Game development, is it arse about elbow ?
- Thread starter Kutter
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Video games used to be a niche market, for geeky types.
Its now a mass market and has to appeal to the masses, and most aren't geeky types.
It's always been mass market. Super Mario Bros in 1985 sold 40 million copies.
(Which as far as I can tell is the second best selling game of all time, Wii Sports is number 1)
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Sorry it was late when i posted, what i kind of meant was that games arent as innovative as they were say 10 years ago. Minecraft, LBP and a few others are fantastic and the kind of direction games programmers should be going. Trying their best to produce new and inventive games.
Sadly though most companys just churnout the same old crap, or make their games worse with each sequel.
Sadly though most companys just churnout the same old crap, or make their games worse with each sequel.
That's to be expected, the development costs of making a game today are massive. 20 years ago, a kid would crunch in his bedroom for 2 weeks and make a mass market title. These days it costs upwards of $10 million to make a title. The bedroom scene is still alive. In the heyday of PC gaming, a title with 100,000 sales would be profitable - that's about $1,000,000 back to the developer, barely enough to pay the salary of a team of 10 for 2 years.
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What would be the cost if they didn't include celebrity voiceovers and overdone bloom?
Thing is you're talking about 2 different markets here
The OP is complaining about the decline of games that are very targeted in their market. That appeal to a very specific fanbase with very specific needs and wants.
Pacman and Mario brothers were never that type of game. They were mass market everybody-pick-up-and-play console games. This type of game is obviously not in decline.
The type of game in decline is games that appeal to a very specific market. Take the new battlefield game for example.They are trying to make it appeal to as many people as possible, by making a balance between a casual game, and a hardcore one for the fans that just want a BF2 re make with the new engine.
A BF2 remake with nothing changed and a new engine would undoubtedly sell, but not nearly enough to cover the costs of making such an epic game. In generations gone by, it was much cheaper and easier to make games like this, so it didn't matter that they didn't sell very well.
Take battlefield 1942, between its release in Sept 2002 and March 2004 it had sold 3 million copies. That's over a period of 18 months, it sold 3 million units.
In comparison, Black Ops sold 5.6 million units, in its first 24 hours !
producing games like 1942 that only appealed to a niche market was fine when games development was cheap. But the bar has been pushed so high now, that its just not viable to produce games anymore than only sell that small amount of units.
New Super mario brothers on the wiii for example, sold over 21 million copies between its realse in Nov2009 and april 2011, a similar comparable 18 month period to Battlefield 1942.
And even if games like Battlefield 3, could be viable by producing a game that only appears to the hardcore fan base and make a profit from selling - say 5 million copies over 18 months. Why shouldn't they alter the game to one that appeals to the mass market, and instead of selling 5 million copies, sells 20 million across the various platforms like COD ?
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a majority of consumers want easy and linear games that is why devs make them. maybe you don't like it, as do i, but unfortunately we have to face the fact that we are a minority. I remember a time when you died in a game - you died, no respawns or endless continues.
I disagree actually, I think the 'hand-holding' in modern games is actually a pretty good thing. Stuff like objective markers don't really damage the game, they just mean you spend less time aimlessly wandering around.
Take Unreal for example, I love the game, but it has pretty massive levels and with nothing to guide you it is easy to get lost. It took me months to complete.
Now compare to modern shooters, most of the time you get a clear objective and radar icon or whatever showing how to get there. It just saves a lot of frustration and wasted time.
Basically modern games are more streamlined in terms of user interaction and build up the setting via cutscenes. I don't really have a problem with that, it makes it easier to keep everyone on board with the story.
Take Unreal for example, I love the game, but it has pretty massive levels and with nothing to guide you it is easy to get lost. It took me months to complete.
Now compare to modern shooters, most of the time you get a clear objective and radar icon or whatever showing how to get there. It just saves a lot of frustration and wasted time.
Basically modern games are more streamlined in terms of user interaction and build up the setting via cutscenes. I don't really have a problem with that, it makes it easier to keep everyone on board with the story.
Soldato
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To be fair... 1942 was the first big title from a relatively unknown company, with no history behind it's franchise, and I don't remember it being pushed much in way of advertising. It did well through word of mouth.
BO has a massive list of games in the same franchise before it, produced by the biggest publisher, and massively pushed with advertising. I'm not sure how comparing their sales shows anything, they're different games from different generations.
Give an option to disable it then? Some of us don't mind exploration or a slower pace, and don't feel the need to race through a game in 5 hours flat. Not that most modern games with a quest compass are that big anyway...
Are we really that stupid that we need to be hand-held down a corridor-esque path?
If they're striving to be movie-like, at least hire some decent writers. Oh, and fix the facial animations - Shepard's smile in Mass Effect wasn't mocked as "rape face" for nothing.
Max Payne did the film-noir thing well, but it didn't take itself too seriously - there was decent humour to stop it getting too tedious.
Metal Gear Solid 4 went completely off the deep end and disappeared into its own rectum with the ridiculously long cutscene-based exposition. One of them is 90 minutes long, and you can put the pad down for about half the "game" in total. At one point Otacon makes a lame 'joke' about *disc swapping*. I mean seriously, what the hell was Kojima smoking? Just as well I only tried it on a friend's PS3...
Caporegime
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I would give you that if many of the games that don't lead you down a path actually required any intelligence. Most simply require a process of elimination
Go to place A, quest solved? If no try somewhere else
Go to place B, quest solved? If no try somewhere else
Go to place C, quest solved? Well done, quest solved.
In that situation I'd rather just be told to go to place C and not have to deal with mindless elimination.
A prime example is The Witcher, one of my quests said something like "I need to spend more time with Shani" I then spent ages talking to her at work, at home, on the trip to work but nothing happened. Checked an FAQ and found out that I couldn't progress the quest at that stage....so why the **** didn't the game just tell me that rather than leading me on for an hour?
Seems to me that what the market needs is more middleware.
A standardised engine with off-the-shelf graphics and models that companies can buy and use to make games much more quickly.
Doing everything in-house and each company having their own competing engine and art assets is what's costing so much money.
Soldato
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I get this between Oblivion and Morrowind.
For a few of the quests in Morrowind I spend ages walking around trying to find something from just the notes in my journal. I loved the addition of the quest marker in Oblivion for the most part. Some of the time it goes too far showing you where things that you should actually have to look and giving it away, but for the most part it's a good addition for that type of game.
Lots of companies already licence engines to other companies, but if I started seeing common models in games that would really put me off.
It's annoying to see the same models and environments in the same game too much, but across several games....
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I'm fine with a general location being given. Say, Vault 13 for example. What I don't like is the Dragon Age 2 type system when the environment is small (a couple of minutes at most to get between the ~5 districts of Kirkwall).
Fallout would be very short if you were led by the nose to where the water chip is.
Haven't played that far so I couldn't comment there. Was that the Enhanced Edition out of interest? It sounds more like a bug to me.
I agree having the option to disable it would be good.
Having an objective marker doesn't have to mean the game is linear. Look at say Fallout 3, that has a map, and objective markers, but it isn't a linear game (in relative terms compared to other games - you can of course make a case for almost any singleplayer, storydriven game being 'linear').
Even if you don't look at the FPS/RPG hybrids, how about something like Far Cry, that is a great example of a game that is not about corridor-esque paths, you can approach objectives via different routes/methods. Yet you still have an objective marker so you don't get completely lost and frustrated.
Max Payne is a great game with good humour as you say (followed up in the sequel - police station level is pure genius with all the DNF in jokes). But it is also a very linear game, I don't see how you can complain about corridor-esque paths and then big up MP
Max Payne is a great game with good humour as you say (followed up in the sequel - police station level is pure genius with all the DNF in jokes). But it is also a very linear game, I don't see how you can complain about corridor-esque paths and then big up MP
I was referring to cutscenes\scripting there, and I don't think MP was marketed as an RPG
It also didn't have a map\compass, not that it needed one given the confined interior environments.I mentioned MGS4 immediately afterwards to contrast with - badly paced and the cutscenes consisted mostly of infodumps aimed at Snake, or action sequences where he should have been controllable (eg the Gekkos early on). Then again I probably should have expected that after MGS2 and Twin Snakes
While we're on gameplay, the sniping sequences in Max Payne 2 were pretty good for the time
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To be fair... 1942 was the first big title from a relatively unknown company, with no history behind it's franchise, and I don't remember it being pushed much in way of advertising. It did well through word of mouth.
BO has a massive list of games in the same franchise before it, produced by the biggest publisher, and massively pushed with advertising. I'm not sure how comparing their sales shows anything, they're different games from different generations.
even BF2 had only sold 2.2 million copies between its release in July 2005 and July 2006.
Again 2.2 million units over 12 months. COD sold 5.6 million units in its first 24 hours.
Sales wise, COD is just in another league. You can't blame DICE for wanting those kind of sales to get the repayment on all the development put into frostbite 2.
If DICE want a franchise like this, the won't get it by remaking games like BF2 but just with prettier graphics which is what some fans (and even some people on here have said in the BF3 thread) would be "just fine"
For those that loved BF2, the new battlefield play 4 free should be interesting. From the footage i've seen it looks to have all the gameplay appeal of the original, if you can stand microtransactions that is.
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Lots of companies already licence engines to other companies, but if I started seeing common models in games that would really put me off.
It's annoying to see the same models and environments in the same game too much, but across several games....
Yeah models you probably couldn't re-use much, unless it's something generic like a car or a helicopter. You probably wouldn't even notice they were being re-used.
But I'm sure there's lots of scope for re-using textures/ buying off-the-shelf textures.