How to go about getting a company to make a real game?

Ok, this is the thing. My imagination is monstrously huge but my skill base is not. I want to try and figure out how I can get a gaming company to make another awesome ad&d game like ToEE but much, much bigger. The biggest hurdle here is getting a game company to realize that graphics that look like virtual whatever are crap and are just for the kiddies who don't know any better. The thing that makes a game great is the game mechanics, not graphics.

Take Doom for instance. There ain't any game anywhere in the universe today that is any more fun than Doom, and that was only 8 bit, 16 bit? It was all about action, babay! And lots of it. If you want to look at something pretty, go rent a dvd or buy a Hustler magazine. All these new games just suck hugely because they are focused on nothing but graphics, like Halo, World Of Moneycraft, and other douchy newer ones like that. Even Warcraft III buckled and went the way of graphics over game play.

We need a real game company with integrity, like Troika, to start making games focusing on gameplay and not cartoonish graphics.

 

Necrotipus,

Nice idea, but it will run smack into reality. The bottom line is show me the money. If I make a game as you suggest what is my return? Most games companies will go where the money is.

Where is the incentive to make a game that may appeal to only a small base? You may find an indie designer who is willing to take a chance. Basilisk Games the maker of Eschalon comes to mind. Knights of Chalice is another. But CRPGs take a great deal of time, money and effort to develop, alpha/beta test and support.

Even then the game has to be at least decent or even the potential base will ignore it. Sales have to cover expenses and hopefully make the developer a little profit. If the developer barely breaks even the incentive may disappear. One example may be the Spiderweb games. Jeff Vogel is able to make money off the games because he has come up with a formula that allows him to craft the game with a small staff at the expense of graphics and other niceities. He has establish his fan base over the years. It has not expanded greatly, but it allows him to make a living off his games.

A small company with a small staff may be interested, but a large company with many people to support and pay will go back to what I said in the first paragraph. Show me the money.

 

This is all correct. None of the large gaming companies even know what the word "integrity" means, let alone practice it. They just want to put crappy games out that look like a virtual cartoon and take the money and run without providing a decent product. I'd love nothing better than to see Blizzard go bankrupt as well as EA. Then perhaps we'd see more smaller game companies making real games again. I hate it how these huge game companies cater to the thirteen year olds while completely ignoring all other demographics. The latest of this type of game being "Fallout 3". It couldn't suck anymore if there was four times the amount of them.

 

The reason why game companies focus so much on graphic is because that is what seems to be important to the majority of people who play and/or buy games. I share the sentiment that game companies seem to be focusing too much on graphics and not enough on acutal game play. I've felt this way for 20 years now. Unfortunately, I seem to be in the minority that doesn't care about graphics as long as the game play is rich.

I think that graphics is very important to many gamers. When I talk to people about some older games, it seems that they always comment about how crappy the graphics look. It is rare that they would say that the game play was worse. Graphics is the first comment I hear.

Back in the 80's, the most popular chess game at the time was called "Battle Chess". It was popular not because of the game play or AI. It was popular because of graphics. When your piece moves to capture another piece, you see it walk over and strike the opponent's piece with a weapon or something. I thought, "So what if the pieces were animated? It's just chess. It's the same game if you used 2D letters to represent the pieces instead of 3D graphics, right?" Well apparently not to the majority of people who buy the games.

I'd play ToEE even if the characters, monsters and terrain were 2D pictures with no animation. The game play is very close to D&D which is what I want out of a D&D computer game. I agree that good graphics add to the atmosphere of the game. It does enhance the game. However, after I get used to the graphics, I don't notice it anymore.

I'm not an expert on market research, but I suspect that people who did research on what would make people more likely to buy a game found that good graphics is a very important factor. It is probably more important that game play.

 

Market Research => The Lowest Common Denominator

 

Ok, but what about this? These huge worthless game companies that make 400 billion metric asstons of money a year, they've got their stability and perhaps dominate one facet of the market. Why wouldn't they want to make more money by targetting different demographics? Seems like a no brainer to me. Take Blizzard for example. They got World Of Asscraft and there is no other game or game company out there that can even come remotely close to competeing with them. They aready got all the PG-13ers who want to watch a cartoon female night-elf dance seductively so they can sit in front of the computer and spank frank all day. One would think that they would want to get all of the rest of the people that refuse to pay every month and try to get something out of them too.

And they could throw just 1 billion metric asstons of money at the project and still have more money except for Bill Gates, even if no one bought it.

 

I would love to see ToEE turned into a NWN type of game where we could all build mods easy and post them.

 

I actually really like those old goldbox games. I'd still play them if my computer were slow enough. I've yet to complete Pools of Darkness. The version I had was buggy. By the time I was able to get a hold of the patched version, my computer was too fast.

 

Yes, that would awesomely astounding. However, I think ToEE is not very modding friendly. I hear all the developers of Co8 over in the modding threads talking about protos.tcf, .mes and whatnot, which is all greek to me and leaves me .sol.

I wouldn't want the game mechanics to change much from ToEE but if they had something cool like a nice file that was a Campaign/World builder with all kinds of stuff that was simplified for your average underachieving window-licker like myself, I could create every old AD&D module from scratch instead of playing the same game over and over! Like the series of Descent Into The Depths Of The Earth, Night Below, The Rod Of Seven Parts, Against The Giants, Lich Lords (from Mayfair Games), The Illithad series, The "Eyes" series, Undermountain, all the Vecna modules! F!@#$^& RRRRAAAWWRRRR!

*EDIT*
The Bloodstone Pass
The Mines Of Bloodstone
The Throne of Bloodstone
A ToEE game engine used to make a REAL Cthulhu game!
A ToEE game engine used to make a REAL Elric Of Melnibone/Stormbringer game!
*faints at the thought*

 

Funny. I'd love to see NWN turned into a ToEE type of game where it was turn based and you can have a party of 5 or so characters. I just really dislike the NWN game engine.

 

Hmmm. I was just perusing the modding stuff and came across a ToEE world builder thread, which I was just talking about! I'm not allowed to post in that thread but I am going to try and check this thing out. If it's not horribly over my wee little head, I may give it a shot.

Does it require more specialized knowledge than just a fan trying to hack his way through everything or do you need to know several different computer languages as well have a minimum of 26 different Micro$oft certifications?

 

I gotta agree with the Stuntman over here, I'd love to see NWN become turn-based. If you could combine NWN and TOEE (TOEE's turn-based and party structure and NWN's modding ability) you would have probably the best game ever made.

HEAR, HEAR!!!! EA has screwed the pooch on Command & Conquer (one of my all-time favourite games) and Bizzard hasn't made anything good since Diablo (and Diablo III doesn't excite me at all).

I actually found a way to download the first one (Pool of Darkness?) and make it work about 4 years ago. Unfortuantely, like Gaear, I just couldn't take the bad graphics. I can handle some games with so-so graphics (heck, I still play X-Com and played Police Quest a year or so ago) but those goldbox games just don't cut it anymore.