Dissatisfied with modern games?

40oz said:

Why would they try something different? People are buying their shit aren't they?

This is 100% true of course. They have no reason to do anything different if money making is their goal. (Protip: It is.) Making money is secondary to customer enjoyment if Activision is paying your bills. There are, of course, a few big companies out there who focus on total customer satisfaction in the gaming and software world (Google, Valve come to mind,) but if most businesses out there see a cash cow they will milk it until it becomes a corpse.

Are Google and Valve really the examples you want to use...?

In any case, can someone enlighten me please on just how Half-Life 1 revolutionized gaming? I vividly remember playing it on release, and, while a fun game, it offered nothing that wasn't seen before. Granted, its modding community kind of flipped around the world of FPS multiplayer (CS, TFC), but that's not Half-Life proper, really.

khartael said:

Are Google and Valve really the examples you want to use...?

In any case, can someone enlighten me please on just how Half-Life 1 revolutionized gaming? I vividly remember playing it on release, and, while a fun game, it offered nothing that wasn't seen before. Granted, its modding community kind of flipped around the world of FPS multiplayer (CS, TFC), but that's not Half-Life proper, really.

sure it is. if it wasn't for half-life, none of that would have seen the light of day.

Herp derp, I actually meant to post this in the "Best games of all time" thread.

Today's DC was made just for this thread:

I feel as though there's some kind of a standard that has developed over over the past couple years. As more games become knockoffs of each other, people will judge video games based on the enjoyment they got from their history of video game playing. While the standard gameplay that I've seen in many many games is totally stale, even without playing them, gamers are still buying "new" games that utilize the exact same core gameplay mechanics (that I find horrendously boring) and suddenly the game doesn't feel that stale any more. It's the same reassuring feeling of playing Doom 2 in a different megawad you've never played before. It's a new experience but nothing has really changed.

As Bank said, video game companies have no moral code to abide by and are not required to create video games just for certain types of people, so instead boil all gamers into some kinda melting pot by trying to create games that will appeal to everyone. Unfortunately, someone like me, is opposed to being included in that melting pot and would rather play games that are exclusive to my interests, even if the budget for said games was ridiculously low. But of course my kind is so few in number that doing so probably wouldn't be very beneficial for them. Hence my hatred of video games.

This is all a part of what I've been saying over the last couple days. If you really want to be blown away with something new, but yet you continue to pour your money towards things that are still all the same, then you are a part of the problem. If people who give up on the video game industry's direction occupied much of their target market, then they will have no choice but to try something new to find out what will interest us. But as far as things are looking, you are still submissively handing them your money regardless of your satisfaction.

khartael said:

Are Google and Valve really the examples you want to use...?

Yes, and I'll elaborate. Google and Valve make stuff that's either fun or useful first, THEN worry about making money off of it. On the Google end, I just have to point to all of the free utilities they release, that we all use on a daily basis. Google, as far as companies go, is basically bathing in money, which allows them and their employees to do whatever they want on the side. Whatever interests them. If something interests them, it will probably interest someone else. And if it interests someone else, chances are they can also sell ads. So working with their network of existing technologies they can create something like Google Earth without needing to worry about revenue, because revenue is something automatically built in to all anything they can put advertisements in. From all accounts I've read about Google internally, their employees are encouraged to create anything they would like to create, as long as you can put adwords on it. It's definitely a cool system.

Valve's business model allows for this too, because they have pioneered and have the most successful platform for digital distribution. What this means is that they can send out content for what amounts to basically free, while other game companies need to worry about the overhead and the risk of sending out a title that might flop. The way Valve does this is through hiring through the modding community, a group of people already used to making fun stuff for free. Take Alien Swarm as a fairly recent example. Alien Swarm was originally a UT mod, but Valve hired many of their devs to work on their other titles, yet encouraged them to work on their passion, Alien Swarm, in the meantime. The end product is an absolutely free game, essentially free to distribute via steam, that anyone can just hop on and download. You can also look at basically every other game that Valve has produced. Valve is a company chock full of modders, who are no strangers to free content and creating content just for the joy of someone else enjoying it, as I believe most people who have made a map on this forum can understand. All of the sponsored mods from the HL1 days are similar: TFC, DOD, CS, etc. Free additions which are officially supported by Valve as added content to the game you've already bought. Make no mistake about it: most other big game companies would lock this shit down the minute they purchased the modding team, and close the games off rather than supporting them so fully. You may not realize it at surface glance, but Valve does a lot more for the customer than they get credit for.

Last year they gave away portal for free.

kristus said:

Last year they gave away portal for free.

Also don't forget Alien Swarm which is still free.

Of course, Treyarch knows what it's talking about when it comes to disgruntled gamers. There has been plenty of mud slung in its direction recently over the current state of Black Ops on PlayStation 3 (and PC).

Best part about the article

Danarchy said:

I don't get the whole "safe" argument. Why would they try to go the safe route and keep making the same game and/or clones of other games?

Danarchy said:

My only excuse for not buying new games is that I already have a huge library of old games that are fun and I only buy new games when something new in one of my favorite IPs comes out.

...

Yeah I think that says all that needs to be said.

Edit: Also,

khartael said:

In any case, can someone enlighten me please on just how Half-Life 1 revolutionized gaming?

What FPS before that told such an in-depth story? And in such an immersive way? Half-life told an incredible story, without ever taking the focus from the eyes of the player. It mastered making you feel like you were part of the world. No FPS did that before Half-life.

That's what it did. Unfortunately it can hardly be said to have caused a revolution in that sense because so few games picked that up and ran with it.

A lot of modern FPS tried to imitate Half-Life's formula, but they ended up making their games becoming boring corridor shooters with ridiculous cutscenes with zero replay value. Even Half-Life 2 is guilty of this somewhat, though the cutscenes are actually good.

AirRaid said:

What FPS before that told such an in-depth story? And in such an immersive way? Half-life told an incredible story, without ever taking the focus from the eyes of the player. It mastered making you feel like you were part of the world. No FPS did that before Half-life.

System Shock did that a hundred times better than Half Life. And Strife of course, which had a much more interesting story than Half Life's Doom clone.

Treyarch is just mad because People Can Fly's Duty Calls (GOTY 2011 for sure) has been selling more copies than Black Ops.

Now I know why the latest CoD out of the cloning vats is generally worthless. Us players won't let them try something new, like fixing bugs and ironing out gameplay issues.

For shame.

kristus said:

System Shock did that a hundred times better than Half Life.

I'd try to argue that, but every time I've ever tried to play the original System Shock I get too irritated over it's interface and controls.

System Shock 2 on the other hand was fucking awesome. Half-Life had better shooting and some good levels, but System Shock 2 was just a better experience all around.. arhg, I think I might play through it again.

Mike.Reiner said:

I'd try to argue that, but every time I've ever tried to play the original System Shock I get too irritated over it's interface and controls.

I played system shock for about 20 minutes and then I quit because I couldn't figure out what the fuck I was supposed to be doing.

kristus said:

System Shock did that a hundred times better than Half Life. And Strife of course, which had a much more interesting story than Half Life's Doom clone.

kristus for president.

System Shock 2 was awesome. It did have a couple cutscenes that took the camera from the player, but they were mercifully short. Its biggest flaw was the same as Hexen: sometimes you'd get stuck wandering a mostly empty map for a day looking for the switch you missed. Half-Life, on the other hand, was busy pioneering the whole linear level idea that most gamers seem to like better. Bastards.

I still haven't played SS2. I've been through a good amount of the first one, but I could never get the second to work on any of my computers.

By the way, there's a project out there that completely revamped the control scheme for SS1 and allowed for higher resolutions and good mouse support. Still controls a bit funny, but it's very bearable.

DDFix is your friend.
http://timeslip.users.sourceforge.net/ddfix.html

read this, it's actually very easy to get system shock 2 running perfectly on new systems:

http://www.systemshock.org/index.php?topic=106.0

Membrain said:

By the way, there's a project out there that completely revamped the control scheme for SS1 and allowed for higher resolutions and good mouse support. Still controls a bit funny, but it's very bearable.

Indeed. "System Shock Portable" is worth a google.

khartael said:

In any case, can someone enlighten me please on just how Half-Life 1 revolutionized gaming?

I'll be cynical here. HL1 revolutionized gaming because it brought storytelling to the forefront. In other words it was the beginning of the end of quality games that focussed on the gameplay, not the story. Most of the things we hate in modern games started here, including the hyper-linear gameplay.

Regarding the article, what a load of bullshit. Playing safe is such an ingrained corporate mentality that such rationalizing by blaming others is just insulting.

kristus said:
System Shock did that a hundred times better than Half Life. And Strife of course, which had a much more interesting story than Half Life's Doom clone.

That's debatable. They are both pretty pulpy sci fi stories told in fairly original ways: in fact, I'd maybe even say half life did it a tiny bit more elegantly. Citadel station was a series of confusing mazes with audio logs that spat out exposition while Black Mesa actually looked like a functional place, which in it's self told the player about the nature of the situation.

Audio logs where a great idea, but I'm not sure I can say I'd play System Shock for fun, more for academic reasons. Give it points for being a head of it's time, but it is seriously clunky as hell to move around.

The thing I give half life props for is teaching FPS developers to use the games environment to tell the story (though the lesson developers took instead was "give you games a million scripted sequences").

Not really dissatisfied, more like "ice cold indifferent". Also because they -probably- are going to be like something I've already seen 1000 times before. Perversely, only Doom source ports, wads and mods manage to stay fresh and innovative, for some reason.

caco_killer said:

The basic premise of 99% of Doom wads is to kill all the monsters.

The basic premise of 99% of all games is to kill all the monsters. :P

caco_killer said:

Like what? I like Doom and all, but the mod community has done barely anything innovative. The basic premise of 99% of Doom wads is to kill all the monsters. The source ports have allowed them to make their levels bigger, prettier, and full of more monsters then ever before.

One could also say that, more importantly, the level design/layout is also more interesting, rather than just being bigger, prettier, and full of more monsters. But I suppose it is not more interesting for everyone.

I've notice ports have allowed modders to build maps that do what other games do. So now we have a Portal mod, invasion maps, CTF maps, team DM maps, mods that play like System Shock 2 minus the inventory (RTC-3057), Quake III maps, etc.

I remember being extremely impressed in 2006 with this wad Darkwolf made. I think it was the only map I ever played for Legacy that relied on heavy scripting and was actually fun.