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[aattss]

The fact that they didn't make dungeon keeper 3 ( and produced a pile of shit and called it dungeon keeper) in addition to the fact that ea is still making always-online games means that whatever you think, one must admit that the op may be on to something.

[Urist McScoopbeard]

How many I put it GlyphGryph...

My problem is I like Pizza... and a while ago I had it good because the only people who liked pizza was me and an audience who were Pizza Connoisseurs, so Pizzas were marketed towards an audience who generally tried a lot of pizza. Yet slowly over time people started to catch onto how good Pizza is.

Now everyone is eating pizza... but instead of making the pizzas with any flavor, they have to make it to sell to as many people as possible and be as easy to swallow as possible.

So Pizzas are now bland and mushy, because they are there to appeal to everyone instead of this select group... and I am not happy because I didn't grow up on bland pizza, I grew up on tasty pizza. So Bland doesn't cut it for me.

A good, but ultimately non sequiter analogy. Videogames are literally better in every way, shape, and form than 20, 10, 5 years ago. In some ways videogames have been "dumbed down", but ultimately it's just that you've played it all before. Companies don't have to be innovative, their products are still excellent quality, especially to young gamers who aren't familiar with older games. What i'm trying to say is, the pizza is still tasty as shit, but you've had it so many times you can't eat any more.

EDIT: ninja'd

Don't think you know what non-sequiter means.

Video games are not in fact better in every way. They are shinier, but that's about it.

your Glyph's Neonivek's analogy is non-sensical, it doesn't apply to this situation in my opinion, and in the manner that he is implying that most videogames are just bland pieces of crap because companies attempt to appeal to a wider audience there is a disconnect between argument and outcome, therefore non-sequiter.

If you want to tell me that videogames in general aren't better, or theyre lacking innovation that's fine, but if you intend to tell me that games like the new Tomb Raider, The Last of Us, and Uncharted aren't better than the games back in the days of yore, your nostalgia is getting to you.

[GlyphGryph]

Wait, how did I get blamed for the analogy?

[Urist McScoopbeard]

whoops, read my own quote pyramid wrong, sorry!

EDIT: wow, cant type today D:

[MoLAoS]

Arguments as soldiers and motivated cognition apply here as well, not just FGCAs. People dismiss a dozen peer reviewed studies with ridiculous arguments all the time in real life. About shit that really matters.

So why would anyone want to spend 1000 hours doing research and data visualization about video games when we all know that no one is going to change their subjective opinion about whether video games are better now or were better 10 years ago?

If I enjoyed data visualization and doing the research to fill it out that much I would work at Google and make 200k a year. I'm certainly not going to do it fruitlessly to convince someone of something on the internet.

This is the problem with having divergent opinions. I simply can't spend the massive amount of time necessary to do the kind of thorough research about every damn thought in my head. Even if I thought I would actually convince people it wouldn't be worth it, much less talking to some guy who "likes to argue" on the internet.

GlyphGryph doesn't actually like to argue, though. He just likes to sit on the side of the status quo where he can put the burden of proof off on the people who differ from the mainstream. Thus he does no hard work and always, in his mind, comes out on top, since the other side never "provided valid evidence."

Of course he can defend himself by going through his post history and showing me a higher % of times where he took the unpopular side and argued it to the standard he requested in this thread.

[Neonivek]

Naw I was just trying to explain my mindset Urist McScoopbeard.

That there is a link between "marketed for mass appeal" and "Less appeal" beyond it just not being for me.

I was going to add a line about there still being good pizza... but I didn't want to muddle what was supposed to be a jist.

if you intend to tell me that games like the new Tomb Raider, The Last of Us, and Uncharted aren't better than the games back in the days of yore, your nostalgia is getting to you

Different. No game is good in everyway.

[MoLAoS]

How many I put it GlyphGryph...

My problem is I like Pizza... and a while ago I had it good because the only people who liked pizza was me and an audience who were Pizza Connoisseurs, so Pizzas were marketed towards an audience who generally tried a lot of pizza. Yet slowly over time people started to catch onto how good Pizza is.

Now everyone is eating pizza... but instead of making the pizzas with any flavor, they have to make it to sell to as many people as possible and be as easy to swallow as possible.

So Pizzas are now bland and mushy, because they are there to appeal to everyone instead of this select group... and I am not happy because I didn't grow up on bland pizza, I grew up on tasty pizza. So Bland doesn't cut it for me.

A good, but ultimately non sequiter analogy. Videogames are literally better in every way, shape, and form than 20, 10, 5 years ago. In some ways videogames have been "dumbed down", but ultimately it's just that you've played it all before. Companies don't have to be innovative, their products are still excellent quality, especially to young gamers who aren't familiar with older games. What i'm trying to say is, the pizza is still tasty as shit, but you've had it so many times you can't eat any more.

EDIT: ninja'd

Don't think you know what non-sequiter means.

Video games are not in fact better in every way. They are shinier, but that's about it.

your Glyph's Neonivek's analogy is non-sensical, it doesn't apply to this situation in my opinion, and in the manner that he is implying that most videogames are just bland pieces of crap because companies attempt to appeal to a wider audience there is a disconnect between argument and outcome, therefore non-sequiter.

If you want to tell me that videogames in general aren't better, or theyre lacking innovation that's fine, but if you intend to tell me that games like the new Tomb Raider, The Last of Us, and Uncharted aren't better than the games back in the days of yore, your nostalgia is getting to you.

I hate all those games. Like, hate. Poor examples to pick

Appealing to a wider audience is by definition making games more bland and samey. This is inescapable and if you don't understand why that is, your ignorance is getting to you.

[Urist McScoopbeard]

Naw I was just trying to explain my mindset Urist McScoopbeard.

That there is a link between "marketed for mass appeal" and "Less appeal" beyond it just not being for me.

I was going to add a line about there still being good pizza... but I didn't want to muddle what was supposed to be a jist.

well in many ways, I say fair enough. I won't lie, and say I still enjoy COD or really most long-standing franchises, aside from Halo these days, and Halo only for the story.

[Urist McScoopbeard]

I hate all those games. Like, hate. Poor examples to pick

Appealing to a wider audience is by definition making games more bland and samey. This is inescapable and if you don't understand why that is, your ignorance is getting to you.

I struggle to classify any three of those games (well maybe uncharted) as bland and/or samey.

Sure, as people understand what works and what doesn't videogames are less likely to contain new and bold ideas, but to say that they all have been cast in the same mold is preposterous, besides games within the same genre are already bound to have a large list of similarities, it's not like every game can be a as-of-yet-unheard-of concept.

[Neonivek]

Few people can really say they are above mass market appeal... and given I am a HUGE Sims fan, and it is PRIME example of drech right now and I still buy it, I cannot say I am above it either.

Though I will say that Tomb Raider is probably a great example to pick if you were arguing for the "bland effect" given the number of mishmashed elements and features and gameplay that feels borrowed from another game, as well as "Survival elements" that are meant to simulate survival in a very shallow way. QTE and stuff...
-Though... I still say Tomb Raider is a good game... Since after you boil everything away, it is still a solid experience and nothing takes away from that. Which really is all that matters.

At the same time however... Someone made a game that combined all the Doom clones into one large melee summoning brawl. (I still say Heretic and Doom feel different even if they are done in the exact same engine) Proving how much classics copied other games.

[Glloyd]

Also to the naysayers of the Metacritics scores follow each series through:

Diablo 1: 8.7 released 1996
Diablo 2: 8.7 released 2000
Diablo 3: 3.9 released 2012

You'll find that with most series the same trend is followed.

My point about how there is, has and will always be shitty games still stands. There were multiple bad sequels in the 90's as well. This is still a logical fallacy, you are still ignoring the vast multitudes of bad games (many of which are sequals) from the last 30 years. It's Glyph's Rose-Coloured Glasses point. There were many shitty games that you are glossing over, and that we have forgot about. In 30 years will we remember the Dungeon Keeper remake? Will we remember Diablo 3? Or will we remember games that people actually enjoyed, like all the various good games from the 80's, 90's and naughts that people still look back to fondly, while forgetting about all the bad games.

That's my real point.

There are always bad games in a certain period, and there always will be. But noone remembers the bad games (except in cases like E.T where the badness is actually something of a legend at this point), people choose to remember what is good. Just as there are always bad games, there are always good games as well.

Give it 20 years. Someone will be complaining about how Terraria 3 is the worst game ever, and that games are in a massive decline and things were better in 2014 when we had games like [insert preferred game here]. It's all relative.

[Neonivek]

Ohh we making a bad classic sequels list?

There is Broken sword... and Excellent point and click and honestly one of the timeless classics...
Broken sword 2, a boring game with annoying characters and a honestly weird and sometimes racist adventure.
Broken sword 3-whatever: uuuuuugh!

Gabriel Knight: a game about voodoo where a ton of research was done and you can learn it all in game with witty and challenging gameplay.
Gabriel Knight 2 a Beast within: One of the best FMV games ever made and it has its problems but it is quite an intelligent game about one of Germany's more famous kinds.
Gabriel Knight 3: MY EYES THEY BLEED!

Lands of Lore: A challenging and intelligent RPG that will put you to the ultimate test of puzzle solving and gameplay!
Lands of Lore 2: A less interesting but still quite interesting RPG that puts you through a magical adventure across the world
Lands of Lore 3: MY EYES THEY BLEED!

Theme Park: A wonderful early rendition of a theme park business tycoon game.
Theme Part 2: a... 3d... barely altered game... that is quite ugly.

I am not including Kings Quest 8 in this, because it was a different game only King Quest 8 in name only (and I think 7 is underrated). I am also leaving Phantasmagoria 2 out of it because, in some ways it deserves some respect.

Ohh goodness was Grim Fandango a good game that unfortunately is a great example of "World of Warcraft Syndrome" as plenty of genuinely good games tried to follow suit and stank because of it.

[MoLAoS]

Just because some people have RCGs doesn't mean everyone does. Some humans are murderers. Doesn't mean we are all murderers, too.

[GlyphGryph]

Here's the problem, MoLAos. I can provide evidence for my beliefs and claims, pretty trivially. Do you want me to? That's a bit off topic, in my opinion, but I certainly can.

You can't do so for yours.

So why do you believe video games are worse today? It's clearly not a belief based on the evidence, evidence you indicate you've made no evidence to uncover despite how passionately you appear to hold your opinion.

Then again, the opposed argument I would make is pretty well supported by fairly obvious element, that being "The video game industry does not suck, as they still manage to turn out a number of high quality titles every year (I simply need to produce a list of high quality titles each year to support this, a much lower burden of evidence, admittedly, than the stance you are taking), and they are obviously not in decline because they are releasing more titles and making more money every year."

Before I bother to provide any of that evidence, I would like to make sure if evidence of reliable yearly output of quality titles is enough, in your opinion, to demonstrate that an industry does not suck, and if it's not enough, what criteria would you consider to be valid for determining whether or not an industry sucks?

The evidence my stance requires to be "true" is a good deal less than yours, on account of how I'm making a much less strong claim (not that the industry is better than it was in the 90s, or that it is worse, merely that it still produces quality products and therefore does not suck), but then, that's the benefit of deciding which claims to support after looking at the actual evidence.

Ronin:
It's relevant to what he actually posted, which was a comment about himself, so maybe you should read what I'm responding to before criticizing.

It's not my problem if you want to stand blindly by a viewpoint you can't find sufficient evidence to support.

Okay, so, it appears you don't actually understand what "evidence" means, but that's okay, we can work on this. It needs to be something that relevant, for one - posting the scores for three games in three different years isn't, on account of how there's a large number of games produced every year, and one can undoubtedly find high and low games from any year. It's a pretty blatant example of cherry-picking, and only supports the argument "bad games have been made recently" and "good games have been made in the past". This is something a lot of people feel passionately about, so I'm sure you can find an argument that is at least *relevant*, if not valid.

(Mind you, I thought the original Diablo was utter shite, but I'm willing to accept, for the purpose of argument, that the "quality" of a video game is independent of my personal opinion, and go by the metacritic scores. Is this acceptable as an assumption by other parties, or would you prefer a different one?)

[Rez]

Well, as long as we're exploring why Platonic Ideals of suck matter for a product whose quality is wholly subjective, I'll grab popcorn, too.