eventually becomes numbing and the player is unsatisfied until another game provides a stronger instinctual reaction, which becomes more and more difficult to achieve. As this happens, interest falls off. I've seen it happen to people time and time again.

Storyline-based gaming based primarily on a world and interactions within that world activates more of the creative portion of the mind, digging out the player's imagination from under the clutter that schooling and obsessive parenting buried it under. The abilities of the imagination are endless and a properly planned First Person Action game uses as much of the player's imagination as it does game mechanics, ensuring that the user is partially responsible for creating their own experience.

For the most part, I think the folks at Frictional Games might understand how to use the best of both better than anybody. While their games may not appeal to today's most vehement FPS gamers, once those same people reach an insurmountable numbness with their own genre, those who try the kind of product Frictional puts out could find some comfort, as Frictional builds on a mix of both survival instinct and imagination.