"What does the game industry have against innovation?"

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Goes into funding, Psychonauts, beancounters, sequels, etc.

― kingfish holiday travesty (kingfish 2.0), Thursday, 22 December 2005 09:11 (twenty years ago)

That article pretty much explains why I only buy about 4 games a year.

― Craig Gilchrist (Craig Gilchrist), Thursday, 22 December 2005 10:29 (twenty years ago)

I'll put this on the list of ways the general populace disappoints me, along with the cancellation of Arrested Development and George Bush's second term.

― Laura H. (laurah), Thursday, 22 December 2005 13:57 (twenty years ago)

Gamespot nicely avoids naming itself and other publications in the indictment. Hi, you're just like the fucking radio. You didn't tell us Psychonauts and Katamari were great until we had already mostly figured it out for ourselves via word of blog. You ONLY COVER shooters and sequels. You give out 7.0 and above to everything unless it's absolutely fucking UNPLAYABLE. "Innovative" (read anything that isn't flavor-of-the-year) games get dumped by the wayside in favor of earning those placement dollars and remaining friendly with the slimy flacks on the other end of the telephone so they'll buy you drinks at the next con. The end result being that gamers NEVER KNOW what to expect from anything they plunk down $50 for, because the magazines and websites have a margin of error of plus or minus ONE HUNDRED PERCENT when reviewing the free products they get in the mail, and gamers also NEVER KNOW when anything comes out that isn't published by a giant.

Go fuck yourself, Gamespot. No points for trying.

― TOMBOT, Thursday, 22 December 2005 18:36 (twenty years ago)

The biggest problem with video games in the english language is that all the companies that make them are fully staffed with overgrown children who've been playing video games and doing nothing else for way too fucking long. Blinders, anyone?

― TOMBOT, Thursday, 22 December 2005 18:39 (twenty years ago)

Wait, I'm not finished. RAAARRRRGH, RAARRRRRGGHH.

OK, I'm done.

― TOMBOT, Thursday, 22 December 2005 18:39 (twenty years ago)

I recently made an art design dude at a video game company who doesn't play video games.

― Jordan (Jordan), Thursday, 22 December 2005 18:48 (twenty years ago)

That's exactly what I've been thinking for a while, Tom… that an overwhelming majority of games are made for maladjusted teenagers in JNCO jeans, and that there's a real dearth of games produced that don't pander to hormonal, angsty, socially awkward boys but rather to normal fucking adults who want to screw around, get stoned, and waggle a joystick or two.

― remy (x Jeremy), Thursday, 22 December 2005 18:51 (twenty years ago)

jordan you MADE a dude?

― s1ocki (slutsky), Thursday, 22 December 2005 19:04 (twenty years ago)

Met. Met a dude. Not made. I'm not playing dog, here.

― Jordan (Jordan), Thursday, 22 December 2005 19:07 (twenty years ago)

A lot of times I think something like Katamari really shouldn't seem so great, but compared to the massive amounts of dull bullshit pumped out by today's game industry it's incredibly refreshing. Not that it isn't actually a great game, but you know what I mean. Games like that shouldn't be as rare as they are.

― sleep (sleep), Thursday, 22 December 2005 19:30 (twenty years ago)

personally i don't think katamari IS that great although i appreciate it for its mild innovation (ultimately it is not THAT unique a game experience--just more repetitive action packaged differently)

― s1ocki (slutsky), Thursday, 22 December 2005 19:45 (twenty years ago)

but at least it's unique packaging!

― metonymus prime (rgeary), Thursday, 22 December 2005 20:01 (twenty years ago)

i mean, if the king of all cosmos showed up with his giant package in quake 8 or whatever, we'd have an entire lost generation of adolescent boys dropping dead of...glam i guess

― metonymus prime (rgeary), Thursday, 22 December 2005 20:01 (twenty years ago)

Yeah I mean Psychonauts from what I understand is not exactly a brand new gameplay paradigm, it's just that somebody put a little more imagination into how to do things than "oh man wouldn't it be cool if you were like scarface or james bond or a big cyborg and you had to fight inside a building that was underground oh man oh dude big guns and titties"

I mean when they put up Katamari and Psychonauts as examples they're kind of showing their hand, to the industry "innovative" just means "weird."

― TOMBOT, Thursday, 22 December 2005 20:25 (twenty years ago)

i don't mind scarface-y games! although a totally gay scarface gta style game would definitely be entertaining

― metonymus prime (rgeary), Thursday, 22 December 2005 22:17 (twenty years ago)

i wish someone would innovate the hell out of all the text boxes you have to click through in katamari

― s1ocki (slutsky), Friday, 23 December 2005 00:06 (twenty years ago)

(and i know pressing start skips some of them... but not nearly enough)

― s1ocki (slutsky), Friday, 23 December 2005 00:09 (twenty years ago)

One of the biggest barriers to truly adult games is the weakness of Plot. Arguably games telling stories is a bad move altogether, but since plot-driven games are unlikely to go away any time soon would it be too much to ask for something with the same moral depth as some novels or movies achieve? Games are still absolutely at the Black Hat vs White Hat stage, even when they try to suggest that they're more complex, like Deus Ex or Black and White or GTA:SA. It's too late and I'm too full of snot to work out the details of what a thematically sophisticated game plot might mean, but the only games that have begun to try to do this have been independently written text adventures, as far as I can remember.

― The Wanderers' Wandering Daughter (noodle vague), Friday, 23 December 2005 00:15 (twenty years ago)

i'm all about completely discarding plot, to me that's the essential brilliance of all the mario games, where the narrative is super-simplified to the point of abstractness.

― s1ocki (slutsky), Friday, 23 December 2005 00:22 (twenty years ago)

I think plot was a wrong turn in the essentials of what makes a great game, but I'd miss GTA and Deus Ex.

― The Wanderers' Wandering Daughter (noodle vague), Friday, 23 December 2005 00:33 (twenty years ago)

I think that game 'plot' (as in requisite expositiony cut-scenes and boring click-through-dialog boxes) is an absolute wrong turn, but I also believe games like GTA and Sims are indicative of the market's hunger for self-directed (and individually plotted) gameplay elements.

I hope that emergent cell-phone and portable gaming technologies will force the hand of larger manufacturers toward production of longer programs with casual- and quick- episodes related through the ubiquity of plot and character but not as heavily dependent on emotional/psychological engagement.

― remy (x Jeremy), Friday, 23 December 2005 03:05 (twenty years ago)

how much of a plot does gta san andreas have anyway? a meaningful plot, anyway? when you're bouncing up and down on your hydraulics in time to a beat or piloting an RC airplane or stealing a jetpack are you really thinking "ahh... every moment i get closer to finding my mother's killer!"

― s1ocki (slutsky), Friday, 23 December 2005 05:26 (twenty years ago)

do you people not pay attention to the hark-ye-old PS1 RPG titles I keep bringing up? Or even the SNES ones? I think those go a bit further in the black hat white hat thing. I mean frickin FF:T has you killing the good guys in like the first stage! And XG has you choosing mortality over transcendence, while the villain goes on to unify with the higher power! Terranigma, shit, I can't even get into that without spoiling everything. Fuckin' FF:TA is the Matrix conundrum redux, "the fantasy world is great, we're famous and powerful here, why would you leave?"

Black hat White hat does seem to be par for the course nowadays though, I wonder why it was OK to be morally complex in the 90s, but not anymore. Have some more 9/11 with your potatoes I guess.

― TOMBOT, Friday, 23 December 2005 14:47 (twenty years ago)

(the trick is that all the games which have morally/politically/philosophically complex storylines are also all extremely linear, with the choices basically boiling down to how you win or lose your fights - today in games it's fashionable to offer players faux-moral (by which I mean aesthetic) choices in plot trees, a feature which aspires to add 200% to replay value but rarely, if ever, achieves this)

― TOMBOT, Friday, 23 December 2005 14:47 (twenty years ago)

is moral complexity really the sign of a good game though? seems to me that's the sign of a good... or maybe more interesting... PLOT, which is still sticking to the idea that games need novel- or movie-style narrative.

― s1ocki (slutsky), Friday, 23 December 2005 14:58 (twenty years ago)

I never said NEED.

― TOMBOT, Friday, 23 December 2005 15:10 (twenty years ago)

WANT?

― s1ocki (slutsky), Friday, 23 December 2005 15:19 (twenty years ago)

the question is can games have complex, guidable plots that are more than choose-your-own-adventure decision trees?

― s1ocki (slutsky), Friday, 23 December 2005 15:20 (twenty years ago)

I hope not, because then text-loving OCD boys like me will have to play them 30000 times instead of just twice or three times.

The thing to bring up here is games like Planescape: Torment, where the plot is more or less on rails. Here's your start, middle and end, here's a few spare bits that you can do at various times through the game or not at all. But the control over your companions through dialogue was great, at each set-piece there were a lot of ways to go through it, each of which would have an effect on your party, and some of which might have been made impossible due to previous decisions. And some of which would have serious effects on your party EG adding or losing members. But the plot kept on keeping on.

― Andrew Farrell (afarrell), Friday, 23 December 2005 15:41 (twenty years ago)

Possibly but if you've ever tried to write event scripts and keep track of all the flags that have to be set to create a truly immersive and variable decision tree set where one act affects another then you know why the graphics keep getting better while the "stories" get worse

The Fallout series does probably the best job of that that I've seen. Chrono Trigger certainly allows for a lot of different choices to be made which have an effect on the outcome but it's still a much more obvious decision tree.

― TOMBOT, Friday, 23 December 2005 15:44 (twenty years ago)

OKAY THIS UNREGISTERED USER CANNOT POST LARGE AMOUNTS OF TEXT "FEATURE" IS FUCKING WORTHLESS STUPID BULLSHIT. CAN A MOD TALK TO SOME OTHER MODS BEFORE I FUCKING LOGIN AND RUIN YOUR FRIDAYS IN A FIT OF PIQUE JDUBZ STEEZ. REMAINDER OF ORIGINAL POST FOLLOWS:

It seems like the way to do it is to have lots and lots of interlocking side quests which affect each other while having marginal (haha! side quests! marginal!) effect on the central "plot" of the game (kill evil boss).

That brings up an interesting problem - why does "kill evil boss" have to be the climax of everything? I mean movies and literature have found many more ways of bringing about resolution to a narrative, how come video games are still just retelling the first third of Beowulf over and over?

― TOMBOT, Friday, 23 December 2005 15:45 (twenty years ago)

it's true! or just action movies over and over again--most of those end with a "boss battle."

i'm not really neccessarily against plots being on rails--i certainly don't mind that in books and movies and stuff...

― s1ocki (slutsky), Friday, 23 December 2005 15:57 (twenty years ago)

Yeah action movies are all Beowulf redux too.

How would you write a game that ends more like, say, a tale of two cities? How you make it FOON?

― TOMBOT, Friday, 23 December 2005 16:03 (twenty years ago)

i was just thinking, to create a game with a truly open-ended narrative with all its attendant complexity you'd probably need some sort of AI to run it all!

― s1ocki (slutsky), Friday, 23 December 2005 16:10 (twenty years ago)

or perhaps those games DO exist and they are actually everquest and other mmporpgs, where other intelligences (the other players) impact & shape the narrative

― s1ocki (slutsky), Friday, 23 December 2005 16:11 (twenty years ago)

The only case I've really heard about where other players actually are able to wield enough power to 'shape narrative' is EVE online, where people own huge corporations and employ other players and that sort of thing. Otherwise MMORPGs are mostly more like the "abstraction" you describe above!

― TOMBOT, Friday, 23 December 2005 16:14 (twenty years ago)

I think that one of the forces keeping games QUESTY instead of complex and open-ended is the expectation that each plot will awesomely expand the scope of the world from the beginning to end: start out in some podunk fucking village, end up in the catacomb underneath the usurper's castle and traverse a continent in between.

With ample cutscenes of sunsets, armies, and sidekick hijinx.

― remy (x Jeremy), Friday, 23 December 2005 16:43 (twenty years ago)

Yeah, it's not so much that PS:T was really on rails, but it seems more that you have a trade-off between "make your own players" vs "limited amount of PCs". I'm thinking her of PS:T/Kotor/BG2, where so much of the game's richness comes from the interactive of the characters in your party. Sidekick hijinx, as Remy put it.

this lack is pretty glaring with something like Icewind Dale or even leading back to Ultima III. Sure, you can invent dialogue between the NPCs, but it's FAR more fun to hear them bust on each other for the entire game, yell about throwing stones at squirrels, etc.

Hopefully, they'll someday finally rig up the game's AI to auto-generate a whole new narrative on the fly, instead of the focus on graphics that we've had since Quake.

But until then, I like the story aspects. You can introduce non-linearity into it(Fallout 2, Divine Divinity, Ultima VII), but you still have the strongest narrative with something plotted out in advance.

― kingfish holiday travesty (kingfish 2.0), Friday, 23 December 2005 17:47 (twenty years ago)

Also wasn't "LEGO Star Wars" pretty innovative? I really would like to see more creative use of licensed IP like that, I think. Somebody should really make some kind of tactical game set in the world of the Brick Testament's Book Of Judges. That shit would rock my world.

― TOMBOT, Friday, 23 December 2005 19:45 (twenty years ago)

Laura , Ian and I saw some special about Military campaigns of the Old Testament being advertised on TV the other day.

Anyway, this thread has made me come up with a brilliant idea for a strategy game that is kind of like SimLife + Civilization + Warcraft + Princess Maker + Sims. Also, it will teach kids about GENETICS.

― GET EQUIPPED WITH BUBBLE LEAD (ex machina), Friday, 23 December 2005 20:06 (twenty years ago)

http://waste.informatik.hu-berlin.de/Grassmuck/Texts/GamesJ/pm3.jpg

― melton mowbray (adr), Friday, 23 December 2005 20:11 (twenty years ago)

I need to find the screenshot of her falling in love with "dad"

― GET EQUIPPED WITH BUBBLE LEAD (ex machina), Friday, 23 December 2005 20:20 (twenty years ago)

Spore

― remy (x Jeremy), Friday, 23 December 2005 20:37 (twenty years ago)

btw, upthread I was speaking derisively about sidekick hijinx.

― remy (x Jeremy), Friday, 23 December 2005 20:38 (twenty years ago)

The sidekick hijinx in Frie Emblem are mostly acceptable.

― TOMBOT, Friday, 23 December 2005 21:12 (twenty years ago)

Sidekick Hijinx are half of the fun of Baldur's Gate 2

― kingfish holiday travesty (kingfish 2.0), Friday, 23 December 2005 21:13 (twenty years ago)

i had a bunch of yakking to do, but firefox crashed. so suffice to say, i am unhappy with any thread where someone calls mario brilliant for its abstractness (yeah ok dude) and where xenogears is held up as an example of excellence in videogame writing.

― I GUARONTEE ::cajun voice:: (Adrian Langston), Saturday, 24 December 2005 01:47 (twenty years ago)

that said i essentially agree with most of the sentiments on this thread so wtf am i bitching abt. i keep forgetting this isn't ILM

― I GUARONTEE ::cajun voice:: (Adrian Langston), Saturday, 24 December 2005 01:48 (twenty years ago)

oh man, bring on the 22-year-old reactionary shits

― kingfish holiday travesty (kingfish 2.0), Saturday, 24 December 2005 01:51 (twenty years ago)

wait, r u talking about me or ilm? cuz if it's me I WILL FUCKING END U PAL

― I GUARONTEE ::cajun voice:: (Adrian Langston), Saturday, 24 December 2005 02:07 (twenty years ago)

You're gonna rue this moment when I'm roto rooting the fuck out of your Jew anus.

― I GUARONTEE ::cajun voice:: (Adrian Langston), Saturday, 24 December 2005 02:09 (twenty years ago)

I need to find the screenshot of her falling in love with "dad"

Jon, that is actually the one I was looking for! You are so OTM you could be
http://blackzarak.co.uk/adi/upload/upload_files/dabf05_05_otm_shank.jpg

― melton mowbray (adr), Saturday, 24 December 2005 02:10 (twenty years ago)

wait, r u talking about me or ilm?

ilm, you big dummy. thus the "reactionary" bit

― kingfish holiday travesty (kingfish 2.0), Saturday, 24 December 2005 02:48 (twenty years ago)

I need to find the screenshot of her falling in love with "dad"

http://solidsharkey.com/pm2marry1.gif
from http://solidsharkey.com/pm2.html

― älänbänänä (alanbanana), Saturday, 24 December 2005 03:10 (twenty years ago)

http://www.solidsharkey.com/fnord.gif
http://www.solidsharkey.com/brentai-ov1.jpg
http://www.solidsharkey.com/ov-storytime.jpg

― I GUARONTEE ::cajun voice:: (Adrian Langston), Saturday, 24 December 2005 03:28 (twenty years ago)

mario IS brilliant for its abstractness!

― s1ocki (slutsky), Saturday, 24 December 2005 03:39 (twenty years ago)

look at the way its elements can be recombined in seemingly INFINITE ways!

― s1ocki (slutsky), Saturday, 24 December 2005 03:39 (twenty years ago)

anyway i would like to hear the opposing view!

― s1ocki (slutsky), Saturday, 24 December 2005 03:40 (twenty years ago)

i dunno if i have one! I do think mario is brilliant, but i don't really see how it's supposed to be any more abstract than most of its platformer contemporaries. i mean, what games WEREN'T super-simplified back then?

― I GUARONTEE ::cajun voice:: (Adrian Langston), Saturday, 24 December 2005 04:18 (twenty years ago)

SMB3 and SMW hold up really well still. Pretty complex,nice sound, fun to play, fun to look at!

No one will ever care about The Need for SOCOM Turismo Ultimate 3 2005 in 10 years.

― GET EQUIPPED WITH BUBBLE LEAD (ex machina), Saturday, 24 December 2005 05:33 (twenty years ago)

i didn't say it was more abstract than its contemporaries! but i think its component elements are kinda brilliantly honed and delightful

― s1ocki (slutsky), Saturday, 24 December 2005 19:01 (twenty years ago)

Let's not forget that there was stylized shine fx on the pipes from SMB1 on.

― GET EQUIPPED WITH BUBBLE LEAD (ex machina), Saturday, 24 December 2005 19:38 (twenty years ago)

There is the changes in FX & whatnot from the SNES version of those games(from the All-Stars cart).

I think the controls are even wonkier.

― kingfish holiday travesty (kingfish 2.0), Saturday, 24 December 2005 22:29 (twenty years ago)

(I kind of like Princess Maker 2! I mean, apart from the huge collossal creepiness. Getting the prince marriage was HARD!)

― Gravel Puzzleworth (Gregory Henry), Saturday, 24 December 2005 22:35 (twenty years ago)

"...the advertising and marketing people at Yahoo viewed this as a disaster, a product management failure. They wanted to be associated with the handful of people who know who Tony Hawk is — ignoring the vastly larger and more captive casual game audience."

― TOMBOT, Tuesday, 27 December 2005 19:53 (twenty years ago)

four weeks pass...

We even heard through the grapevine that one ad buyer recently told our sales department that their client wants Ziff Davis publications to start playing ball with them, or else they're pulling support (meaning, if we don't start putting their games on our covers, we can kiss that ad money bye-bye, as well as support for normal editorial coverage of their titles).
EGM/1UP Ed in Chief Dan Hsu

― TOMBOT, Wednesday, 25 January 2006 20:25 (twenty years ago)

Perhaps more importantly

50 Cent: Bulletproof was universally panned and mocked (EGM nailed it with a two 3.5s and a 3.0), yet somehow there were enough people in America and the United Kingdom interested in living out the man's fantasy life to put it over the million mark.

― TOMBOT, Wednesday, 25 January 2006 20:27 (twenty years ago)

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