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Comment by whywhywhywhy | Hacker News Reader

Kinda sad to me that a lot of the greats from those eras of gaming end up fizzling out on things they shouldn't really be working on and are not to their strengths because of industry ideas of the sorts of games that should be made today.

Like Molyneux's last games all being centered around trash exploitative mobile game mechanics.

Spector being the progenitor of 2 entire very rich single player genres with Thief and DeusEx it just feels completely the wrong person to be working on some coop online game that got support ended after 2 months. It's just not what a talent like him should be working on and the business mechanics don't align with his strengths.

Would have made a lot more sense to be doing a budget IMSIM, there is an audience there on PC for for these sort of games at a visual fidelity level a small team can accomplish rather than trying to make something more mainstream with a reliance on online.

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Or maybe, just maybe, these guys made great games because they were surrounded by great people. That QA guy who gave key insights into how tedious certain game mechanics were; the "bad executive" they all hated who reined in their unreachable goals; that one developer who applied his good game design senses despite not being a designated designer.

I find the notion of auteur "game developers" somewhat puzzling. I say that as someone who played, and still play, these games when they came out. Most of these guys haven't made great games in a long, long while. Obsidian's only decent game in a long while is Pentiment, and that for all intents was a passion project.

The other factor that might be in play is that the people who made great games got lucky and didn't really know exactly what made their games so good and aren't able to recapture the magic.

It's a combination of all those things really. There's also a lot of people in commercial game development that get stuck in their thesis of success when the market has moved on.

In particular I'd say right now it's really hard to look at any given game that has commerical potential and spot the winners across any size category. There is a glut of supply that tends to exentuate the hit driven nature of making games as gamers latch onto the next viral success whilst at the same time making it hard to have multiple hits. Back in the day competition was less and money could buy a scope and technology advantage. Both of which are ideas that no longer really apply.

And then you have Jeff Vogel, who has spent roughly 2/3 of his career literally remaking the games he first released 30 years ago. And I've literally bought them all.

Even that might be subject to shifting market trends as his audience ages eventually but it's definitely been a nice sticky niche.

Or maybe, just maybe, it's both. As with basically all things like this in life. Obviously, you need a great leader, and you need a great team.

Like look at Hidetaka Miyazaki's work on Demon's Souls and then go and tell me that the leader doesn't matter.

yeah, it's meaningful when you can tell a particular designer's touch on a game

The intern who didn't know it was impossible so did it anyway.

Spector has acknowledged that. Reminds me of this funny opening line.

> "There's a tendency among the press to attribute the creation of a game to a single person," says Warren Spector, creator of Thief and Deus Ex.

https://www.ign.com/articles/2001/11/12/deus-ex-2

Especially funny because by his own admission, Spector wasn't even a major contributor to the development of Thief.

It certainly is synergistic though I also think it has to do with being at the right place at the right time. New technology, new industry, new ideas - pure excitement for all involved.

I feel as the industry ages out the "fresh new excitement cutting edge" environment you thrived in is now mainstream. It's procedural and boring so you feel forced to churn out another "cutting edge" mainstream thing. You burn out trying to blend in with the furniture.

Perhaps if you keep finding new cutting edge things to do you can stay on top but most people are ensnared by their zeitgeist.

What you're describing is the inability to maintain quality over a career, which is a separate issue from whether auteurs exist. Often it's because fame and success remove the constraints that were forcing the work to be tight and focused. I don't think the idea of a game auteur is any less real than that of a film auteur. Both are made by large teams, but the best works are often a single person's vision.

I think it is other way round. Some people are able to maintain quality over a career and that proves they are the 'auteurs' of those things.

And some other people cant reproduce the former success, which makes it much more likely the reasons for success were well beyond their control.

An auteur is just the "author", the primary creative force behind a project. Sustained success is orthogonal to that and depends on the person. Francis Ford Coppola didn't make anything of note after the 1970s, but he was still the auteur behind The Godfather and Apocalypse Now.

exhibit B: Chris Roberts. pretty sure this guy needs a studio counterpart that gives him limits, or else nothing ever gets actually finished.

You are absolutely spot on. I’ve worked on a number of game development teams, and it was always clear to me that the game was created by the whole team.

Great gameplay ideas came from programmers, artists, designers, marketing people, testers, and many others. All those ideas were then brought together into one unified product.

Seems like that’s more the norm than not. You have a few great games in you and then you’re kind of out of ideas or the unique thing you brought gets diffused into the genre. Romero was one of the first ones to go through that. Has anyone other the Miyamoto and Miyazaki and Sid Meier(?) been able to keep the quality up? And they’re probably more like managers of designers at this point

Has sid meier kept up the quality? Last I heard the new civilization game is petty crap and shipped unfinished in favor of dlc for basic game play

Meier's about as connected to most of these things as Tony the tiger is to the actual production of cornflakes.

That's been par for the course on the series for some time now.

Not sure when exactly, I assume since physical media became less important, but it's been recommended for at least V and VI, not just VII to skip the x.0 releases, wait for some updates.

No, 7 is way worse than any Civ game has ever been, and has a much worse reception than any Civ game has ever had. There are always a vocal contingent of users who are unhappy with the new Civ on release, but it's never been almost everyone before (as it is with Civ 7). Firaxis really screwed this one up.

Kojima games have only gotten more Kojima.

Yoko Taro also

If you've been paying attention this past week, you'll know that Tetsuya Nomura isn't just making new games, he's making his old ones, too (to raucous hype).

EDIT: I'll add Daisuke Ishiwatari and Fumito Ueda. It's hard to think of someone in the West, though. A lot of them got run out. Amy Hennig's an infamous case.

Music is like that too. Bands have one and maybe a follow up album that gets them popular then everything usually doesn't compare.

Tim Schafer has had a pretty good run over his career

Well, at least for Peter Molyneux he seems to be giving it one last shot at making something overly ambitious: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3165650/Masters_of_Albion...

Today's development is either pay huge money for blockbusters, or go budget and make "lovely" games as indie developers.

Hard to get the mid ground, they rarely recoup the costs.

I don't think Molyneux's issue ever was due to industry pressure. The guy made some great games back in the day, but as long as he has been in the spotlight he has been known for overpromising and underdelivering.

Don't get me wrong, a game like Fable was pretty good, but it was nowhere near what he was effectively selling back when it was known as Project Ego.

That Molyneux chose to make a mindless clicker as his first game with 22cans really can't be blamed on anything or anyone other than Peter himself.

>"Kinda sad to me that a lot of the greats from those eras of gaming end up fizzling out on things they shouldn't really be working on and are not to their strengths because of industry ideas of the sorts of games that should be made today."

I'm sure his bank account disagrees. All games are, ultimately, commercial ventures with the express purpose of making money. It's why they are so hard to classify as "art". There are a select few auteur driven passion projects that can transcend this now and again, but they are generally extreme outliers among even their creator's careers, let alone the industry as a whole.

Artists have to eat, it doesn’t make them not artists. Games are not hard to classify as art. You may not like the art or think a lot of it’s not very good, but they are art, because art is not the exclusive domain of “auteur driven passion projects”.

Cyberpunk 2077 creators bank account is bigger, and arguably that game is he true spiritual successor of Deus Ex.

I haven't played Cyberpunk, I loved the original Deus ex. I think cyberpunk would probably too much for me to try and play these days, due to no free time. Is it open world, so unlike Deus ex single contained levels?

That seems a bit silly considering how many of the most famous paintings and artworks are/were commissions. Do you disqualify anything that was made for monetary reasons?

Thief is something more than a commercial venture. The Black Parade getting released decades after, for free, is a testament to that.

https://www.moddb.com/groups/2023-mod-of-the-year-awards/fea...

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