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Dear Videogame Industry, Please Stop Making Games

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Re: Dear Videogame Industry, Please Stop Making Games

#41

Post by timwiseman »

Tichy wrote: post #6

How do people learn about new games these days? For some reason I stopped reading the online game mags a while ago, and now to start again seems a bit overwhelming. Would be nice to only hear about the real must-play games.

ArsTechnica tends to have very good reviews and I get the vast majority of my gaming news from them (the rest is from friends I know in person.) But that works for me because I am a long time reader and know that their tastes in game are similar to mine. If your tastes skew far differently they may not be a good source. Also, it helps that I read their technical content anyway so I see the gaming news in the course of what I am doing anyway.

In general, the best place to possibly get good reviews is to have friends with similar tastes as you and ask them what they like. Not only will you get recommendations you know are good, you will have someone to talk about the games with/play multiplayer with.

And despite the fact they will be dated, don't forget some of the classics. Planescape Torment and Quest for Glory V were fantastic. Even with dated graphics they stand up well to many modern games, at least to someone with my taste in RPG games.

Re: Dear Videogame Industry, Please Stop Making Games

#42

Post by mwexler »

You guys are all focusing on his complaint of "too many games". If you notice, he's pointing out that they are actually too full of content for him to complete before the next shiny object grabs his attention.

Yes, we rate "playtime" as one of our attributes of quality. "For $50, I better get more than 1 hour of playtime out of an RPG or other exploration game" is a common concern; vs. replayability or addictiveness of the casual gaming world.

But just like Blaise Pascal's quote (http://www.famousquotes.com/show.php?_id=1045873) “I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead," (no, it's not Mark Twain), if we had games that took some of the time of adding just one more world or level and instead enhanced aspects of the main game, aka judicious editing, well, perhaps we'd be able to experience more of the game, and even feel a sense of completion. We'd have less stuff to conquer, but perhaps the conquering could be more subtle, have more ways to solve, have more realism, better characters, more complex motivations, whatever.

In playing some of these games he mentions as the good ones, I experienced meaningless quests (my friends called them "bolt ons"), busy-work, farming, all sorts of things that didn't move the story forward, or involved repetitive labor. They weren't puzzles, they were just grunt work. These could have been edited out and the effort spent elsewhere, reducing "time to complete" but making a good game even better.

So, if a game needs lots of time to complete a vast and compelling story, or it's a subscription game that needs more content, so be it. But instead of a game requiring as much work as, well, my job, perhaps a game that gave more enjoyment but also allowed me to feel a sense of completion would be a popular game.

Look, sometimes I love a 500 page book or a 3 hr movie or watching a miniseries or season in one sitting; we all do. But we don't want them all the time. Perhaps we should hold games accountable not on "hours to complete" but on "satisfaction felt upon completion, given that the game should take more than 1 hour". This puts the emphasis on immersion, storytelling, interaction and not so much on "cram more junk in".

As an aside, if we complete more games and feel more satisfied when we do, we will buy more games. Sounds like a win for both sides.

Re: Dear Videogame Industry, Please Stop Making Games

#43

Post by zach »

ryanelkins wrote: post #27
nickelplate wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is pretty hard to focus on a single game or genre though. There are days when you just feel like playing something else.

I'm pretty sure this qualifies as blasphemy against WoW. In all serious though, if you want to truly get into the endgame of WoW, you generally don't have alot of time for other games (this is of course depending on how much time you have for gaming in general). Blizzard has definitely made it easy to spend the majority of that time in their world.

And PopCap has helped by repackaging two of their games as WoW add-ons so you can, you know, play while you play:

http://www3.popcap.com/promos/wow/

Re: Dear Videogame Industry, Please Stop Making Games

#44

Post by potatolicious »

nickelplate wrote: post #21
sjsivak wrote: post #20

Drucker's problem is that he is trying to enjoy the "kitchen sink" of the game industry. This is like saying you enjoy cooking as your hobby and then you try to learn the best culinary techniques of French, Spanish, Italian, Thai, and Creole. You can't expect to become a master and experience everything in all of these areas. My Advice: Pick the platform or genre you enjoy the most and focus on those games. You will…

You can easily get overwhelmed even if you stick to a few genres or platforms. I own Fallout 3, Dragon Age and Mass Effect 2, and I am pretty confident that I will not come close to fully exploring them before the next great RPG is released.

> "and I am pretty confident that I will not come close to fully exploring them before the next great RPG is released."

I think that's part of the experience, though. Having just finished Mass Effect 2, I can tell with certainty that there's a huge amount of the game I never got to see due to my choices, but I'm fine with that. One of the chief strengths of that game is its ability to give every player a unique experience - you don't need to experience every line of dialogue, every possible outcome of a situation, etc etc, to have a profoundly enjoyable experience.

Re: Dear Videogame Industry, Please Stop Making Games

#45

Post by jerf »

LucaDuval wrote: post #37
jerf wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dropping an undefined "better" into a post like that is a bit unfair, since it is basically tautological most ways you could mean that. I'm going to guess you would agree that there is no objective "better", in which case it's totally just defining yourself the win. I will say this; I have a clear preference for some modern stuff over the older stuff. The biggest one is modern TV vs. older TV; going back to 1960 or 1…

I didn't explained myself well then. My point is that, in my opinion, there is no progress in art exactly for the reason you have just given that there is no objective "better" to measure progress with. About TV..., if you are talking about TV shows I wouldn't consider them art at all.

"if you are talking about TV shows I wouldn't consider them art at all."

Also tautological depending on your definition of "art". The definition I favor doesn't disqualify something for the medium it is in, but it certainly isn't the only relevant definition.

Re: Dear Videogame Industry, Please Stop Making Games

#46

Post by joshuakb »

Gimpson wrote: post #38
LucaDuval wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't explained myself well then. My point is that, in my opinion, there is no progress in art exactly for the reason you have just given that there is no objective "better" to measure progress with. About TV..., if you are talking about TV shows I wouldn't consider them art at all.

I'd argue that there was more interesting video content being produced for TV in the last ten years than movies. (Maybe you don't consider movies art either...) I'll put The Wire up against any movie in the last ten years.

The wire is also the only show I know of that moves slowly enough to tell an interesting story. I would put the wire up against anything period.

Re: Dear Videogame Industry, Please Stop Making Games

#47

Post by LucaDuval »

jerf wrote: post #45
LucaDuval wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't explained myself well then. My point is that, in my opinion, there is no progress in art exactly for the reason you have just given that there is no objective "better" to measure progress with. About TV..., if you are talking about TV shows I wouldn't consider them art at all.

"if you are talking about TV shows I wouldn't consider them art at all." Also tautological depending on your definition of "art". The definition I favor doesn't disqualify something for the medium it is in, but it certainly isn't the only relevant definition.

Every time somebody express an opinion somebody else can call it a tautology if he decides that the speaker is willing to tweak the definition as he likes.

To point it out is pleonastic.

The following sentence is tautological.

The previous sentence is tautological and pleonastic.

Re: Dear Videogame Industry, Please Stop Making Games

#48

Post by calcnerd256 »

tome wrote: post #11
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #7

This may be humour but he's getting to the heart of something big. Why don't we just watch all the amazing films and TV shows of the past? Why do we listen to music that's in the charts when we've got over 5 decades of complete genius waiting to be listened to? Because fundamentally these are social acts. We like listening to the music that others are listening to, to define ourselves by the films we like in common w…

Five decades ? Have you given evidence in opposition to your own question?

I wonder how many songs would be in a fifty-year playlist

Re: Dear Videogame Industry, Please Stop Making Games

#49

Post by dkimball »

mwexler wrote: post #42

You guys are all focusing on his complaint of "too many games". If you notice, he's pointing out that they are actually too full of content for him to complete before the next shiny object grabs his attention. Yes, we rate "playtime" as one of our attributes of quality. "For $50, I better get more than 1 hour of playtime out of an RPG or other exploration game" is a common concern; vs. replayability or addictiveness…

Preach it, brother! :) That's exactly what's been driving me off from gaming -- vast quantities of filler that just pad out the total play time.

I'd have to add something else: the propensity for filler, especially "filler quests" in RPGs, degrades the quality of the main game. I really enjoyed _Knights of the Old Republic_ and _Jade Empire_, but their storytelling -- especially _Jade Empire_'s -- was a large step back from _Final Fantasy 4_ or _Final Fantasy 6_; neither of the Square RPGs had the hero wandering off to close a dam and kill an inn full of cannibals as opposed to progressing the story and/or interacting interestingly with the other major characters.

I believe the genre that you're looking for, and that I am, is called "hardcasual" -- short, high-quality, high-content games, not casual games at all but completely free of filler, aimed at people with lives and jobs but still a keen interest in games. (For total time to play, expect 3 hours at the low end, 10 hours at the high end -- and note, you can fit a _large_ story into ten filler-less hours.)

Unfortunately, hardcasual games appear to be rare; in particular, the mainstream games industry doesn't touch them...

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