Game development, is it arse about elbow ?

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So ive been reading the posts about SWG and TOR and also i happened to DL the demo of Black OP's on PS3.

So Back in the mists of time we had UO, where basically you got dropped in a world and you made your own entertainment. No hand holding, no quests, everything was out to kill you.

Now we have progressed to TOR, where you have to follow a story and most things are simplified.

Now COD BO, what can i say, cutscene, bit of shooting, cutscene, bit of shooting, etc etc.

Shouldn't things be the other way round, game development progressing from the hand holding linear games to the games we used to have. Games that make you think, games that don't drag you along for the ride, but where you dictate what you feel like doing ?

If your fairly young, you might not have experienced the likes of UO and Elite where there was complete freedom, which is a shame because the way things are going games might never be like that again.
 
not really i was commenting on games development in general, look at Project igi and how much freedom you had in that. If you compare COD 4 with the BO's one, its a world of difference.
 
doofski said:
So ive been reading the posts about SWG and TOR and also i happened to DL the demo of Black OP's on PS3.

So Back in the mists of time we had UO, where basically you got dropped in a world and you made your own entertainment. No hand holding, no quests, everything was out to kill you.

Now we have progressed to TOR, where you have to follow a story and most things are simplified.

Now COD BO, what can i say, cutscene, bit of shooting, cutscene, bit of shooting, etc etc.

Shouldn't things be the other way round, game development progressing from the hand holding linear games to the games we used to have. Games that make you think, games that don't drag you along for the ride, but where you dictate what you feel like doing ?

If your fairly young, you might not have experienced the likes of UO and Elite where there was complete freedom, which is a shame because the way things are going games might never be like that again.
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stop using **** games like black ops for your reference point?



why not try x3 tc.


not really i was commenting on games development in general, look at Project igi and how much freedom you had in that. If you compare COD 4 with the BO's one, its a world of difference.
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yeah it's almost as if they're aimed at completely different markets isn't it??


people in not all liking the same thing shocker.
 
There's still plenty of open world do what you want games, and there have always been linear story driven titles. The ratio might have changed, but there's always other titles you can play if you don't want linear titles... Comparing completely different genres doesn't help either. Not every game needs to be open world and give entire freedom.

The two biggest factors that have changed development is cost and profit. Certain types of games cost a lot of money to produce compared to others. From a business point of view spending years making a massive open world at enormous cost, and selling less than a linear cheap to produce game isn't a viable option for a lot of companies.

That said... even if it was, people will find something to bitch about in games regardless of what's developed.
 
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What a ridiculous post :confused:

what about games like Little Big Planet? There are still games that offer almost complete freedom to do what you want with the tools the devs provide.

There will always be linear and non linear games because they both offer different experiences.
 
Games are a fraction of what they once were. Before dev's would try to recreate lots of cool things in games.

Raven Shield for instance, you can open doors! Crazy hey! Not just open and shut but anywhere from a tiny crack to completely open.

Early COD's, different gun fireing modes, gone!


It's probably not the dev's fault though, such small time scales to get a game done, don't have time for making cool and useful, thoughtful features.
 
I do believe one factor contributing to the "derp" factor is the complexity of game design nowadays.

ALTHOUGH... saying that...

CONSOLES DO NOT HELP (Saying that, the PS3 is getting some very good exclusives now devs have learned how to develop for the thing).

Supreme Commander/Forged alliance were awesome games, pushed the PC to its limits and it showed.

Supreme Commander 2 on the other hand was WAY more restrictive, I can only assume because the consoles could not handle the processing power which meant unit/map sizes were nerfed.

Why else would you nerf a great game?

Sequels should be better than their originals, take what was good and improve upon it.

Supreme Commander 2 did not standup to Total Anihilation in my opinion.

Has Hank_Marvin said though, time restraints do not help.

The best games ever made were made in a time when passion was put into games when the developers believed in what they were doing and publishers left them to it. Now, (for AAA games anyway) it is all very "Hollywood" with the **** fest which comes with it both political and financial. Back in the day, when games were not considered such big business, it was better as not soo many greedy people around.

In a way, gaming as become a victim of its own success. To appeal to the masses and not just "geeks", they had to make the games more "Hollywood" too which has not helped. Nowadays, you have games designed for gamers, and games designed for people who play games, two very different markets. The truth is, "Gamers" is a dirty word to the big publishers so it is upto the Indies and few bigger "gamers" studios to produce the games us gamers want to play.

Did Chris Taylor want to release Supreme Commander 2 on a console, I very much doubt it, THQ would have insisted upon it and from there on in, the game was never going to be as good as its predecessor.

Indie development is where it is at for two reasons, PASSION AND FREEDOM.

Frozen Synapse and Minecraft are two examples.

Magnificent games although if in the hands of a big publisher, imagine what would happen?

Oh, did I forget Valve and Tripwire Interactive, THEY ROCK. And guess what, they publish themselves so do whatever they want.

Imagine Bobby Kottick in the dev meeting for TF2..

Gabe: "Hi Bobby. Yes, were going to be supporting this for over 5 years with constant updates, over a hundred of them"
Kottick: "Wow, think of all the money"
Gabe: "No Bobby, they will be free"
Kottick: Has a heart attack and dies - HOORAY

Kottick exemplifies the very reason of the ops post.

GREED.
 
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They're not ALL gone. Still plenty of selection out there :)

I deffinately see what you mean though!!

I tend to avoid the 'on-rails' games. I hated Resistance (PS3) that was raved about as I felt like I was just watching it happen.

Final Fantasy is a perfect example. I Dispise the recent restricted ones (X, X2, XIII).

However some games are getting ever and ever larger! GTA, Elder Scrolls etc and many let you do whatever you want - LBP, garry's mod etc.

It goes both way.
 
Minecraft - You're dropped near naked in the world. Almost everything wants to hurt you. You'll die at night if you don't make a shelter in time...
 
The reason games are so popular nowadays is because they're filling that "cinematic experience" gap that films sit in. People can engage with that experience far more easily, and it's so much simpler to extract the fun out of a game without having to pour time and effort into it. Some people really do just want a game they can where they can pick it up, blast away for half an hour and then put down again.

The older sort of games you described are what gave games that geeky stigma, because to make the most of them you had to spend a lot of time playing it, therefore you naturally attract kids/men with loads of spare time sitting around in their basements/bedrooms.

It's a shame, because I think they can be so much more, but in most people's lives games are not a priority. For them there's simply no benefit to plugging 100+ hours into a video game.
 
The reason games are so popular nowadays is because they're filling that "cinematic experience" gap that films sit in.
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Videogames were popular in the early eighties too, but were certainly not cinematic then. You had openworld games and tightly focussed games then. Elite/Mercenary were open Horace goes Skiing, not so much.
 
sldsmkd said:
Videogames were popular in the early eighties too, but were certainly not cinematic then.
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You can't seriously be stating that the popularity of video games in the 80s compares to the market today? Compared to the level of popularity video games have reached in recent years, the industry was catering for a tiny niche.
 
Shiny graphics and cutscenes are more marketable, these cost additional moolah, so the entire process is distorted from the beginning. A small minority of publishers have cornered the videogame market, so it will only get worse. The need to have everything fit the console platform doesn't help either (for a start, a controller has less buttons and mobility v a keyboard\mouse).

It wouldn't surprise me if certain games introduced a button to skip forward to the next story sequence :p Heavy Rain was pretty much a QTE cinematic.
 
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