Let’s face it: the industry needs a change. I’m not going to lie and say that we haven’t seen any good things from this generation of games so far (some would even say this is the best generation yet), but it seems that with all this power, people have stopped looking at gaming. the way games were intended to be looked at.
I know countless people who will take a look at a screenshot of a game and judge it based on its graphics. If the graphics look like they can be done on a PS2, the game sucks. Period. I’m not going to lie, I do it from time to time. It’s a problem that’s rampant in this generation and it’s scaring the hell out of me. Purely from a gamer’s point of view, I see the failure or success of games measured by their graphics. Simply put, a game that has amazing graphics is sure to be much more successful than a game that looks like crap. Sales are down and investors/publishers don’t have that incentive to keep putting out more games.
Then I try to look at this from a developer’s point of view: Ok, if we don’t have amazing graphics for our game, we’re not going to make as good a profit as we hoped, so we’d better focus all of our resources on how the game looks on rather than how the story unfolds or how the game fits together. These developers pretty much get caught up in an endless cycle of being forced to focus their talents on the wrong thing for the sake of player happiness. Don’t get me wrong, there are companies that can deliver amazing graphics and gameplay at the same time (I’m looking at you, 2kGames), but the smaller guys can’t spend as much time on their original. IPs that no one has ever heard of that should grab players attention the moment they look at the boxart or first screenshot. On the other hand, corporate giants are also struggling: To get more money for their biggest franchises, they have to release “shovelware” games that look like they were created by a first-year game design student in one day. I don’t know if I can make excuses for EA – there’s no reason why they can’t improve on some of their franchises (namely the now mediocre NBA Live and Madden NFL games), especially when you know they’re one of the richest companies and powerhouses in today’s industry.
So where the hell am I going with all this? It’s time for a change. There will come a time, and this is soon, when we won’t be able to make these big leaps in graphics. The polygon count of games from one generation to the next will only improve slightly, and we’ll be stuck with a bunch of crap whose sole purpose was to see how far we can push the hardware. When we get to that point, perhaps more game developers will start to realize that the focus needs to go elsewhere. Looking at games today, the most overlooked aspect of any game, the AI, can be greatly improved. The “immersion” of a game will no longer be about how real everything looks, but how real everything FEELs. I know the technology is out there – I’ve seen countless tech demos of moving dynamic reactive motors. So why is no one using it? Why should I be able to easily go through an enemy because he doesn’t try to shoot me even though I’m 10 feet away from him? Why doesn’t my opponent attack me on Smackdown vs RAW when he has the perfect opportunity? Some developers have honed their craft in this area: Infinity Ward made the Veteran mode in their Call of Duty games as realistic as possible. Other companies have taken an approach to the same problem, but the approaches so far have been highly illogical. Some developers go as far as to make their games cheat in front of you. The point I’m trying to make is that we should view high horsepower as a way to drive more realistic behavior rather than aesthetics. When Dead Rising came out, it was almost revolutionary for me: lots of enemies on screen, all untreatable, all coming at me for the sole purpose of biting my head off. I mean, what else do you expect a zombie to do? It was perhaps one of the best zombie experiences I’ve ever had the pleasure of playing just because it felt like I was in one of the old “…Of The Dead” movies.
And not only the AI, but also the gameplay. I must admit that some of the most innovative advancements in game mechanics have been in this generation’s mode. When you have components like the Nintendo Wii and the EyeToy3, it’s hard to argue. But there is still room for improvement. It seems like everyone just watches the big game and copy and paste. I don’t even have to remind anyone how popular an online co-op and hedging system has become in the last 3 years. And this is by no means a bad thing: if a game can be copied well, it will be copied. But we need more than just 2 or 3 games that will define the rest of the industry for the next 5 years.
So where is the rest of the industry? When are they going to come out of this graphic hole and offer something with a little more substance than being able to count the hairs on the nose in its main protagonists? I hope that day comes sometime before my 360 dies, the slow and inevitable death of him. Until then, someone wake me up when Killzone 2 launches.