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I don't think that the video game magazines are to blame. I think the people that choose to buy uninspired sequels or copied formulas of successful games such as COD, WOW and DOTA are to blame. There are always going to be people that just want the new "fix" in something, just like you have a guaranteed random action movie or random romantic comedy come out in movies and make millions of dollars despite being creatively shallow. Just like you have pop music selling off of a catchy hook and not actual interesting or worthwhile music composition. There are differences in games though since games are an interactive medium, so that's one reason I don't often trust reviews or metacritic scores before I play games. What may be fun and fulfilling to one person, or even many other people, may not be fun to me. -
I think, videogame magazines are blame. They discribe games as entertaining PRODUCTS, not as WONDERFUL WORLDS.
When one buys WORLD, he looks for unexpectable things and new experiense, which guarantees impressions. When one buys after-work-evening entertainment, he looks for something simple and familiar, which garantees fun.
When people talk about stories, it's good to have an unique story. When people talk about entertainment, it's good to be in trend.
10 years ago I had Pentium-166 and hardly could find games for it. I bought "Knights and Merchants". I knew NOTHING about RTS, I wanted to TRY. And it was WONDERFUL!!! And everybody who played the game - it was boys, who liked shooters and RPG's - was excited. And I know that if I read about this game in some magazine, I wouldn't buy it. Bad graphics, bad enemies AI, weak battle gameplay, 8 types of units, no difference between different sides, no RPG elements, complex economic system... BORING! But the game wsa EXCELENT!!! It feeled light and easy, as iPad games, but deep and long, as other PC strategies.
And it's bad system: journalist trys to be objective, and we get speric review in vacuum and can't FEEL the game. Can't understand, what is it about. Does it fit to us. So we can only trust well-known genres and 8's and 10's on Metacritic. -
I understand. But there is NO SENSE to make second Call of Duty. Not exactly: we actualy have second CoD - Battlefield. And Medal of Honor. And Spec Ops. The Line. And Ghost Recon. Do that gamess get the same sells as CoD? Or if the most succesfull films are Avatar and Titanic, should other companies make clones? Companies shold make not wnat already exists, but things that will make unique face of company. See Ubisoft. first Assassin's Creed or second Far Cry weren't great success. But Ubi went on and made great games. And, by the way, where is their Ghost Recon's success?
And I originally talked about games as art. Some companies can make clones and sequels, but not all of them. I always read about AAA titles. And never heard about a game marked "AA" or "B". I'm a programmer a bit and I know that making the base of program is about 20% of work and 80% of work are features, tiny things. So, AA game costs, for example, $10 mln, and the same game tuned to AAA level will cost $50 mln. So why don't company make GOOD unique game for 5-10 mln?
Myst 5 selled bad, and Telltale Games projects was succesfull. And what about Minecraft? Or Limbo? So it's not about mainstream genres and hi-end graphics. It's about right marketing for good games. -
I'm right there with you. I don't mean to knock CoD because it is a great game but there's a lot of things that try to emulate it.
But there are a number of problems here. First, companies need to make money. Prince of Persia didn't even sell 2 million copies since 2008 but Black Ops II has sold OVER 22 million units in 3 months. That's 11x the number of sales in 1/16th of the time! For comparison, The Dark Knight Rises which was a huge movie did $162 million in the Box Office. Battleship? $65 million. That's not even 2.5x as much.
The simple fact of the matter is that they need to make games that people want to buy and people clearly say "I want to buy Call of Duty". If people bought other games then they would make other games. So part of the problem is the consumer base. The entire world plays games now BUT they are unaware of what there is to play. It's going to fall to the smaller and indie developers to show the world the kind of games there are out there to play. And this is going to happen in the near future for one reason - Android. It's not the games that people will learn, it's the idea. People will learn how to handle electronics and that with a little bit more effort, they will be paid back ten fold. When people become less afraid of electronics and the internet in general, these smaller ventures will really gain some traction.
Ultimately, however, it falls to the current gamers to expand people's awareness. The truth is that even gamers do a very poor job of showing what games are really capable of. Even we treat games as second class citizens to film and TV. And nothing is going to change until we do. -
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I'm not against CoD. But in movies you have actions, dramas, comedies, horrors, european cinema... And, I think, nobody says "Avatar got a lot of money, let's make sci-fi!" or "This horror failde, we'll not make horrors anymore". And in videogames it's everywhere. How many games like BGE or Alone In The Dark 2008 or Prince Of Persia 2008 can you name? And hwo many games could exist if publishers tried to make something new. It's compuer, you can make anything! Where are good racing games with guns on PC? Or racing on flying vehicles? Or RPG in modern world? -
They will be. We're reaching the point of saturation. When pushing specs on a game no longer becomes enough, what will set them apart will be design decisions, not numbers. We'll always have Call of Duty type games just like we'll always have the big action movies but we'll also have great games that everybody has experienced. It simply requires that people share their experiences with others. And that's what we do here. -
Hopefully they will be recognized in the future generation of gaming -
Yes, bu it took MANY years to develop sequels. I mean, this games are GOOD. Good graphics, gameplay, story, world. Unique ideas. This games are full of developers' love insead of marketing researches. And it's sad that people don't buy and don't pla them. I think, that when usual man hears "videogame", he should imagine "Beyond Good And Evil" instead of "Call of Duty". -
At least you are keeping them alive by posting about them here. Welcome to the site! -
I don't know if I'd say that Alone in the Dark was great game (though the original certainly was). The others were pretty good games though. Beyond Good and Evil got an HD rerelease, Dreamfall is getting a sequel and I think I heard development had started on Mirror's Edge 2. Those games will still be around =).
Spacesims? Hardcore wargames? Magic Cartep simulator? Pirate RPG? Years ago I would be excited only with idea of them. And now I play what I hear about - Deus Ex, Dishonored, AC, CoD,DmC, FarCry, Borderlands... Good gameplay, good graphics, good (smoetimes) story, easy-to-use and lots of fun. I forgot when I played RTS last time.
But which boy didn't want to be a space pilot, or a pirate, or a space pirate? Or be a magician, or a battleship captain, or a thousand-man army commander? Why don't that boys or ex-boys play games which give them this ability?
Why did The Secret World fail? It has REALY ineresting world, good story, unique quests, familiar WoW gameplay... So why???