I have a fair few friends who play alot more video games than me, and i always notice the similarities between all of them .. this similarity is that they always mainly play online gaming eg the multiplayer .. but they do not play the single player .. and they always play the newest installment of a series eg: every COD that comes out ... What ever happend to the video game community where it became just a place for people to play the same game style over hundreds of different games and then argue about them and just yell at eachother and act like idiots. It seems to me that modern gaming and design is becoming far to cliche' and same same .. what do you think (I know this post probably doesn't make much sense)

It still exists as I am one of those type of gamers.

I would love to have been around when the halo lan parties happened

They were fun .. lan support has been taken out of most games these days .. that like made so many games awesome, eg starcraft 1

>>1 isnt it the same with every game ever made? or, lets not stop at the games, let's talk about every possible media outlet ever (movies, books, ads, tv shows, etc...). it seems that all of the classic elements in each and every on of these things has inevitably been reduced in quality. sure, every once in a while 1 thing comes out that blows your mind and makes you re-appreciate one of these things again, but the severe lack of originality really depreciated the value of these things.to me though, this is almost inevitable. After a while there can be no real new ideas as they have all already been taken. To me though, games aren't as bad in this department. Sure, no one plays single player in a lot of these new games that are coming out, but that's because a lot of the times the single player campaign isnt anything special anyways, so they opt for some other means of entertainment, i.e online multiplayer. it's an almost proven fact that most games are better when you get to experience them with a friend, and so games nowadays opt to have the best mulitplayer around. Enter the repetitive online problem. almost every game, especially FPS games, is the same when you go online, but it's done because the formula has worked and has been proven to draw people in, it's the whole "don't fix what isn't broke" attitude. don't mistake my understanding of the problem as support for the direction the industry has taken, i really want some things to change for the better. a good step would to be to stop annualizing games and coming up with ridiculous time constraints for the dev teams to have the game ready. LET THEM PLAN, REVISE, AND WORK ON THE DAMN GAMES. I've found myself playing a lot of old school games recently, and there was one thing in particular that i noticed. the games are ugly as fuck.the technology sucked so much as back then thar there was nothing the development teams could do other than copy paste and maybe put some original art in the background. so what did they do to improve on this problem? THEY FOCUSED ON THE GAMEPLAY AND STORY TO MAKE UP FOR THEIR SHIT GRAPHICS. maybe all we need is a break from our obsession with how things look in games. sure, we're perfecting the visual technology, but what are we sacrificing to this end? don't get me wrong, i love a game set in beautiful environments with realistic looking characters ready to rape my eyeballs with their intesity, but as i stated before, old games made up for their shit graphics with gameplay and story, but it does not work when you make up for your shitty story and horrid gameplay with your breathtaking graphics. it's like looking at a lump of coal painted to look like a diamond from far away, then you pick it up and say "hey, that piece of shit jewelry store sold me a fucking lump of coal :@"

TL;DR get back to basics yo.

>>5

I refuse to read this until you format it. No matter how awesome I think the content is going to be.

Good points >>5 ... I think companies like Valve and Blizzard are the best at games .. they always remmeber that the story is still important but also while concentrating on story quality, they create awesome looking games ... Sure not every Dev can afford to spend 10 Years making a game like those studios can, and still have a fan base waiting to buy anything they bring out on their every whim ..

I do think the main decline is quality and origionality is a result of two things .. our want for things to come out quicker and our want for things to always look better than the things before ... if we were able to address these things, then maybe we might get some new stuff .. But as it is we cant have everything being awesome and original we must have some normality and same same or else we wouldnt have properly defined genres

The online show Extra Credits on Penny arcade makes some great points about this and the dev cycle.

>>5

Holy Batman, Great Wall Of Text!!!!

>>6 god dammit aya. fine

isnt it the same with every game ever made? or, lets not stop at the games, let's talk about every possible media outlet ever (movies, books, ads, tv shows, etc...). it seems that all of the classic elements in each and every on of these things has inevitably been reduced in quality. sure, every once in a while 1 thing comes out that blows your mind and makes you re-appreciate one of these things again, but the severe lack of originality really depreciated the value of these things.to me though, this is almost inevitable. After a while there can be no real new ideas as they have all already been taken.

To me though, games aren't as bad in this department. Sure, no one plays single player in a lot of these new games that are coming out, but that's because a lot of the times the single player campaign isnt anything special anyways, so they opt for some other means of entertainment, i.e online multiplayer. it's an almost proven fact that most games are better when you get to experience them with a friend, and so games nowadays opt to have the best mulitplayer around. Enter the repetitive online problem. almost every game, especially FPS games, is the same when you go online, but it's done because the formula has worked and has been proven to draw people in, it's the whole "don't fix what isn't broke" attitude. don't mistake my understanding of the problem as support for the direction the industry has taken, i really want some things to change for the better. a good step would to be to stop annualizing games and coming up with ridiculous time constraints for the dev teams to have the game ready. LET THEM PLAN, REVISE, AND WORK ON THE DAMN GAMES.

I've found myself playing a lot of old school games recently, and there was one thing in particular that i noticed. the games are ugly as fuck.the technology sucked so much as back then that there was nothing the development teams could do other than copy paste and maybe put some original art in the background. so what did they do to improve on this problem? THEY FOCUSED ON THE GAMEPLAY AND STORY TO MAKE UP FOR THEIR SHIT GRAPHICS.

Maybe all we need is a break from our obsession with how things look in games. sure, we're perfecting the visual technology, but what are we sacrificing to this end? don't get me wrong, i love a game set in beautiful environments with realistic looking characters ready to rape my eyeballs with their intesity, but as i stated before, old games made up for their shit graphics with gameplay and story, but it does not work when you make up for your shitty story and horrid gameplay with your breathtaking graphics. it's like looking at a lump of coal painted to look like a diamond from far away, then you pick it up and say "hey, that piece of shit jewelry store sold me a fucking lump of coal :@"

TL;DR get back to basics yo.

There. Reformatted and 1 spelling error corrected for the sake of Aya and people that prefer to read paragraphs over walls of text.

>>9

That was beautiful. It was a glorious rant/speech on the state of gaming and media today.

I feel like the time I spent reading it was worth it, many fold.

>>10 thank you. that means a lot. i'll go put it on my wall next to where i will keep my high school and college diplomas (not sarcastic, but meant to be funny)

Agreed, hit the nail on the head there, Kumo.

Incidentally, have any of you watched the Sequelitis series done by Egoraptor? So far he only has three videos out (two of which are on Castlevania, the other one on Megaman) and they do a good analysis on game design practices. Like you pointed out, he talks about how games were constrained to portraying content through something other than aesthetics back then (i.e. gameplay, story).

Take Cave Story for example. It was made not a long time ago, but it had the aesthetics (graphics and sound) of a game from the 8-bit era. Everything was so simplified, even the dialogue - there was no point where you had to wade through ten paragraphs of exposition just to get a point across, it was enough with the very basic dialogue between characters, and the events that took place. I find it's an example of a bare-bones game done right.

For reference:
Sequelitis 1 (Castlevania 1 vs 2)
Sequelitis 2 (Megaman Classic vs X)

Cave Story thread, complete with inadequate OP.

>>13 i really enjoyed both of those videos. took forever. but they were amazing