This is old ground which i’m retreading here. It’s also something i’ve thought about for a long time. As a (part time) games designer now and a previously games producer game design is a subject dear to my heart and also something sorely ignored or abused in the modern age of gaming.
If we travel back into the dim and distant time of games past, to the Spectrum / C64 era – graphics were not very advanced in most cases all you had pretty much amounted to a few coloured pixels making up a barely discernable blocky image. Because the visuals were never going to attract and keep the players attention the actual gameplay had to carry the game.
This meant games were made to be addictive and simple, simple because there was also very restricted memory. Games were also cheap mainly because development was done by 2 people at most sat in their bedroom.
Fast forward to today and the games industry is a multi-billion industry and the average development team is made up of 30+ programmers, designers and artists. This should, in theory, produce a better higher quality game right? Well, it certainly produces a better looking game, and a better sounding game. But rarely do we get better playing games – why?
Games today are sold like films, eye candy is everything and you grab potential customers wallets by showing previews of stunning pixels rampaging around a giant environment. The story, the gameplay rarely plays a part in this theatre – half the time the preview comes from pre-rendered graphics, effectively films made using the game assets. People buy these games even with this limited idea so, as evolution has taught us, the strongest games are the ones that look the best – they get the most sales and therefore get the sequels. It doesn’t matter if they don’t do well in terms of reviews, the chances are the same people who watched the preview will still buy the game.
Back in the old days (damn kids, get off my lawn) the only way we really had of finding out about new games was through the magazines, because of that we generally saved our pocket money for whatever Crash or Your Sinclair deemed worthy. Mostly this meant you’d only get games with a bit of substance (eventually, of course, economics came in and publishers started throwing money around – but it was pure for a bit) because reviews tended to be biased to games that played well – graphics were a lower priority.
There are obviously exceptions to this, there are some very well designed games out there. Some exceptional designers have the power the drive a game with the design and the graphics follow. But these are few and far between, and usually end up being quagmired in sequel after sequel.
Call of Duty was a good game, the modern warfare IP bought about a revolution in FPS design, but the constant sequels – with very little changes – reduced the impact to nothing. I still bought Black Ops 2 – despite being utterly bored of the series. I’ll probably buy the next one too. This is the same for millions of other players, and it will continue to stagnate whilst we do this. While Activision are making million / billions from the franchise they won’t take any risks with it.
The single bright and shiny point in the world is the indy developer. Games like Minecraft have shown that there is a market for the quirky bedroom developer still. And the iPhone / Android markets have allowed bedroom developers to start making marketable games. The big guys who make millions will never risk those millions, the independent developers always will.