a picture I happened upon reddit about how fallout fans see fallout 3. I think it also reflects a common blight that has settled on the industry.

It is supposed to be the golden ages of game development and all we are seeing are hyped up sequels, marketing pitches and empty promises. Game design elements are overlooked and somewhere along the road FPS started meaning "immersion". Who's gonna stop this travesty?

Play more indie games.

That's where most of the original ideas can be found nowadays imo..

I've tried playing a FPS once on a console. I stopped when I couldn't turn fast enough to aim at someone. When I fired anyway, I hit my target - the game has a ridiculous auto-aim system, reminding me of the old Doom (enemies could be lower/higher than you, but you were unable to aim up/down, so the vertical aim was done for you).

Instead of making games that play well with the controllers (like Nintendo does), many game producers dumb down games to make them playable on a console. This is actually the primary reason I don't play on a console at all.

I'm not a console guy either, but I do know not every console FPS is like that (anymore). Take Resident Evil 4 (I played the GC version) for example. You aim with the analog joystick, and though it requires some exercise, you will soon get the hang of it. It is however never as fast or precise as a mouse, and hence you can't really play it on a network versus PC-gamers.

The auto-aim FPS games are a thing of the past, though there remain exceptions (note that this 'feature' can sometimes be turned off in the menu). Traditionally the console FPS games where derived from their PC counterparts. Nowadays, the FPS designers are more familiar with the concept in order to be able to make it more suitable for play with a controller. These controllers have evolved as well (note that there were no analog joysticks on most standard consoles up until the 'Playstation 1'-age began) to comply with their needs.

Btw, most console owners I know regard auto-aiming games as a kids-thing these days

FPS on a console is obviously worse than on the PC (with a mouse). However, there are plenty of games that play well with a controller, it's just other types of games where timing is more important than accuracy.

Ofcourse FPS games on consoles play differently than they do on PC. Nevertheless, a lot has changed since Golden Eye 64 Controlling the motions has become far more sophisticated and therefore the auto-aim is less obvious because it is required less. I laughed at sybren for telling he quit playing FPS on consoles the moment he couldnt turn fast enough. If you've ever played a fast paced FPS on PC, you've probably noticed that when you first started playing you felt like you couldnt turn fast enough. You can adapt the sensitivity on both PC and Console and it both requires practice to master it; its part of the process of becoming better at the game as a player. Note that every one you are playing against (human players for that matter) have the same conditions to deal with.

Id have to agree that games have become easier, but I wouldnt depict that to developers making games playable on consoles with respect to PC, in my opinion that is just not right. It just has to do with the fact that the playing audience has become broader in the sense that the audience now also contains people who haven't really grown up with games and/or are hardcore gamers like us. If that is a good thing, I don't know. If you look at Mario Galaxy for example, I couldn't put myself to play that game despite the inovative gameplay, just because it's way too easy and it didn't challenge me enough.

I've gotta say, and people are probably gonna hate me for this... but I LOVED Halo on the original XBox. But understand that for me it included the social experience of eating pizza, watching movies, and playing this game with three of my best friends in high school. The game was very well balanced in multiplayer, and it was fun. The experience, of course, is different from an FPS on a PC. The responsiveness may be slower, the aim less accurate, but that is how that game works. It's not better or worse, it's just a different style of play.

In that small-scale down-to-earth social respect, consoles have PC's beat. PC LAN parties are basically equivalent, but setting those up is usually non-trivial. With consoles, you just plop down with a couple friends and start playing. The games may be more simple, but there you are with your buddies. This is of course a different experience to non-face-to-face multiplay and especially to massively-multiplayer gaming.

On the other hand, as a serious gamer, I do enjoy my PC games for their greater complexity and depth.



However, I'm afraid that the era of the "casual gamer" is upon us. We are at a stage where you don't have to be a hard-core computer guy to own a decent computer. So suddenly average people can actually run games on their comps.

That in turn means that the market for computer games has gotten much much bigger. It's where the money is, and so games are shifting to be less hardcore and to have more mass-appeal.

Purists will complain, but unfortunately (or fortunately, as I'll show in a moment), this is the way of the world.

On the bright side, what we are experiencing now is something else entirely new: Of the current generation of kids, EVERYONE plays computer games. Computer games have become a part of life. This is an important point... In 5, 10, 20 years, this generation will be adults, and I believe that as they get older, they will start to want and need more interesting and complex games to satisfy their ever more demanding tastes.

And that's where we come in....

Badasscommy wrote:I've gotta say, and people are probably gonna hate me for this...

Of the current generation of kids, EVERYONE plays computer games. Computer games have become a part of life. This is an important point... In 5, 10, 20 years, this generation will be adults, and I believe that as they get older, they will start to want and need more interesting and complex games to satisfy their ever more demanding tastes.

And that's where we come in....

Nobody will blame you for liking a game buddy Halo experience is a good one no arguing about that. But it was not what I was talking about. It is a genre of game designed for consoles. (with the gameplay and social aspect of course) Just goes to say how you create a game is not relevant to what you put in it.

But I disagree with you when you say that they will (in 5-20 years) request more complex games. Future will not be different from now. We all played simple games as kids, and then of course looked for more complex games in our adulthood. Luckily we found some. However we are failing to find more. This is not a cycle, this is more like a linear thing where somewhere along the line people simply started creating dumber games because the crowd got bigger, and it won't get smaller in the future.

Adults may want more gore and sex in their games, and maybe more thrill etc. but they do want the same simplicity that I am complaining about. Or not "want" but put up with.

It is more like Rambo compared to Bergman movies. It is solely a question of mass rather than time. Instead of telling a story you give the guy a gun let him loose. What happened to Myst, Monkey Island, Baldur's Gate, Sanitorium etc. was my question, even Diablo had a story and conveyed it well enough (being an arcade that is a difficult thing). Now the new Diablo looks like it's coated with lollypops, I can only guess the story involves unicorns and kittens. Show me one contemporary game that has the mastery of Thief series when it comes to pulling you into its world. Even the console games are suffering in some sense. Silent Hill series are pretty much dead.

So the malady is that game developers put up with the whims of the audience rather than expecting the audience to show some compassion and intelligence to discover the game.

Where we come in? I am not sure, but if this trend continues I think we are risking more than ever to be slaves rather than masters of the game industry.

So you are one of those guys that rather have Diablo look like a dark gray colorless game without much contrast ? I honestly wouldn't know what our future is going to bring, but I tend to agree that I rather like to make challenging games than games that players blaze trough in boredom.

ravenger wrote:So you are one of those guys that rather have Diablo look like a dark gray colorless game without much contrast ?

not really, there must be a way between the two, that is between unicorns pooping rainbows and emo adjusted gamma.