I have so many questions about that list. I guess it's best to wait for someone at GAF to investigate/figure out the logic behind this because just from the looks of it there is some seriously sinister shit happening there. I guess Metacritic is over unless they completely reset/come out with sound reasoning.
No way will publishers play ball with that kind of bullshit now that it's out in the open.
My eyes weep tears of sweet joy at your write-up here! There is one thing that I lament the most. Games as art is something that has been a controversial issue since that one guy said they won't ever be art. I think developers have kind of gone out of their way to prove him wrong (even though I 100% agree with him and think they're fighting an unwinnable battle). The focus on art is exactly one thing that has made me so jaded about video games.
I wanted to repond to this point in specific. I personally view the term 'art' in the context of video games as art as more of a medium of expression, as in one of the great artforms: literature, painting, sculpture, dance and so on. And at one stage be studied much like one would study film or painting
I feel you're incorrect by interpreting it as the actual focus on visual assets,graphic engines, artistic direction.
I get what you're saying that the industry is focusing perhaps too much on how it looks as opposed to creating a world where a player is freer to have a more dramatic and organic impact on the world and the npcs within and vice versa, by perhaps removing scripted enounters for example
Art has a technical meaning with regard to game development. It specifically refers to the creation of visual assets. Character models. Environment textures. Props and lighting. Animations for all these things. Sometimes it can expand its scope to sound effects, music. Even GUI design.
It is distinct from engineering, which usually revolves around game code and asset management. And design, which is the structure of the game, the writing and story, the gameplay element.
He's right to say that games have been focusing on art too much, in this technical sense. On a fundamental level, the latest Call of Duty is almost indistinct from the first Call of Duty. A hovering gun with attached hands floats around a linear environment shooting at foreign men. Tweaks to the formula are slight, more a suite of refinements and additional mechanics. But at the base level it is no different. All of the money and decades of development progress have been put into the art. Into making the environments more realistic, having a wider variety of them with a greater emphasis on dynamic scripted events and eye-catching vistas.
What he's saying, and is something I agree with, is that while the consoles stagnated, money should have been put into design instead of art. Games wouldn't have looked any better but would have played better. New mechanics taking advantage of the hardware in new, interest ways.
The best place to see this change is in indie games. Often, they have no budget for asset production. So the focus is solely on new mechanics. The difference between, say, VVVVVV and SuperHexagon isn't gradual. They're entirely different. Wholly separate experiences. But they're from the same team using broadly similar art styles and visual representations. But the mechanics of play are not even on a linear slope. They're on different planets. Imagine the difference hundreds of millions of dollars would make to design if instead of making monolithic, Hollywood-esque blockbusters, these publishers instead made thousands of small, experimental titles. Where would the gaming industry be then compared to now?
Development budgets are not going to increase forever, or even for a while. In fact, as the raw horsepower of home consoles gets better, development costs will actually go down, and quite drastically. Here's why.
The visual fidelity of games has not significantly improved in two or three years. I'm talking about a technical improvement here. The seventh generation of consoles has been the longest for ages, far longer than the previous two. And we reached the peak of their performance a while back, probably around Gears of War 2, maybe a bit later. Any improvements since then have been clever design trickery or stylistic decisions. Pure polygons on screen was maxed out, as was simultaneous AI actors and draw distances. We know this because it makes for good PR. Hell, Sony even admitted that the PS3 was running at max in late 2007. Everything since then has been refinement. So the balance of workforce at these developers had to change, from an even keel of engineering and art, to a much more heavily art focused team, once the peak was met.
Case in point: The art department for Dead Space 1 in 2008 was 55, not including the 20 contracted concept artists in Shanghai. And the engineering/production department was roughly the same size. 62, not including exec level production or any of that 'special thanks' bullshit. For Dead Space 2, just three years later, this balance drastically changes. Art goes up to 80, while producers, sound and engineering go down to 39. This change is mirrored for the Gears of War franchise and the Halo franchise (though the change from Halo 3 to Halo 4 is probably anomalous due to the developer). And this is not down to them being sequels. Even new franchises have started off with far larger art departments then engineering, because all the middleware is in place. Everything from the Unreal engine to fucking Speed Tree has been built and sold. Eidos Montreal, a new startup, has over three hundred employees on two teams, fully half of which are artists, level designers, sound designers or other asset producers. Heck, it was founded by a team of artists. Why? Because everything is licensed. The engine came from Crystal Dynamics, the sound and text engine from somewhere else. All brought in wholesale, ready made.
The point being that art assets have long been the bottleneck of game production. Everything else is quick and easy by comparison. Level design can be done in two minutes with SketchUp, and simple game engines can be put together in less than a day. Sid Meier built an entire game in an afternoon, from scratch, while on the phone. In fact, for a better result, you want a small team of level designers and gameplay designers. Too many cooks and all that. But art is not easy, or quick. Art has more stages to it, from concept art to 3D modelling to optimization and final design. Art is also expensive, requiring the paid services of highly sought after individuals in a seller's marketplace. I've heard many times people say that if you want to get into game development, learn how to code or learn how to draw. Otherwise, you're being dumped into QA for minimum wage.
In the last couple of years many developers have turned to outsourcing simply to get it done quicker. Arkane had all of their character art outsourced to independent French artists who never even came into the studio, Spicy Horse moved halfway across the world just to use cheap Chinese labor to produce their titles. Then look at Assassin's Creed. That's the worst offender of them all, with six international Ubisoft studios being involved in the production of the fourth one, up from an insane five on the previous two. All of that extra work is content production. Character models. Texture art. Sound effects. Music. None of it is engineering, the Anvil engine having already been made in Montreal and already refined to the point where nobody needs to work on it anymore. Because there's nowhere else to go. The 360 simply can't render anymore polys, or simulate any more physics actions or AI responses.
One of the biggest reasons art is so expensive to produce is because of downsampling and optimization. Two processes which anyone will tell you take up a huge amount of resources, and more importantly, time. Because these AAA titles have to run on everything, which means the lowest common denominator is the baseline. Character models are routinely created at orders of magnitude more polys than are used in-game. Texture files are duplicated for the all the various resolutions, sound is encoded at a huge variety of sample rates and so on and so on. The reason Unreal Engine is so popular among console developers is not because it can do the most things, or because it is the cheapest to license, it is because it streamlines this artistic process. Hence we get texture pop-in and soft-body physics. Epic were one of the pioneers of normal mapping for this exact reason. High quality assets made functional in the engine itself, reducing development time and effort.
This also explains why all those crazy Eastern-European games with the insanely high quality visuals are all running on PC. Not because the PC is more powerful (though it is), but because that is the standard of asset production everywhere. It's just that AAA titles have to be trimmed down to work on outdated and underpowered consoles. That costs money. That costs time. That's why development budgets have skyrocketed these past few years. It's also why almost all DLC is asset based. New weapons with new models with new textures with new sound effects and animations. Very little DLC consists of new mechanics, or new gameplay systems. Or even new ideas. It's just art. Art in a box produced by the biggest content pipelines the industry has ever seen, bloated by years of extended hiatus, waiting for the next generation of consoles to arrive.
What were developers most excited about with regards to the PS4 announcement? Was it the new controller, with a new share functionality or expanded suite of online mechanics? No. It was the RAM. The 8 gigs of RAM. And the off-the-shelf AMD processors with increased horsepower. Stuff the consumer doesn't care or even know about, but they do. Because finally they can start moving forward again, reducing the time and expense of their asset production by working on a fresher set of hardware.
Obviously modelling Vekta City for that Killzone: Shadow Fall demonstration wasn't cheap. But it will have been much cheaper than what the boys at DICE are having to do just to fit Battlefield 4 onto the PS3. Or the people at Ubisoft squeezing Watch_Dogs onto this generation of hardware. Which is to say nothing of the savings in almost all other areas. Motion capture has reduced animation budgets drastically, even with the inclusion of actor costs. Fewer and fewer textures are hand painted nowadays, lots of photo assets are used. And more and more game components are being shared among developers under the same roof. We've all read endlessly about the Naughty Dog black ops team that runs around Sony dev houses fixing up shit. That reduces costs too. Couple all of that with a significant digital distribution platform from day one for all three eight-gen consoles and things are looking up. It's totally false to think that AAA game development is going to reach some kind of 'peak oil' situation and crash and burn. We have seen video games go from popular pasttime to the most lucrative entertainment industry in the world, in the space of one console generation. That's just expansion, not unsustainable, out of control growth.
I wish I could say that I believe this (although it is basically an extended form of the "high power makes things easier on devs, thus development will be cheaper").
There really is just no indication that games are expensive now because developers have to pare down photorealism onto consoles that can't manage it, nor can I honestly believe that developers can just point cameras at things now and have a game apparate within the spaces.
There was some talk last decade about how computers could ultimately make movie budgets cheaper by making expensive shots cheaper and actors easily virtualizable. In some limited ways, that has been true - movies like District 9 or Chronicle probably couldn't have happened for the amount they cost to produce without access to relatively cheap computer effects. That said, blockbuster movies haven't become cheaper on the whole as computer effects became easier to work with - the drive for photorealism and spectacle has kept those budgets climbing.
The trend is to push the limit. It's what devs want, and it's what (most) players want. More power means developers with modest ambitions can do some things somewhat easier - it does not mean that you can make the videogame equivalent of The Avengers with nothing but a digital camera and a twinkle in your eye.
Harmonix, the developer of the Rock Band and Dance Central franchises (and creator of Guitar Hero), has received investment from venture capital firm The Foundry Group. The VC previously backed Zynga and Sifteo.
"Last fall, Alex Rigopulos and his partner Eran Egozy showed me the three new games they were working on. Each addressed a different HCI (Human Computer Interface) paradigm. Each was stunningly envisioned. And each was magic, even in its rough form," wrote Foundry Group Managing Director Brad Feld, who will now take a spot on the Harmonix board. "Earlier this year I saw each game again, in a more advanced form. And I was completely and totally blown away – literally bouncing in my seat as I saw them demoed."
HCI is essentially an exploration of interacting with computers beyond the keyboard and mouse interface, which is something Harmonix has demonstrable experience with, given its history with new tech like Microsoft's Kinect.
Although Feld's words should not be taken to mean Harmonix is working on several peripheral-based games, it does mean that the developer is utilizing different concepts for player-game interaction.
There's still no word on when Harmonix will reveal these projects, but Microsoft has been a good partner for the company. We've got E3 coming up, as well as an expected new Xbox announcement in the coming months.
I saw that, don't really know what to make of it. I guess more plastic gizmos are on the way?
If I were to bet on which three different HCI methods were demoed, I'd say XBox controller, Kinect (2?), and touch (likely an iPad). No peripherals involved, and three things that HMX has experience with.
A fair point. Though my point was that currently budgets are inflated because of the stagnation of the console releases. We should have had the PS4 and 720 a couple of years ago. But we didn't. Budgets will normalize once the new ones are out. They will rise but not at the unsustainable rate we have seen in the past eighteen/twenty-four months. Furthermore, people tend to extrapolate years into the future based on a large but rapid expansion of the industry. Video gaming is still new, just as cinema was back in 'the day'. Gaming has expanded so rapidly this past generation that development pipelines and infrastructure has not kept pace. That's why so much is outsourced. Time is money and they don't have the people required to make games fast enough.
Over time, this infrastructure will reduce costs the more developed it becomes. There will always be outliers, always an Avengers. But industry-wide, these past few years are just puberty for a juvenile form of entertainment. It is, after all, in its current incarnation only about two decades old. People don't keep growing their whole lives, and gaming won't either.
THQ was a fair-sized publisher and the exxxtreme budget policies sank it.
THQ sank because they threw an absurd amount of money at a couple of incredibly, unutterably awful products and their licensed games stopped selling quite as well as they used to.
If Homefront had perhaps not sucked they might have come out okay. The lesson here is "don't make shitty games."
Salvation122 on
+1
Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
THQ was a fair-sized publisher and the exxxtreme budget policies sank it.
THQ sank because they threw an absurd amount of money at a couple of incredibly, unutterably awful products and their licensed games stopped selling quite as well as they used to.
If Homefront had perhaps not sucked they might have come out okay. The lesson here is "don't make shitty games."
Which was my exact point. They threw way too much money into projects where they had no idea about viability of profit, then collapsed under the weight of spending way too much to get too little.
If the people running the company had had any common sense, they would be going strong right now because they would've dumped all of that completely wasted uDraw/Homefront money into profitable, though not hugely successful, projects, then kept the rest as profit. Their inability to have reasonable budgets made them crash and burn, hard.
It's actually a trend that afflicts many large companies, so the video game industry isn't an outlier here, especially because the particular kinds of clueless corporate types who end up running game companies. Having your company grow big, fast, is a major problem, especially if trying to sustain that growth or maintain what you've gained. Many, many companies collapse under the weight of their own success from a simple lack of realizing that big success isn't permanent or reliable.
I dunno, the Udraw situation feels a bit different to me. It's like the difference between going broke because you blew all your money on hookers and blow (regular development issues) and going broke because you bet your life savings on 31 Black at the roulette table and lost (Udraw).
edit: And to clarify a little bit more: The first guy had a lifestyle that was unsustainable and needed to be overhauled completely. While the latter guy was doing ok, but made one fucking colossally huge mistake and it killed him.
The Wolfman on
"The sausage of Green Earth explodes with flavor like the cannon of culinary delight."
0
NocrenLt Futz, Back in ActionNorth CarolinaRegistered Userregular
The thing is though, they shouldn't have put their life saving on 31 Black.
Maybe just a couple grand. (Basically a smaller print run of the hardware instead of thinking "This sold like gang busters on the Wii! Let's port this MOTHER!")
0
MordaRazgromМорда РазгромRuling the Taffer KingdomRegistered Userregular
My eyes weep tears of sweet joy at your write-up here! There is one thing that I lament the most. Games as art is something that has been a controversial issue since that one guy said they won't ever be art. I think developers have kind of gone out of their way to prove him wrong (even though I 100% agree with him and think they're fighting an unwinnable battle). The focus on art is exactly one thing that has made me so jaded about video games.
I wanted to repond to this point in specific. I personally view the term 'art' in the context of video games as art as more of a medium of expression, as in one of the great artforms: literature, painting, sculpture, dance and so on. And at one stage be studied much like one would study film or painting
I feel you're incorrect by interpreting it as the actual focus on visual assets,graphic engines, artistic direction.
I get what you're saying that the industry is focusing perhaps too much on how it looks as opposed to creating a world where a player is freer to have a more dramatic and organic impact on the world and the npcs within and vice versa, by perhaps removing scripted enounters for example
Okay quick clarification. Don't hate me, it's just my opinion. To me games are NOT art, but only because I view them as an easel. I'm the artist, the developer gives me tools. I want better tools, I don't want to be given a finished and stiff product.
Monster Hunter Tri code/username: 1MF42Z (Morda)
WiiU Username: MordaRazgrom
Steam Username: MordaRazgrom
WoW/Diablo 3 Battlenet Battletag: MordaRazgrom#1755
Me and my wife have a gamer YouTube page if interested www.youtube.com/TeamMarriage
The thing is though, they shouldn't have put their life saving on 31 Black.
Maybe just a couple grand. (Basically a smaller print run of the hardware instead of thinking "This sold like gang busters on the Wii! Let's port this MOTHER!")
Oh, obviously. Not disputing that.
"The sausage of Green Earth explodes with flavor like the cannon of culinary delight."
My eyes weep tears of sweet joy at your write-up here! There is one thing that I lament the most. Games as art is something that has been a controversial issue since that one guy said they won't ever be art. I think developers have kind of gone out of their way to prove him wrong (even though I 100% agree with him and think they're fighting an unwinnable battle). The focus on art is exactly one thing that has made me so jaded about video games.
I wanted to repond to this point in specific. I personally view the term 'art' in the context of video games as art as more of a medium of expression, as in one of the great artforms: literature, painting, sculpture, dance and so on. And at one stage be studied much like one would study film or painting
I feel you're incorrect by interpreting it as the actual focus on visual assets,graphic engines, artistic direction.
I get what you're saying that the industry is focusing perhaps too much on how it looks as opposed to creating a world where a player is freer to have a more dramatic and organic impact on the world and the npcs within and vice versa, by perhaps removing scripted enounters for example
Okay quick clarification. Don't hate me, it's just my opinion. To me games are NOT art, but only because I view them as an easel. I'm the artist, the developer gives me tools. I want better tools, I don't want to be given a finished and stiff product.
Just so we don't go around in circles on this. Your opinion is valid but games are literally art, by any reasonable definition of the word. The whole games as art debate is done to death.
My eyes weep tears of sweet joy at your write-up here! There is one thing that I lament the most. Games as art is something that has been a controversial issue since that one guy said they won't ever be art. I think developers have kind of gone out of their way to prove him wrong (even though I 100% agree with him and think they're fighting an unwinnable battle). The focus on art is exactly one thing that has made me so jaded about video games.
I wanted to repond to this point in specific. I personally view the term 'art' in the context of video games as art as more of a medium of expression, as in one of the great artforms: literature, painting, sculpture, dance and so on. And at one stage be studied much like one would study film or painting
I feel you're incorrect by interpreting it as the actual focus on visual assets,graphic engines, artistic direction.
I get what you're saying that the industry is focusing perhaps too much on how it looks as opposed to creating a world where a player is freer to have a more dramatic and organic impact on the world and the npcs within and vice versa, by perhaps removing scripted enounters for example
Okay quick clarification. Don't hate me, it's just my opinion. To me games are NOT art, but only because I view them as an easel. I'm the artist, the developer gives me tools. I want better tools, I don't want to be given a finished and stiff product.
Just so we don't go around in circles on this. Your opinion is valid but games are literally art, by any reasonable definition of the word. The whole games as art debate is done to death.
I'm wholly unconvinced. Last ill say though, I've seen the debates and know the points. This not where to discuss that. I was more commenting about how you were saying about direction of focus, and lamenting that I want that focus turned elsewhere
Monster Hunter Tri code/username: 1MF42Z (Morda)
WiiU Username: MordaRazgrom
Steam Username: MordaRazgrom
WoW/Diablo 3 Battlenet Battletag: MordaRazgrom#1755
Me and my wife have a gamer YouTube page if interested www.youtube.com/TeamMarriage
Utterly mediocre. Darksiders 2 was decent, but it was a solid B rental not a AAA blockbuster. Fun but insubstantial.
0
MordaRazgromМорда РазгромRuling the Taffer KingdomRegistered Userregular
The idea of home front was interesting. It was a mash up of survival and call of duty, right? Or am I woefully mistaken?
Monster Hunter Tri code/username: 1MF42Z (Morda)
WiiU Username: MordaRazgrom
Steam Username: MordaRazgrom
WoW/Diablo 3 Battlenet Battletag: MordaRazgrom#1755
Me and my wife have a gamer YouTube page if interested www.youtube.com/TeamMarriage
0
Dhalphirdon't you open that trapdooryou're a fool if you dareRegistered Userregular
edited March 2013
Homefront was a fun four hours and it had an interesting premise with at least a unique backstory.
That's about the best anyone can say about it.
EDIT: and I am only that generous because I got it in the THQ pack and not for full price.
The idea of home front was interesting. It was a mash up of survival and call of duty, right? Or am I woefully mistaken?
Homefront was the most linear, most scripted game I have ever played. It is a series of very short set pieces where you are constantly being told to do by NPCs that make the "Reload, Dr. Freeman" guy seem, uh...
no, he's still annoying. It's just that the NPCs in Homefront are worse.
To expand on the above: many of the levels of Homefront are interrupted by doors, which you must wait for another character to come up and open for you. This is bad enough - I guess maybe your character is afraid of doorknobs? - but it reaches its nadir in a sequence where you cannot walk through a gap in a fence until another NPC walks through it first. They couldn't even be bothered to put a door in for that one.
Slightly more on-topic for the industry thread, THQ's stock cratered when it was released and the first reviews hit. uDraw definitely helped take the company the rest of the way, but trying to make a CoD killer was a huge mistake.
Homefront I believe is the game where they had the bright idea of launching a million balloons in San Francisco as a PR stunt. Which promptly all fell into the harbor and pissed off all the environmentalists.
"The sausage of Green Earth explodes with flavor like the cannon of culinary delight."
With Battleblock Theater finally getting a release, I wonder if it'll have a stranglehold on the XBLA charts like Castle Crashers. I think Behemoth is perhaps the last indie developer to not hate Microsoft and run into Valve's loving embrace.
...it'd also be nice if the PC port would be sooner than four years later.
Homefront I believe is the game where they had the bright idea of launching a million balloons in San Francisco as a PR stunt. Which promptly all fell into the harbor and pissed off all the environmentalists.
Doesn't even break the top ten of worst PR stunts for video games.
My personal favorite: Akklaim would pay for your funeral if you had Shadow Man chiseled onto the tombstone.
Acclaim IS THE TOP TEN list. They are the best there is, was and ever will be at PR fuckups.
3DS CODE: 3093-7068-3576
+4
MordaRazgromМорда РазгромRuling the Taffer KingdomRegistered Userregular
Man, why do companies take gret ideas and fuck it up? It's kind of in their best interest not to, no?
Monster Hunter Tri code/username: 1MF42Z (Morda)
WiiU Username: MordaRazgrom
Steam Username: MordaRazgrom
WoW/Diablo 3 Battlenet Battletag: MordaRazgrom#1755
Me and my wife have a gamer YouTube page if interested www.youtube.com/TeamMarriage
I don't want to make this into a full-blown art games thread, but "poor taste" brought to mind a couple of things:
Seeing plot points like this make me think back to an interview with the screenwriter for Haze, Rob Yescombe. The game really was ambitious, talking about military and drug-induced indoctrination in the same breath that it gave you a bunch of guns and asked you to kill people. Yescombe spoke briefly about his own run-in with poor taste while discussing an early draft of his script, in which one of the Mantle soldiers is committing a rape. The rape scene was removed very early on when he realized "there's no way it would sit right in interactive entertainment."
In one part he basically spells it out as an evolutionary process of remaining commercially viable, and as being responsive to the limitations of your team/game build. "Although Apocalypse Now was the foundation, we inevitably had to pull back from that level of emotional extremity because our priority was, and always will be, playability. The game has to be fun."
It's enough to make me wonder how many good kernels of ideas got cut out of some of our games because of technical limitations, and how many that we cringe at must have sounded cool to the designers before they got rendered in the game.
And of course it's nice to see that in just 5 years' time, better tech, in the service of well-executed ideas, can give us things like Spec Ops: The Line.
With Battleblock Theater finally getting a release, I wonder if it'll have a stranglehold on the XBLA charts like Castle Crashers. I think Behemoth is perhaps the last indie developer to not hate Microsoft and run into Valve's loving embrace.
...it'd also be nice if the PC port would be sooner than four years later.
Is anything an XBLA big deal anymore? Even MS doesn't feel that people should turn on their Xbox to play games.
Then again, the deals were probably in place a long time ago, long before the XBLA marketplace started to sour for indie games.
SirUltimosDon't talk, Rusty. Just paint.Registered Userregular
It's kinda crazy how MS had the indie scene developers sewn up and then completely lost them. Hell, nowadays even Nintendo gets more praise from the indie scene.
Probably didn't help some developers realized they weren't all playing on a leveled field with one another, I remember how a few were upset that the team responsible for Minecraft on Xbox Live were getting numbers and information much easier if not quicker, plus pretty sure they didn't have to deal with all the annoyances of patch problems with MS that many others have including the big names.
My eyes weep tears of sweet joy at your write-up here! There is one thing that I lament the most. Games as art is something that has been a controversial issue since that one guy said they won't ever be art. I think developers have kind of gone out of their way to prove him wrong (even though I 100% agree with him and think they're fighting an unwinnable battle). The focus on art is exactly one thing that has made me so jaded about video games.
I wanted to repond to this point in specific. I personally view the term 'art' in the context of video games as art as more of a medium of expression, as in one of the great artforms: literature, painting, sculpture, dance and so on. And at one stage be studied much like one would study film or painting
I feel you're incorrect by interpreting it as the actual focus on visual assets,graphic engines, artistic direction.
I get what you're saying that the industry is focusing perhaps too much on how it looks as opposed to creating a world where a player is freer to have a more dramatic and organic impact on the world and the npcs within and vice versa, by perhaps removing scripted enounters for example
Okay quick clarification. Don't hate me, it's just my opinion. To me games are NOT art, but only because I view them as an easel. I'm the artist, the developer gives me tools. I want better tools, I don't want to be given a finished and stiff product.
It is the case for all media that art does not exist until somebody interacts with it. It's taken to a more literal level with games, but even a book is just ink and paper until you interact with it by reading it.
Wasn't a lot of XBLA built on top of the framework people were already familiar with, programming directX games? And then there was the whole indie bundle-steam sale thing, which didn't exists back when XBLA started
It's kinda crazy how MS had the indie scene developers sewn up and then completely lost them. Hell, nowadays even Nintendo gets more praise from the indie scene.
That definitely had more to do with barrier of entry. Once it was time for the games to come out, it became apparent Microsoft was not interested in helping indie devs.
Is anything an XBLA big deal anymore? Even MS doesn't feel that people should turn on their Xbox to play games.
Well, I believe Minecraft has consistently held the #1 Best Selling XBLA game and the #2 Most Played 360 Game rank every week since it came out so it's obviously doing well. I believe Pinball FX2 & Trials Evolution did rather well also.
Aside from a couple megahits like those though, I think XBLA sales have definitely died down from the height of XBLA's popularity. Summer of Arcade 2012 in particular did much worse overall than previous Summer XBLA promotions (although at least Dust: An Elysian Tail did well enough to pay the bills).
Posts
No way will publishers play ball with that kind of bullshit now that it's out in the open.
I wanted to repond to this point in specific. I personally view the term 'art' in the context of video games as art as more of a medium of expression, as in one of the great artforms: literature, painting, sculpture, dance and so on. And at one stage be studied much like one would study film or painting
I feel you're incorrect by interpreting it as the actual focus on visual assets,graphic engines, artistic direction.
I get what you're saying that the industry is focusing perhaps too much on how it looks as opposed to creating a world where a player is freer to have a more dramatic and organic impact on the world and the npcs within and vice versa, by perhaps removing scripted enounters for example
Want to play co-op games? Feel free to hit me up!
Edit: You know what I'm just gonna go ahead and make a thread about that.
It is distinct from engineering, which usually revolves around game code and asset management. And design, which is the structure of the game, the writing and story, the gameplay element.
He's right to say that games have been focusing on art too much, in this technical sense. On a fundamental level, the latest Call of Duty is almost indistinct from the first Call of Duty. A hovering gun with attached hands floats around a linear environment shooting at foreign men. Tweaks to the formula are slight, more a suite of refinements and additional mechanics. But at the base level it is no different. All of the money and decades of development progress have been put into the art. Into making the environments more realistic, having a wider variety of them with a greater emphasis on dynamic scripted events and eye-catching vistas.
What he's saying, and is something I agree with, is that while the consoles stagnated, money should have been put into design instead of art. Games wouldn't have looked any better but would have played better. New mechanics taking advantage of the hardware in new, interest ways.
The best place to see this change is in indie games. Often, they have no budget for asset production. So the focus is solely on new mechanics. The difference between, say, VVVVVV and SuperHexagon isn't gradual. They're entirely different. Wholly separate experiences. But they're from the same team using broadly similar art styles and visual representations. But the mechanics of play are not even on a linear slope. They're on different planets. Imagine the difference hundreds of millions of dollars would make to design if instead of making monolithic, Hollywood-esque blockbusters, these publishers instead made thousands of small, experimental titles. Where would the gaming industry be then compared to now?
I wish I could say that I believe this (although it is basically an extended form of the "high power makes things easier on devs, thus development will be cheaper").
There really is just no indication that games are expensive now because developers have to pare down photorealism onto consoles that can't manage it, nor can I honestly believe that developers can just point cameras at things now and have a game apparate within the spaces.
There was some talk last decade about how computers could ultimately make movie budgets cheaper by making expensive shots cheaper and actors easily virtualizable. In some limited ways, that has been true - movies like District 9 or Chronicle probably couldn't have happened for the amount they cost to produce without access to relatively cheap computer effects. That said, blockbuster movies haven't become cheaper on the whole as computer effects became easier to work with - the drive for photorealism and spectacle has kept those budgets climbing.
The trend is to push the limit. It's what devs want, and it's what (most) players want. More power means developers with modest ambitions can do some things somewhat easier - it does not mean that you can make the videogame equivalent of The Avengers with nothing but a digital camera and a twinkle in your eye.
If I were to bet on which three different HCI methods were demoed, I'd say XBox controller, Kinect (2?), and touch (likely an iPad). No peripherals involved, and three things that HMX has experience with.
I'll believe it when I see it.
Over time, this infrastructure will reduce costs the more developed it becomes. There will always be outliers, always an Avengers. But industry-wide, these past few years are just puberty for a juvenile form of entertainment. It is, after all, in its current incarnation only about two decades old. People don't keep growing their whole lives, and gaming won't either.
IGN - 1.5
So Metacritic is even bigger pile of shite than previously imagined. And that's not even the worst part of that list.
THQ sank because they threw an absurd amount of money at a couple of incredibly, unutterably awful products and their licensed games stopped selling quite as well as they used to.
If Homefront had perhaps not sucked they might have come out okay. The lesson here is "don't make shitty games."
Which was my exact point. They threw way too much money into projects where they had no idea about viability of profit, then collapsed under the weight of spending way too much to get too little.
If the people running the company had had any common sense, they would be going strong right now because they would've dumped all of that completely wasted uDraw/Homefront money into profitable, though not hugely successful, projects, then kept the rest as profit. Their inability to have reasonable budgets made them crash and burn, hard.
It's actually a trend that afflicts many large companies, so the video game industry isn't an outlier here, especially because the particular kinds of clueless corporate types who end up running game companies. Having your company grow big, fast, is a major problem, especially if trying to sustain that growth or maintain what you've gained. Many, many companies collapse under the weight of their own success from a simple lack of realizing that big success isn't permanent or reliable.
edit: And to clarify a little bit more: The first guy had a lifestyle that was unsustainable and needed to be overhauled completely. While the latter guy was doing ok, but made one fucking colossally huge mistake and it killed him.
Maybe just a couple grand. (Basically a smaller print run of the hardware instead of thinking "This sold like gang busters on the Wii! Let's port this MOTHER!")
Okay quick clarification. Don't hate me, it's just my opinion. To me games are NOT art, but only because I view them as an easel. I'm the artist, the developer gives me tools. I want better tools, I don't want to be given a finished and stiff product.
WiiU Username: MordaRazgrom
Steam Username: MordaRazgrom
WoW/Diablo 3 Battlenet Battletag: MordaRazgrom#1755
Me and my wife have a gamer YouTube page if interested www.youtube.com/TeamMarriage
Oh, obviously. Not disputing that.
Just so we don't go around in circles on this. Your opinion is valid but games are literally art, by any reasonable definition of the word. The whole games as art debate is done to death.
I'm wholly unconvinced. Last ill say though, I've seen the debates and know the points. This not where to discuss that. I was more commenting about how you were saying about direction of focus, and lamenting that I want that focus turned elsewhere
WiiU Username: MordaRazgrom
Steam Username: MordaRazgrom
WoW/Diablo 3 Battlenet Battletag: MordaRazgrom#1755
Me and my wife have a gamer YouTube page if interested www.youtube.com/TeamMarriage
Utterly mediocre. Darksiders 2 was decent, but it was a solid B rental not a AAA blockbuster. Fun but insubstantial.
WiiU Username: MordaRazgrom
Steam Username: MordaRazgrom
WoW/Diablo 3 Battlenet Battletag: MordaRazgrom#1755
Me and my wife have a gamer YouTube page if interested www.youtube.com/TeamMarriage
That's about the best anyone can say about it.
EDIT: and I am only that generous because I got it in the THQ pack and not for full price.
Homefront was the most linear, most scripted game I have ever played. It is a series of very short set pieces where you are constantly being told to do by NPCs that make the "Reload, Dr. Freeman" guy seem, uh...
no, he's still annoying. It's just that the NPCs in Homefront are worse.
To expand on the above: many of the levels of Homefront are interrupted by doors, which you must wait for another character to come up and open for you. This is bad enough - I guess maybe your character is afraid of doorknobs? - but it reaches its nadir in a sequence where you cannot walk through a gap in a fence until another NPC walks through it first. They couldn't even be bothered to put a door in for that one.
Slightly more on-topic for the industry thread, THQ's stock cratered when it was released and the first reviews hit. uDraw definitely helped take the company the rest of the way, but trying to make a CoD killer was a huge mistake.
...it'd also be nice if the PC port would be sooner than four years later.
Doesn't even break the top ten of worst PR stunts for video games.
My personal favorite: Akklaim would pay for your funeral if you had Shadow Man chiseled onto the tombstone.
WiiU Username: MordaRazgrom
Steam Username: MordaRazgrom
WoW/Diablo 3 Battlenet Battletag: MordaRazgrom#1755
Me and my wife have a gamer YouTube page if interested www.youtube.com/TeamMarriage
I think a joke tag line from reviews was "Press X to hide in mass grave!"
Edit: linking image for what is probably poor taste: http://wheredoesgodzillapoop.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/homefront.jpeg
Do you think having herpes is bad? If not, this game is for you!
A unique backstory if you don't count Red Dawn or Freedom Fighters.
I don't want to make this into a full-blown art games thread, but "poor taste" brought to mind a couple of things:
Seeing plot points like this make me think back to an interview with the screenwriter for Haze, Rob Yescombe. The game really was ambitious, talking about military and drug-induced indoctrination in the same breath that it gave you a bunch of guns and asked you to kill people. Yescombe spoke briefly about his own run-in with poor taste while discussing an early draft of his script, in which one of the Mantle soldiers is committing a rape. The rape scene was removed very early on when he realized "there's no way it would sit right in interactive entertainment."
In one part he basically spells it out as an evolutionary process of remaining commercially viable, and as being responsive to the limitations of your team/game build. "Although Apocalypse Now was the foundation, we inevitably had to pull back from that level of emotional extremity because our priority was, and always will be, playability. The game has to be fun."
It's enough to make me wonder how many good kernels of ideas got cut out of some of our games because of technical limitations, and how many that we cringe at must have sounded cool to the designers before they got rendered in the game.
And of course it's nice to see that in just 5 years' time, better tech, in the service of well-executed ideas, can give us things like Spec Ops: The Line.
Ka-Chung!
Ka-Chung!
Is anything an XBLA big deal anymore? Even MS doesn't feel that people should turn on their Xbox to play games.
Then again, the deals were probably in place a long time ago, long before the XBLA marketplace started to sour for indie games.
3DS Friend Code: 2165-6448-8348 www.Twitch.TV/cooljammer00
Battle.Net: JohnDarc#1203 Origin/UPlay: CoolJammer00
But wait.
I..
Homefront always looked bad but..
My name...
I don't even know what to think anymore. /wrist
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand
It is the case for all media that art does not exist until somebody interacts with it. It's taken to a more literal level with games, but even a book is just ink and paper until you interact with it by reading it.
That definitely had more to do with barrier of entry. Once it was time for the games to come out, it became apparent Microsoft was not interested in helping indie devs.
Well, I believe Minecraft has consistently held the #1 Best Selling XBLA game and the #2 Most Played 360 Game rank every week since it came out so it's obviously doing well. I believe Pinball FX2 & Trials Evolution did rather well also.
Aside from a couple megahits like those though, I think XBLA sales have definitely died down from the height of XBLA's popularity. Summer of Arcade 2012 in particular did much worse overall than previous Summer XBLA promotions (although at least Dust: An Elysian Tail did well enough to pay the bills).
Zeboyd Games Development Blog
Steam ID : rwb36, Twitter : Werezompire, Facebook : Zeboyd Games