The Day the Gaming Industry Died

[lazarus]

http://www.cracked.com/article_18608_the-day-gaming-industry-died-impressions-from-e3-2010.html

[ZombieHorde]

1. I still like the old style games. I bought the PSN game,

Soldner-X 2:Final Prototype the first day it came out and I love it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJ06n20AFbE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCzBaQxuhKE&feature=related

Three unlockable worlds, six unlockable weapons, an unlockable ship, and some other unlockables I have not figured out yet.

The game is intense and awesome.

[realisticphish]

2. David Wong is great

I followed him to Cracked from Pointless Waste of Time, and he's my video game prophet. I don't ALWAYS agree with him, but he has a way of deconstructing the gaming industry

[FormerDittoHead]

3. He's right. The medium needs a reboot, starting with character animation.

Natal / Kinect, will be a BIG HARD FAT DUD. Microsoft Bob bad. No WAY this thing will work without lag - all the demos are rigged. Who the HELL wants to hold their hands up in the air for 2 hours pretending they're holding a steering wheel? I get tired just looking at the demos.

Gamestop has STACKS of used Wiis. Guy behind the counter said that people get tired of the novelty.

Don't get me wrong - I love alternative controllers. I have steering wheels, DDR pad, Donkey Kong bongos and even a MIB Steel Battalion - http://bit.ly/dsbeQI - so I'm not anti-alternative controller, but Kinect JUST WON'T WORK.

Speaking of not working - here's a tip to the industry: forget 3D - it will ALWAYS a novelty until they can do it without having us wear glasses, and I've never seen anything practical that works that way.

After playing a good range of Xbox 360 games in high-def (readers, if you're not gaming in high-def, you're missing out - use a PC monitor as I do) I got the idea of what the current technology can do.

While the backgrounds are great and detailed, the characters are still quite chunky and unnatural. Game designers have tried to work around this by making their games "cartoony" and stylized, but ultimately, THEY'RE STILL UNREALISTIC.

I can't help but think that it's a BASIC GOAL to get characters to actually move their lips along with its speech, but the games look worse than foreign movies. Some of the lip-synch / expression disconnect is funny. Develop the hardware / gaming library to let you do better speech and facial expressions, and you'll have your next generation.

In the meantime, after the failure of Kinect is absorbed, I WOULD suggest letting games add a (real) keyboard and mouse to controller options. That would really expand things, and I really don't understand why this was never done.

[Occulus]

6. I've always been very bothered by the character animation used in video games

Do the animators in the industry not understand that people- real, live humans- accompany nearly every word they speak with body gestures, facial expressions, and the like?

As to your lip movement/speech sync thing, yes, that needs to be vastly improved. I will never understand, for example, how the people at the Blender Foundation are able to do lip/facial animations so well for next to nothing (see: the Durian Project), dollar-wise, and yet multi-million-dollar budget studios can't seem to do it at all.

Some of the problems you're referring to- like the cartoony look many game characters have- is due largely to the shaders used by the texture artists. Console game platforms- hell, even high-end gaming PCs- simply do not have (and will not have for years hence) the power to do things like proper global illumination (photon scattering, etc), subsurface scattering, etc. Advances in raytracing will help to fix this, but those reputed advances haven't yet materialized.

Here's to hoping that changes eventually...

[PVnRT]

4. He's absolutely right

One - the gamers who drive the industry demand brand, new shiny toys every five years, and get pissed off when they don't get them. They focus too much on peripheral bullshit like frame refresh rates and backgrounds instead of how fun the game is (not all gamers, but plenty do). Really, I don't give a flying fuck how realistic the fans in the stands look, or if they are only six models repeated throughout the stadium. I bought the game to play baseball.

Two - There is virtually no innovation anymore - the last truly "original" thing I can remember is probably Guitar Hero and the Wii. If you aren't into first-person shooters anymore, it seems like there are very few console games worth checking out, and if you're just a casual gamer...forget about it.

[realisticphish]

5. I wonder though

how much of it is self-fulfilling prophecy. Gaming companies listen to high-end video nuts, and assume that everyone gives a shit about increasing the frame rate by 4. NES is STILL fun. There are quite a few xBox games that I still play on my 360.

I think that for the vast majority of gamers, improving writing, controls, and overall game concepts are far, FAR more important than making every hair in a character's nose look realistic. I don't recall where I saw it, but someone was going apeshit over the pixel dimensions not being QUITE the size the company claimed. WHO CARES.

I think companies make new consoles for the psychos who live in gaming echo-chambers. And we buy them, because we want to be playing the newest games. And they assume we want more new consoles... etc

That, and its easier to bump the frame rate, re-release games as "classic," sell a shitload of new hardware and call it a day

[Evoman]

7. I never understood gamers obsessed with the tech.

For me, it's never been about the tech. I'll be honest...it is pretty exciting when a new console comes out, and we get better graphics, etc. But graphics and technology only influence me once they come out...I'm not usually clamoring for the next best thing. Hell, I was happy when the ps3 came out largely because the price of PS2 games I haven't played dropped, and I could spend just a little money to play all the games I couldn't afford before.

The problem with video game companies is the same problem with movie companies....as the price of production goes up, the willingness to take risks drops. That's why we get movies based on franchises that are already popular, and games that are basically copies of what made money before. And yeah, part of that is our fault as gamers. Sometimes something really innovative and awesome comes out, and few of us are willing to shell out the money to try it out. Instead we buy Call of Duty 127: World War 2 Revisisted again.

However, with that being said, I think PSN and XBOX online will be the way the game industry develops. Cheap, neat games that both casual gamers and hardcore gamers can enjoy, while biding our time for the same old big blockbusters.