Everyone hates good games 20 Dec, 2005 / Comments: 14
Gamespot has just put up a pretty good article that discusses why innovation in the games industry is met with so many problems. You are going to read this article because it mostly talks about Psychonauts and features comments from Schafer about the game's low sales and the challenges involved with pitching Double Fine's new game to publishers. The article as a whole is interesting, pretty sad, and worth checking out.
any more?
People fear change. Designers fear change, and consumers fear change.
I swear, if someone could step up and find a middle ground for what made Day of the Tentacle sell a million copies, and what made Quake 2 sell a million copies, maybe wede have something, or maybe not. Thats the risk factor no one is willing to take. The "maybe not" drives people away, and it shouldnt. This industry started out with guys in their 1 bedroom apartments, distributing their ideas in plastic baggies with one floppy disk and a photo copied manual. If their idea was unsuccessful, they tried again, if people liked it, that was the style they stuck with until they, or someone else, set a new standard.
But how can we set a new standard, if every time we buy a new game, we expect a,s,d,w and a mouse to be the best and only control set up? And we expect only to see the best explosions and the kick back on the AK-47 to be as real as the game we played last month.
When people stopped making point and click adventures, it was mainly due to games like Quake and its knock offs selling a bajillion copies. When people stopped making verb based games where typing "Open North Door" did what it said, it was because using the mouse to click on "Open" then the "Door" seemed easier.
Something new, and something not quite seen before, is what this industry needs. My idea is, going back a little and taking what made the old games good, and go forward a little, to what makes Half Life 2 good, and adding some form of midle ground, be it a controler that is differnt from the boomerang shaped game pad that we use from everything from PS1 to 3rd Person games on PC, or be it a style of game play we may not be at all familar with. Something that makes you think more about whats going on in the story, and less about how you can push those crates together to get over that wall.
Will the industry find this middle ground? Will some up and comer programmer that could be sitting in his parents house right now trying to figure out how Half Life 2 made the water reflect like that find this ground? Or will the video game industry go into another slump like we saw in 1984 when we thought there was nothing new to do?
This remains to be seen, but if something isnt done, I see the same games, re processed, and spit out over and over again, happening until the industry starts to lose money. The sad part is, we have to wait until what we love is almost dead for it to be brought back to life with something new, unless someone can step up and raise the bar higher than just more reflections on the screen, and more bodies piling up behind the player.
The future is as bright as we make it,
Shmargin has spoken...
Kill the entire gaming community.