Ironically, since this year is supposed to mark the magnum opus of technology, what with all the radically different advancements crawling out of the woodwork. On the technical front, you’ve got Direct X10 with its pretty shaders and its associated new architecture for both video and aural development. On the other front that hits closer to home, you have Nintendo and Sony embracing actual player movement, in a bid to enhance the illusion of immersiveness within the world we call videogames. Even Microsoft, generally regarded as the upstart and monopolist of the technological industry, has seen remarkable success with their offering of the Xbox 360 and its associated LIVE service.
So why the pessimistic post heading?
I’ve been playing games for well over a decade now, ever since my first experience with the bootlegged version of Pac-Man on a Windows 3.1 Datamini that would probably still serve well as a Ventrilo server had my parents not gotten rid of it when we started going with the technology flow. Things have certainly come a long way from 16-colour sprites to fully real-time rendered 3D polygons and 2D textures plastered onto them, each year becoming more and more detailed in their respective fields. Even audio has slowly matured from primitive synthesized tones to that of samples so rich in quality you can almost see the music, literally; waveforms can now overlap and superimpose on each other to produce an overall aural experience that we couldn’t even have begun to dream of a couple of years ago.
These advancements have definitely brought computer generated imagery (CGI) and gaming to a whole new level, elevated its status to something that, instead of merely mimicking life, could very well become indistinguishable from life itself. And at the rate we’re going, pretty soon real-time graphics will hit that barrier, perhaps even sooner than we think. Movies like Spiderman and Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children, rendered in mental ray and composited mostly using Maya, were hailed as breakthroughs in character animation and rendering quality, and to this day remain fine examples of what can truly be achieved using mere computers instead of live-motion actors. Yes, Spiderman did mix Toby Maguire’s real-life counterpart along with the 3D rendered sequences, but to think of a stuntman performing the acts Spiderman did in the movie, even with greenscreens, is quite the stretch. And that’s being optimistic; 3D animation undoubtedly has the ability to allow characters to exhibit expressions and movements that would be difficult at best to pull off in real life.
Games have progressed along with the times too. Real-time animation these days has the benefit of new and improved shaders that can mimic the look of pre-rendered scenes, allowing for a new depth of immersion that has never been before seen in the history of visual entertainment. The 3rd generation of the Unreal Engine has offered gamers a peek at what awaits through Epic’s own Gears of War, and more recently, 2K Games’ Bioshock, both critically-acclaimed titles. Valve’s ubiquitous Half-Life series has its sequels and spin-offs utilize the Source engine, which has arguably one of the best in-game dynamic character facial animation systems since the simple open/close morph targets and animated textures that games seemed destined to use forever just a few years ago. Along with High-Dynamic Range (HDR) rendering, motion blurring, and even depth of field slowly finding their way into current titles, terms that were previously the sole domain of pre-rendered CGI are now becoming universal, testament to our ever-increasing processor speeds and cores.
Yet, with all these advancements, these improvements in every aspect of gaming itself, it seems that one element has been overlooked, underdeveloped, if you will; gameplay.
Games are, after all the hullabaloo and boxart stating otherwise, games. We play games because of their gameplay, because we find it amusing to score yet another headshot on some hapless sap a quarter of a mile away with the AWP; we find it horrifying to have to fight Sigma in his second form after taking out his first while losing half our health in the process; we want to avenge Aeris and put a stop to whatever crazed plans Sephiroth has for Gaia. We want these things, not a few billion polygons rendered on-screen with 2048×5012 pixel-sized textures, with FLAC audio that takes up 20 gigabytes of data just for the soundtrack alone.
Yet, instead of being offered innovations and improvements in the one thing that makes games games, we are instead offered things that merely serve to force an upgrade of our aging processors and graphic cards.
If you’ve actually stayed with me so far until this point, you may think that I have a grudge against “shiny, pretty graphics” and that this rant probably goes with the other 9,412 other posts on GameFAQs. Being a wannabe graphic designer whose very desired career depends on the advancement of such technology, I can safely assure you: this is not the case.
So what am I babbling about then? Where should I even begin?
Think about the games we’re playing now, and those we were a couple of years ago. Think about Half-Life, and Half-Life 2: Episode 2. I remember finishing HL1 with a sense of wonder; finishing Episode 2 made we wonder why I even bothered playing it. Yes, Gordon Freeman is still there, the Gravity Gun is still great, and the visual and audio experience is as polished is ever. The gameplay, however, seems to have taken a severe hit along with the storyline. Episode 2 may be critically acclaimed by most people, and perhaps they’re right, but I feel that Valve have chosen to take a wrong path for the direction of the Half-Life series: the story no longer has its appeal, the characters feel awkward, even annoying, and the gameplay is becoming both repetitive and less of a mental challenge than it should be.
Another example? Call of Duty, and its recently released sequel, Call of Duty 4. You’d think, that after all the WWII games, Infinity Ward would have learned that sometimes saturating an already-brim-filled market with yet another of the same doesn’t exactly bode well for innovation, and yet they’ve done it again, except that this time instead of killing Nazis you get to blow up terrorists, the talking point on everyone’s agenda these days. Fission Mucking Accomplished. And it plays like an updated version of Battlefield 2, only without the fun of vehicles.
Honestly, what happened to games? What happened to the tense, even literally nail-biting moments I had in Rogue Spear and Raven Shield, gone with the aberration that is Rainbow Six: Vegas? I’m not even sure Tom Clancy plays through the games anymore before allowing his name on them, because I’m pretty sure that even SAS soldiers don’t have magically regenerating health, nor is it SOP to fire over a table gangsta-style. Ghost Recon and Splinter Cell, the latter being one of the more interesting blends of realism and fiction, have both turned into, essentially, modernized versions of Star Wars.
It’s not just Ubisoft who is guilty of this kind of ridiculous simplification, though; look at the Command & Conquer series. Once, it was worthy of its stature as a revered RTS title, these days, with Command & Conquer 3‘s release, I find it hard to have faith in anything bearing the C&C brand that isn’t from a time past, when Westwood Studios was still independent from the giant that is EA.
And it’s not just gameplay that is slowly turning the industry backwards. Ask yourself this one question: has there been any game released in the past few years that didn’t require a patch immediately or almost immediately after its launch? When I read threads dedicated to Hellgate: London, I can almost hear the agony emanating from the various users who have all manner of problems with the game. On the other extreme, I boot up Battlefield 2 and find the server browser still as unresponsive as ever, even after getting a new rig with almost twice the processing power of my old one; the game hasn’t been updated at all ever since Battlefield 2142 was released, splitting the community into two in the process.
Consoles, while hailed as the gaming hubs of this generation, are, in my opinion, slowly draining the life out of games altogether. Forget the controller-being-designed-for-gaming arguments and the mice-are-better-for-aiming comebacks, consoles are a poison to games. Instead of allowing developers to focus on developing a game with great gameplay and perhaps excellent accompanying visuals and audio, they are now forced to deal with the capitalistic pressures of the economic world, treading carefully with every step they take lest it bring them to financial ruin. And even taking the multiplatform release route is not as viable as it should be; architectures are vastly different, capabilites must be taken into consideration, and if anything, console gamers have even less tolerance for bugs and issues when it comes to games than PC gamers. The barriers to entry are high, with platform SDKs costing more than what a lone man with a great idea can afford, forcing him to base his development on the PC, which even now is being decried as a “lesser” platform for gaming than consoles.
The Wii boasts innovation with its nunchuk and motion sensors, but where everyone sees creativity, ingenuity and cuteness, I beg to differ. The Wii certainly has potential in its unique control system, but so far, no game I have seen really makes use of it well enough to matter. Not the gestures in Twilight Princess, and certainly not the aiming in Resident Evil. What would really raise my eyebrows would be a game that actually had the nunchuk make a conceivable difference in all axes of movement, be it X, Y, Z or rotation. This is where I sometimes wish Sony and Nintendo would collaborate and produce a SIXAXIS nunchuk or something. And even then, a game that actually made intuitive use of this system would be required to complete the immersion.
The Xbox 360 and its LIVE service would be an interesting endeavour by Microsoft if it hadn’t already been done before with XFire, Steam and Ventrilo, and if it wasn’t pay-to-use. This, I feel, is completely unnecessary and unwarranted: players should never have to pay to enjoy their games’ multiplayer features with other players if they do not have to go through Microsoft servers to do so. A feeble excuse that hosting servers that contain account and matchmaking capabilites is not enough.
But I digress from my point: why games are actually dying in the first place.
Have you ever wondered about a 16 x 16 pixel-sized icon? Assuming a sRGB profile, there are approximately 16581375 combinations that a single pixel can have. Now multiply that by the number of pixels available in such an icon, and you have 4244832000 combinations altogether. Not even more than the number of people on this planet.
What does this have to do with anything, you ask? Well, I’m getting a feeling that games are slowly, but surely starting to run out of ideas, simply because there aren’t any left. Through this decade, we’ve gone through action, action-adventure, shooters, real-time strategies, turn-based strategies, puzzles, platformers, platformer-shooters, hack-and-slash-ers, text-based, audio-based, Massively Multiplayer Online (which is essentially an extension of the action genre) and about a few hundred more genres than I can come up with. We’ve covered our characters from first-person, third-person, isometric, top-down perspectives and even mixed them all up sometimes just for the heck of it. ‘Spiritual sequel’ seems to be a key term these days, and even new IPs like Assassin’s Creed suffer from the prequel syndrome: it plays very similarly to Ubisoft’s earlier Prince of Persia offerings, while mixing a few new elements snatched from Chaos Theory.
We’re running out of ideas faster than we can come up with new games, and it’s beginning to show rather painfully. Choices in Bioshock? Yes if you want to be a good little angel, no if you want to be a sick perverted freak. Teamwork in Team Fortress 2 and Call of Duty 4? I had more teamwork in Operation Flashpoint and Pandora Tomorrow than I think I ever will have in any other game, and with far less players and even more anonymity.
Of course, it’s not unreasonable to expect that, after such a long time, games start to repeat certain elements of themselves; there is nothing wrong with re-experiencing something we love a slightly different way. Even art is mostly derivative of itself, and most artists copy each other in order to discover their own personal style. But when styles begin to merge, blend and remain stagnant as is the case with games, this leads to disincentive for new niches to be found and filled; developers become slaves to re-releasing FIFA and Counter-Strike with plots that would make LOST proud; Crysis looked awesome but had a storyline that could at best be described as being composed entirely of lose and suck, with gameplay elements being – surprise – a spiritual successor of Far Cry’s gameplay. Translation: it’s Far Cry with shinier graphics and a guy wearing a nano muscle suit instead of a ragged demeanour.
So, after all this, what can be done? What could developers do to somehow save the world of gaming and earn their place back in my good books?
This is where a rant would usually start to go in-depth about various methods and means to right what’s wrong that would merely serve to prove how un-objective it was, and this is why my next statement may be unfamiliar, if you’ve endured my writing thus far.
I’m of the opinion that, really, there is nothing that can be done. The underlying problem, really, isn’t that developers are lazy or that gamers are stupid or anything like that; it’s that our world is far too concerned with the concept of capitalism for anything to become viable unless it’s profitable anymore. This acts as a noose, a stranglehold on whatever sparks of creativity and innovation that could perhaps have revealed itself through some brilliant epiphany of someone or other. This was less of a problem back when developers still pretty much made games at a loss (mentally-wise), simply because they cared more about the games than the money. These days, with the poppycock that the media has spouted about the booming games industry, it seems that every Joe these days wants to go about designing games and making big money in the process.
Also, there’s that thing about running out of fresh ideas simply because there are none left to come up with. You can mock me for believing that there are limits to our imagination, but let’s just say that when someone claims that the sky’s the limit, realize that said sky isn’t exactly that high up above the Earth.
Now, to you, I’m most likely just a random idiot on the Internet who has way too much free time to type out crap like this. Believe what you will. But I hope that if you actually read this, you’ll think twice about the next game you play, and perhaps appreciate the elements in what made old, ugly games play great.
That, I think, is the whole point of my post, and is what will probably be the only way to get people to enjoy games again, and not just re-updated features and graphics.
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