What do you think about the modern game development trends?

What I don't quite understand, honestly, is, that the publishers don't see that they are crippling their own sales by publishing crippled (read : buggy) games.

A game without bugs develops over the time more income, because gamers ain't no fools and word spreads quite fast if a game is bugged or not.

Publishers seem more to be focused on short-termed cheap cash instead of long-term sales.

And sadly, this is how ALL industry seems o go nowadays. That's why we're BEEEPing up our own envoronment. Companies sawing millions of trees just to generate fast & cheap cash, not even the slightest bit thinking about a climate change, for example.

It's getting worse (current study about perhaps "oceans being empty by 2050"), and it's only then when the peoples will wake up. You can't feed on money.




By the way, Larian Studios (developers of Divinity) are currently completely self-funding their next RPG, Divinity 2. They are doing other works just for that, for example Ketnetkick for a major Belgian broadcaster.

 

i agree with basically all of the points said here. the early cool games i loved were made by people who loved making cool games. i think thats the biggest difference between then and now. in the early 90's the pc platform had more potential to run cool games than the basic nintendo type systems out at the time. so those early programmers went out and maximized the pc's capability and made the games they actually wanted to play, and hoped they could maybe make a few bucks at it along the way. as a result you had a variety of games that were great, because you had a wide variety of programmers with many varied personal interests. i still remember the thrill i had when i finally got my first modem to modem game of wolfenstein going (after being in driver and modem string hell for like 8 hours). i havent had that thrill in a long long time.

nowadays, with the dumbed down homogenized society we have, as you guys stated, its all about the bottom line and hitting the widest group of people with something they will buy. they dont care if you like it, they just want you to buy it. its like the big companies shoot wide area of effect shotgun blasts that will hit and wound the most stuff, but they are not looking for the kill (the supremely satisfied customer). all they need to do to win is to wound (get us to buy it). what is missing these days are the skilled sniper shots we used to get hit with. (doom, hexen, any game that was cool enuf to utilize the thrustmaster 2000 joystick, heroes of might and magic 2 and 3, hell, even zork 1 kicked ass). so we sit here all wounded and pissed off.

god thats a shity analogy, but it gets the point across i guess.


my question is this: as a non programmer i have no clue, but i would love to know, is it possible for a garage full of friends to develop a supercool game anymore? is the hardware and software required for that sort of thing so prohibitively costly that it makes it impossible? is the knowledge so specialized that only pros can do it?

back before all the new games had a built in program allowing you to play the game with people from all over the world, people had to make that crap up as best they could. anyone remember ifrag? written by jay cotton? it made doom 2 think that it was playing over a local network when it was really playing over the internet. that was the result of some guy's idea and desire to play the game with friends who didnt go to his same college. sure, it was dos based and took like a day to figure out how to get the $%%&$ thing to work, but once you did you felt like you achieved something, and to the victor went the spoils of playing doom 2 with a guy from australia for free without having to dial up sydney with the old 9600 baud modem.

do those types of people exist anymore? i see a lot of that spirit here, in the modding community. but not being a modder myself, i wonder, why dont you guys just collaberate to make your own game? from scratch? make a new toee, and continue it all the way through the giants and drow series too. why be limited by someone else's copyright?

i see that same spirit in the open source community too. but again, thats modding an existing product in a sense. where are the new products? obviously we are not going to get them from the big puiblishers. so we have to make them ourselves i guess. or at least those with the skills and desire will have to make them.

which leads me back to my earlier question---is it possible?

 

Here's a link to another article, this one in the New Yorker, about Will Wright (created SimCity etc) and Spore. Pretty much agrees, between the lines, with everything said here.

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/061106fa_fact aper:

 

I think yes, it is. It takes time, though. And a strong will. Look at Ultima 5 Lazarus, or at Spellforce, or even Far Cry, made by relatively unknown groups. A member of the poriginal Spellforce dev team even called his group "underdogs".

 

yeah, i didnt mean that post as a shot at co8. just the opposite. i see all the tqalent here u guys have and i wonder, why not just make a new game up from scratch? why be limited by someone else's copyright so that all the hard work you do will never get you any money? you guys know the nuts and bolts of game design by now with all the modding you have done, so why not use that experience to make one of your own? is it possible? if so, why not do it?

 

thats my point. if there was a payday at the end of the process it might motivate all of you to put out a cool game fast. and the payday cant come from mods, it can only come from an original game.

 

yeah i just got an earful on how hard it i to make your own game engine over on irc. guess i didnt realize how much of task that would be, being someone who hasnt programed since i as 13 in the days of the commodore vic 20.

i am surprised tsr or wizards or whoever they are these days has not contracted for an engine based on 3.5 rules which would allow them to make any game they want in the future on it. it could even be updatable by purchasing the hardcover expansion books. buy the bok get the software update, alowing u to play the new classes and spells from the bok in the game.

 

Years ago, a friend was seriously considering licensing the Infinity Engine to make a commercial game. Sadly it fell through; game design is a risky business, and expensive if your work force isn't made up mostly of volunteers. I think that game mods have a fairly bright future, and we will probably keep seeing a trickle of RPGs, including indies. I don't see anything like the days of a new worthwhile RPG every year returning.

 

sadly i think your right old book. i just dont see another new CRPG anywhere in the future, but whenever another one does show i hope they make it much more mod friendly. as ted said creating an engine from scratch is an awesome undertaking and i havnt done serious programing in over 20 years either. at this point id be happy just to see an expansion pack of some kind come out for ToEE with all the tools included.

 

My take on modern game development... I find it similar to modern day movies, music and television. I don't know if I'm just not part of the primary demographic anymore, but the stories and expressions coming out of the artforms nowadays don't seem to access the archetypes that I enjoyed when the industry was at its peak (this is all my opinion of course, I enjoyed the artforms most from '85-'90 or so, including a few rare gems before and after that).

Another way of saying it: Lots of spectacle and fluff, but most of the artistic industry fails to work on multiple levels the way it used to. It's like the industry thinks people want to pay for good looks. And people do, unfortunately, because they think that's what they want. But the joy isn't there anymore.

Games today also aren't as challenging, otherwise they wouldn't have such mainstream success (except maybe for the intense fighter games that requires two people to compete). I like hard games (but not too hard). They make me feel like I accomplished something. Easy games just make me feel like I've gone for the ride, and when it's over, I realize there weren't enough highs to make me want to go through it again.

But, unfortunately, like so many, I'll buy the next big game that comes out, looking for "that experience" again.

 

Another interview going into that direction : http://wired.com/news/technology/0,72093-0.html?tw=wn_technology_11

interesting is, that many, many agree that it's the publisher's mistake, but nothing will never ever change, because the publishers have all of the power and they won't give it away, no matter how crappy the games being made under their pressure are.

 

Here is what I think about the modern game development trends and I agree with much of what has been said here.

I remember when I first started gaming in the early 1980's. The warm glow of Atari, Intellivision, and ColecoVision was starting to fade. Avalon Hill was still around and they had many great boardgames like Squad Leader, Civilization, Diplomacy, and others some of which later made it into computer format. It was a good time to be a gamer. Dungeons&Dragons was in its 2nd Edition and the Commodore 64 was the new gamer's rage along with video game arcades. The C64 quickly became my gaming choice and many hours of enjoyment were had playing M.U.L.E, The Ultima series, Boulder Dash, 7 Cities of Gold, Sid Meier's Civilization and Pirates!; Jumpman, Maniac Mansion, Pool of Radiance, Impossible Mission ("Another visitor: stay awhile...STAY FOREVER Mwuh-hah-hah-hah!") and many other great games. I could not believe they achieved voice on just 64kb of memory, wrote such great games in Basic programming language but they did.

And, very important here, virtually every game released for the C64 was bug free. You knew when you bought a game it would play. Of course there were some big stinkers, games that were garbage, stuff rushed out the door to meet demand. However, even the stinkers were free of bugs. Most bugs encountered were screen freezes or loading problems, usually the result of that infernal 1541 Disk Drive. Even today, when I see the numbers "1541" I have an urge to destroy something. I well remember, unhappily mind you, Waiting 5 minutes for a game to load making loud knocking noises as the heads hit the piracy-protection blocks. There is no going back to those days for me.

The PC and Apple had some games but these computers were at that time mainly used for business or education purposes. These were the times of DOS 3.0 so GUI for the PC hadn't really taken off yet. In the late 1980's the Amiga came out and it had some great games like, "pant-pant", the Space Quest series featuring the 2 Guys from Andromeda. Fewer games for the Amiga were produced but they were still mainly bug-free.

Then came the Nintendo and all its spawns, the Playstations and so forth. Virtually all (I never ran across any bugs) of the game cartridges were bug-free. Some games were good, some bad but the quality was there. Games for Windows 3.1 and its incarnations came out and the games were also largely bug free and of good quality. Again, there were stinkers but the quality control was there.

Now the internet. This is the time software quality started to slip. Before the internet the games that shipped had been relentlessly playtested and put through severe quality control because there was no way except by gaming magazine articles to reach customers after the product shipped. To prevent huge customer dissatisfaction it was imperative to release bug-free games. Today, if you release a bugged game just announce to the online forum board "a patch is on the way" and hopefully the gamers will download the patch and be happy.

This is where the problem has arisen. Gamers aren't happy and are holding back buying games upon release. I am one of these people, having a policy in place NEVER buy a game upon release but wait 3 to 6 months for the bugs to get worked out and as a bonus maybe the price will drop too. Software companies have gotten it into their heads they can push unfinished product onto the masses covering their butts via online patching. Neverwinter Nights 2 recently shipped
and what awaited the gamer? AN 85mb PATCH. More patches in the future are required to fix all the bugs that keep popping up so I've read from the forums. The consensus is still out whether the game is great or should have stayed in the oven a little longer to bake properly. Maybe releasing unfinished games is a way to defeat piracy? I don't know why software companies are releasing unfinished and/or bug-ridden games.

My point is this: Atari released Temple of Elemental Evil in an unfinished state and they released Neverwinter Nights 2 in an unfinished state, banking on patches via the internet to hopefully patch up the game to playability. The problem with this is that there does not seem to be any more quality control. Clunky interface? Tedious gameplay? A game where a player spends more time clicking through menus than playing the game? "So what" says the publisher. "Rush the product out the door, punch your meal ticket and move on to something else and let the poor suckers left behind deal with the mess and patches and customer support."

I do think the internet is a great thing for games. It allows instant feedback and for gamers to meet in a forum to discuss things and hopefully make the game better or even provide improved versions of it as Circle of Eight is doing.

Unfortunately, the internet has also harmed games in that it is being used as a means to circumvent some of the development process, especially quality control and game testing. I am starting to come to the conclusion that those who test games these days sit in a pot-smoke filled room in their apartment downloading games or getting them by mail. They thank the developers for their free copy of the game then wait awhile then send an email saying, "Bugs? Nope none...cough...no bugs I found. Plays like a charm on my system." Then they go and collect their gametesting check for "testing" the game or sell the game on e-Bay for cash. Whoever is testing these games don't seem to be doing a good job or they just don't care.

That isn't to say all games coming out these days are bad! There have been some good ones AND bug-free but the trend is that games are put out requiring patches to make them playable. That is the trend and I don't like it. For dial-up folks or those with pay-by-the-minute connection rates it's a kick in the teeth having to download large patches to fix things, things which could have been caught within an hour of playtesting

It is a running joke among gamers that the first release of software is usually the Beta version. That is unacceptable and a disrespect to gamers who have paid their money for an unfinished product.

I'm also finding that games are requiring more and more disk space and enormous amounts of memory to play and even if they do play well or are fun, memory leaks or poor coding techniques cause them to crash. Is there some kind of unholy alliance between the hardware manufacturerers and the software industry stating that new games must require more memory and faster CPUs to run? Could C++ be the culprit? Is it the proper coding language for games? Sure it works great for operating systems but is it optimal for making games? Maybe the game programmers are lazy and let the defaults manage memory when they should be writing code to allocate and release memory efficiently. C64 games were written in Basic and there weren't these problems. Many remarkable games were made with just 64kb of memory. 64kb! Then again, there was only one hardware platform to code for not the cesspool menagerie of graphics cards, operating systems, chipsets, and other hardware proliferations we have today.

Finally, I don't think the trend is totally set by the developers. They are simply responding to a demand for games. Older gamers like myself, we've seen the princess rescued countless times, spent hours if not months of game time shooting down flying aliens-bubbles-warplanes-blimps-whatever, and moving all manner of things across a screen to win the prize, kill the meanie, or get to the next level. We've played Fantastic Football/Baseball/Hockey/Soccer/Tennis of multiple versions, chess and other boardgames out the wangdoodle. By Gumby, we've just about seen and played it all! We're a tough group of gamers to please. New games coming out can't be same-old-stuff or we won't buy it.

Perhaps that is why games always trend towards the younger gamer, the "Me see now me want now" type of player who wants to play NOW and doesn't have the experience to analyze a game too much and doesn't have the patience to wait and see if it's worth a hoot.

These days it takes a lot more to release a game than it did 15 years ago. Long gone are the days of Dan & Bill Bunten cobbling together a game in the basement for a single platform, or a Karl Buiter all on his own turning out a nifty game called Earth Orbit Station and getting it to market. Sure there are some small-time developers but these days the demand, as set by the gamers, is for great stereophonic sounds so you need a professional musician to compose music. That's money. You need to hire graphic artists and designers. More money. Web designers and staff to post news and updates. Again, more money. Then there are manuals to print, other staff to pay, managers and designers and a whole team of people which it takes today to make a game. Not cheap so it is understandable that if a company can cut corners they'll do it just like they do in the construction business. Anybody these days getting a house built you better be onsite watching every move they make. The developer will skimp on insulation, cut corners, use cheaper materials and do whatever he can to squeeze out the most cash knowing after a year or so you can't blame him for anything anymore.

Okay, that's it. Enough blather. Just one last thing: A few years ago I downloaded a C64 emulator and tried to play the old games again but the magic was gone. The graphics are dinky and dated compared to 16 million colors and 3-D rendering and imaging. The music tinny and plain compared to the stereo quality stuff today. What used to be WoW! is now just a yawn.