SimCity is back, gaming is dead, RIP gaming.

[rk47]

So...I can't see your privates?   

[Modern Angel]

How is it possible that games in 2013 suck more than 10 or 20 years ago?

The industry's a shithold and lots of devs hate their audience.

There's a crash a-comin' and it's going to be epic.

[Special J]

Ah well, there's another franchise that's dead to me.

[MisterNoisy]

How is it possible that games in 2013 suck more than 10 or 20 years ago?

Publicly traded companies.  Having to answer to shareholders fucks any enterprise up.

[Paelos]

How is it possible that games in 2013 suck more than 10 or 20 years ago?

Publicly traded companies.  Having to answer to shareholders fucks any enterprise up.

Actually I think the issue is gaming companies are trying to tap the aging market that has more disposable income than ever, and their kids. They expanded beyond belief when riding the high side the wave, and are now mired in their corporate behemoths, just as the economy went into the shitter and financing for new projects dried up. That started the cycle of cost-cutting which many of them targeted at the development level instead of the overhead level. Also, they tried to put DRM moats around their IPs to make up for what they perceived to be lost revenues so they could make up some of the difference.

In a down economy nobody was/is willing to take any chances, so they just kept trying to copy the same shit. In between recovery from the .com bubble bursting and the 2008 downturn, we actually got to see some decent games. We also had some pretty good games before the tech bubble went boom.

[Lakov_Sanite]

Great games are still being made, they just aren't YOUR games. Simcity? Seriously? Any franchise that old is either dead or bought up by some faceless corporation. Just face facts, we're all old and we used to be into 'it' but now 'it' is something new and strange and we don't know what 'it' even is any more.

[Ghambit]

Go sit in on a class at your local community college and you'll have your answer as to why games suck these days.

[Fordel]

Ahh yes, the everyone is dumber argument. 

[rk47]

But of course, we're wrong again..



BUT THERE'S STILL HOPE!

[Sparky]

I'd have accepted the shitty DRM if city sizes were reasonable.  But those tiny cities and everything else is just too much compromise.  Good news is Cities in Motion 2 is out soonish and SimCity4 still exists.  I have no doubt SimCity will be unplayable 10 years hence as the servers will be long shuttered.

[tgr]

BUT THERE'S STILL HOPE!

Problem here is that last I checked, both Tropicos required a kalypso account to start up, CitiesXL and City Life 2008 were terribad, and I haven't played either cities in motion or towns, so I've no real idea of their suck-factor.

[Yoru]

Cities in Motion basically plays itself. The game goes like this:
* Start
* Take out bonds
* Make two metro stations
* Ignore water taxis, buses, trams and everything else because they're awful.
* Quit and play a decent game

Cities in Motion 2, hopefully, will solve this.

Edit: I also bought the new SimCity. Installed it last night, logged on to Euro West 1 and then instantly quit because it was bedtime.

[Modern Angel]

Ahh yes, the everyone is dumber argument. 

Combined with the churn in the industry as dudes with actual degrees (I'm in a community college now. My work's hard. It's not four year compsci hard.) burn themselves out? Yeah. Those CC and Full Sail kids aren't coming up in a vacuum. Dudes I know with nine, ten years of experience in the industry hit a wall and just burn out. They want to see their kids and spouses. If they have to crunch, they don't want to get paid 10k less a year than they would in a grown up field. There's zero pressure on anyone to pay for the best because the suits know there's an army of Hollywood waiters from degree mills waiting for their big break in Austin, SV, and RTP; they'll pay a third less to cut costs and not be burned because they know that everyone will snap up whatever horseshit gets churned out.

Which doesn't mean good games aren't being made. Of course they are. It'd be retarded to say otherwise. But they sure are a lot less thick on the ground, the barrier to entry to get in is a lot higher, and everything is monetized to hell and back.

There are a lot more SimCity and D3 situations out there than... I dunno, whatever the hell people think is awesome these days. Path of Exile or something.

[tgr]

Which parts of sim city and D3's problems is/were due to "dumb developers"?

[Modern Angel]

Is this a trick question?

[Sparky]

Choosing to simulate every asshole in your city then presumably finding out half way through development that whoops this scales like shit so we better make tiny neighborhood sized cities was, imo, at least getting priorities mixed up.  The simulation should service big expansive cities, you shouldn't compromise the whole point of a city builder for some cool little feature like following individual sims as they go about their very similar lives.  

Unless they're simply holding back big cities for DLC then it's just EA.

[Modern Angel]

To boot, I don't know that you can separate out the evil, scary suits from the benign, put-upon devs when it comes to these monetization schemes and the way the DRM works anymore. It doesn't work that way.

[Yoru]

The whole thing seems very much like the Simsville game they were developing back in 1999-2001, which got canned along with SimMars when The Sims made them giant moneyhats. Reviving that might have been a better move in terms of market expectations than this debacle.

Still looking forward to playing John D. Rockefeller tonight.

[tgr]

I'll give the simulation of everything as a design choice which might not scale as well as we might desire it to do, but the way the always on drm has been put in there isn't due to some "dumb developer" or due to some "lack of intelligence" on the part of the techies, it's down to the suits' greed, pure and simple.

[Modern Angel]

Do you think that the particular way it was implemented, with the full experience only gotten through connection to others, was down to the suits writing up the design docs and putting in the code? With D3, do you think the particular way in which the RMAH was implemented was all suits or all devs? Or do you think it was a little bit of both? When the head of Gearbox lied about a PC-only UI for Borderlands 1, was that the suits pushing him to do it? Was Mark Jacobs lying or just kidding about WAR? To himself or to you? Was he a suit or a dev?

Let me tell you a story. I've worked at a AAA company and had a dev (lead dev) and a suit (lead PR) stream a live interview on Gamespot which saw them lie, baldfaced, to their customers prior to release. Not stretch the truth. Not fibs. Lie. About what was in the game and about how much it had been tested, content which the internal folks hadn't even seen yet. One major dev. One major suit. Working in tandem. And it happens everywhere.

This notion that if the suits would go away then it would be a wonderful industry with smart devs leading us back to the promised land is a fiction. What each side does is intertwined the other and you can't untangle it anymore. Outside of the small development end and a few large companies (eg Valve) the distinctions aren't what you think they are. Things are fucked, dude.

[tgr]

So let's distill it down to greed, not lack of intelligence, and leave the "suits" definition out of it. Works either way.

[Modern Angel]

I'm mostly okay with doing that, but the crux of what I was saying was that stupidity does play a role in it. When you burn out industry vets by the time they're 30, you don't replace experience with experience. You replace him with someone lower on the totem pole, on down, and the guy who will replace THAT guy in ten years isn't a four comp-sci dude from the prestigious tech university anymore but some schlub from Full Sail or an EBGames manager who just, like, wants to make games, man. That's been going on for a good five or six (at least) years now.

[Merusk]

In other words, ineptitude and inexperience, not greed or outright malice.  The usual industry MO of over-promise of what you're able to deliver and apologize/ patch for it later.

[HaemishM]

The new devs all come from the Peter Molyneux Institute of Game Design and Marketing.

[jakonovski]

It's the EU launch day.

EA promised the game's problems would be resolved by then.

The SO bought me Simcity as a surprise gift.

The EU servers are down.

edit: Got in! Awesome, I knew complaining on f13 would help!

[Strazos]

What's kind of funny is that I know numerous people (at least 5) who went to Full Sail...none of them work on games, though at least some of them work in other programming fields.

School always seemed like a massively-overpriced mill school to me, like a glorified ITT Tech or something.

[Sir T]

This thread is the best advertisement for Sim City 4 it ever had. :D

[tazelbain]

Yep, but that would still put money in ea's pocket.

[luckton]

So now the word is that EA is turning off stuff, like achievements, leaderboards, and such to improve server performance.  We have now gone beyond Error 34; we're in the uncharted territories now.   

[Fabricated]

Even Microsoft is getting away from their own DRM shit.

Age of Empires 2 is getting an HD re-release on Steam, complete with workshop support.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_MEFt7KrxQ

[Paelos]

Great games are still being made, they just aren't YOUR games.

Really? What great games being made started a new franchise before the end of 2008?

Most of gaming between then and now has been just sequels and redos.

EDIT: 2 jumped immediately to mind, Dragon Age and Demon's Souls. But that's pretty much it for 2009.

[murdoc]

Great games are still being made, they just aren't YOUR games.

Really? What great games being made started a new franchise before the end of 2008?

Most of gaming between then and now has been just sequels and redos.

Wat? Are you trying to say there's been no original, great games in the last 5 years?

[Malakili]

Great games are still being made, they just aren't YOUR games.

Really? What great games being made started a new franchise before the end of 2008?

Most of gaming between then and now has been just sequels and redos.

Wat? Are you trying to say there's been no original, great games in the last 5 years?

I can't really think of any besides Minecraft and Portal.

[Paelos]

I'm saying that if you actually dig into releases of each year, you'll see exactly how rare a new idea or series actually was.

[jakonovski]

Remember when I told you I got in? Well, I was afk for a while and now I can't even load the executable because the launcher fails to authenticate.

edit: looks like their hotfix fucked up everything.

edit: I can now log in and start the game, but the actual game servers are down too so no playing.