problem with gaming industry (current gen)

Post Reply New Topic

the current generation (since late 2006, wii/ps3/xbox360) is probably one of the most disappointing generations.

i found the ps2/gamecube/xbox generation far better because it had a larger variety of titles.

where did this generation go wrong?

the wii's, while innovative, motion sensing technology requirements created an obligation to use motion controls and half of games did not need that. couple that with severe hardware limitations and that was why developersdid not make 3rd party titles for the wii. the wii did appeal to new demographics, but that was a fad and it faded.

with the ps3 and xbox, there was a greater problem.

the biggest problem of this gaming gen: technological standards have increased.

now, games require big budgets and cutting-edge graphics. so the larger costs mean the less games produced. with such large budgets, especially in a recession, if the game doesn't sell well, it is a loss for the company. so, companies have not innovated as much and have not made sequels for many non-mainstream games to play it safe. they've seen sports games, gun/shooter games and guitar hero games as the safest titles, so they simply continued with proven genres rather than innovate. so that is why we have too many gun games.

I do agree, there have been less innovative titles as opposed to the previous generation of gaming. Many games are made to appease Call of Duty and Gears of War fan boys rather than people that may be interested in innovative game play or the casual WII gamers.

It's really to do with marketing, for instance a shooter like Call of Duty Black Ops sells 12 million copies worldwide whereas an innovative games like Mass Effect 2 and Fallout 3 only sell a few million copies each, it's not a risk that every game production company is willing to take, especially if they are an upcoming company. They will have trouble finding an investor unless they convince the investor that they can sell their game to mass population of gamers which include WII style games and run of the mill recycled versions of shooters like Call of Duty and Gears of War.

the enxt generation is hsaping up to become much better.

syndicate is a decent example of innovative game mechanics but i would prefer innovative games.

This gen's been pretty decent, for me. I've loved things like Mushihimesama Futari, Akai Katana Shin, Deathsmiles, DoDon Pachi Resurrection, Muchi Muchi Pork/Pink Sweets, Espgaluda 2, Dead Rising, MGS4, GTA4, Dead Space, Left 4 Dead, Resident Evil 5 Move, Demon's/Dark Souls, Bayonetta, MGS Peace Walker, No More Heroes, Need For Speed : Hot Pursuit and lots of downloadable titles on XBLA/PSN. I also played quite a bit of CoD4/Gears 1,2 & 3 online and enjoyed Ninja Gaiden 2 despite it not being a patch on the first. None of the games I've listed have raised the bar dramatically, but there are subtle little innovations. Given the cost of current development, I think that's more of a realistic expectation.

[quote="ZX_SpectrumDisorder"]This gen's been pretty decent, for me. I've loved things like Mushihimesama Futari, Akai Katana Shin, Deathsmiles, DoDon Pachi Resurrection, Muchi Muchi Pork/Pink Sweets, Espgaluda 2, Dead Rising, MGS4, GTA4, Dead Space, Left 4 Dead, Resident Evil 5 Move, Demon's/Dark Souls, Bayonetta, MGS Peace Walker, No More Heroes, Need For Speed : Hot Pursuit and lots of downloadable titles on XBLA/PSN. I also played quite a bit of CoD4/Gears 1,2 & 3 online and enjoyed Ninja Gaiden 2 despite it not being a patch on the first. None of the games I've listed have raised the bar dramatically, but there are subtle little innovations. Given the cost of current development, I think that's more of a realistic expectation.[/quote

I agree with you there, although some of the games you've mentioned are Japanese only.

I think games like The World Ends With You, Muramasa: The Demon Blade and even games like Catherine have found their audience.

Plus, there's the fact that SEGA is slowly becoming a better dev (last gen they were TERRIBLE!), like you've said about Bayonetta, the move to publish Platinum Games' games has been great! They've also published some great games from other devs to keep the pace going.

Resonance of Fate, despite being a complex RPG that takes ages to get into, was a very good dungeon crawler JRPG if you missed the SMT games from the PS2, and Valkyria Chronicles, a SRPG which changed the way we play those games forever have been pretty great this gen.

I don't get the first few comments about this gen being bad, there was a lot of hidden gems that were overlooked due to Developer (LOL SEGA, LOL SONY), price (Why would I pay $60/£45 for this!?!) or just bad marketing (What's Yakuza? What's Bayonetta? What's The World Ends with you?).

I think you need to scowl the Wikipedia pages of each gen to find the gems as there are quite a few....heck, even Okami got a second coming AND a sequel!

there will always be gems hidden in any generation just as there are brilliant indie games (minecraft, voxeltron)
but there is a large amount of generic mainstream content being pumped out to basically saturate the market to the point of repulsion, then they will find the next big fad based on the indie and innovative games of the previous season.

sifting through the awful one finds there has been a couple of hidden gems,
world of tanks, sword of the stars 2 (after 25 updates so that part was complete bs, the game is nice now though)
deus ex human revolution, skyrim.

I think that the biggest problem is, as others have said, that most games out there are only catering to a specific audience. 99% of games that come out are the same ol' generic FPS or sports games, with a few survival horror or RPG games thrown in the mix. Most of these games have practically no focus on story (if there even is a story, it usually either doesn't make much sense or has no real impact on the gameplay).

I'm a huge fan of some of the older adventure-style games, I'm really sad that the genre has essentially died out. I always thought that the genre had a huge potential with the advanced graphics we have nowadays but I guess I'm in the minority lol.

Also, I find that a lot of the challenge has gone from modern-day games. In a way that's good (no more incessant hair-pulling lol) but I also kind of miss the challenge that some of the older games had, many of them actually made you think. In alot of the games today it's like you're just a one-man army and nothing can get in your way lol, puzzles or major battles usually don't take more than 2-3 minutes to figure out.

That said there are definitely some really good games being made nowadays. For a lot of them you do have to look at the indie titles though.

Thank you. I'm glad I'm not the only one who feels this way. There are decent games out there. The occasional mainstream title has actual effort put into it. Too bad they're outnumbered by fps, sports titles and motion control garbage. There are plenty of underrated games that are good, or are at least decent. Yes, there is such a thing as a game with effort put into it. There is also such a thing as a game where its dev actually took a risk. Believe it or not, there is even such a thing as a complete game, where none of it is withheld and sold later as downloadable content. The natural habitat of a lot of these games is the downloadable service of one's system of choice, but some can be found in physical form too, if one is knowledgeable enough.

Of course, it seems like an eternity ago when most mainstream games maintained a certain level of quality. Unfortunately there are only two solutions for one who is dissatisfied with the current state of the gaming industry. One is to be well informed, so you know how to find titles that satisfy your needs. Talking to people on message boards can help too. The other is to take up retro gaming and/or last gen gaming and pretend this gen never happened. If you're having trouble finding modern games that you enjoy, the latter option should solve all your problems, assuming graphics don't matter to you. Thankfully downloadable services on current consoles also provide access to certain retro titles at a reasonable price. I wouldn't be surprised if one day, there will be no games worth playing, and I'll actually be grateful that I have a huge backlog.

I agree, though there've been many excellent titles this generation there's been a lack of originality. Most of the best titles this generation have been variations on old ideas, which is not in itself is a bad thing, but there hasn't been as many left-field games.

A lot of the more original ideas are appearing on lower specced hardware such as the portable devices and the Wii. There's also been a rise in so-called indie games on the PC. Undoubtedly this is due to the lower costs of development for these platforms.

I meant to add Bulletstorm. The Echoes mode on that is amazing.

The technology industry is moving too fast for the gaming industry to keep up. Games developers are spread too thin over the myriad of platforms they now feel they have to cater for. It also does not help when publishers such as EA produce watered down games that they think can appeal to everyone, they don't seem to realise that not everyone will like every game they make and should focus their attention more on games for specified audiences rather than turning everything they touch in to a sports franchise, The Sims or an FPS (Syndicate aka NOTHING like Syndicate/Syndicate Wars). The situation is compounded on Nintendo's end when all they seem to do now is rehash old titles and polish them up to today's (frankly very low) standards.

But games aren't just for gamers any more, they are for everyone and everyone is trying to cash in on that by producing games that are as generic as can be (CoD). Then there's the game reviewers that are paid off to endorse a game that I frankly would want one of my enemies to be tortured with (CoD). Then there's the players; a set of pseudo gamers that have saturated the market with their "I'll play wherever is popular" attitude and end up buying these abortions known as games (CoD). This in turn allows the developers to keep taking their money so they can churn out more and more copy and pasted games (CoD).

Alas there is hope. There are still a few games developers that take pride in their work. Whilst the PC gaming community is still afflicted with similar curses that consoles have, PC games developers have the freedom of an open platform to work with, which allows (not in all cases) games to potentially be of a higher quality. The few developers that are still producing gems for me are; DICE, Valve, Blizzard, Bethesda, 2K and Eidos. It's just a shame when you see quality games developers going bust because of the way the market produces vast quantities of filth (CoD).

R.I.P.
Looking Glass Studios
Bullfrog
Ion Storm

And yes, I loathe Call of Duty.

It's not graphics imo. As a note on consoles graphics actually didn't evolve that much as all 'current gen' stuff is old.

But today's games have some obvious flaws, I think more caused by the money chase than by attention to graphics.

Biggest flaw to me is that they centre around one feature / core gameplay and built a game around it that usually starts good and becomes crappy as it nears the end as they repeat things. Think of ubisoft games, cool basic mechanic & gameplay.... and then repeated 20 times. This in combination with gaming worlds being less coherent spacewise. And the ends are worse, WAY worse these days. They always paste the end on it cheaply, never comparing to missions comming before it.

Stalker's good example of this, espcially clear sky. Great game, and then when you FINALLY reach the reactor "shoot this dude 13 times with a ghost rifle" and BAM credits. WTF just happened. Same with call of prypjat. "go to the square & hold it" , helicopter comes & game over. Hun, what? was the point REALLY just getting out without any further plot or evil to counter? Remember the original Halo? That end rocked.

I find the games are not smart enough, and not fun enough. Especially games like mass effect. The first one was great because it was somewhat new as far as storyline and gameplay goes, but the second one seemed to be an expansion to the first. I was doing the same things, and the choices I had only changed a small number of outcomes, most of which weren't even that interesting. I really dislike games that give you choices to do things, but only a couple different results happen, and it's usually nothing major, maybe a different cutscene, or this npc or that npc might attack me now.

I also despise how games these days are dumbing themselves down so any dumby can play the game and succeed very easily.

My biggest problem with the game industry is that they don't support PC gamers as much as they should. With a console, you play the game, and that's it. On a computer, you have the tools to make your own maps, character models, animations, and online communities spring up around user-created content. This is why games like Unreal Tournament 2004 are still WAY more popular than games released as recently as Brink. Yet still, the games are all obviously designed around consoles. You can tell just by how the user interfaces are built. Then you've got COD not letting you run your own servers anymore, no custom maps? How can you build a community around that?

Many PC games give you the tools to be creative and create something new with a game. Quake released their tools, Valve has an editor, Epic Games even released the Unreal Development Kit, which used to cost in the millions of dollars, yet still games like Unreal Tournament 3 are buggy almost to the point that they're almost unplayable on PC, while the same game on a console works great.

Then again, I'm biased. I built and run the most popular modded server on UT3