I took a few minutes out to check GameSpot today and saw the article/interview with Ian Fischer (Robot Entertainment), Soren Johnson (EA2D), Dustin Browder (Blizzard Entertainment), and Jon Shafer (Stardock). The article is called "The state of the strategy genre". Here's an excerpt:
(note: Johnson's reply here made me think OH HELL NO HE DIDN'T JUST SAY TAHT!!!"...lol)
"Johnson thinks that strategy games need to be simpler. He frets that games don't get their message across. "Don't be afraid to cut to the chase," he said. He said that designers shouldn't be afraid to cut down on content, since "more isn't better." He thinks that AAA games are too expensive, and that middle-tier titles--even ones that sell 1 million--don’t interest blockbuster-hungry publishers anymore."
Luckily for us strategy gamers both Mr Shafer and Browder both have brains and don't work for EA. They said this:
"Fischer disagreed, saying that he wants strategy games to offer more features like Paradox's World War II title Hearts of Iron, not less. Shafer also disagreed with Johnson, saying that there still is market for "middle games." That was a reason he went to Stardock, and held up Sins of a Solar Empire as an example."
Thank the gods there are devs out there that Don't Think everything needs to be "simpler". That's EXACTLY what's wrong with strategy and PC gaming in general in today's market and why PC gaming isn't what it used to be compared to back in the day's of the original X-Com and Warcraft. Too many devs want to make things "simpler" and "dumbed down". They try to hide this by using buzz-words like "innovative" and "stream-lined". In reality that means just what Johnson says in the first paragraph when he says "cut down on content" and "cut to the chase".
More often then not that just means they're cutting out options, cutting out content, and plain out just cutting out Depth. Yet people seem to wonder why PC gaming doesn't feel like PC Gaming anymore and why there are so many crappy ports and PC gaming isn't raking in the big bucks with every other title like it did back in the early and mid 90's. It's because of devs that think like Mr Johnson up there. Guys that are so hooked into the "corporate aspect" of gaming that they have completely and totally forgot what it is that made PC Gaming what it was to begin with.
Back in the day's of the Super-Ness and Genesis and PS 1, a PC game had leaps and bounds more depth than any game practically that could be ran on those systems. That's why all the good strategy and FPS titles were on PC while the consoles handled all the platformers, fighters, and twitch games with the occasional decent or good RPG thrown in. With today's consoles most of the PC centric titles can be ran on a console minus the mouse interface so there isn't as much emphasis put on PC titles and on what a PC can do that a console can't and because of this PC gaming has suffered as a whole.
I just wanted to write this little post here to Thank Jon Shafer for not only having a Brain, but for also actually remembering what it is at the heart of strategy and PC gaming as well. Well done, sir. My hat's off to you.
Agreed!
There's something to be said for streamlining and simplification if it's done right. Many traditional RTS games have unnecessary complexity that don't really add anything and in fact distract from the game. Sins of a Solar Empire is actually a great example of what good streamlining is; there is nothing missing from this game, but the nuts and bolts of your empire more or less manage themselves. You don't need to juggle construction frigates to optimize work orders, you don't need to replace destroyed trade ships, everything is built with one or two clicks and then lets you get on with the game.
The problem with EA's path is that they "simplify" by taking away strategic depth, but leaving the high-maintenance aspects in there. Spore's civliization age is perhaps the worst offender. You have to do some experimentation to find optimal factory/housing/entertainment combinations, but once you do there's an obvious best combo that maximizes income with little negative repercussion. The best unit is one with the best balance of HP and firepower, and since the economy is trivial to protect there's no role for speed and the entire game just devolves down to brute force of throwing masses of units at your opponent. The beginner is still screwed by a system that appears complex and difficult to learn, the expert is bored out of his mind by a system that really doesn't offer any choice except build your default economy then attack move with as many units as possible. Worst of both worlds.
Excellent, I knew there was a good reason why I like what I see from Blizzard and Stardock, thank you Dustin Browder and Jon Shafer for knowing what gaming is all about. What Soren Johnson said is one of the reasons why I don't like EA very much.
Man, that makes me think of games like supcom 2...
It was a disappointment because GPG tried to make it simpler. The fans all liked the original for its complexity, and that was completely lost when they redid the entire game.
As I said, there's something to be said for simplification. SupCom got a bit wrapped up in base management and you spent too much time nit-picking engineers. There was a lot of room for improvement there, but instead of trying to reduce the management load and technical sophistication while maintaining the depth and strategic sophistication, they threw out the depth.
That's really the issue with most games--simplification IS the standard but when you simplify at the expense of depth and strategy, it's structure without the purpose. The trick is to come up with a UNIQUE way to simplify that adds sparkle and distinctiveness without bogging down play.
Back in the day of board game simulations, players often made really poor deigners becasue they wanted to add in so much they lost the fun of it.
I actually had a patent for a game and ran into this when I wanted a layer of strategy but not micromanagement and in the end created a device to do the work for the player--then the patent office said when they were ready to grant my patent that the device was so clever I would have to patent the it seperately from the game. Cleverness is sometimes expensive.
I can understand why Soren Johnson would say what he said. Supreme Commander, for example, had a UI that could be described fairly as 'obscene'. Making the UI simpler would have allowed for more people to play the game easily. Unfortunately, when the industry talks about 'streamlining' and 'cutting to the chase' we don't end up with complex games that are easier to understand and play. Point in case: Supreme Commander 2. An improved UI, better path finding, a more optimised or scaleable Engine and changing the Unit Tiers so that each Tier didn't completely replace the previous Tier - thus opening more strategic options as you upgraded - would've made Supreme Commander 2 a massive hit. Unforutnately, they 'streamlined' and 'cut to the chase'.
Oblivion Streamlined Morrowind's incredibly over-complex UI - remember the Journal system? It went a little too far towards dumbing it down, and traveled into cliche fantasy territory, however it still stands to me as a way of making a game more accessible while not simply cutting the game in half and saying 'play this you dumb bastard.'
For me, the issue lies with the people with the money; publishers. They want to see massive hits - we're talking Call of Duty's numbers - for every release. It's either an international AAA blockbuster smash hit or it doesn't get greenlit. Instead of realising that if they didn't make 'Military Shooter 29' for $55,000,000.00, then they wouldn't need it to be a massive, international hit. Instead, take the funding and build four titles that appeal to different markets; a quality RTS Game, a complex TBRPG, etc. These games, if good enough, would sell, and now the publisher has four brand new franchises just waiting to become monster hits. Final Fantasy didn't start with number VII - it started as the last ditch effort of a bankrupt company. Trying to push out monster hits year after year turns your games into shit; Need for Speed, Tony Hawk, Call of Duty, Guitar Hero, etc.
Yeah...money is the root of much evil. you can't sell a game through or to a company today unless you are a design house, were given an outline of "elements" they want in it and do it to their spec.
Selling your own as an independent is the only way to make a really good game and release it unless you are connected.
I remember when Halo 2 had come out and there were talks of a second Halo trilogy that would be a dumbed down story type game with some minor FPS elements. It angered me, because most FPS type games are fairly simple and straitforward already - Why dumb things down even more? I can't find any articles pertaining to this discussion, but that doesn't surprise me now that Bungie is out of the loop after Reach. These talks were coming out around the same time as the first news of a live action Halo production.
If a genre of games was profitable ten years ago, shouldn't it be profitable now? We're still around. Most of the original Civilization players are playing Civilization IV or V unless they dropped off on the way with the simplifications that occurred on some levels. And the original Doom players are likely playing Battlefield, Call of Duty, etc. They want more, not less.
Baldur's Gate fans are still alive and kicking, else Bioware wouldn't have gone after Dragon Age (Even though most of the last DLC's sucked especially Witch Hunt) if that genre of games were dead.
Technology may seem like it's lept ahead by decades, but it's been twenty years. I was one of the original Doom players, one of the original Civilization players. I remember when Shareware.com was where you went to try new games, not for porn. (That was a terrible day - I wasn't aware the site had changed and went to download a new game while at school. Luckily my teacher was there and when I flipped out he came over and closed out of it for me. )
I remember playing Castle of the Winds before Diablo or Baldur's Gate. I spent months on that game, playing it again and again.
When people talk about dumbing things down, streamlining games, it sounds good from a publisher's budget standpoint, and from the standpoint of people who develop business applications, but from gaming? No. M04R 15 B3773R.
Well when it comes to streamlining I think it's hard to say that it's outright bad or good. I'm sure even the most hardcore complexity fan can find streamlining changes they actually liked if they think about them.
An example would be back in old school days of the wizardry series. Back then when you found gold it was automatically divided up among your party members. When you wanted to buy something, you had to manually transfer the gold from each character to the one doing the buying. An example of a good streamlining change was when games switched to a party pool. It did simplify things, but it did so in a way that didn't remove any options or strategy, just busywork. Although I'm sure somewhere out there is a person complaining about how they missed having to go to each character and transfer their gold manually......
(aside) I did not get the chance to usurp the Mad Overlord back in the day. Sad. A good friend of mine did enjoy his adventure on a nice colorless Mac. I still remember his joy when wielding the dreaded Epee of Dismay...
Anyhow, FadedC's comments about moving money around brought back a host of memories. The ability to (P)ool gold was definitely a nice bit of streamlining. Automap was a nice feature as well. I don't recall when I first had the pleasure to enjoy that small feature (M&M3 perhaps? Wasteland?), but I do recall the hours of painstaking map-making done on tiny graph paper. From The Bard's Tale I and II to Might and Magic I and II.. to the original Gold-Box games... You are not a Man until you have etched the enirety of Skara Brae onto a grid of 1/4" squares... Perseverance is the key
Anyone recall the disk swapping trick on those old games, specifically the c64/AppleII era. You could keep a seperate floppy with your mule characters on it... then anytime you wanted to duplicate an item or gold you could load up your mule.. swap disks to save your party.. then load up your mule again. We would run around with a party full of mages each wielding identical Destiny Wand segments. I don't feel great about it... but hey, I was 12.
You can streamline without cutting out depth. It is in the eye of the beholder to a degree.
Streamlining you like= eliminating tedious micromanagement.
Steamlining you don't like= dumbing things down.
One example of how it's in the eye of the beholder is a fighting game that was released a couple years ago, SFII HD remix. The creator of that game simplified many motions, and made balance changes to make certain situations more balanced in terms of risk/reward. Many players started playing the game due to this, saying that the game wwas more accessible. (I agree with this camp) Many folks had a fit, and some went straight out into haterade and sabotage on the game's competitive scene- because of the changes. (these people were haters in my eyes). On many forums this topic is still a guaranteed flamewar.
I like depth, but I also don't like tedious tasks.
Stardock games tend to have a lot of good streamlining in spots, but other spots where it gets very tedious. It's a mixed bag, but usually on the good side. EWOM has some tedium, as does GalCiv II.
I completely agree. Steamlining itself has both good and bad uses. The current trends in the game industry are fairly understandable when one takes a look from a purely business stand point. Most games make the vast majority of their sales in the first two weeks, and by the end of the first month, most titles have made 80% of their total sales. This time frame is barely enough time for the average gamer to either play to completion or boredom. While most publishers advertise their product heavily before release and during the first two weeks, the word of mouth concerning various game play elements from either reviews or friends holds an incredible amount of sway on potential customers. Thus, the average game tends to have a really good first 10-20 hours of game play with the later game play slowly giving way to less and less interesting content, as this first 10-20 hours is roughly the amount of time the average player can put into a game during this crucial first two weeks.
Recently, on the Elemental Forums, a lot of players have been discussing playing AoW for 8 years. As far as many publishers are concerned, this is simply too long to play a single purchase game, as these players can not be counted on to purchase new games in the next month or even next quarter. Thus, these publishers tend to create three distinct types of games - short term fun games, which are bought played once in a short time frame and put aside, franchise titles, which tend to be your sports games and other yearly update games, and highly expandable titles, which are games which draw players in for a long haul while keeping large amounts of content back for future expansions. All of these types of games ensure that players eventually stop playing their single purchase product and go back to the store for a new game, a new iteration, or a new expansion.
Speaking of mapping, there's actually a recent game on the DS (Etrian Oddysey or something like that) which gives you the old school mapping experience by providing you with digital graph paper that you have to draw the lines in with your stylus while you explore. Once you get the hang of it, it's actually kind of fun in a nostalgic kind of way. The nintendo DS has some surprisingly high quality games for it, many of which have a classic old school/turn based feel to them.
This is exactly what I hate about the direction the real-time strategy genre has gone. When your actions per second is a major indicator of your skill, it's no longer a strategy game.
Strategic depth has been replaced with unsatisfying rock/paper/scissors gameplay where by the time you know your opponent has gone "scissors", it's too late to switch to "rock" because the game is already half over. Or you can have a combination of rock, paper, and scissors units, and that works out okay... until you realize, hey, I'm building 3 types of unit just so I can counter his 3 types of unit; we're basically just building 1 unit on both sides but composed of 3 parts. Then we rush them at each other until one of us blindly stumbles upon a defensive vulnerability and it's GG.
Then there's games where there is a "right" way to play, and you have to learn how to do it or you'll lose. Build exactly in this order, at exactly these times, fall behind by 5 seconds and you'll probably be at a disadvantage.
I think the problem comes down to this: developers know they need to make a game easy to learn, so they can either make it intuitive or make it simple. Simple comes with the advantage that it's a lot cheaper to make, and it does great with the "never seen a computer before" playtesting demographic, which publishers love.
Great, now my inner economist is going to come out again.
this comes down to the concept of economic rent. If a gamer values a game at $100, the companyy wants to make $100 off that gamer.
The problem is games are a highly elastic market outside of the hardcore.
This is one reason why we have so much DLC- it makes sense for the companies , even if it does directly hurt the consumer, who can no longer get that $100 experience for the price of a game, now it's price of a game+DLC. The problem with this is you create an income effect, which means people buy fewer games, and therefore, take fewer chances.
This is why Stardock-size budgets are becoming increasingly rare- it's hard to make a game that's mid-value.
Mainstream games are being made for reviewers to get high scores more than actual gamers today.
Ironic that you'd list NFS in there when two of the three NFS developers are putting out extremely good games. (World...not so much.)
well said raven, well said. about a year ago i picked up jagged alliance 2 on GOG.com. it was a game that i had always wanted to play back in the nineties but never got around to it. needless to say it was definetly one of those golden era pc games. well, i remember that there was a point in the game wehre i had 2 guys shooting at someone, and one of my shooters had run out of ammo. i really didn't know what to do, but i was aware that i could give ammo to another merc. well when i clicked on the ammo to give it to my team mate is popped up a throw command. this blew me away that i could just simply throw it to him, and this was only a year ago amongst all the so called new and advanced games of the time! well i threw it to him and i missed! i actually missed because the guy i was throwing it to had so little stamina. this blew me away even more.
i can't help to think why? why aren't games deep like this anymore?
All that is true but complexity needs a lot of work in terms of balance and so far Stardock has been unable to do that with Elemental.
In fact complexity is not a solution either and there is such a thing as over complex games.
Take Age of Wonders Shadow Magic, that game is incredibly complex but those 12 races are incredibly well balanced (some of them are still a bit better than others, but the gameplay allows a certain number of ways to work around that).
From the Gamespot article:
"The moderator then asked if publishers should spend a lot of money developing enemy AI. Shafer said that it doesn't make a lot of sense financially, but Browder disagreed. He said the Starcraft II AI was very carefully designed so it can't cheat, since it doesn't know the player's location."
Wish there was more on that aspect. The article is sort of vague and short. I would have liked to hear their full responses to the questions instead of these short and not very clear summaries from the author of the piece. Not sure if Shafer means less attention should be spent on developing AI, and more on other aspects of a game, or that throwing money into AI development is not the way to go about making a better AI.
In my opinion, with strategy gaming, a challenging AI is probably the most important part of the game. You can make fun games with a crappy AI (like MOO2), but they tend to get repetative pretty quick, once the player figures out the AI weaknesses.
If you're interested in my full thoughts on AI in strategy games, check out this thread:
http://www.quartertothree.com/game-talk/showthread.php?t=63821
A lot more depth there than in any of the GDC summaries you'll find online.
Jon
Thanks, much clearer now.
This from the designer of Civ 5? Actions speak louder than words.
You do realize a developer is capable of producing different kinds of games, yes?
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