State of the Player Address

[AOFanboi]

until they break the restraints of Gygax

Gygax or Arneson? I'm not sure which of them is to blame for the killing=exp stuff, but Gygax was still doing RPGs in the 90s when dramatic roleplaying was "in" (World of Darkness, diceless gaming etc.)

Anyway, the "whack a mob for exp" mentality in Dungeons & Dragons was somewhat mollified by the roles the PCs undertook later, e.g. care for their followers at level 9, land ownership around 18, empires at 30, and seeking godhood at 36. Whether DMs actually did make their players lead nations etc. is a different matter. And it's even less likely MMOGs (Shadowbane excepted) will pick upo that part as long as the mob-whacking powergamers pay the bills.

But I digress: The D&D "mentality" is mostly absent in ATiTD and EVE, but has that helped those games to any extent? Inquiring minds want to know.

[schild]

Eve and ATiTD's systems weren't any better than D&D rules. The point is they need to be replaced with something better. Someone will eventually do it, because the current whack-a-mole system is total shite.

[geldonyetich]

All Gygax and team developed was a means to keep track of the adventure, thoroughly recommending that one's imagination be used as much as possible to bridge the gap between figures and a real roleplay experience.  

For the state of modern CRPGs, don't blame the design of D&D, blame the platform.   Computers are, after all, just really big adding machines.    Naturally early game programmers felt the experience adding mechanics far easier to implement than teaching the computer how to express genuine adventure.  

Today computers are somewhat more complicated than their predecessors, but adhering to tradition is far easier.  Designing and coding mere number crunching versus genuinely entertaining gameplay is right up a programmer's alley.    Also, we've been spoiled: Players have been taught it's far easier to let some unknown artists' expert manipulation of their graphic card's capabilities produce a result than to actually attempt to use their imagination.

Ultimately, I can't blame Gygax, I can only blame the game designers who have failed to understand what he was trying to achieve.   There is no "better" RPG system, because numbers and manipulating them alone have little to do with what your trying to achieve.    

That's not to say that there aren't some exceptional products out there that have managed to make progress at creating a real *experience* as opposed to yet another "hack/slash/gain levels" exercise.   For example, look at Thief.   Though it may be a sneaker FPS, it's far closer to the kind of fantasy experience a game like D&D was trying to create with pen and paper alone.

[ajax34i]

I don't know about the DnD ruleset being that big of a problem.  I didn't really see it while playing DnD (maybe it was that we actually had a couple good DM's).

I think it became a problem when they tried to make computer games, because they had to take away all the "fluff" and come up with hard rules, and that's when the whole calculable, predictable x mobs killed = y xp equation was invented.

I don't remember getting the same xp for killing the same number of orcs in DnD.  It always varied, and was just a lump award at the end of the day, kinda like "here, we had fun."  And it was never about the grind anyway.

...

As for the discussion above, about crap, I was a bit harsh to accentuate my point.  Basically it's quite impossible for a game maker to determine whether a person buying a game is informed or uninformed.  Whether they actually like the game, or they just bought it due to the hype.  And they don't really care, as long as the game sells.

Because we live in a world of "good enough".  Hell, I'd love to baby every computer I fix, clean up the dust totally instead of just a rush vacuum job, rearrange the guy's files properly, install the latest patches, retune his OS to work better, get rid of his clutter, add some of the better utilities and teach him how to use them, get a nice screen saver and background scheme...  Do I?  No, he just wanted (and is only paying for) his noisy fan replaced.

Same with game makers.  If "good enough" sells, you'll end up pressured by time and finances to only be able to put in good enough.

When CoH launched, there was a post on the WoW boards where they were comparing CoH with WoW, and the devs said it was unfair to compare a finished product with a beta product.  True.  But at the same time, I got the distinct sense that they were regretting a little bit their decision to work on their game for "as long as it takes, to make it perfect."

[HaemishM]

An increasing risk, in fact, because these selfsame games keep selling to increasingly hardcore picky people like you whose standards keep rising. Meanwhile, they lock out the more casual player who can't even tell what you're arguing about on this forum most of the time because it's a level of connoisseurship that is beyond them.

Meanwhile, a game which might seem to be the anti-F13 game seems to have captured most of us for at least a month, City of Heroes. By all accounts, it should be reviled by us. It's about nothing but combat, it's not a virtual world, and it's class- and level-based.

Yet, somehow, that same old formula HAS captured us, for far longer than others of its type. It is the epitome of a game a 'casual' or 'time-starved' player can get into. It is a challenge, but it's also deceptively easy to get into.

So how did that game impress us when by all accounts our standards are rising?

EDIT: Also, just to pick nits, ATiTD should be considered a fucking monumental success. I've said this before. ATiTD had a fraction of the budget of something like SWG, and yet, it has at times had twice the number of subscribers it need to break even. 200% profit... I bet SOE would give up lots of left testicles for that.

[schild]

On top of which, most of you hardcore jaded folks actually prefer to play games that you can demonstrate mastery on, not games that offer new and unique perspectives on gaming as a whole. The current gamer is the gamer who passed up the Sims (fortunately for EA and Maxis, your girlfriends picked it up).

You guys keep writing these all-encompassing essays about "what's wrong with the MMOs." I always read them, I always enjoy them. But why do you always leave out some large chunk of reality when you do it? :)

I bought the Sims. And the first expansion. I'm also probably going to review a game I just got around to playing - Startopia. I buy *many* games that are released on the market. This month alone I've picked up four (sure, one of them was Diablo II - for the 4th time, sigh), and I plan on picking up Ribbit King next week. There's also a chance I'll pick up Riddick: Butcher Bay next week.

...I had a lot more written, but it's not worth it. Let's just say I don't leave out a large chunk of reality compared to the large chunk of reality many devs seem to dismiss when they are designing a game. Core systems that are flawed, patches that take forever to roll out, classes that are NEVER finished. These should be criminal acts - when a customer pays for a service, they should be able to expect a complete product.

Somehow the developers have managed to convince the playerbase collective of MMOGs that a game is not going to be ready until 6 months to a year after released and that somehow that's OK. Well, guess what, it's not. And when players stop buying into this half-ass attitude the developers are shopping us then maybe the developers will turn around a finish a goddamn project...I would also be content with a single developer saying, "Sorry, our publishers are assholes, here is the product as is, it will not be ready for 6 months, blame them - not us." But that won't happen, and until then it's time for the players to take a stand.

[Jain Zar]

Me, I plan on picking up Front Mission 4, which is basically Front Mission 3 with better graphics and a new story, and Trackmania, which FINALLY gets a US release in the middle of June, not that EB or Gamestop is aware of its existence.

The former is a rarer type of game so playing a glorified mission/graphics patch isnt so bad when the last game came out around 4-5 years ago.  The latter is a breath of fresh air, combining a racing game with a puzzle game, while having some oldschool game feel to it.  They are different, either a rare breed of game, or a hybrid that manages to feel new.  

Both had demos I enjoyed, and hey, its better than yet another WW2 game.  Right?

[Chiastic]

Here's a hint:  badgering people to vote with their wallets is never going to work because most of them don't give a damn about your Vision(tm) for the industry and aren't the least bit interested in helping you proactively shape its future.  Sorry.

I read a version of either this rant or the "Devs are the Greed" rant every other day on sites like this one.  I've been waiting for everybody to get a clue for... Jesus, how long has it been now?  Five years?  Longer?... but it hasn't happened yet and I'm not holding my breath anymore.

There are certain people within this community for whom the suggestion that their arbitrary personal standards of quality don't amount to anything significant is tantamount to the suggestion that maybe Jesus liked it in the butt.  Hint:  If you're planning to purposely ignore what you know I mean by "quality" and respond to this with a screed on the obvious-to-anyone-with-a-pulse evils of bugginess or incompleteness, you're one of them and there's no point in arguing with you.

On the other side of the coin are the people (mostly industry folks) who believe that the success of games like EverQuest vindicates the idea that the employment of lackluster LCD development strategies and price gouging is a business model that yields sustainable growth over the long term.  Hint:  Try telling that to a music industry executive who doesn't suffer from The Grand Napster Delusion.

As always, it's the industry that's diseased and needs to wake up, not the consumers.  The consumers may suffer from delusions of grandeur, but when push comes to shove they're too diffuse a group to saddle with the responsibility of policing an industry that, frankly, isn't exactly worth policing.  I'm not about to start wasting my time enforcing subjective game-development standards even if that means I make crappy purchases every now and then.  Bad games don't really kill people and I have a life, thanks.

So here's three things that the gaming industry (especially on the PC end) needs to realize:

1)  Trying to commoditize your products by manipulating (read: stripping down) their aesthetics for mass appeal while not coming down on pricing makes no sense.  It isn't a sustainable way to generate revenue.  It produces the much maligned Everything Is Just Like Everything Else (And Way Too Expensive) syndrome that leads to consumer burnout and apathy.  Likewise, you can only strip out so much of a game's "eccentricity" before you start to negatively impact its overall quality which leads to even more consumer burnout and apathy.  The music industry tried this trick and it didn't work, what makes you think it's going to work for you?

2)  Franchise management.  This is a big killer in the PC world.  Quake, Diablo, Warcraft, Starcraft, Doom, Unreal, Half-Life, Ultima and of course, the example to end all examples, Command & Conquer.  Guys, I know that its cheaper to run your franchises into the ground with expansions and sequels than it is to make new games, but you're cannibalizing yourselves here.  Half of the PC shelf space in Best Buy is taken up by those sequels, expansions, and of course the ultra-stupid Platinum Editions, etc. that contain the game and all the add-ons in one nifty package.  You can't possibly think this is a smart way to do business.  Watch Nintendo and learn.

3)  You're selling (essentially) art, not toilet paper, so blindly whoring for the bottom line doesn't always make sense.  This is just #1 taken a step farther (or is it "further?") to say that trying to commoditize your products period is a stupid thing to do.  You've got to allow yourselves to run a little wild and adopt business models that can tolerate failure if you want to have any chance at all of keeping the industry vital.  It would help too if you didn't define success quite so restrictively.  Don't smother your own creativity or you won't survive.  Seriously, it makes sense if you think about it.  Efficacy > Profit over the long-term.  You may not make as much money over, say, the next twelve quarters as a rival milking a hot property for all its worth that's destined for a blowout because it doesn't have anything new in the pipe that it can use to stay viable after the afore-mentioned hot property runs out its life-cycle, but you'll be able to continue making not-as-much-money indefinently.  A winner is you.

And that concludes my bi-monthly contribution to this site.

[HaemishM]

The best one individual can hope for with the game industry is to get his individual buying habits screwed on straight enough to not buy the new shiney unless it's worth it. It helps being broke.

Trying to change the industry from any sort of outside position isn't going to work; Lum the Mad.net was a singular instance of convergence, just like UO and EQ. It will not happen again, because the industry learned you can placate the bitches by acting like you listen to them, since they likely will continue paying you anyway.

As for:

1) We are in the Commodity Age. All thoughts, qualities and factors of a game or any other piece of work are a commodity to be bought and sold (hence the term Intellectual Property). How exactly has commoditizing the music industry NOT worked for the people who really make money in the music industry?

2) See EA. EA is the one who made money off of the raping of Westwood and Origin, not Westwood or Origin. Nintendo is a fat giant about to die a long-overdue death as a hardware manufacturer. Long-term means nothing when there's always another DICE to acquire.

3) The game industry will take a long time to see itself as an art form, a realization that will be further delayed by 1 and 2 above.

[Chiastic]

1) We are in the Commodity Age. All thoughts, qualities and factors of a game or any other piece of work are a commodity to be bought and sold (hence the term Intellectual Property). How exactly has commoditizing the music industry NOT worked for the people who really make money in the music industry?

That's like asking how exactly Enron's business model DIDN'T work for Ken Lay (he pocketed millions, after all).  You can't use individual insiders who are in a unique position to make tons of money no matter what happens as proxies for the industries and companies they represent.  The music industry is in trouble.  Its woes are quite well documented, thanks.

The Commodity Age is a cute buzz-phrase that doesn't really mean anything because the model is largely untested in the markets we're talking about here.  It works great for selling stuff like wheat, iron, diapers, paper towels, soft drinks, etc. but whether or not it's going to prove viable in the land of products whose value is driven more by abstract aesthetic appeal than any particular use remains to be seen (especially in IP-land, a world that mightily resists cutting into margins to pump up sales volume; there's a reason that Wally World hasn't been able to knock anything off the prices of software and CDs).  You need more than a decade or two of hyper-consumerism to hash this stuff out.  Incedentally, the fact that this is never discussed is a travesty.

2) See EA. EA is the one who made money off of the raping of Westwood and Origin, not Westwood or Origin. Nintendo is a fat giant about to die a long-overdue death as a hardware manufacturer. Long-term means nothing when there's always another DICE to acquire.

Business 101:  You cannot indefinently create earnings growth through aquisition.  It's a giant red flag when somebody goes on an aquisition binge.  Nobody except Microsoft and a few others have the raw cash on-hand to sustain that model for any reasonable period of time without incurring serious debt and sparking investor panic (both because of the outstanding debt and because earnings growth is going to fall off a cliff when you hit the point at which you can no longer raise the necessary capital to keep buying people until you clear some of that debt and therefore your growth engine gets shut off by your creditors).  There are a thousand other reasons why it doesn't work, but I'm not getting paid to lecture on business principles here.

3) The game industry will take a long time to see itself as an art form, a realization that will be further delayed by 1 and 2 above.

At least we can generally agree on this, though.

[Roac]

It's fun watching people talk about what should happen without either knowing about, or acknowledging they understand, the business side of things.  Case in point; Trying to commoditize your products by manipulating (read: stripping down) their aesthetics for mass appeal while not coming down on pricing makes no sense.  If you can strip a product of features, which should save development cost (else why do it?), yet sell it for the same amount you otherwise would've sold it for with those same features, you're doing good.  The issue is often put to management in a different way; what does the customer really want?  The idea goes that the customer wants what they pay for.  If they're paying for it, they apparently want it.

Ok, that may not be a bullet proof argument, but the only thing that really matters here is sales.  If you can sell a product and make money, regardless of what some ranters want to cry about, you win.  If they think, based on their experience and research, adding features will not increase revenue over and above expense, they don't get added.  They may be wrong of course, and nothing bad about backseat devs (us) gleefully pointing out their errors, but I'd shy away from global, industry-wide, sweeping statements of "they're all doing it wrong".  

There's nothing unique in this industry; companies are doing everything they can to sell minimums, because minimums cost them less.  Companies don't get rich by selling what "should", pie-in-the-sky fashion, be put on shelves or in catalogues.  They get rich by making on the cheap, and selling with margins - either with high markup for "premium" items, in quantity, or do both "4 teh win!1"  

Of course, customers can all sit around pouting about how they want such and such, and the companies are doing them and the industry wrong.  Reality is still reality though, so being upset about it isn't going to change anything.  You'd have to work with the system, tossing ideas that mesh with the system, to have a hope of that, but that requires having some degree of respect toward the other side of the fence.

[HaemishM]

EA clears debt easily enough it appears by shutting down the acquisitions, laying off a bunch of people and absorbing the rest into the body politic. Now, whether or not this will continue to work will depend on how long their cash cows (EA Sports lines) keep selling. Lack of creativity has not hurt that line; hell, Madden has made them a mint off of NOT being creative in any way, shape or form beyond the first iteration. And it shows no signs of stopping. It has become a brand in and of itself, no matter what clueless fucktard development house is stuck on it.

As for the music industry, they aren't in trouble, they just like to wave that flag in an attempt to solidify their stranglehold on the distribution channel for music. The Big 5 ain't going anywhere any time soon, no matter how many of their recycled acts fade into obscurity. Will a secondary market be created/grow out of their lack of producing anything worthwhile? Sure, but in the meantime, they will continue to treat creative ventures as commodities that can be bought, sold, mass-produced and trading like pork bellies, just like the game industry, only with half a clue.

[Sky]

Madden has made them a mint off of NOT being creative in any way, shape or form beyond the first iteration. And it shows no signs of stopping. It has become a brand in and of itself, no matter what clueless fucktard development house is stuck on it.  
 

OMG how can you say that about Madden?!?! It's teh SEERIOUS foosball!

Take 2 cutting the price of ESPN NFL 2k5 to $20 and the rumor of an early release (2 weeks before Madden is the rumor) should make this an interesting year.

Visual Concepts has really put a ton of cool new stuff in the 2kx franchise this year, so I'll just cry into my beer that much more profusely when the lemmings line up and buy Madden anyway.

Sorry to sidetrack the conversation, please carry on :) I was at least tangential this time!

[RipSnort]

Really just repeating points made in prior posts, But it's slow in the office. and dammnit, I feel like ranting..

It's always appeared to me that investors in the game industry draw a direct parallel to those in the film Industry. They see a formula or business model that's succesfull and repeat it to death. Like the first succesful disaster movie which spwaned dozens after it. Maybe none succeeded as well as the original but they were profitable and lured the audience into the theater. Or something like Jaws which was a risky venture changed the face of the industry and was a catalyst for a new formula or business model for film.
Main difference in the game industry is that the "consumers" are much more intimate with the "product". Gamers spend way more hours interacting with a game as opposed to the 2 1/2 spent in a theater. So there much less tolerance for "formula" or business models of a prior game's content "shinied up".
A call to arms for the player base to boycott games that are teh suk may not be necessary. I think in the big picture games that are worth a damn will rise to the surface by maintaining sales beyond initial release. I'm all for seeing the market glutted with half baked games. All the faster trends of purchase will become apparent to the business mind.
The animal known as the "Investor" or Business mind is by nature nature pragmatic and not a big risk taker. They wanna be damn sure the big money they put in sees a profit. They sure as hell aren't gonna take any unnecessary risks that my jeopardize that.
I would imagine the question posed when investing in a game is what will make people buy it, or in the case of MMO's what will make them continue to pay monthly. That question doesn't necessarily take into account innovation and new concepts of game play. Why bother with them if a profit can be made without their inclusion.
Analysis and trends in the gaming industry need to prove to investors that what will make people pay is synonomous with innovation and new concepts.
The gaming industry is young and persistant worlds younger. There's a lot of growing pains right now for all parties -investors, developers and players.
I'm cynical as a player for the garbage I'm being fed as "next generation", "next thing". On the other hand I'm optimistc the future will bring fun and innovation for the players , more creative freedom for game makers and wiser investors who understand the game industry has a unique set of rules for profit.

There's a number of MMO's on the horizon all with big promises and alternative views of what a persistant world should be. The player base for MMO's may grow but not enough to keep all these games profitable. People will jump ship from those whose focus was on profit more than what the player community desires.

[bignatz]

Well, then, after reading this thread:

When a good part of the customers are fucktard idiots that are too stupid to realize they are harming themselves mentally and physically in many of the current MMOPGs, and a good part of them are underage.

And when most of the industry robs said customers by consistently rolling out shitty broken products after professionally hyping them to a frenzy, giggle in front of their Vision, and refuse to discuss ethics on places like the Muddevlist.

Wouldn`t you guys in the US then call for external regulation of that fucked up market? Or have your tort lawyers give the industry a helping, at least?

I mean, the other pron is over 18, and animal sex is illegal, right?