What do you think about the modern game development trends?

You mentioned Sega Genesis, have you tried "Herzog Zwei"? A real gem, there is a free "clone" of it floating around the internet for the PC but it is poor compared to the original.

The lack of good RPGs could be blamed on MMORPGs for thats where the $$$ is.

I've played the 3 Troika games and I feel that they are not that good. Oblivion and its predecessors are boring. Neverwinter Nights original campaign is just too badly made and I never won it after more than 5 attempts.

I'm replaying those 90s games now, Ultima Underworld, Flame Dragon 2. Tried unsuccessfully to get Ultima7 and Tie Fighter to work. Poor graphics games like Unreal World, Adom or Gearhead interests me more.

 

Optimisation for new PC games is atrocious. I am seriously starting to think that theres a few kickbacks between Video card companies and major game devs, I honestly don't know how these people would be able to code a decent game for a C64 back in the day.

The other trend I see is the 'everyman' game that is being released. RPG's in particular have been incessantly simplified over time so that the 'casual' gamers enjoy them too. Now, I have nothing against anyone enjoying an RPG. The more the merrier. However it has gotten to the point where I am finding new RPG's to be far too easy, far too simplified for my tastes.

I am not advocating a return to the save game wipe or anything, but the scales have tipped way too far for my liking.

Lets look at Bethesda's Oblivion as a small example. Wanna be Evil? Go for it, do the Dark brotherhood quests till the cows come home. Oh you wanna be mr good guy too? Sweet, join a goody faction at the same time! Be everything! Heres a compass so you don't have to explore too, enjoy!

No thanks. Major devs are starting to really suck, big time. My final nail in the coffin will be when Bioware release Dragon Age, a supposed return to RPG roots. We shall see.

:anger: :beer:

 

I liked oblivion, I joined the dark brotherhood and I only commited one murder (cos I liked a bow that a guy had and I wanted it) when I was on a mission I would only kill the target. it was my secret other job away from the main quest. another thing about oblivion and morrowind is that you can build a character how you want, if you spend the time training in the skills you want to be good at (altho I don't like their class systems - "wizards" aren't slightly better at magic than everyone else, sorcerers don't spontainiously learn new spells, barbarians can't rage etc)

I liked fables alignment system, altho it was a pita when I wanted to steal something and everyone was standing around chearing for me. also the way you could build your character was well done I thought.

 

Nice to hear from the old Troika guys. One of them announced on RPGcodex that he was making an RPG/strategy game set in space (this was a few months back) but I've heard nada since. Can't even remember which one...

Wishing them all the best. Especially Tim.

(Would have said this on the other thread, but it was locked ;p)

 

I liked Daggerfall better than Morrowind, and Morrowind better than Oblivion.

Oblivion did have the best graphics of the bunch, and I loved the way that NPCs would go out, work in the fields, commit their own crimes, buy and sell stuff, etc. However, the world felt small and the story was really dumbed down compared to Morrowind.

Morrowind was prettier than Daggerfall, and the story had wonderful depth to it if you tracked down all the books, secret papers, letters, etc. Unfortunately the NPC AI was crap, and the world was smaller than Daggerfall.

Daggerfall, once most of the bugs were fixed, was one of the best CRPGs I've played. Almost infinite choices, unlimited quests, gigantic world, far better than almost anything on the market at the time. It got repetative and your actions outside of the main quest line never changed the world much, and almost no NPC AI at all, but a great game.

 

Before I must go out buying some things I'll sum up my basic belief regarding cuurrent developments :


- Too much focus on profits.
- Too much focus on sales.
- Too much focus on action.
- Too much focus on graphics.
- Too much withdrawal from deep, immersive stories.
- Too few immersion (and if, then companies to to rely *only* on immersion by graphics !)
- Probably a shift in the gaming generation : Younger consumers preferring action games ?
- No creativeness, no innovation.
- Reduction.

I could write a ten pages long rant ( ) , but that's a sammary of what I'm basically thinking roght now.

There's *definitively* not much innovation and creativeness going on now. The focus have shifted towards sales and profits. The more is sold, the better, even if this means reducing everything else.

Master of reduction is Blizzard. Their Action-RPGs are basically a torso of a proper game. Everything is so much reduced that it looks like a new form in itself (take paintings or sculptures as an example of how much things can be reduced to their absolutely necessary core components).

But on the other hand Blizzard is still offering patches - which is unrivalled in the gaming business, as far as I know. Every other company (the begger, the rather, so to say, like EA and Atari) would consider this behaviour total nonsense and - to put it cynically - rather punish a developing company (by no more paying it) than waste its money on THAT.
I think, these companies would allow it - as long as it consumes NO costs at all !

Innovation is bought, not generated. EA is the biggest example of that, except from Spore, maybe. And the Sims, of course. Who had expected it would sell that much ?

Which leads to the rising number of female gamers. I do hope one day we'll see a developing studio entirely consisting of women. Nowadays games are made by men - for men. Not women. Gothic is imho an very good example of that.

And I think there couöd be a change in the ages of the gaming community, too : I suspect that nowadays younger gamers are sought after by the publishers. Which has influence on how the games are made, more action based and so on.

But I'm still not sure about that.


Okay, enough ranting for now. I rather stop before i write my nine pages ...
(Apart from the fact that I've still got things to do.)

 

i tend to agree with most of whats been said already here. a good example of the changes in games is the Civ series. the new one has great graphics, best any of them, if you can get it to work. it was released half finished. after the patch and the expansion you can now play a decent game but it still wont work completly right unless you have better than 1.5 gig of ram. more and more the games are about the look of it rather than the feel of it. ToEE is a good game with lots of potential but to me it will never be as much fun as BG I & II. there was just so much more interaction with npcs and other aspects of the game that you had to think, it wasnt just a hack and slash which sadly is what i think they were going for when the wrote ToEE. i just hope that future games will be more about allowing the player to have fun rather than trying to outdo the other guys graphics engine.

 

And the *really* bad thing is that publishers WON'T release a game ith big, flashy graphics at all !

Worst example is Simon the Sorcerer 3. Parts 1 & 2 are really absolute classics for advventure fans, but they could'nt get a SINGLE publisher to realease part 3 - without 3D graphics. The result looks ... sad.

It is 3D, but looks terrible.

What publishers nowadays do, is, to have far too much influence on the development process (too much focus on graphics, too much focus on profits, too few support for devs, too few focus on story, unfisnished games).

That's why I regard publishers as the "big evil force" in the whole development process. They destroy nearly everything, because their managers do know a lot about economics, but less then zero about (gaming) fun. And THAT influences the games.

My wish is that devs unite somehow to give themselves a bigger, stronger voice. A union, maybe. Right now my feelings are that they are currently being utterly exploited by publishers, who use their pressure on them to get through what they want - and fun is definitively nothing they want.
They want money.

Current devs are far too much dependent on the publishers. I call this exploitation.

 

In essence, I agree with your sentiment Alrik Fassbauer, but in reality, it isn't how it works....

Basically, the Publishers, and in their turn down the line, the developers, are now beholden by the market. Investors is the word for it.

Since games are now big money, Investors put up the capital so that publishers can farm out jobs (games to be made) to devs. The dev that will do the most, for the least money, in the least amount of time, gets the 'job' just like any other industry.

Before, games didn't cost enough nor make enough, to have these investors getting involved with them. They were below the radar. Oh, they made money, but nothing like they do today. They did have creative freedom however, as the overheads were bugger all (Few guys in their computer room, or a small office of devs at most (Origin for eg)). Eventually money was thrown at them, and they accepted. Tech companies leapt on this wagon too, so now its one big happy family.

The family has turned into 'solely for profit' now though. A publisher will look at its quarterly statement, nothing else will matter but this. If a game isn't finished? patch it up and push it out the door to boost the quarterly statement. This makes people weary of them yes? Indeed, but they are beholden to the investors who gave them the money. The rug will be pulled out if the QS doesn't live up to what the investors want.

The devs just have suck on it. And make less money themselves than they ever used to.

Due to the nature of the marketplace and investors, each generation of titles needs to make even more money, otherwise shareprices fall. So every new game needs to get more sales, in order to do this, each new game must be everything to everyone.

Getting fools like us who are RPG nuts isn't good enough anymore. They need the action crowd. They need the FPS crowd....In order to make more money, to buy more expensive tech, in order to create better graphics, in order to draw in more fans...Im sure you get the drift here.:blahblah:

Its big business now. Even the Publishers are in over their heads, though they did decide to take the cheques at the start.

 

The New York Times had an article yesterday (in the business section) talking about Nintendo's Wii console and it's variant approach to this problem. It mentions numbers--that a new game will cost $14 million (!!!) to develop for say the Xbox, ~ 1/2 that for Nintendo because they are focusing on gameplay instead of under-the-hood graphics-intensive processing muscle. Anyway, here's the link, it'll only be free for 6 more days: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/30/technology/30nintendo.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Just thought I'd mention, it sounded pertinent.:nerd:

 

Yes, I remember the Atari boards...Yet I don't really blame people for feeling pissed off to some degree. It was a largely unfinished product when we first bought the game (Yes, I bought it on day one...:eyebrow: ).

Basically, Atari fucked themselves and Troika at the same time. It COULD have been a new Goldbox if enough time had been given to the devs. True, the devs did sign off on it, but anyone with any vision at Atari would have signed on for another 6 months just to give the whole idea an even chance.

Without the bugs, and with a finished game, TOEE would have been a quite successful title. Not a Sims, or Oblivion I grant, but a good, successful engine to crank out various modules for a few good years. Additions to bells and whistles could have been made along the way. Atari screwed itself by not giving the original engine enough time to be made. 1 and a half years is madness when it comes to making a new engine as well as putting a full module into it.

Hopefully Atari will die shortly. They are currently on the ropes, and the NASDAQ shows them at almost the same shareprice as Interplay was at when they folded.

The funny thing is they did it all themselves. Way to go Atari:doublethu