> There is so much unexplored space in the medium. We might have stripped the surface, but there is gold down there somewhere.
And so the cycle continues :P
And so the cycle continues :P
I think in the past 20 years, we actually have not made as many breakthroughs in game mechanics (of course, this was easier in the early days). Games are still fairly similar to those of the 90s, only technically more complex. I think we are beginning to maybe get a better handle on game design, which I am seeing creep in with more appreciation of more obscure (now less obscure) game types like roguelikes and CCGs. Little known fact is that Plants vs Zombies was largely inspired by deck building mechanics found in Magic the Gathering, so you are beginning to see some more obscure mechanics like that get mainstreamed.
Genres completely abandoned by AAA developers ages ago are seeing a resurgence thanks to crowdsourcing. Space sims have been all but dead since Freelancer in 2003 but now there are several to play and look forward to.
Formerly obscure genres like roguelikes are seeing mainstream success thanks to high quality "roguelike-like" games like FTL.
Hell, even the impenetrable Dwarf Fortress brings in enough money from donations to support future development.
Not really. Its golden Age was in the late 80s, early 90s, where games were still made by educated people FOR educated people, before the whole thing went mainstream and any sign of complexity went progressively down the drain so that Everyone could start playing games. I miss Falcon's 300 pages manual, or even Colonization's fantastic booklet that went far above describing how to just play the game.
The early 90s were dominated by AAA titles from Origin, pushing both the boundaries of what was technically possible on PC as well as driving genres forward by developing non-linear game structures and exploring 3D environments. Nowadays AAA blockbusters jsut rehash the same formula over and over again (care to take another Assassin's Creed?).
I kind of agree. A lot of AAA games these days are just unoriginal. They follow the genre they exist in without much creativity or original ideas. Perhaps the storyline in the game is what people are after these days, but gameplay-wise, I don't remember when I've seen a big production game that I would have wanted to play.
Not to underestimate the value of nostalgia, of course. Some of the old games have not stood up to the test of time. E.g. I played the original Dungeon Keeper recently and I was a bit underwhelmed because I remember when I played that game when it was new and how great it felt.
Good thing that there are still interesting indie games. Even 15-20 years ago when I played more games, I spent more time playing small indie titles I found from BBS'es and computer magazines than I did playing big titles.
Certainly, but the opposite is also true. Baldur's Gate 2, Planescape Torment still hold up very well to this day and shame more recent RPGs lacking good stories and good character development, aimed at folks who liked RPGs on pen and paper and who actually liked RPGs before they existed on computers.
Indies are great, but there's a certain lack of ambition and a lot of rehashing there too (shovel knight reproducing 8 bit games, others using pixel art as a form of style instead of using all pixels available on screen to do something gorgeous, many reboots of ancient IPs, etc...). Truly original, innovative games are few because most of the genres have already been established for a long time.
Colonization 2008 manual (38 pages): http://replacementdocs.com/download.php?view.377
Edit: fixed duplicate link, thanks ekianjo.
The booklets also helped the immersion, things really have changed.
Incidentally, for many years, everything I "knew" about the colonial & revolutionary times in the US, I had learned from Colonization and Day of the Tentacle :)
The golden age is in the future, and the future is already here (just not evenly distributed).
Also, he's VERY involved in the design aspects. CIG recently published a breakdown of their ship design and development process. There's three or four major stages, and every one has "approval from Chris Roberts" as a gate at the end.
So, while he's certainly not writing a majority of the code like he might have in the past, I'd definitely disagree with the phrase "not involved in development".
I do really miss Microprose and Bullfrog. As a wargammer, I would add SSI, SSG, and Three-Sixty to that list as well.
I actually trace this to Diablo II and Torchlight. Yes, they aren't strictly rogue-likes—among other things they're realtime—but they raised excitement for the genre just the same.
Diablo 2 and Torchlight have the latter, but they are quite old, and the resurgence of roguelikes is relatively recent.
I believe it's just has to do with it being a very solid (and addictive) gameplay model, and one that fits much better indie games than AAA titles.
Before, the top AAA studios made games with mods in mind. This allowed massive genres like Dota and Counter-Strike to come into existence.
Nowadays AAA studios see modders as leeches and try to cut them out of the game so they can sell DLC and skins to whales.
You can see this happening everywhere.
- No modding in Blizzard's new games.
- No modding in Dota2.
- CS:GO and TF2: Making 3rd party servers hard to find compared to official ones.
- Minecraft declaring freemium servers to be illegal
The indie games on Steam Greenlight don't make up for this. It is much harder to prove a concept by making a game from scratch. Most of them are quite shoddy and get abandoned after they receive a bunch of money from early access.
What about Starcraft Arcade, which makes use of Blizzard-provided tools to heavily mod the game?
http://us.battle.net/arcade/en/
> No modding in Dota2.
Valve announced workshop tools that would allow users "to create, play, and share custom maps and game modes for Dota 2."
http://steamcommunity.com/workshop/discussions/-1/3522031560...
Starcraft 2 is not recent anymore. Out of WoW, Diablo 3, Hearthstone, Heroes of the Storm, and Overwatch, it is the only one.
> Valve announced workshop tools that would allow users "to create, play, and share custom maps and game modes for Dota 2."
Announced about half a year ago with no apparent progress? And the game has already been out since 2013 with a hefty 1 year "beta" where anyone that wanted an invite could easily get one?
Starcraft 2 is still quite heavily played, and an expansion is still in the works.
I don't see how you can say Starcraft 2 is not recent, and then use WoW to further your point, when that game was released many years prior.
The fact that Dota 2's workshop tools are still in alpha is irrelevant. The fact is, there is a healthy, modding community within Dota 2, and this is being officially supported by Valve. It is also growing all the time, which contradicts your point that we are "headed for the dark ages of PC gaming".
The valve mod tools are based on source 2 and already work, though they are in an early state. I've played maps made using them - anyone can - they're in the DOTA 2 workshop. Valve has said the dev tools are paused while they port the main DOTA 2 client to source 2 so the client doesn't need to close & boot source 2 to play user-made content. I'm not a game developer, but I'm told the current source 2 map maker is excellent if buggy & poorly documented.
It's possible Valve will release Source 2 for the client and never update the tools, but that seems unlikely. They've made an enormous amount of money off user-created content, and I expect they'll want to continue to add to that revenue stream (as well as it being the cool & decent thing to do).
2. Starcraft 2's mod tools are vastly more powerful than those from Warcraft 3 and especially Starcraft 1 (in some ways this is actually a bad thing).
3. Blizzard implemented a major overhaul of the custom games interface for Starcraft 2's first expansion in 2013, so clearly they still care.
4. Starcraft 2 is still under active development; the latest expansion is expected sometime this year.
I am not familiar with the other games to know how much original content there was, but I remember that both CS and TFC used a number of assets from the original.
Source is not free. Saying Unity is free and Unreal is cheap completely ignores the cost of modeling.
One of the more 'interesting' gaming communities is the PAYDAY 2 community. It's a fiercely competitive multiplayer game with lots of levelling up (why does EVERY game want to be an RPG these days.... I digress) yet all the play has been sucked out of the competitive part. There's this massive conflation between 'modding' and 'griefing' where the attitude to people experimenting with the game is openly hostile.
Now admittedly yes, in a multiplayer competitive game it sucks when a cheater enters your game server and griefs your game. Yet I couldn't imagine the kind of open hostility existing in the Doom or Duke Nukem 3D communities of old, where modding was encouraged and celebrated as experimentation and where the games weren't taken so damn seriously.
There is not enough accountability on Early Access and Kickstarter, and this is magnified by the fact that most people are not good at judging a team's ability early on (see: YogVentures, etc).
It may take a while but I forsee people getting tired of getting milked for DLCs and skins, and the major studios won't have another genre like Dota or CS to copy because they screwed over modders.
Yes, the dark ages, where developers look to protect their consumers (which in this case are often children!) from money-sucking leeches.
The Minecraft mod scene is thriving and massive and Mojang hasn't tried to stop it at all.