Is gaming really evolving?

Industry immitating life.

from GalCiv2 Forums
Being the geek that I am, I am fascinated by the idea of life somewhere beyond our own planet. Like many others, I've dreamed and believed that life could very possibly take on a from we humans would not be at all familiar with. But in recent years, that idea has been challenged by a theory called "Convergence" Basically the idea states that there are certain forms that are most efficient in nature, and that life will inevitably evolve towards those forms... For example, the vast majority of macroscopic life on this planet has an even number of legs (2,4,6,or 8). This is leading current theorists to believe that if/when we encounter life from another planet it will be something similar to what we have observed here on Earth.

To me its easy to see that the idea of convergence could be applied to video games as well. As developers try to reach a maximum audience games are becoming more and more universal. Fans of almost any series can tell stories of how "the newest sequel sucks" or how genres have changed. Take Rainbow 6 for example: This was a game in which tactics, plenty of pre-planning, and careful, thoughtful decision were an earmark of the franchise. The current iterations of the games have become much more run, cover and gun... Something many of the old guard have lamented. But still, in order to obtain a maximum fan base the game play will most likely to stay changed.

This sort of thing can be seen in many of our games... Even games without a history are becoming more and more similar to their rivals. Now I'm not claiming that games suck now, nor am I blaming this on PCs/consoles or developers. In fact, one could argue that this is a good thing and that video games are simply reaching a most efficient form able to please a maximum audience.

I would love to hear everyones thoughts or comments on this. Its something that I have been thinking over the past few days.
39,967 views 11 replies
Reply #1 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
From a political view (trust me, I'm a scientist!) you can see similar situations. A candidate will appeal to their base during early (pre-primary) times inorder to gain early funding and such. However, since most people are not hard line conservatives or liberals, they will spend most of their campaign trying to appeal to the moderates. Since ideology (when placed on a simple X/Y axies) takes the form of a bell curve, with most of the people in the middle, it is the only practicle thing to do. This appeases the greater number of people, but leads to homoginization of candidates, and alienation of the original base.

I think the same can be said of games. Most people are not "hardcore" gamers, regardless of genre. For them games are not an experiance, but an activity. And since that is all games will ever be to them, they are suspect of a game that requires something more. A good example of this would be all the individual reviews about GalCiv on Gamespot that complain aobut how big the manual is.

However, there is hope. When a market becomes so homogenous that people demand something differant, there is always someone willig to provide it for them. Why would someone spend $8 on a hamburger at Fudruckers instead of $1 at McDonalds? Because it is differant, it is better, it isn't always the same.

So, while Rainbow Six may be going more run n' gun, there will probably be another developer in future who thinks that they can fill the gap that was left behind. As their product gets more popular, thier comapny will grow in size. As they get more overhead, they will have to go more mainstream to secure the needed income, etc. and the cycle will have started all over again.
Reply #2 from JoeUser Forums Top
I think one solid problem with gaming is that they target... gamers. To keep their products from being a gamble they shoot for the most likely group to buy them. Nothing wrong with that, it makes good business sense.

But as you say, more and more people are coming to gaming. That means more and more diverse tastes. Around the same time they are totally giving up on old standards, like the MYST style adventure games, etc. I think that is a terrible mistake.

I wish I could be as optimistic as Feud, but I dunno. I think it more likely that perspective gamers, especially computer gamers, will go to the store and see the same old shelf after shelf of the same, and just go do something else. I'm hoping games like Spore will keep the mold flexible enough that later perhaps people will give other, discarded genre a try.
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Reply #3 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
I think that most games are trying to appeal to such a large audience that most of them will turn in to something like The Elder Scrolls or Fable. You create 'you', and play around in their world. Spore goes beyond that, and larger the sandbox a game has, the the more it will be purchased.

MMORPG's have a very large sandbox, for example in World of Warcraft you create a custom hero and do what you want, for the most part it's up to you. In Star Wars Galaxies you have an entire planet to explore, and if you get bored just go to another one. Or get a ship and fly around in space doing whatever it is you do there. MMORPG's also let you have semi-social interaction, since you can chat in real time with many different people, most of which you don't know. It's a pretty good system.

I think that most games will let you have a large sandbox to play in, and only have some limited form of structure. Spore, for example, lets you build a race, let it evolve, and even go to other planets and see other peoples. But it still has the structure, you HAVE to build a race, and you HAVE to have it evolve, or you will hit the edge of your sandbox. I think most games will start to come out like that. And who knows, maybe people will start to want more structure and the older style of games will come back. But for the most part I don't think they are.
Reply #4 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Interesting thoughts..

I am convinced that the development of games, certainly in the last five years, has been artificially driven by the accelerated advancement in hardware simply to show off the levels of gfx that can be achieved.

If we were to look at the 'Total War' series, as an example. The concept of the original title 'Shogun TW' was developed and enhanced in the follow up 'Medeival TW'. The series attracted a large, but genre-limited fan-base.

However, due to pressures exerted by hardware advances, and to some degree the dilution of the genre to appeal to a wider market, the series moved further and further from the original concept concentrating more and more on the 'visual' aspects of the game. After all, everyone likes pretty gfx right?

Well... not all..

From Rome TW, the transition was complete in the completely awful 'Medeival II TW' from Turn Based Strategy with a magnificent battle engine.. to a RTS of poor quality with no AI and whose biggest intellectual challenge is to hit the 'open/close' button of the DVD tray on the PC.

Unfortunately, todays 'gamer' is less likely to have a basis for comparison and so, accepts these rather poor offerings as the 'norm'.

They readily embrace the misconception that 'multiplayer' is player vs player, and do not seem to mind the lack of any AI in their games. Most games, seemingly ending up as a mere interface to allow 'board games'to be played on a PC.

It's unfortunate..

I also believe that the focus on shallow AI and better gfx is a false economic model. If all games devolve into a single genre... ultimately, we would need only a single game.

I know I only have my own experience to go by, but my expenditure on PC games has fallen from around £750 p/a to £120 p/a as my own needs are ignored. (Excluding subscriptions)

Sadly, those of us that can see past pretty gfx, to the shallow AI and gameplay in many recent releases are in the 'target market' "Disposable Income" and as we are a difficult market to please, perhaps its simply too much effort to satisfy us.

I for one am extremely grateful that whilst ever a game like GalCiv II, is around... in this genre at least... the 'pretty gfx' developers still have standards by which to be measured.

And to finish... just to show how serious I am about having someone meet my own personal requisite for games.. to Stardock...

I am not entirely sure how everyone else feels, but for the chance to play this game, allied with my Son, against the AI in a MP game......

I would gladly pay $200. Please consider this e_mail a pre-order for such a product, at the said price and charge my account accordingly as soon as it is available.

Keep up the fantastic work...

Regards as always,
AOD,
Bradford Pa.
Reply #5 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Being the geek that I am, I am fascinated by the idea of life somewhere beyond our own planet. Like many others, I've dreamed and believed that life could very possibly take on a from we humans would not be at all familiar with. But in recent years, that idea has been challenged by a theory called "Convergence" Basically the idea states that there are certain forms that are most efficient in nature, and that life will inevitably evolve towards those forms... For example, the vast majority of macroscopic life on this planet has an even number of legs (2,4,6,or 8). This is leading current theorists to believe that if/when we encounter life from another planet it will be something similar to what we have observed here on Earth.


I doubt this very strongly. You have to take into consideration that on earth we have a certain conditions like gravity, temperature, atmospheric condition and such and this influences what form life will take.

On other planets with different conditions life will probably take another form.

But anyway, back to gaming. I myself have really been into MMORPGs ever since the first ones were released (Meridian, Ultima Online) and if you disregard gfx I think the games have more devolved than evolved. MMORPGs were originally designed in such a way that you as a player could influence the world and this was true to some extent in the early MMORPGs. But lately almost all MMORPGs have put heavy restrictions on what you can do and where. Take WoW for example, the freedom you have there is an illusion since even though you can go to most places in the world you really cant level or do anything useful there unless you are in the level range for that particular place which makes the world kinda linear. Level 1-10 you are in zone x and y, level 11-15 you are in zone a and b and so on.

Also there is nothing you can do which has server side effects. PvP is heavily restricted and dont influence anything really and killing high level mobs has no lasting effects as they will keep spawning. Same with quests, thousands of people can finish the quest which saves the same village from some danger or whatever but finishing that quest, or not finishing it, has no effect what so ever on the village. It's just meaningless fluff.

All in all you can say that MMORPGs have been "dumbified" so it requires little thought to do most of anything, it just takes time (=more fees for the company) and why has it become like this?

Well seeing as WoW has so many subsribers it seems that it appeals to the big masses of gamers and apparently those people want it easy and casual which means any "idiot" can advance to the top level. This is negative because if everyone can be at the highest level then it really means that noone is at the highest level because it means nothing. Imagine for example if there were a 1000 heavy weight boxing champions and a 1000 presidents of the US. The title would instantly become worthless.

And this for me is a devolution of the MMORPG genre. But not only the MMORPG genre has seen such effects. Alot of new games seem to focus more on instant gratification from the most advanced gfx but with little depth and with almost no requirment to actually use your brain when playing.

GC II is a nice exception to that but it too has shortcomings. Like no control of combat and a simplified tech tree without any advanced weapons or such, which would require you to think a bit more when designing your ship beside putting weapons that does XX dmg and defence that shields for YY dmg. In this case GC II has devolved from MOO2 where there was a huge varierity of weapons that did more than just doing dmg.

Reply #6 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Actually IMHO gaming is evolving the same way the old war gaming industry did -- with the twist of hardware advances. First simple little games, then a plethora of cheap but more varied games, then an expolsion of games moderately priced in categories. Then (the present stage), with a sniff of money, really advanced and complicated games but very expensive to make -- thus a grand contraction of vareity with the simple business need to recoup the expense by appealing to a larger market.

The twist of ever improving hardware is extending the cycle and sometimes pushing it back a step but it truly seems like the bubble is about to burst. With so many converging games in each genre, their uniquenesses blending, profit needs will lead to near monopolostic (pun intended) games.

Oh sure, there will be the occasional new game, but The Sims will rule the sim genre, GalCiv
Reply #7 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Game design is first and foremost an art--not a science.

Innovation in game design is driven by designers trying to make new games within the confines of the free market.

A lot of things about games are changing: graphics and computational power first and foremost. But gameplay--the way a game plays, the way a game feels, the kinds of things it challenges a gamer to do--hasn't seen much innovation in the last 5 years. Mainstream publishers seldom welcome innovation--it's too risky, whereas designing one more sequel to your latest cash cow is seen as a sound business decision.

I look back at some of the absolute favorite games that I ever played (Civilization, X-Com: UFO Defense, and Panzer General all come to mind), and I realized that each of those games featured a different style of gameplay than I had experienced before.

You don't have to create a whole new genre--the way Warcraft spawned RTS or Everquest broke open the long-sleepy MMORPG scene--to come up with an intriguing new game design. You also don't need fancy graphics to offer a compelling gameplay experience to a good number of fans (Space Rangers 2 and Dominions II both come to mind).

I think that the market's slide towards high-end graphics games has made it harder for small-time designers (read "small groups of would-be innovators chasing a brave new vision") to innovate as much as they used to. The barriers-to-entry are just too high (it takes too many graphic artists rendering too many polygons, etc.) for folks without major funding.

Lots of folks say that game design has gotten worse in recent years. But as Sid Meiers pointed out when asked this question a few years ago, there were always a lot of bad games out there--we just forget about them quickly.

I'm not sure that game design has gotten worse, but it does seem to me to be emphasizing the wrong things too often--primarily pretty pictures over gameplay (competent AI is perhaps the most neglected piece of gameplay, but it's only one piece).
Reply #8 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
AOD-Bradford mentioned the Total War games above. I greatly lament that series' descent from a beautiful game of strategy AND tactics (Shogun) into a boring clickfest (RTW and (apparently) M2TW) where all of the developers' resources are spent on animations for the stupid 3D soldiers and the computer 'opponent' is about as imaginative on the battlefield as Pillow at Cerro Gordo or his buddy Pickett at Gettysburg.

Reply #9 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
"Being the geek that I am, I am fascinated by the idea of life somewhere beyond our own planet. Like many others, I've dreamed and believed that life could very possibly take on a from we humans would not be at all familiar with. But in recent years, that idea has been challenged by a theory called "Convergence" Basically the idea states that there are certain forms that are most efficient in nature, and that life will inevitably evolve towards those forms... For example, the vast majority of macroscopic life on this planet has an even number of legs (2,4,6,or 8). This is leading current theorists to believe that if/when we encounter life from another planet it will be something similar to what we have observed here on Earth."

I think they might be onto something, the laws of physics could be another example, surface area divided by volume, keeps animals inside a certain parameter, weight that is, effect of gravity, also prevents ants from being the size of cars, or elephants any larger then they are.

As for games, what the gaming community should do, is encourage responsible purchases, that is, make a quality gaming review, cheap and the sole place to get info, so that the masses who have bought one or two games for top dollar and realize they are crap know where to go to get an accurate rating on those games and ratings on other products that don't suck.

There are a large majority of consumers that would gladly be in the know and skip a purchase for a crap product in order to buy a quality and well liked program. If the community was to organize those quality programs would more then likely also be more hardcore then generic as well. Unfortunately I don't see that happening anytime soon.
Reply #10 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Ofcourse gaming is evolving! Back in 1986 with my new NES, platform games like mario and arcade games like spaceinvaders was the norm. These days it's global tournamnets in fastpaced RTS and FPS games that put your skill to the test which you follow LIVE on the net!

A.I has become more advanced since more computing power is available.

Graphics has advanced so that physics are now a factor in games so an artillery shell can hit airplanes (Supreme Commander), bullets can hit different parts of the body with different reactions (pixel collision or what it's called).

But you focus on the bad things
Reply #11 from JoeUser Forums Top
They are evolving, but the pace has slowed when you consider the volume of money in the marketplace. No longer are major new genres or concepts introduced at a steady pace. Also most of the new stuff is just rehashes of older games, albeit with better graphics and improved interface as you suggest. They sometimes don't include enough flavor of their own to really be remarkable.

I'm speaking largely of PC gaming. What is evolving rapidly is the way in which we move the data, originally on floppy disk, then onto CD's, for a while over phone line download, then broadband download, then DVD. Pretty soon, texture files and software content will be too large and costly to produce on DVD's and another medium will have to be developed. I don't think Blue ray or the other larger CD type formats will really be that big either. DVD's hold plenty of data and the Blue Ray doesn't hold a magnitude greater like CD's did for floppy, and DVD for CD's.

I think in the future broadband is going to be faster stuff like optical cable and really wide pipes will allow you to download DVD sized files in seconds. The problem might not even be hard drive read/write speeds because in the 64 bit world, we are dealing with gigabytes of RAM, and 32 GB of ram seems to be less then 10 years off. Maybe within 5 years, They already sell 2GB ram sticks.

A 3D removable and writable/readable and dependable storage unit that used an advanced USB standard might be the perfect application for such medium storage. That is if most digital content isn't already just downloaded at whim.