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Well as a long term fan of gaming i have played and witnessed the progression of the gaming market, and now in 2009 i am here to witness its degradation.

Most people complain about the unhealthy hunger for graphical prowess in the gaming market, although that’s not what bothers me. Personally my main issue is the type of games being released.

Shooting Games : Noo not another shooter. Nowadays nearly every game released is a shooting game; this is not surprising; as shooting games cost little to make and are enjoyed by the mass's. Personally i dont mind shooting games, they are a solid genre, but making 9/10 games released a shooter demeans the market.

Lets have more strategy and puzzle games. Even the fighting genre is being decimated, Kratos, we can get through this....please

But strategy puzzle arnt considered cool. So yes...
i agree with you some what , but the 90% of others probably wont.

The market is based on whatever makes the most money. Shooters sell the best, so...

I wish there were smarter games out there, too, but as Luna said, they aren't "cool", and don't appeal to the mindless masses.

Darth wrote:Well as a long term fan of gaming i have played and witnessed the progression of the gaming market, and now in 2009 i am here to witness its degradation.

Most people complain about the unhealthy hunger for graphical prowess in the gaming market, although that’s not what bothers me. Personally my main issue is the type of games being released.

Shooting Games : Noo not another shooter. Nowadays nearly every game released is a shooting game; this is not surprising; as shooting games cost little to make and are enjoyed by the mass's. Personally i dont mind shooting games, they are a solid genre, but making 9/10 games released a shooter demeans the market.

Lets have more strategy and puzzle games. Even the fighting genre is being decimated, Kratos, we can get through this....please

It's because video games used to be something younger people played, but those younger people are all adults now and those that are still 'hardcore' gamers would have grown up with the first FPS games, like Wolfenstein, Doom, Quake, and Duke Nukem 3D. Keep in mind that FPS players are graphics-mad because in first person view, you should be able to see a lot of detail. If you zoom right in on DoW II you can still see slightly blurred detail, but in FPS games, everything has to be clearly defined since you're so close to it all the time.

Also, FPS games are a lot more competitive due to the higher reflex times needed and the 'jump in and play' style of multiplayer. I'll always like FPS games, just not this boring generic 'kill the terrorists' or 'kill the Russians' genre. I like FPS games like Halo, which are more fun for the single-player, and Darkwatch, which is a seriously underrated and obscure game. Steampunk Wild West with a vampire cowboy? Yes please.

"It's because video games used to be something younger people played, but those younger people are all adults now and those that are still 'hardcore' gamers would have grown up with the first FPS games"

Yes and i was one of them. However i also enjoyed Starcraft, Civ and Thief. It is new additions to the gaming market that hunger for these shooting games.

"Also, FPS games are a lot more competitive due to the higher reflex times"

Reflex times? I personally never feel victorious from pressing the left click button faster than my opponents, i would feel success from outsmarting them. If i wanted to be competitive on testing my human instincts i would go shooting in the real world, or play rugby.

Dont get me wrong, i enjoy shooting games. But they are inferior in many ways and thier domination of the market is aggrivating.

Remember that FPS games are becoming more widespread on consoles to to Xbox Live and Playstation Network. It's harder to control a console FPS, and you have to practice a lot to play competitively.

However, I will always be a PC man. (By the way, there's a 'quote' button if you want to quote what people say)

There's always Nintendo and handhelds. Nowhere near as many first person shooters available on those consoles and usually has pretty nifty and innovative features. And if you like puzzle and strategy games they have a few of those IIRC.

As for the PC, just gotta wait for Blizzard's Starcraft 2 and Diablo 3 imo. Sucks that it takes forever for the really good games to come out; I can only imagine when Half Life 3 will go gold.

I bet you my life savings that Starcraft II will never be released and Diablo III will have no GRIMDARK whatsoever.

They just pushed back Starcraft II. Why? It's in the beta stage, it's virtually finished. The same thing happened with Starcraft: Ghost.

"We're pushing it back due to technical difficulties."
"More techincal difficulties people, hang on."
"Sorry, looks too buggy, can't fix it, let's make more WoW games instead."

Retards.

If the fact that I don't play video games means anything, then yes video games are going down down down, whereas computer games seem to be following the random chaos theory of creation and creativity.

Gotta love the old buggering tower some times .

"Note"
Watching video games is like watching cable without the commercials... which I guess it better than nothing? Man... cable sucks too though .

I like platformers. And racing games where you shoot missiles and magic spells. And RTSs.

Cheese Elemental wrote:I bet you my life savings that Starcraft II will never be released and Diablo III will have no GRIMDARK whatsoever.

They just pushed back Starcraft II. Why? It's in the beta stage, it's virtually finished. The same thing happened with Starcraft: Ghost.

"We're pushing it back due to technical difficulties."
"More techincal difficulties people, hang on."
"Sorry, looks too buggy, can't fix it, let's make more WoW games instead."

Retards.

This comment is sadly qft and full of win. I used to be one of the blizzard fanboys trumpeting "Well of COURSE the game takes forever for release but when it comes out it'll be really good!" for WC3 and Diablo 2. Same with WOTLK for WoW and I found that disappointing. Blizzard used up their good fortune with me 2 years ago when SC2 was delayed yet again....and again...

I have been saying this sort of thing for awhile...

since '03!

games have simply become flashier, or, nothing but a deathmatch with a singleplayer or co-op tacked on as afterthought...

Although I like games to look great, I don't think that a fantastic graphics engine makes up for a game you can complete in an afternoon or so.

A lot of FPS games are like this, and when that is combined with a) little to no effort at a story or characters you can get into and b) a hefty price tag, I long for the days of yore when you could pick up a game which was a handful of pixels and an enjoyable story you could play for days and days (or even longer).

Having said that, I do enjoy Halo 3... nice graphics, a pretty interesting story and great online multiplayer (I love their match making, so much better to put people of simmilar skill together than other games where you go in on your first match and get slaughtered by people who are on their 2nd or 3rd way through the rank system *coughCoD4cough*).

I can even play the main Halo game with my GF, who is not an FPS player by any means, because it can be relatively gentle as far as pacing etc goes, so we can both have fun on it.

Though we both more often than not will play a game together which is far more story or thought driven, such as RPG's, point and clicks, puzzle games etc...

There's a few more arty, experimental, and introverted games that are both fascinating and revealing. Examples: The Graveyard, and The Path, both available on Steam for modest prices, and free demos.

These two are damned creepy, the latter especially. Macabre, but they play on your imagination and work off that a lot.

Well, also my 2 pence about the FPS genre in general, mainly about how gak it is becoming. I detest casual gaming, like a proverbial cancer rotting away at all the games I've grinded and slaved over for that undeniable satisfaction you can get from a shiny new badge, or piece of pixelated kit. Consoles like the Wii work for the Casual audience only, and apart from the image they're now trying to purport, it's still too casual. It degrades the quality of the other games made by the same developers who are tapping into the crowd that never played Video Games before. If the next CoD turns out how I think it will, I'm selling it.

sA

Infinity ward needs to take CoD back towards the CoD2 style.

Long and involving missions, checkpoints that are NOT preset, and add a decent co-op.

We also need to do away with Stupid-hard difficulties, where things are harder simply because you have less health or the enimies spam more grenades than usual. We need the difficulty raised by switching out or adding objectives, and more intelligent AI, not the abstract gak we've got now!

Illeix wrote:Infinity ward needs to take CoD back towards the CoD2 style.

Long and involving missions, checkpoints that are NOT preset, and add a decent co-op.

We also need to do away with Stupid-hard difficulties, where things are harder simply because you have less health or the enimies spam more grenades than usual. We need the difficulty raised by switching out or adding objectives, and more intelligent AI, not the abstract gak we've got now!

Amen to that. CoD 3 is awesome, even if it is fairly short (it only took me eight hours on hard). The acting is really good.

Don't you worry Cheese, I am currently writing a position paper/essay/fancy written thing on this very subject. Then I hope to reduce the sucktitude of our predicament with it.

There are gems in between, or diamonds in the rough. Problem is that much like movies, other factors meddle with the product and leave you with something horrible. Or things are taken too far, like with Red Alert 3, which took zany and corny acting to a horrible new level.

Personally, I don't like the new emphasis on nickel and diming people with "just a little more" downloadable content. It's comparable to getting someone hooked on a drug and charging them "less" for little bits at a time.

I hate certain parts of CoD games though. Infinite enemy spawn points and enemies that take severl body shots from a Garand to down, said enemies continuing to shoot you when you've clearly plugged them with a K98 in the chest in an infinite spawn area, having to rush an objective and hope you don't get enemies spawned on you that'll kill you instantly because they won't stop coming out of that hole in the wall around the corner until your standing on some pre-ordained spot and killed all of them at once.

Most of my issues comes from the infinite spawn points. I must have killed a few thousand Nazis myself on the damned Reichstag mission in Word at War.

I, for one, don't mind the video game companies spamming FPS's with the same MO, re-skinned graphics, re-skinned weapons, re-skinned plots.

How can you not like playing the same stuff over again w/little to no innovation?

BrookM wrote:There are gems in between, or diamonds in the rough. Problem is that much like movies, other factors meddle with the product and leave you with something horrible. Or things are taken too far, like with Red Alert 3, which took zany and corny acting to a horrible new level.

I agree! As someone else mentioned, there are games and designers out there putting out some interesting stuff but it is sadly, not like the old days. You can't just sit all alone on your Commodore 64, Apple IIe or IBM and hammer out code for the next great game (at least not until there exists some mighty powerful software tools). It would just take too long and the technology might pass you by while you fine-tune it.

Systems are beefier and people expect a certain sheen. Not necessarily Hideo Kojima level sheen but better than NES or Genesis if you get my meaning.

Gaming has become big business. Really big business, with all of its bonuses and pitfalls because they're (big business) the only ones outside of Japan that can produce games with any kind of speed to the level that us jaded gamers demand.

Of course, I understand in Japan there exists many one-off interesting game experiments. Or is this disappearing in Japan as well? I know I had a modded PS1 and used to get quite a bit of oddball games out of Japan. Some were actually kind of good although I could never tell what was being said. Anyway, I digress.

It is bittersweet. Some games are incredible but most are meh at best and puzzlers and strategy have all but faded away. Everything has to be an 'experience' now.

Railguns wrote:Personally, I don't like the new emphasis on nickel and diming people...

Yeah I agree with this wholeheartedly. This is a bad trend that is getting worse, fast.

I play tournament halo 3 and alot of large games of call of duty (4) so my opinions are pretty biased

allthough, picked up a game a few weeks back (Infinite Undiscovery) and have been amused by it, not my usual sort of game, but very much like FF series (funnily enough its made by Square enix)
Only problem was its too quick to finish, allthough the story aint bad.

I'm not sure there has ever been that much variety in gaming. I grew up in gaming in the mid 90s and every other game was a platformer, the rest were side scrolling shooters or top down shooters. There was the odd rpg and very rarely we got an adventure game.

Gaming isn't very adventurous because developing a new style of game means longer development, with more unknowns. That means risk and risk is bad in business. It's a shame but there's stuff all we can do about it.

I don't think games are going downhill, I just think we as gamers are expecting more and more as the technology that makes them get better. What most game creators don't seem to understand that their game might be the flashy and high tech one out there, with superb graphics and rendering ... but if the storyline and game play is rubbish they will simply crash.and burn.

Take Starcraft for example, graphics weren't great, but its story driven campaign and gameplay was simply amazing that it is still a cult classic and one of my personal favourites even now.

Final Fantasy 7 seriously screwed up the ending of their game, but it is still heralded as an all time great ... why? ... because of excellent gameplay and a very good storyline.

Yes the graphics help, but its the actual gameplay that makes a game good. I don't think the gaming industry has changed in that sense from years ago compared to now. We still have excellent games as well as rubbish ones, just like we did years ago, its still the same, only the quality of graphics is changing.

I'm so glad to see that someone else thinks the same as I do. I'm bored of first person shooters. I've had my fill of them now and want to play something different. I can see the attraction, but I just can't see the attraction of playing yet another and another and another. Improving the graphics does not make the experience significantly better for me. I've been playing computer games since the very early eighties and have seen them grow from the blocky tennis tv game (whose name I have momentarily forgotten, but you know the one I mean) to the almost cinematically perfect latest offerings, which means I feel more than able to comment on the current place of computer games. GIVE US MORE VARIETY IN NEW RELEASES! If you want my money, do something innovative or interesting to earn it. It took me effort to get it into my bank account, so don't think you can get at it by just releasing another clone!

End of rant.

Darth wrote:
Lets have more strategy and puzzle games.

You've just gotta look in the right places:

http://www.paradoxplaza.com (Hearts of Iron 3 just released, probably the best WW2 simulation yet)
http://www.shrapnelgames.com

and to a lesser extent:
http://www.matrixgames.com/
http://www.strategyfirst.com/en/

Shooters are a popular choice for developers because they are relatively easy to do (in some ways) and work well as competitive multi-player titles on network.

Racing and fighting games have a lot of trouble on networks due to latency.

It's astonishing the number of games being released now which are merely updates of early 1980s ideas with improved graphics.

I checked out Paradox interactive. HoI3 looks tasty, but Mount & Blade?!

Sorry, but if you look at the screenshots, most of the landscape looks just ripped out of Oblivion. Even the buildings. Hmmm.

sA

Batman Arkham Asylum, you are my highest hope for this year. Not even Modern Warfare 2 is doing it for me.

I haven't played it yet: thoughts?

No, MW2 is off my Pre-Order list on Amazon. I'm sick of it. I'd prefer just to hit up GRAW2 or something, something that feels real to me. Watching the fall of shot is what it's all about.

sA