Wolfire Games Forums

I'm going to split this rant into multiple parts:

1. Console Exclusives
Sometimes I feel that no matter how much I try to give myself a complete and wholesome gamer's experience, I always feel I'm being cheated somehow. I can understand the reasons behind companies creating exclusives, but I hate it when they do. I spent good money on my console and enjoy the library of games I have on it already, but then there always must come along yet another game that I cannot access due to my not having the necessary resources to play it. I recently bought a PS3 to replace my old, dead Xbox 360, because I had been reminded countless times that PS3s are so much better and have a better library of games or something. But then I recently saw the trailers for Dust: An Elysian Tale and it dawned on me that I couldn't play it. It was frustrating enough that I spent time while on an Xbox staring in envy at games such as Uncharted, Infamous and Journey and wishing I could play them. But then I make the switch to a different console and find out that the games I want to play are only available for the last console I had. Grr!

2. Cinematography
I remember the Uncharted series being the flagship title of the Playstation and the single game that fanboys would always tout as being the sole reason the Playstation was better than the Xbox. When I finally got around to playing it I found myself very disappointed. It isn't that it is a bad game, but when Uncharted 2 won multiple game of the year awards in 2009 (beating games such as Arkham Asylum and Assassin's Creed 2) and Uncharted 3 was said to surpass it, probably losing only to Skyrim, one's expectations are set remarkably high.
Sometimes I feel as though the gaming industry in being invaded by movie-goers who are disappointed in their own industry's lack of overall quality recently and are seeking refuge in the gamer community, all be it demanding that games become easier and simpler to play, have longer cutscenes, better graphics and are purposefully short. The gameplay in the Uncharted series barely changed more than a slightly different take on combat over the course of all three games. I also recently bought the Ratchet and Clank collection, to which I was treated to three remarkably solid games with shorter, wittier cutscenes, more challenging and engaging gun battles and heaps of variation over the course of the trilogy. I want my games to be games and not films in the same way I want my books to be books and not films. Film culture is bleeding its way into other media and I don't like it.

3. Graphics
I have two points to make on this one:
- First, graphics do not determine a good game. If a game were a cake, the graphics would be the sprinkling of cocoa powder on top of the icing. Yes, sometimes it is good to eat large clumps of the cocoa powder on its own, but when you eat nothing but cocoa powder the taste becomes diluted and disgusting and you yourself become fat and your breath smells.
- Second, is it really so hard to make good graphics? I understand that it is a challenge, but when I was playing my Xbox the graphics on most multiplatform games were substantially weaker than on the PS3 or the PC. Yet when I played the Witcher 2 Enhanced Edition on my Xbox, I found that the graphics were gorgeous (yes, they were downgraded from the PC but they still looked good). If you remember back early in the PS3's life most games were not optimized for the console as well as on the Xbox. It seems that graphics nowadays depend less on the hardware and more on the optimization of the software. I can acknowledge that the Xbox has weaker hardware, but handing me a game full of low res textures that pop-in like a jack-in-the-box, draw distances that would make the PS1 feel good about itself and framerates that descend into slideshows every time one too many characters walks past the camera, and then blame it on the hardware, I tend to think that the development team was just lazy. Cocoa powder is no longer desirable when its full of dirt.

Fuck normal consoles, get OnLive.

Good graphics don't depend on textures and poly count nearly as much as they do on good lighting and animation.

I think part of the film culture bleeding over is a result of developers wanting to give games fuller and more immersive storylines - something films have been doing for years, while games are just recently getting sort of sometimes good at. I agree that a lot of times the result of the collision is a shitty game with a decent story behind it, but I think that may be the reason behind it.

Also, this may be utter bullshit hearsay, but I heard that OnLive may be ending. I just discovered it and have been having an amazing time trialing awesome games on my low-powered laptop, but apparently moving boxes have been reported coming out of their offices.

Ope, yep, internet confirms that there are indeed rumors and anonymous sources and such: http://gamepolitics.com/2012/08/17/conf ... oyees-laid

FFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUCCCCCCCCCCK
It was so cool. Dafuq, world?

High bandwidth costs were bankrupting them.

Jacktheawesome wrote:I think part of the film culture bleeding over is a result of developers wanting to give games fuller and more immersive storylines - something films have been doing for years, while games are just recently getting sort of sometimes good at. I agree that a lot of times the result of the collision is a shitty game with a decent story behind it, but I think that may be the reason behind it.

But games can tell engaging stories without elongated expensive cutscenes and gameplay sacrificing. My point was that the mainstream Hollywood films that engage with the everyman have been diminishing in quality recently, so the film-goers whom are disappointed with Hollywood are seeking refuge in the games industry. Mainstream game developers are always seeking to make a buck and pander to the film-goer refugees by making games that are more like films. They aren't sacrificing gameplay in order to save money for the cutscenes and writing, they are purposefully making the gameplay simpler and easier so that the film-goer refugees don't have to work their way through to the next part of the story. But games are not films, they never have been and we don't need them to start being films now.

It's like books. Some more modern books are starting to read like they were written specifically to be films or television shows. These books usually get much more mainstream press and whatnot because they are easier for the film-goer to read and so easier to market. And sometimes the film-goer doesn't need to read it, as the book's story and idea is bought by Hollywood and made into a film anyway.

By the way, I recently spend some good time playing through the Witcher videogames and reading through the Witcher book series at the same time. I highly recommend it.

Well, yeah, I'm sure that is also the case. It's true; the film industry is pretty pervasive. I guess it depends. I'm not sure I completely agree that movies are diminishing in quality; I remember some pretty terrible-looking movies from the early 2000's, and there have been some good movies recently too . I can definitely see that cinematic games are pretty popular right now, and you're right, it probably comes down to movie-goer pandering. I don't think it's bad, necessarily, to have some of those games, but they can't take over.