The industry is in for a gaming crash

If you are talking about console games, quite a few..

 

You have a point but the Atari 2600 era (I played the 800XL games..) was a time when genres were being "defined" and therefore there were no clear game types. Obviously there will be more original ideas when a market is being pioneered than when it is saturated. Comparing 2005 to 1980 is absurd. Even thus, with the advent of the 3D era gaming was revitalized with a few new genres. Everyone is treading new ground with 3D games and focus has shifted from gameplay to technology - so what? Has it not happened before? Once the original River Raid became a smash hit, for decades we played shoot em ups, gameplay staying completely the same while the graphics improved. And we didn't whine, because we had little choice and we liked it.

I'm sorry but I think the new century has spoiled us all.

And when you say the previous generation added only better graphics, I suggest that you remind yourself of a huge development that totally changed console gaming for lots of people who don't game on PCs: Live! As for this generation, don't diss the Nintendo controller just yet.

 

to me, you don't even have to be radically original. just simply provide an interesting experience..

like the upcoming titles that are similar to Boiling Point (a genre i've been waiting for...modern RPG).
Just Cause
Pirates of the XXI Century

if you have new fresh maps and surroundings. nice variety. and you're able to get as close or closer to reality than the games that came before. you're a winner IMO.

it seems like alot of games, rather than mitigating risky new content or style. have stripped down gameplay to just running down a tube shooting wave after wave of NPC baddies. i don't call that mitigating risk. i call that a cash grab.

 

PC gaming market might be shrinking but console market is booming and is expected to see even more high growths esp with next gen console lanuches.

 

First, two (semi-rethorical) questions:

As an example, GTA is on its fifth generation on the PC (more if you count expansions and console platform specific titles). If the forthcoming GTA4 game is named "Beat you senseless and steal your car" instead of GTA4whatever, will it count as an original game and not yet another sequel? What if it was another studio doing it? Q4 was done by very different people than the ones that made Q2, so is it a sequel to that game? Where do you draw the line?

Secondly, when "original" games such as darwinia, sentinel, etc. come out and sell very, very poorly when compared to the latest GTA (for instance), whose fault is it? The "original" design's or the execution of that design? Isn't the fact that "sequels" sell and "original" games often don't, a sufficient enough reason to think that perhaps people don't want "original" games?

My opinion: Original game designs are dead and have been dead for decades. Every single "original" game that shows up has been done in the atari, spectrum, c64, NES/Famicom days, if not before. GTA, Mafia and Manhunt for instance are all variations on a theme. And the further you abstract yourself from the execution of the design and extol the lack of any core gameplay variety the farther back in time you have to go to find a truly original game.

If you do enough abstraction and enough backtracking you'll see that every single game is a sequel to the father of video games: Spacewar for the DEC PDP built at MIT in the early sixties.

It's like deconstructing literary tales. There's only ever two kinds of stories: someone goes on a journey, and: a stranger comes to town. Think of any movie, play or book novel and you can characterise every story into either of those premises. Likewise, deconstruct any game into its core removing all the pretty graphics and clever interaction and you will most likely find an old, forgotten game released in the late seventies or early eighties that is pretty much the same.

What IS the point in doing this though? None as far as I'm concerned, only perhaps as an academic exercise in nostalgia which can be entertaining in its own right but that shouldn't be based for any kind of characterisation of today's games. You can't divorce execution from design and that's why I completly disagree with people who say "graphics don't matter in games, only the gameplay". These people have been proven wrong for the last fifty years where new games almost always improve graphically on their predecessors. Gameplay _may_ be considered more important than graphics, but graphics (and sound, interface, etc.) are if not an equal partner in the equation then a very important factor in the fun factor. What people mistake as an absolute authority of gameplay over graphics is in fact, that SOME games don't actually _need_ great graphics to be effective in the desired goal of any game: to be fun and entertaining.

If today's games were generally not fun and entertaining (and each of us has a different interpretation of what these two concepts should even mean in a game: thought-provoking, frightening, funny, challenging, timekiller, etc.) they wouldn't sell. There hasn't been a massive drop in retail sales, even with piracy reaching absurd heights. And bottom line (pardon the pun) is that the publisher's bottom line tells them that sequels are profitable while "original" games are risky. Next time, vote with your wallet.

 

isn't piracy a much bigger problem on the pc than on consoles as well? especially in terms of the global picture?

 

REZ.....but only like 5 people bought it.

 

It really depends upon what you mean by original. There really aren't many games out there that are direct copies of other games. Even games within the same franchise will frequently make small changes that can significantly affect gameplay.

Consider, for example, UT vs. UT2004. UT2004 has a number of relatively small gameplay changes (like the way the rocket launcher works, double jumping, minor tweaks to movement) that dramatically change the feel of the game. Yes, it's the same basic gameplay idea. But it feels different, and as such manages to be its own game, quite separate from UT.

More originality is also found in looking at how companies have combined disparate genres together. Consider a game like Deus Ex that combines story and RPG elements into a first person shooter framework.

I wouldn't say originality is dead. I'd say that you can't expect any game to be released to be completely and utterly original. In particular, completely new ideas just don't happen. If you research hard enough, you can always find something that came before that some idea or another was based upon. True originality comes from combining known concepts in new and interesting ways.

 

And Katamari Damacy.

And Shadow of the Colossus.

I could go on..

 

That is exactly my point (and why I differentiated between "original" gameplay and original gameplay). UT2004 is a sequel to UT Classic, but for all the outcries in the media and forums from people pointing out the lack of originality in today's games it would seem UT2004 and UT are the same game with different graphics. Like you pointed out this is untrue. GTA might be on its fifth generation but is SA the same game as VC when we strip away the cosmetics? No.

So. If people that write these articles fail to see this and want to use 'original gameplay' as a concept meaning "absolute and complete inovation" then I'll also use the same scope of that concept and say there hasn't been an original game in decades. There have been many "original" games though.

This is not a new development though. Gamers's opinions (on the internet mostly) have become increasingly extremist. A game is either great or hopelessly bad, linear or non-linear, original or not. We see this in review scores where if a game rates lower than 90% then the general opinion is that it sucks so bad the publisher should have to pay gamers to play it. This of course means that regardless of quality a game's rating is clamped to 70-100%. We're quickly coming up to a point where reviews might as well just rate games as "good" and "bad" and be done with it, after all, that's what gamer opinion on the internet seems to fall back on.

 

The concept of originality often seems overrated. How many movies came out the past few years that had even one truly original idea? How many books?

It’s a bit different with games, perhaps because of a younger industry. Still, it will get harder and harder to come up with truly original games. Also technical development has allowed (and will allow in future?) making of games that would’ve been virtually impossible to make 10 years ago. Of course there are a lot of underdeveloped ideas and concepts, and probably some no one has even thought of yet, but if it were so easy to come up with them we wouldn’t be having this conversation. And this topic has been already brought up every now and then for several years -- and far longer than that if we consider movies for example.

As long as games remain good entertainment, I really don’t care about the originality. That doesn’t mean I’d like to play the same game over and over, but the presentation of ideas (not just from technical standpoint) matters as much as the idea itself. I’d expect most games to offer some evolution of the concept, some games to take risks and make bigger strides and maybe every now and then we'd be lucky enough to get something that at least would seem really original (and wouldn't suck like many of the original ideas do).

That being said there are problems in games industry. Most of which boil down to rapidly rising development costs. I don’t see any apocalypse coming our way though.

As a side note I haven’t noticed the price of PC gaming going up at all. If anything integration is making it cheaper, as there’s hardly need to buy any add-on cards besides a graphics card for a decent gaming PC these days. That graphics card is also the only thing you’ll need ‘extra’ if you consider keeping up a reasonably performing PC for other needs.

 

How can anyone write this rubbish? Did you not own a Spectrum? Did you not groan when the 20 millionth isometric dungeon adventure was released?

IMO, all this is is the original gaming crowd from the Atari 2600 days getting old enough to start having rose tinted memories of the past, and so generate nonsense like this article.

Hell, just post a topic on any gaming forum like this one for game reccomendations (especially freeware/shareware games) and you'll be offered some fascinating games you've never even heard of!

 

Quoted for truth.

 

I think having games becoming Hollywood films is exactly what people are afriad of. We are seeing 10 hour long games with no replayability at increasing frequency. Chronocals of Riddic, Max Payne, Star Wars Republic Commando are some I think think of.

 

Which would that be? I'm not a console gamer, the only original idea I know of recently was Pikmin. In the PC space, I'd say Psychonauts although the gameplay itself is old, the design was very refreshing.

 

Chronicles of Riddick was also a rather cheap game that offered (I felt) an excellent experience (I haven't played the others you mentioned).

Anyway, replayability is only one possible feature a game could have to its favor. It's good for games to exist which have very little replayability. These games are able to offer a much more focused experience, typically with a better story.

It's also good, of course, for other games to offer much more replayability, because while it may not be quite as fun the first time as a less replayable game, you can play the game over and over. This gives us gamers choice.

 

Rez, Katamari Damacy, Shadow of the Colossus, Dance Dance Revolution are the first that come to my mind.

As for the PC, I have to say The Movies was quite novel and innovative.

 

I have and played and loved all the games you listed, I have no problems with any of them. All were highly polished, high quality, and extremely entertaining games.

I don't like games that take more than 15 hours to complete, that's beyond my attention span and time constraints..

 

The problem of originality in games these day is that in order to be proffitable they need to reaaly be backed up from a moster of gaming, and IMO these is almost impossible in the PC espace and even in the console I think that only the HW manufactors can do, but even Nintendo needs to have the traditional controller as a option to do (or try to) a shift (and this is said by one how think Rev can be a truly Rev), we will see if they can (I guess they will but it is only IMO, yet).

I also think that new/others HW is also need to make original games as gfx will not give tha anymore, most of the really innovative games on the last years are on the arcades which owns their own controlling methods from gun games here you (your body) need to avoid get shotted, a truly sniper game (it has a sniper and a screen on it, which makes the zoom), a snow boardgames whith a board, while the game theme isnt really new those are really fun, good and fresh, that is what I want to fell (new and fresh and still good) with new machines.

If the actual situation keeps people will have 1 new game for 1000 clones by year and most people (sonner or later) will only see reasn to buy one and if that happens the industry crashs and then there is no games anymore.

We can keep the same good old games, but only those and clones will kill the industry, or at least the todays one with very high costs which is the only one how can still make better (art, gfx, animation, music, voice, physics, AI etc...improvements on what is already done) good old games.

 

Unfortunately all too many gamers seem to rank quantity over quality.

This article is typical of the rubbish that is churned out all the time. People complain about bad movies, all the while forgetting that in the 1920's critics were complaining that movies were dreadfully un-original. People will always think this because they don't play games from the past, they remember them. If people had to suffer 99% of the Spectrum games that existed, not only would see they there were just as few BIG genres then as there are now (they were just different genres) they'd see that there was just as much crap.

Rock on modern gaming, that's all I can say. IMO we've never had it so good. I recently ran across a site with hundreds of free, that's right, FREE point & click adventures. Damn it's heaven.