Game Design Backlash?

[Silicone_Milk]

I've been thinking a lot lately about the latest games and how they're all turning out to look very similar to each other. I think that as companies push to making games as realistic as possible, the differences between the games begin to blur.

Personally I'm bored with new games. I still find myself playing Quake 1, 2, and Duke Nukem 3D more than I do with games like Gears of War, Halo, ETQW, etc...
A possible reason to this could be because of the previously mentioned push for realistic graphics. When games look too realistic they no longer feel like a game. Games no longer have the entertainment quality they had in the early to mid 90s. Games now feel like a chore to play while games then were just that - games.

So, moving on to the topic of this thread, everything I have written so far leads me to the conclusion that games will go through a backlash in design much like how "retro" fashion and fads come back then die again. As people want begin to feel like all games are the same, games will start being made like they were when it wasn't a struggle to look prettier.

I post this to hear your thoughts on this. Let's hear them.

[Hipshot]

(Actually, been thinking about it lately too)

You can't really make games as good as they were, since focus moved from gameplay to graphics; FPS moved from PC to console; marketing got more to say than gamedesign; most really good ideas, that made it all happen, has already been done, hard to redo as good or even near - that's why most games that ships today will be forgotten and never played again in 5 years. In 5 years, I bet you there will be more people playing Quake World than Cod4, no none will even remember the first Assassins Creed, System Shock 2 will still be the remembered game, not Bio Shock, etc,

[Survivor]

I feel that is the problem. Like said most games these days focus on the graphics side of the product, with gameplay often underdeveloped. But what mostly keeps you coming back to a game is gameplay, with looks just needing to be adequate. Sadly this prioritizing is missing since you can't really show or falsily soup up gameplay in a commercial but you can make it look really nice or prettier than it is.

[Silicone_Milk]

I agree 100% on the point of all the focus being put on graphics.

I think the folks heres should get together and work on a retro style FPS

[obsidian]

I play ETQW. Obsessively. It's like the new Quake 3 only with objectives. I pwn.

But yes, in the half dreamy awakened state that I was in this morning I was sort of thinking the same thing. There is a lot of games that have been pushed together that makes gameplay pretty much the same, but I don't attribute that to the graphics. You're right that graphics shouldn't be the sole push in the game and that a lot more needs to be done with regards to focus on gameplay rather than a lot of the other extraneous stuff being tossed in as bullet points on the box.

I think part of the problem with recent (FPS) games is that they are being nerfed down for consoles. There aren't too many big title games released for PC only so you see a lot of games that have very similar gameplay mechanics that are targeted towards consoles. These games are then ported over to PC. Stuff that annoys me about these new games and why they've been nerfed:

• Health Bars - where are the health bars? It used to be that you had to manage your health pickups. Take it now or save for later? Risk running back to pick up that health and face more spawning enemies or continue going with half-health? Gee, low on health, better be more sneaky and careful. Those were strategic decisions that I used to make in games of old, but in recent games they've taken out health as a gameplay mechanic and replaced it with self-recharging "health". All you have to do now is duck and cover for a few seconds to heal. Games like GoW, Halo, Jericho, MoH:Airborne, all games I've played recently that did the same thing. Even Bioshock - there was a health bar, but I never cared for health pickups since if you died, there was no penalty, you just spawn back at the nearest regen booth and you even get most of your plasmid points restored.
• Action Buttons - I hate these. I love Guitar Hero, but only if I choose to play this kind of game. Hitting onscreen buttons at the right time has no place in an FPS. They occur during "interactive cutscenes" but they make me ignore the cutscene entirely and I'm just staring at the screen looking for the next icon to pop up. It's also a pretty big break in the immersion factor since all of a sudden, it's a different kind of game and it's quite intrusive. Jericho pissed me off to no end due to this.
• Limited Weapon Loadout - Good in some games, terrible in others. I can see how in a game like MoH or CoD you are limited to carrying around a fixed number of guns due to some level of realism. That's okay providing that the weapons are more or less the same anyway. You get to carry around a machine gun and a rifle of different types. But games with a bigger range of weapon types and especially games with bosses, you should be able to carry all weapons. I'm stuck on GoW now because I'm at the final boss and I had the misfortune of walking in with a machine gun and a sniper rifle when explosive weapons are a necessity. The last checkpoint I'm at won't allow me to move back to swap out guns.

I can probably go on, but that's a small sample and I'll stop here for fear of making myself sound like a grumpy old man shaking his walking stick at those darned Xbox 360's and telling about the good ol' days... I'm probably already too late and should have stopped at the first paragraph.

[Silicone_Milk]

It's funny that everybody has been thinking the same way lately.

I wasn't joking about working on a retro-style fps btw Would there be any volunteers?

I know everybody is busy with their own thing and right now I have to finish up a contract BUT if you're mapping/modeling/texturing/programming/thinking in your spare time why not put it towards a just-for-fun project?

[Survivor]

i can think and test, i suck at developpy stuff since i just don't have the spirit to finish stuff it seems.

[Fjoggs]

Seing how most similar projects like "Pass the map" fail, I sadly don't see such a project being realised.

[Survivor]

That one pass the map is still going though isn't it?

[Silicone_Milk]

Seing how most similar projects like "Pass the map" fail, I sadly don't see such a project being realised.

A similar thought had come to mind when I suggested this.

Regardless, this interests me so I'll be working on this in my free time even though I was already working on a rewrite of the Q3 engine (never really got anywhere).

For inspiration I'm going to play through Quake, Quake 2, Duke Nukem 3D, and Doom 1 for the single player. It's much too early to consider multiplayer beyond 4-player co-op but I think I'd been looking towards the game that perfected the MP scene - Quake 3.

I also need to come up with an over-the-top main character and a sterotypical scenario.
Crude humor, a killer soundtrack, and generally a lot of bigass guns and bigger monsters is essential to making something that can be taken purely as light-hearted entertainment instead of a serious commitment to finishing it.

Another key thing for the game would be to NOT to add a lot of stuff to it (detail, features, etc). Provide some room for the modders to hack away at the game and provide their own custom content.

[v1l3]

This is a good thread. I have pretty much the same thoughts on the majority of what's already been said, and how games have gone more visual than playable. I mean..you can only come up with so many original idea, before their all taken up and repeated by someone else.
I'm not really too needy on the whole realistic graphics, though it's really nice to look at sometimes. Computers need to be updated every 20 minutes because some guy made the smoke on the screen look more realistic, or the blood that is seeping from some dudes head has the cartilage poking out behind it.
I personally can aim my shotgun in UltimateDoom at the old school brown Imp's face and shoot it, and watch the cheapy pixels of blood take over the face and it just never gets old to me. It's not real looking at all, but back when games were like that, your imagination of the shot was the biggest part of the game.
These days everything is a freakin imitation of something already done by someone else. The only kind of game that is any good to play is one that has a replay value. That's why Q3 is still going! They came up with an engine that could be altered and the game just keeps on changing by itself by the players. Q3 is nothing like what it started as.

Someone should make a custom mission game(engine), that is of the same likeness as Q3(in concept) where it starts as something simple that people change. If that happened then game production companies wouldn't be able to make games anymore, because it would turn gaming into freeware which was made by someone for free to allow people to play their version of whatever their idea was that ran on the original engine. Kind of like a thought of Q4 without all of the damn Strogg storyline shit. Just an engine.

[Silicone_Milk]

Someone should make a custom mission game(engine), that is of the same likeness as Q3(in concept) where it starts as something simple that people change. If that happened then game production companies wouldn't be able to make games anymore, because it would turn gaming into freeware which was made by someone for free to allow people to play their version of whatever their idea was that ran on the original engine. Kind of like a thought of Q4 without all of the damn Strogg storyline shit. Just an engine.

That's what I thought made Quake 3 so much fun. It was "easily" modified and constantly changing.

That's why I want to make this game as a barebones stripped down fps with enough content to make it entertaining but not enough to make it feel like everythings already been done with the game so there's no point in modding it.

When people mod a game I feel like there's a sense of pride and a closer bond between player and game. When this happens they're more and more likely to replay the game because its something they helped create or know so in-depth that they don't want to go to other games.

[urgrund777]

Maybe it wasn't mentioned... but a good reason (ie. the main reason) why games are all pretty similar is a financial reason. We (dev studios) are are dictated to by the check-writers. A lot of dev studios are just large 'outsourcing' houses for publisher owned IP (we made Viva Pinata-Party Animals, even though Rare made the original... Microsoft don't care, it's their IP and contracted us). Not too many studios have the capital to self-fund their "cool" new game ideas - and even when they do, you have to convince a publisher that it is profitable for them to press and distribute.

So, now that AAA games are hitting <>$15million to produce for these next-gen consoles, an investor is going to make the safest choice... They don't want to hear about your innovative, revolutionary new gameplay idea... they're thinking risk assessment, returns and unit sales... not game-play. So they jump on the band-wagon and keep milking the FPS's!

So,it's not really a "focus on graphics"... it's just that hardware capabilities advance more than innovation in the industry now days.

Where does it end? ...well, we've started a thread here showing that we're not exactly happy games are starting to stagnate a little. But the real talking power is with your money... publishers will stop investing in the FPS titles when it is shown on paper that the consumers have moved on. Unfortunately that data could take 5 years before publishers need to take a 'do or die' risk with some cool new ideas. (the Wii has at least provided a platform for this and I believe has overtaken the PS3 and X360 in sales in Japan)

my 2cc :P

[a13n]

We don't need a new rendering engine.
We need a CPU-intensive client-side bot for older titles such as q3!
In that case repeatability and variety are unimaginable.

Silicone_Milk, is it theoretically possible to gather instructive data(such as way point) from a series of demo files and use it for bot AI?
Here is a rough cut.
For example we have 100 demo files of q3dm6.
Then we use an external tool extract instructive data from those files.
Extracted data is stored in DB for later random use by bots.

@urgrund777
I've never heard a story that commmon people have ever gained access to console development tools for NES, SNES, Sega Saturn, Dreamcast, Nintendo64, ps2, xbox, to say nothing of xbox360, wii, ps3, in Japan.(anyway it's a half-colony of U.S.A. ruled by pirates of the southern chinese with their full dictatorship)
I think that it explains the position of game development in imperially capitalized society.

[ix-ir]

If any of you are seriously interested in doing an old-style FPS I'd strongly recommend you help an existing team. I have a huge vested interest in this as my team needs texture artists (Promode) but I mean all the existing DM projects such as Warsow, A-l-i-e-n (why does the forum replace the word al-ien with geoff?) Arena and some of the open source projects like Cube. I'm sure they could all use your skills and your efforts are more likely to see use in one of the existing projects than by further dividing the retro FPS communities.

If you want to do something a little different then cooperative play monster killing is underexplored as a gameplay.

On the topic - games have become exactly what movies are, they're made with huge budgets by very talented people to appeal to utter morons so, as a result, are unthreatening pap.

There are other issues too, I think the progression of technology is making mapping and modelling a little too hard to get into which is leading to a sterile, in it to become professional mod scene and reducing access to others. One thing I've been surprised by is how much a lot of people seem to dislike working with D3 engine-level technology compared with Q3, hopefully there's a lot of life in Q3 yet.

We need a CPU-intensive client-side bot for older titles such as q3!

Or you could play actual people.

[Silicone_Milk]

a13n, I've always been fond of saying "anything is possible". However, that sounds like a major pain in the ass

Ix-Ir - I'm thinking more along the lines of sprite-represented monsters. As for the al-ien thing you'd have to hang out on General Discussion to understand

Co-op monster killing is something I would very much like to work on. I remember playing Duke Nukem 3D with my uncle on the N64 and had a great time in co-op mode. There could be some great boss fights in co-op mode...

[a13n]

However, that sounds like a major pain in the ass

Why?
Does the problem lie in demo file?

playing Duke Nukem 3D with my uncle...

You have a good uncle! (j/k)

[dichtfux]

a13n, I've always been fond of saying "anything is possible". However, that sounds like a major pain in the ass

I don't think that we need better bots, but I doubt that generating paths from demos is much harder than having the bots roam freely. There's quite a few bots that use user-defined paths. An example is the eraser bot for Quake II that actually generates it's path information by letting you run around the map and pick up all items a single time if you run it on a map that doesn't have waypoints yet. I gave it a try on my quake2 map and it works pretty good. Don't know where I got it from, but there's a copy here if you, a13n or anyone else wants to give it a try.

I also doubt that trying to create a whole new engine and game isn't worth it. You'd need a good number of players (and some cool tools) before people would even think about mapping for it. And that would take quite a while if you want to start from scratch...

Co-op monster killing is something I would very much like to work on. I remember playing Duke Nukem 3D with my uncle on the N64 and had a great time in co-op mode. There could be some great boss fights in co-op mode...

Yeah, coop monster killing is great. I regularly play Quake II in coop mode with a friend, and I even compiled some doom port (zdoom?) on linux lately and had tons of fun. That port even supported TCP/IP, so no fiddling around with those serial cables anymore.

[FragaGeddon]

One thing that annoys me about video games when they must write shit across the middle of the screen.

[obsidian]

(anyway it's a half-colony of U.S.A. ruled by pirates of the southern chinese with their full dictatorship) I think that it explains the position of game development in imperially capitalized society.

The rest of it I'm okay with but keep this in the Void please, it certainly doesn't have a place here.

why does the forum replace the word al-ien with geoff?

scared (aka Geoff) is Q3W's resident stay-at-home, dishwashing a1ien conspiracist. I'd love to lock a13n and scared in a room together to see what happens, they seem to have a lot in common to talk about.


I think game developers are aware of the gameplay issue and have been unsuccessfully trying to combat a way around it. I remember reading developer interviews about Medal of Honor: Airborne, they mentioned that you can parachute anywhere in the map and how the AI dynamically responds to you flanking and your movement around the map. Those are okay gameplay additions, but it still isn't as much fun as the classic Allied Assault. Gameplay in AA was far from realistic, you are a single soldier against the whole German army. As much as people have been asking for something "different", and I believe game studios are trying to respond by adding things that are different, but as a result we're going "different" in the wrong direction.

Games should be foremost, a fun representation of life. There's nothing fun about being in a realistic war where people get killed, but if you make it a fun simulation - looks like a war, but behaves differently from a real war - then it might be fun to play Rambo for a day. I think that's why arcade style games like Guitar Hero are such a big hit. It takes a real life instrument and dumbs it down into a simplified interface that anyone can do. So even if you happen to be completely tone deaf, you can still pretend that you know how to play guitar. Would Guitar Hero be as much fun if it actually came with 6 strings and a full set of frets?

[urgrund777]

@urgrund777
I've never heard a story that commmon people have ever gained access to console development tools for NES, SNES, Sega Saturn, Dreamcast, Nintendo64, ps2, xbox, to say nothing of xbox360, wii, ps3, in Japan.(anyway it's a half-colony of U.S.A. ruled by pirates of the southern chinese with their full dictatorship)
I think that it explains the position of game development in imperially capitalized society.

What the fuck... ?

[Silicone_Milk]

Hmm so based on current suggestions the idea is to add single-player style gameplay to Quake 3 and rework the netcode so single-player can have an option to connect to the internet and start up the co-op "single player" battles.

I think the physics would have to be edited too to make it feel less like a frantic multiplayer giblet-filled fragfest. New players probably would be intimidated by Q3 style gameplay

[a13n]

That's great, Silicone!
If such a project came true w/o any kind of additional unnecessary price tag attached, q3 community would be revived again including mapping/modding.

[obsidian]

Quake 3 has hardly died in the first place for a need to be "revived". Besides, Quake Zero will be out in a couple of years or so, and I don't think it will involve too much work to port maps over and if you're editing for Q3, QZ will be a snap.

[v1l3]

Would Guitar Hero be as much fun if it actually came with 6 strings and a full set of frets?

I enjoy playing my real guitar on a stage quite a bit more I guess that's why I like Q3, because if I really shot this many people in real life, they would put me in a gas chamber. When I respawn they'd keep throwing me in the gas chamber over and over. Then I'd have to deal with what God wanted to do with me after I got up to killing a million people! Do you go to hell for killing stroggs, chitinids, sorgs, Gargoyles, Ninjas, and Cybronic Humans?