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[MoLAoS]

This reminds me of the rant mode I went into when NPR has some guy on just singing the praises of Nirvana today. Nirvana is "the most influential alt rock band" the same way Harry Potter is "the most influential story of a mistreated or bored adolescent who goes on a fantastic adventure". Its literally true but its so full of shit at the same time.

After both of those works came out my positive experiences in the relevant areas, fantasy literature and non-mainstream music began to decline significantly.

The video game industry has gone downhill in the same sense. In the Golden Age of SciFi it was all about the grand ideas, and similarly for say, punk rock. Now pop punk and modern sci fi is all about relationship drama or mindless action sequences. See Battlestar and like, New Found Glory. The masses care about their irrelevant social dramas and brainless passive entertainment and so accessibility essentially translates to, as they say on the Codex, Decline.

Video games tend to fall into mindless action in order to be "accessible" although we have trivially simple casual games as well. And of course social games devolve into the kind of trivial social garbage that even Jane Austen would be disgusted by.

Indie games, like indie music, decline in a different way. Being focused on the dramas of elitist middle class white people in a way that was once the territory of english lit majors. "God, my game/book/song is so self referential and obscure!" "The minimalist geometry/corridor based space shooter I made is so artsy!"

You can claim all you want that making accessible media brings in new blood but the % of people who know who Clarke or Jello Biafra or Richard Bartle are has not increased, and similarly for their modern day equivalents.

[Mr. Strange]

Most AAA games nowadays are pretty shitty, and there are hardly any games on consoles later than the PS2 that I enjoy. (Notable exceptions include Skyrim and GTA V,  but I don't consider Valve an AAA company because of their work philosophy, which remains close to the "small teams" philosophy).

I've never played GTA 4 so I can't say anything about that, but Skyrim makes me rage. Not because it's a bad game (I think it is "meh" game at best, considered on it's own), but because it was intended to be much better than what it turned out to be on release. There's so much cut content in it (like the dynamic Civil war quests) that was planed and partly coded into the game files but never completed in time for the release, and it wasn't even patched in later or made into new DLC, it was all buried and Bethesda pretended it never existed. Stuff that would have changed the whole game experience wasn't considered important enough, they didn't want to pay for few extra code monkeys since they blew all their budget on those neat auroras and ants on tree stumps and wind blowing leafs around (but only on few prefixed locations, what were you expecting, random enviromental effects?). Looking at the modding community and what they can do with the game system is amazing, but the vanilla game is nothing but bare bones of an RPG, if it even deserves to be called that. It's taking huge leap toward action genre and trends you see in FPS games, railroaded story with cutscenes with ocasional fight with unsurprising outcome (YOU WIN! CONGRATULATIONS! ARCHIVEMENT UNLOCKED!) that's intended to provide "interactivity" to the player. Sure, there's the free to explore world, but all the events and quests you find bring the same railroaded experience you saw in your last playthrough, no mater what you do differently. Unless you manage to break the game, that's allways fun to do.

[penguinofhonor]

This reminds me of the rant mode I went into when NPR has some guy on just singing the praises of Nirvana today. Nirvana is "the most influential alt rock band" the same way Harry Potter is "the most influential story of a mistreated or bored adolescent who goes on a fantastic adventure". Its literally true but its so full of shit at the same time.

After both of those works came out my positive experiences in the relevant areas, fantasy literature and non-mainstream music began to decline significantly.

The video game industry has gone downhill in the same sense. In the Golden Age of SciFi it was all about the grand ideas, and similarly for say, punk rock. Now pop punk and modern sci fi is all about relationship drama or mindless action sequences. See Battlestar and like, New Found Glory. The masses care about their irrelevant social dramas and brainless passive entertainment and so accessibility essentially translates to, as they say on the Codex, Decline.

Video games tend to fall into mindless action in order to be "accessible" although we have trivially simple casual games as well. And of course social games devolve into the kind of trivial social garbage that even Jane Austen would be disgusted by.

Indie games, like indie music, decline in a different way. Being focused on the dramas of elitist middle class white people in a way that was once the territory of english lit majors. "God, my game/book/song is so self referential and obscure!" "The minimalist geometry/corridor based space shooter I made is so artsy!"

You can claim all you want that making accessible media brings in new blood but the % of people who know who Clarke or Jello Biafra or Richard Bartle are has not increased, and similarly for their modern day equivalents.

I'm not sure if this is intentionally a caricature of the original topic, but congrats on a funny one either way.

[Moghjubar]

(To OP)While there are some definite stinkers, and if you only look at those it looks terrible over all... honestly theres plenty of other variety out there as far as neat, actually good games go.

As for kickstarter, only really a few of the kickstarter games are out by now, so the verdict is not yet out on that batch (unless you just pick those few and judge the entirety of the large number of KS games by those).

In any case though, since you seem to think its all terrible...

[Arcvasti]

(To OP)While there are some definite stinkers, and if you only look at those it looks terrible over all... honestly theres plenty of other variety out there as far as neat, actually good games go.

As for kickstarter, only really a few of the kickstarter games are out by now, so the verdict is not yet out on that batch (unless you just pick those few and judge the entirety of the large number of KS games by those).

In any case though, since you seem to think its all terrible...

Sadly, I think many video game companies are going with #14 as their answer to their problems.

[MoLAoS]

This reminds me of the rant mode I went into when NPR has some guy on just singing the praises of Nirvana today. Nirvana is "the most influential alt rock band" the same way Harry Potter is "the most influential story of a mistreated or bored adolescent who goes on a fantastic adventure". Its literally true but its so full of shit at the same time.

After both of those works came out my positive experiences in the relevant areas, fantasy literature and non-mainstream music began to decline significantly.

The video game industry has gone downhill in the same sense. In the Golden Age of SciFi it was all about the grand ideas, and similarly for say, punk rock. Now pop punk and modern sci fi is all about relationship drama or mindless action sequences. See Battlestar and like, New Found Glory. The masses care about their irrelevant social dramas and brainless passive entertainment and so accessibility essentially translates to, as they say on the Codex, Decline.

Video games tend to fall into mindless action in order to be "accessible" although we have trivially simple casual games as well. And of course social games devolve into the kind of trivial social garbage that even Jane Austen would be disgusted by.

Indie games, like indie music, decline in a different way. Being focused on the dramas of elitist middle class white people in a way that was once the territory of english lit majors. "God, my game/book/song is so self referential and obscure!" "The minimalist geometry/corridor based space shooter I made is so artsy!"

You can claim all you want that making accessible media brings in new blood but the % of people who know who Clarke or Jello Biafra or Richard Bartle are has not increased, and similarly for their modern day equivalents.

I'm not sure if this is intentionally a caricature of the original topic, but congrats on a funny one either way.

Its sort of a hyperbolic rant. It probably falls short of self-caricature, but at the same times its not meant to be taken entirely sincerely.

[BurnedToast]

I think a lot of this is just nostalgia.

Don't get me wrong, I hate dumbing down of games as much as the next guy, but it's very very easy to pretend old games were a lot better then they were.

For example, everyone holds up MoO2 as the best 4x ever in the history of ever. And maybe it was. But it was also a trainwreck in many ways - The AI was atrocious even on the hardest level with huge cheats. Race creation was so unbalanced it's hilarious (not just pre-patch creative, but so many abusable combinations that break the game) and so was ship creation. Diplomacy was (especially on the harder difficulties) basically non-existent. It was also micromanagement hell, I think I spent more time mindlessly queuing up buildings then anything else because auto-build was so dumb.

But nobody ever mentions any of that, it's just OMG SO GOOD. If the exact same game was released today (either with better graphics, or as an indie game to excuse the bad graphics) it would be torn to shreds and get, at best, low-middle reviews.

I think in the end, it's two steps forward, one step back... but it's a LOT easier to notice the one step back and miss the gradual improvements.

As far as developers making the same game over and over.... can you really blame them? Call of battlefield black ops 2033 sells 400 bajillion copies every time they release it. What's wrong with giving the people what they so obviously want?

[MoLAoS]

MoO2 is indeed awful by today's standards. So is Dune2. The problem is that anyone who wants to can just throw down the rose colored glasses argument to win 100%. Its what you might call a fully general counter argument.

[Neonivek]

Kickstarter to me has always been a necessary evil

I have pretty much decided that it will disappoint me constantly...

But when you have an industry that seems nearly against innovation... you need something that can push it.

Even if only 1 in 10 projects ever turn out any good.

[Frumple]

Ha. If 1 in 10 projects turned out good, it would be beating the industry standard for the last twenty or so years by an incredibly large margin

I remember those demo CDs. Upward 200 game demos, of which maybe 3-5 were worth even the slightest of damns.

[Shadowlord]

For example, everyone holds up MoO2 as the best 4x ever in the history of ever. And maybe it was. But it was also a trainwreck in many ways - The AI was atrocious even on the hardest level with huge cheats. Race creation was so unbalanced it's hilarious (not just pre-patch creative, but so many abusable combinations that break the game) and so was ship creation. Diplomacy was (especially on the harder difficulties) basically non-existent. It was also micromanagement hell, I think I spent more time mindlessly queuing up buildings then anything else because auto-build was so dumb.

This. Telepath + ground combat bonus: Nice fleet you got there. I think I'll take it with my marines, and then I think I'll mind-control your planets from orbit. Add in creative and you don't have to choose between techs, making you even more overpowered. (Probably have to take negative choices for it, but a -pop growth penalty is not a huge issue when you can mind control everyone from orbit, fly technologically superior starships, and capture every fleet that you meet in the first 3 turns of combat*.)

One time I even won the game without ever colonizing outside my home solar system, with a custom race of course. On the Huge map size, IIRC, but I think it was standard difficulty.

* The AI sometimes does seem to understand what's going to happen - Its reaction to the arrival of a small ship-capturing fleet often seemed to be to jump its entire fleet into hyperspace ASAP.

[alway]

I think a lot of this is just nostalgia.

Don't get me wrong, I hate dumbing down of games as much as the next guy, but it's very very easy to pretend old games were a lot better then they were.

For example, everyone holds up MoO2 as the best 4x ever in the history of ever. And maybe it was. But it was also a trainwreck in many ways - The AI was atrocious even on the hardest level with huge cheats. Race creation was so unbalanced it's hilarious (not just pre-patch creative, but so many abusable combinations that break the game) and so was ship creation. Diplomacy was (especially on the harder difficulties) basically non-existent. It was also micromanagement hell, I think I spent more time mindlessly queuing up buildings then anything else because auto-build was so dumb.

But nobody ever mentions any of that, it's just OMG SO GOOD. If the exact same game was released today (either with better graphics, or as an indie game to excuse the bad graphics) it would be torn to shreds and get, at best, low-middle reviews.

I think in the end, it's two steps forward, one step back... but it's a LOT easier to notice the one step back and miss the gradual improvements.

As far as developers making the same game over and over.... can you really blame them? Call of battlefield black ops 2033 sells 400 bajillion copies every time they release it. What's wrong with giving the people what they so obviously want?

Yep, this. Those OMGSOAWESOME classics were seen as amazingly good precisely because the alternatives were things like E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. Here's a Let's Play of that, to give you an idea of what an awful AAA video game REALLY looks like. And fun fact, that was sold for $50 in 1982. Or approximately $120 if you adjust for inflation.

[Mech#4]

I think that E.T game was developed in about a month by one guy. Quickly made to bring out along with the movie.

[Neonivek]

I think that E.T game was developed in about a month by one guy. Quickly made to bring out along with the movie.

Yep, E.T. was basically an incomplete load of garbage made as a cash in because people wouldn't know how bad it is until they bought it.

Just like... hmmm... I guess that still happens.

[Rez]

The issue with kickstarter is that publishers actually do perform a job, with regards to QA and, yknow, making sure the developer can actually do what they're saying.  Kickstarter is pretty clear proof that publishers aren't bad guys all the time and that customers aren't necessarily well-equipped to decide what projects are viable.  Now, if you look at kickstarter as a system for donating to projects that you like, you won't be too upset.  If you look at it as an investment, you're going to get burnt, badly and often.  Most kickstarting games are on kickstarter, because they're too early or too rough to get funding anywhere else.  There's often a reason for that.

Publishers being incredibly short-sighted and seemingly actively seeking to lose customers seems to be a side-effect of the market for gaming ballooning dramatically.  EA and acti-blizz are the best example of this.  If a dev is bought by EA, you can watch the quality of their games drop from release to release.  Acti-blizz has been more of a slow, sad decline, though perhaps not so slow in the last 2 years or so. 

Of course, it doesn't matter much, because the price for a game is relatively small and few customers practice their disdain with boycotts.  Unless they release many truly awful games, plenty of people will buy them just to have them.  Thanks to pre-orders and a large number of really horrendous reviewers and publications, plenty of people will buy awful games regardless of how terrible they are.

Nostalgia certainly informs our opinions.  We can look at the best games of yesteryear and ignore the bad ones.  However, it's hard to avoid the feeling that there's less variety of games and less effort in producing well thought out gameplay.

It might be interesting to compare design and art budgets between the 90's and now.  And throw advertising money into that bar graph, just for the lulz.

edit:

I honestly wonder if we might actually be getting close to a Triple-A collapse.

I doubt it, because my 3rd paragraph.  AAA's in general haven't been losing money [citation needed] and that's what needs to happen for bad companies to go bankrupt, which coincidentally might free some unutilized IP, like SMAC or Ogre Battle.

snip

This is Bethesda's MO now.  I think they realized sometime during production or after release of Morrowind that they could release unfinished games as long as they made modding accessible.