Let's get to making some real fucking games
What kind of games do you like playing?
What kind of games do you like playing?
These days, I prefer playing games for the social experience so I'm more into German-style board games.
I also wrote a card game called Ambition (which I linked in this thread) and that's pretty fun.
I can't stand most of the derivative stuff that comes out of the major studios. It's so formulaic.
The social experience from playing games is pretty broad too. Pretty much every game has an active community behind it. I like playing fighting games; online play for most is pretty solid, and at least in the US there's always a local group of players to play, hang out, and host or go to tournaments with. The same goes for RTSs and action RTSs, even though I don't play those.
If you want to try playing RPGs for the story again, recent games like Nier and Xenoblade Chronicles are lauded for their story and characters. I've also heard good things about Ni no Kuni, which famed anime studio Studio Ghibli also worked on.
Beyond that, there's a near endless stream of quality AAA and indie games on Steam to browse or try.
I might be assuming too much, but whenever I hear someone say new games are bland and formulaic, it seems like they've only heard of Call of Duty, and really aren't taking any time to look for what else exists. Most games made now are bland; most games in the 90s were bland too, but since there's a ton more people making games, there's a ton more variety to choice from. The marketing for the CoD types may be strong, but that doesn't make it impossible to look past that to see the constant stream of excellent games being made right now.
After an hour or two of playing this game, I couldn't help but think that this was carefully balanced, and little more than a clever attempt to stretch the length of the game. I wouldn't be surprised if I the creators of the game (Microsoft and Remedy) had some psychologist conduct studies on how long it takes for people to lose interest. I completed the game, but I felt like in some kind of stupor: never completely engaged, but never so bored that I wanted to quit. Something quite similar happens in MMORPGs where the "drop rates" of items are carefully balanced to maximize the time you invest. From a relevant article [0]:
"How to make players play hard.
Translated into the language we've been using, how do we make players maintain a high, consistent rate of activity? Looking at our four basic schedules, the answer is a variable ratio schedule, one where each response has a chance of producing a reward. Activity level is a function of how soon the participant expects a reward to occur. The more certain they are that something good or interesting will happen soon, the harder they'll play. When the player knows the reward is a long way off, such as when the player has just leveled and needs thousands of points before they can do it again, motivation is low and so is player activity.
How to make players play forever.
The short answer is to make sure that there is always, always a reason for the player to be playing. The variable schedules I discussed produce a constant probability of reward, and thus the player always has a reason to do the next thing. What a game designer also wants from players is a lot of "behavioral momentum," a tendency to keep doing what they're doing even during the parts where there isn't an immediate reward. One schedule that produces a lot of momentum is the avoidance schedule, where the players work to prevent bad things from happening. Even when there's nothing going on, the player can achieve something positive by postponing a negative consequence."
That article makes for some chilling reading.
To get back to the point Michael was making: I do think that games nowadays are in general much more unappealing than they used to be. I know, I know, in the early 90s we had one platformer after another, but they often had quite distinct graphical styles and the mechanics didn't transfer 1:1 either --- just compare Mario to Sonic --- but today you've got one FPS after another, and almost all of them strive for realism and instant gratification a la Call of Duty. Many FPS games have absolutely identical mechanics, down to the button mapping. Storywise, FPS games are an absolute disaster. Very few games try to be different, like Spec Ops: The Line which provided a rather unusual emotional experience. Sadly, it sold very poorly.
[0] http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131494/behavioral_game...