Warpy

Am I just getting old, bored easily of PC game titles, or is there a drought of really good titles with quality game play?

I remember the old days of SOF2, Quake 2, Flashpoint and other titles that roled from the *cough* internet.

It's getting pretty bad of late, the gaming industry is in need of something good, all I seem to have to look forward to these days is BF2 and The Godfather.

What are your thoughts?

MSX

... games are taking longer to create. Thus there is more overhead capital required from publishers. Publishers want to push out the same crap in order to appeal to the largest audience and make money.

Games are taking longer due to graphics. As soon as graphics hit another plateau and engines again become realitivly easy to create/licence you can expect a lot of crap.

You sound like you like action games. Seems most action games are going console. t sucks, but them's the breaks.

cheese_thief

I wonder, if developers were given better tools to create games with, would they be better?

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Dyre Straits

OFF TOPIC: Warpy, your sig reminded me.....

Q: Why do Ducks have flat feet?
A: From stomping out forest fires.

Q: Why do Elephants have flat feet?
A: From stomping out flaming ducks!

(Sorry, couldn't resist. )

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dooT

As far as I can see, they already have pretty good tools to work with. It's the creativity that's lacking. Plus, some times when they do have good ideas the publisher pushes the developers to release it within a certain time limit. Thus often forcing them to scrap some of their ideas.

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Zardon

Most truly original games dont come from large game publishers, they are too risky for them to make enough money, therefore you find the creative stuff coming from small developers. All we have now is improved graphics with the same old drivel hitting the shelves.

I mean look at a game like Doom3 for example, enough said.

Warpy

Yes, what I find disappointing is the hype behind a game, like Doom 3. Turned out the DVD made an excellent coaster in the end.

I don't think the tools are to blame nor the engines. What I see is new titles with the same graphics. Nothing has really blown me away in amazment other than screenshots from Unreal 3, but a screenshot is about as useless as a chocolate teapot.

pr0digal jenius

yea...the farcry's and quake's of the world are few and far between these days...and you can't really predict them either. I mean honestly....who saw farcry coming in a magazine and said "hey...these guys are gunna be huge!"....nobody...cuz it never got in any magazines

Zardon

I still think farcry is one of the best titles in the last 5 years. it broke the mould for FPS when it was released.

BoroVC

I think as the PC gaming market has grown recently there has been more emphasis on pushing the bigger, more saleable titles. This unfortunately causes the lesser known games and publishers under the carpet and these are quite often the games that would break the mould.

You have to dig deep these days to find a modern day 'classic' but if you look they are still there.

This is sad because its the old breakthrough games that made PC gaming what it is today.

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No_Style

Oh the dilenma that is modern gaming development. It takes a lot of corporate balls to make a "unique" game these days like Zardon pointed out. Another problem lies in the whole development cost. If a developer wanted to get the sales and grab the attention of the "gamers", they need to have a wad of cash or affiliate themselves with either one the bigger publishers/houses.

The typical "gamer" nowadays wants pretty graphics. Pretty graphics costs money. A lot of money. Then there's licenses. Depending on what kind of game your developing this may or may not apply to the developer. But nowadays, thanks to EA's big wallet, if any other development house doesn't use real players, real cars, real stadiums, real fields etc.. The consumer turns away. I guess what people really want is authenticity more than originality and fun.

So if you're looking for a great game to come out, I'd wait a little longer when the development houses have gotten used to developing with these new engines and the cost of developing goes down a bit. Remember the wave of Q3 based games? That happened when all the development houses pretty much mastered that engine.

So the lack of great games these days can be caused by a variety of things:

1) Resources focused for next-gen consoles or consoles in general
2) High development costs
3) New technologies (Which can cause lots of other problems as well)
4) Sacrificing originality for the sake of authenticity
5) Not straying from working formulae.

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BWX

It isn't just you, 95% of games today aren't worth a second look.

As soon as a company goes public, it has one goal, actually one responsibility, to make money for it's stock holders. So they churn out crappy game after crappy game for years.

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Nacht

It all depends on how you look at it. I thought Doom 3 was a terrific game. So what if it was hyped? Is that the devs fault? Not really, so you shouldnt listen to hype - play the game, and enjoy it. I thought Doom 3 was great, and couldnt even bring myself to finish HL2. I'm not saying its not a good game - I guess it's just not my type.

The market is just going in a different direction right now. There has been a drought of good shooters IMO, but other areas have been flourishing, see WoW for example. It might not be your type of game - it may be, but you will never know till you try. I thought the idea of paying a monthly fee was retarded...but now that I do it, its not that big of a deal. I pay in 3 month blocks, and its actually cheaper having bought it. Before I would buy a new game about every month, maybe a month and a half, shelling out 40-50 bucks for each. I havent bought one new game since I got WoW in January, and pay 42.00 every 3 months for service. I would suggest getting it and using the month trial it comes with - you dont have much to loose trying it out.

No_Style

Yes, focusing on a single genre of gaming can grow stale.

You can blame "hype" on the "internet screenshot problem". It's ridiculous how people comment on how a game is going to be like purely by the screenshot. I don't see developers releasing screenshots for the sole purpose of creating hype. To me it's more like a memo telling me that the game is still in development and they haven't forgotten about releasing it. I'm guilty of generating hype based on screenshots, but I don't get all bent out of shape over the failure of a game.

P.S - Doom 3 wasn't a failure to me. Nice to see you posting Nacht! How are things in the lands of Azeroth?

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Tipstaff

If you asked this question of any game developer, you'd get this response:

"The attention span of todays gamers is very low. They can be all excited about a product one minute, and get completely bored with it the next.. especially if it 'stinks' or is not worth playing. The trend today is to create games that work within that attention span. Anything longer than 20 hours gameplay, and you would almost certainly lose that person to something else.. something 'new'. By creating games that sit within that 20 hour gameplay format we can not only develop a game faster, but it costs us, the developers less in the long run. Does this effect the quality of the product? It can, yes. However, with a shorter development time we can put out another product in a much lesser period of time, almost right after the last one, that might continue the story. If that were the case, then no, it wouldn't, because we can keep that gamers attention span, however short, onto 1 brand for a long period of time. Sometimes to the point where they keep coming back to that brand over and over."

I actually had a very similar conversation with a developer that said, more or less, something just like the above.

Agree or disagree?

-Tip

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No_Style

Agree. Another possibility for the length factor is that sometimes they just behind schedule because they've spent so much time developing the graphical component of a game. (Yes, I've been blaming the need for great graphics causing development issues, a lot lately... But it's the truth!).

A lot of games want to be released within a 2 year time frame. That's a lot of work in a little timeframe.

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Nacht

lol - they're great, thats the main reason that I haven't posted much in a long time.

Many games are only good for one play through, HL2 and Doom 3 are no exception, nor are other "greats" like Far Cry. Games like WoW are meant to be played for a long while - I have one character at max level and I raid dungeons with my guild constantly. These groups contain 40 people all working for the same goals, it's something to see.

Zardon

ive been playing farcry for a year sometimes just to play specific levels again.

Mazuko

I'll be honest the only game I have gone back to over and over again for years is Counter-Strike. Not because it looks great, not because it's even the best game in the world. I return simply because of the communities the game was and is capable of building. I'll be honest, you could play the greatest single player game in the world (Escape from Buthers Bay for example) but not really have the desire to play it again. It lacks the "involvement of outside parties" it lacks the need for HUMAN interaction.

I feel thats what alot of developers are spending their time on these days. Trying to make a game that A) Looks beautiful and B) Has a multiplayer option. Be it the crap hole Multiplayer on Doom 3, or the MMORGPH of WoW, or the 32 man play of a Counter-Strike game.

I have not seen many games released over the past few years without some variation of multiplayer game play that just HAS to have pretty eye candy.

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dooT

I've been playing RTCW since it came out along with Enemy Territory. I've met some great people and it's still fun so I just keep going back to it. I sure hope I can find some other games which I can enjoy as much.

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BWX

Problem with multiplayer games is that 50% of the people are damn cheaters. Takes the fun out it. I bought HL2/CS:S because at the time I thought Valve was going to do something about the cheating. I guess I was wrong. I played one time and realized it was a "who has the better cheat hack" contest.

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No_Style

50%? That's pretty high. I think it's an isolated "CS" issue. Cheaters in RTCW? Almost nil. Warcraft 3 had cheaters, but Blizzard took care of them. I guess it's just Valve's problem. It's also the matter of finding good servers. When I was playing RTCW, I rarely did any random pub games. I developed a list of good servers and just played in those.

Nice to see another RTCW fan, DooT! I hope to see RTCW2 sometime within the next year or so. I may drop by to ET once again. RTCW though, I can't seem to get myself to play it with the sorts of servers still around Too many stat whores.

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BWX

I used to play SOF II and RTCW all the time- Cheaters all over the place. PunkBuster helped a little, but not much.. They were getting busted left and right 100 times a day.. what does that tell you?

Until they come up with a better anti cheat system, and actually make it work, I just quit playing FPS on-line games. Maybe once in a while for fun, but not like I used to. Some supposed "cheat free" clans were busted and almost all of them were cheating with wall hacks, aimbots, etc..

It is/was a huge problem.

You could spectate people and watch them follow people that were behind walls- all the time every day. I just gave up.

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MSX

The best anti cheat is complete server side interation. Just put the textures and a runner(perhaps maps and the physics engine) on a machine and thats it. Decent models and programming can be sent on the fly if made right. I mean just look at that 64K video game not too long ago. A 256K game is perfectly reasonable. But thats a pipe dream at the moment. Though I believe guild wars does something like that to a lesser extent.

Anyway, back on topic. The real reason there arent any modern day classics is that there is no single player worth mention. Yes, I disagree with you BWX. Multiplayer should be an aferthought. If its a really great afterthought supporting a lot of players, great tools with a small learning curve your good to go. I just can't see why people do not see that formula. It's part of almost every "great" game of the past.

The others just had single player that could stand its own.

Zardon

I tend to agree with you. Personally im looking forward to seeing what is going to be possible with IDs Doom3 engine. the ROE expansion pack was good in parts but it just didnt "feel" like a classic.

Graphics dont make a game but they can certainly help with an immersive atmosphere - especially if you see Doom3 ROE running on a 6800 ultra SLI rig with a Dell 2405 at 1920x1200 . I can understand why some people in this thread however are bored of FPS games, but once in a while a classic comes out, its probably still my favourite genre if its done right.

dooT

Well, I'm down to playing once a week with some nice euro folk
as seen on last week's post They switch between ET and RTCW.

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Nacht

Games shouldnt be designed with multiplayer "as an afterthought". What would have become of Battlefield 1942 had it not been designed around multiplayer? It would have been complete crap!

MSX

... yes. that is the point Nacht. The game was designed to be mainly multiplayer. If it wasn't I'd lose any respect I had for DICE.

Say, BF1942 had a SP mode like COD or something more immersive it would have been better right?

quakerjtf

No, there hasn't been jack shit out for 6 months. There should be some good stuff Q3/Q4. 2006 will be a much better year though.

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Warpy

Well guys, what do you think will be the next move in graphics engines and visuals? The move from Direct 8.1 to Directx 9 was great with the full reflective surfaces and water effects, I am not too familar with the correct terms they use for the effects but I wonder what will be the next big visual improvement.

Perhaps it will be the bump mapping, were the room textures dont just look 3d, but are actually 3d, similar to to a room containig a brick wall, except each brick is an object sticking out the wall like this:



Here is a list of the Unreal 3 engine visuals, maybe this is what we will be seeing soon?

• 64-bit color High Dynamic Range rendering pipeline. The gamma-correct, linear color space renderer provides for immaculate color precision while supporting a wide range of post processing effects such as light blooms, lenticular halos, and depth-of-field.

• Support for all modern per-pixel lighting and rendering techniques including normal mapped, parameterized Phong lighting; custom artist controlled per material lighting models including anisotropic effects; virtual displacement mapping; light attenuation functions; pre-computed shadow masks; directional light maps; and pre-computed bump-granularity self-shadowing using spherical harmonic maps.

• Advanced Dynamic Shadowing. Unreal Engine 3 provides full support for four shadowing techniques:

• Dynamic stencil buffered shadow volumes supporting fully dynamic, moving light sources casting accurate shadows on all objects in the scene.

• Dynamic characters casting dynamic soft, fuzzy shadows on the scene using 16X-oversampled shadow buffers.

• Ultra high quality and high performance pre-computed shadow masks allow offline processing of static light interactions, while retaining fully dynamic specular lighting and reflections.

• Directional Light Mapping enables the static shadowing and diffuse normal-mapped lighting of an unlimited number of lights to be precomputed and stored into a single set of texture maps, enabling very large light counts in high-performance scenes.

• All of the supported shadow techniques are visually compatible and may be mixed freely at the artist's discretion, and may be combined with colored attenuation functions enabling properly shadowed directional, spotlight, and projector lighting effects.

• Powerful material system, enabling artists to create arbitrarily complex realtime shaders on-the-fly in a visual interface that is comparable in power to the non-realtime functionality provided by Maya.

• The material framework is modular, so programmers can add not just new shader programs, but shader components which artists can connect with other components on-the-fly, resulting in dynamic composition and compilation of shader code.

• Full support for seamlessly interconnected indoor and outdoor environments with dynamic per-pixel lighting and shadowing supported everywhere.

• Artists can build terrain using a dynamically-deformable base height map extended by multiple layers of smoothly-blended materials including displacement maps, normal maps and arbitrarily complex materials, dynamic LOD-based tessellation, and vegetation layers with procedurally-placed meshes. Further, the terrain system supports artist-controlled layers of procedural weathering, for example, grass and vegetation on the flat areas of terrain, rock on high slopes, and snow at the peaks.

• Volumetric environmental effects including height fog.

• Extensible particle system with visual editor, supporting particle physics and environmental effects.