Slashdot Mirror
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."
Humble Indie Bundle
Indie Gala
Indie Royale
Be Mine
"There are people who do not love their fellow human being, and I _hate_ people like that!" - Tom Lehrer
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.