It was an interesting article, and certainly one worth looking at,
but (and I'm going to say this generally first, and more specifically
later) it seemed like what the author was REALLY saying was "Stop
making fun/cool/amusing games, and start mimicking real life." Okay,
the idea of a fighting game where the girls are "sexy" and "cooing"
is a little ridiculous, but look at it from the other side: How many
intelligent, female rights activists do you you know who would devote
their time to fighting?!? It's a fighting game, and they're trying
to make the characters as APPEALING as POSSIBLE. For what it's
worth, in my time as a game salesman last winter, NOBODY bought games
like Rumble Roses, unless they were 14-year-old boys.
His segment on storylines reads to me as follows: "Stories are old
and stagnating. Get some new ones. Oh, and while you're at it,
NEVER DO ANYTHING THAT'S BEEN DONE IN THE PAST NO MATTER HOW COOL IT
IS!" Is he really suggesting no more zombie games?!? I LOVE zombie
games! And the flood -- being all THREE of those things -- actually
works out to be a pretty cool enemy in my opinion. (Mind, I'm never
the first to support Halo, as the repetition in bland level design
almost made me nauseous, but that's not what he's arguing here.)
Basically, this segment seems to rule out all FPS games we've seen
aside from... say... Postal. How are you going to make an FPS
without SOMETHING to make the player special, without SOME kind of
opposition to fight? What? No reason to investigate and LEARN
something from the detailed story? No inner conflict to wrestle
with? Okay, I'll just make a game where I run around and blow sh*t
up 'cause it's there... >.< Also, we've SEEN a game where you play
the "bad guy"... It was called Manhunt -- and it sucked. Nobody
bought it.
I TOTALLY disagree with his epics idea, also. I LOVE epics. That's
probably about 70% of the reason I'll play ANY game is because of the
story. Without story for me, there's no point in the game. And I'm
sorry, but nobody wants to play THEMSELVES. We do that ALL day
long. How fun would it be to play a mail-man... Oh wait! Paperboy!
Yeah, I spent about 5 minutes playing that when I was 12. Who wants
to play the über new realistic FPS "Collate"?!?!? Or "Let's Take A
Memo", or "Kid-Who-Sits-In-His-Parents'-Basement-Playing-Games" where
you don't PLAY the games, rather you have some weird controll scheme
that makes HIM play HIS games... >.<;;;; That'll be fun!
Spectacles... I'll agree that too many games spend too much time on
graphics/effects and not enough on gameplay/story. So I guess this
makes sense. However, even though a book cannot be judged by its
cover, people will still half the time decide to read it based on the
cover or not. Games like Doom 3 wanted to get ATTENTION, and you
can't get someone's attention/make their jaw drop with excellent
gameplay, because you cannot DEMO gameplay, nor story. I'm watching
TV and see some guy pwning someone else online in a new way, so
what? How am I to get excited about that...? So I agree that
graphics are often grown to the detriment of other things, but you
gotta get some kind of reasonable ration of quality graphics vs. good
content vs. fun gameplay. (By the way, if you haven't tried the
"Indigo Prophesy" demo, I HIGHLY recommend that, as I think it
exemplifies a great compromise of all three thus far.)
Cinematics -- it's called immersion, buddy. In the movie
"Braveheart", when Mel Gibson rides in front of the army hollering
"They can take our live; but they can never take away our
FREEDOM!!!", there's a good reason this line works well, and draws
the viewer in. Now, imagine this line is instead in an RPG where you
play one of the soldiers in that army, but it's on a 16-bit console
(SNES/Genesis), so all you can do is show the troops, and then pop up
Mel's face and display the above text. How much less effective will
it be? Like I said before, a large portion of a good game is good
story, and unless you DRAW the player in with good CINEMATIC
TECHNIQUE, then it'll fall flat on its face.
I think the author has GENERALLY a good idea, but I believe he chose
too much hyperbole in his arguments, making broad sweeping statements
and requiring of the developers that they stay as FAR from things
that are more common as possible. I think that MORE he should be
arguing to game PRODUCERS and PUBLISHERS, pleading with them to hire
legitimate GOOD authors -- people who KNOW what makes a good,
original story -- or let the developers have freedom to do what they
will with THEIR story. As far as his argument for perhaps making a
game where the main character slowly finds out that they ARE the bad
guy, look at one of the games he mentioned a couple times.. SPOILER
SPOILER SPOILER FF7 SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER. I seem to recall that's
about how that one went.
Overall, I imagine that the industry is in not so much trouble as the
author claims, especially with games like Beyond Good and Evil, Black
and White 2, Indigo Prophecy, F.E.A.R., Psychonauts, and their ilk
that have come and are forthcoming, I believe that his view must
somehow be skewed by something. That or he simply doesn't get a good
look at what's coming out. Sure, half or more of the games are crap,
but there's that other part that he seems to be ignoring. It's like
any other ratio -- a bell-curve. means that you're gonna get MOST of
them in the range of 30-70% quality. It's natural, and it's been
around for hundreds of years that things will follow that.
There's my $.02... and maybe a little more in change. ~_^ Sorry for the lo~ng post.
--Scott
On 14 Sep, 2005, at 5:04 PM, Bob Pendleton wrote:
Not how to do a save game, but how to save the game industry from itself. This is a very interesting commentary on the current state of the game industry.
http://www.games.net/features/104208.shtml
Try to keep the flames down as low as possible and remember not to take
flames personally.
Bob Pendleton
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