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if 1999 was this bad.. what would Williams say now?

Theldaran

Liturgist
Joined
Oct 10, 2015
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1,772
Still, the lowest tier of videogaming is consoles, which are mainly populated by rat kids and mongrels. There is also the displacement in the public's age, but I'll leave that discussion aside.

I guess you've never heard of mobile gaming?

I didn't even consider it. I hate playing anything on my phone, or even on my tablet. Besides, all those games are the very embodiment of casual, if not money sinks with microtransactions Hell and all that.
 

Egosphere

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Jan 25, 2018
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Hibernia
Saying computer games got worse because now everyone can play them is like saying books got worse because now everyone can read.

They didn't get worse, but fiction definitely simplified its language after publishing became easier.

6tivyb.png


That's from a paper on arxiv using google ngram data. Note the fall in the green after 1990.
 

Ninjerk

Arcane
Joined
Jul 10, 2013
Messages
14,323
With respect to literature, Twilight would probably be a good example of a megahit fundamentally altering publisher taste (although this is more a presumption on my part than something I'm resolutely sure about).
 

Theldaran

Liturgist
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50 Shades of Grey is probably worse even than Twilight. And Dan Brown is decline too.
 

Mark Richard

Arcane
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Mar 14, 2016
Messages
1,192
As the focus of giant publishers narrows each year, the mid-tier budget game has vanished, harming RPGs irrevocably. Meanwhile Indi devs struggle with the expense of a genre outside of their financial weight class and appeal to the players directly. Roughly half of the games on the Codex's 2012-2016 GOTY Results used alternate funding methods like crowdfunding or alphafunding, and would be otherwise impossible for an independent studio to take on.

Frankly I don't think the fall of the point & click adventure relates. It was a genre built closely for the limitations of the time, producing worlds that were light years ahead of anything else.
 
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Max Edge

Guest
I just read this quotable piece from an interview with Roberta Williams, mis-quoted on badgames 2, and dug around to find the source. If it was accurate of 1999, it's absolutely prescient about the games market today. I think it applies to a lot more than just Adventure games as well.

Roberta Williams from her 1999 interview with Gamer's Depot said:
GD: Why do you think that the Adventure game genre has kind of died out?

Roberta: Well, since I've not been in touch with the gaming industry as much as I'd like to, my answer might seem kind of off. Back when I got started, which sounds like ancient history, back then the demographics of people who were into computer games, was totally different, in my opinion, then they are today. Back then, computers were more expensive, which made them more exclusive to people who were maybe at a certain income level, or education level. So the people that played computer games 15 years ago were that type of person. They probably didn't watch television as much, and the instant gratification era hadn't quite grown the way it has lately. I think in the last 5 or 6 years, the demographics have really changed, now this is my opinion, because computers are less expensive so more people can afford them. More "average" people now feel they should own one. There's also the influence of the game consoles as well. So most of these people have gotten used to shoot-em' up kind of games on the consoles. Now they want to get that kind of experience on their computers.

MRY Pyke Vault Dweller Whalenought_Joe whalenought_hannah Marat Sar dcfedor TimCain I thank you all, because each of you, in your own way, are pushing back against a massive cultural shift towards simplification, instant gratification and the degeneration of gameplay. There was nothing special about the 80s, 90s and early 00s when some of the best games were made, other than the people making them. It takes courage to go against market forces and create new games that harken back to a previous era. You are using lessons of the past to improve, innovate and create something new on those (now archaic) foundations, all without the expectation of massive financial gain.

:salute:

Market was young and most gamers was children and teenagers. That was forcing companies to looking for new ideas nd taking risk. It's similar situation like western cinema end of sixties and seventies. Or music. Cultural revolution 1968-2000 was very short period of time when people looking for something new (definition of "new" was changing with across decades). Now everything is so expensive, but more important is fact, that buyers don't need new ideas. There is new order of culture and normies accept that.
 

santino27

Arcane
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Messages
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My team has the sexiest and deadliest waifus you can recruit.
Saying computer games got worse because now everyone can play them is like saying books got worse because now everyone can read.

They didn't get worse, but fiction definitely simplified its language after publishing became easier.

6tivyb.png


That's from a paper on arxiv using google ngram data. Note the fall in the green after 1990.

The trend with e-publishing (which is seeming to impact traditional publishing as well) is that it's better to release shorter books more frequently (i.e. 200pp-300pp book every few months) than the alternative (an 800 page book every 2 years). Essentially, there is so much content available that if you're not somehow keeping your name in front of the audience, they'll forget all about you and move on to an author who does.

I tend to find books that short utterly unsatisfying (especially as the first of a series... there's scarcely time to both worldbuild AND have a reasonably interesting plot), but the more successful self published writers all seem to pursue that strategy, so what do I know?
 
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Cael

Arcane
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Nov 1, 2017
Messages
20,295
Roberta's right, of course. Back in the 80s and early 90s computers cost 3-5k (in the 80s money too) and weren't a household item but a tool of STEM trade. You even had to solve a memory puzzle first if you want to play a game - I remember buying this cool new game called Master of Orion, but the game needed 575KB of conventional memory to run. I had a super advanced computer with 4 fucking MEGA bytes of memory but it meant shit because it was conventional memory that mattered which was in limited supply (the first 640 KB), so if you wanted to play a game that needed 575 or god forbid 592 KB, you had to free up the memory by loading all the shit you thought you didn't need into upper memory blocks, which was a lot of fun. Took me 40 min just to launch the game.
You should get pretty high if you have a boot disk with a command.com (or was it the autoexec.bat file? I forgot) file consisting of just 4 lines and a keyboard buffer set to 10 or so... That was the one I was using for most of my games at the time.
 

Kruno

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Village Idiot Zionist Agent Shitposter
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I would argue 800 pages is too short. Read TWoT. Any book/s that is interesting will leave you wanting more.
 

santino27

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My team has the sexiest and deadliest waifus you can recruit.
I would argue 800 pages is too short. Read TWoT. Any book/s that is interesting will leave you wanting more.

If by TWoT, you mean The Wheel of Time, I'd argue that there was a LOT of fluff in individual books (let alone the series as a whole). But my point wasn't about whether or not a book that is 800 pages or 1200 pages or 2000 pages might still leave you wanting more but that it is very difficult to write a 'full-length novel' in only 200 pages without sacrificing something (and that something is often a plot that actually reaches even a semblance of conclusion). My larger point was that the industry is trending in that direction anyway, precisely BECAUSE the barriers to publishing have lowered, it's therefore harder to both get and keep an audience's attention, and the way to build a following and make money is to make sure you always have fresh product in the market.
 

Beastro

Arcane
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May 11, 2015
Messages
7,952
The part I don't get is her talking about an instant gratifation era in '99 unless she's talking about things in relation to the massive load times and disk swapping that PC players had to deal with before then.

It may have been my taste in games, but instant gratification still wasn't around in any for even if it was on the edge with the end of the 5th generation consoles and the coming of PS2 and Xbox. Around that time I got my first PC and quickly got in EQ, as far as MMORPGss were they weren't anywhere close to that given what dominated mechanic-wise (Like in EQ leaving your items on your corpse forcing you to corpse recover naked) until WoW caused their casual paradigm shift in 2004.

Games went mass market which has never been a symbol of quality. If I need to make a game that must sell 2 million copies to break even I can't take any chances and must play it as safe as possible, while making sure that literally anyone can play it.

It's not like things weren't mass marketted in their own ways given the limitations of the time. It was the era of shareware and "100 games on one CD".

I think some people in this thread are conflating two separate issues. They are correct about the mass market watering everything down, and so on, but incorrect in associating any element of progress with the decline. Just because incline happened when most RPGs were isometric and turn based, and decline happened as games went 3D, first person, open world, etc, do NOT conflate these two things together.

You can absolutely have sophisticated intelligent RPGs with first person 3D graphics and open world and real time combat. It just depends on your approach and audience and so on. Just look at something like Ultima Underworld or Gothic.

They may not be the same, but for the last twnety years they've been bedfellows far too much. UU was long before the graphics obsession hit and Gothic was in the dusk of day when it came to it. I remember the sensation Wing Commander 3s budget caused and it continued to loom over gaming for a good while much like what Cleopatra's was to movies. That came to about $4 million, which is now the norm, and we all know how much of that is devoted to the graphics.

It's bloody annoying to me, since back in '99 I was a big RTS and X4 fan, and I felt that they along with RPGs had reached a level in decent graphics that it would mean developers could finally dedicate more time and resources to improving other aspects of those genres, above all else the AI. But what do we get now? X4, RPGs, and what few RTS are still made, with the same level AI and sligtly more polised graphics that now go beyond being purely presentation but masturbation, like the way Civilization is being handled and what is being devoted to making leaders look fancy when they were simple flavouring to get you into the mood to play a certain Civ (Something itself that hasn't been strong in the series since Civ3).

Yes, decent RPGs with what your describe can be made, but much like Hollyood blackbusters have gone for decaes, you'll forgive me if I'm highly doubtful that any 3D, first person open world RPGs will be any good for the same reason I have no faith any blockbuster will be able to run the gauntlet of Hollywood and come out as anything but a safe cash cow.

Oh, how true this bit about conventional memory! You felt like figuring out gravity when you designed a boot disk which freed the necessary amount of memory, and these were prized works of engineering.

I was just happy knowing enough to launch a game in DOS. :|
 
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Beastro

Arcane
Joined
May 11, 2015
Messages
7,952
Read this,

https://rockstarintel.com/2018/05/04/red-dead-2-consolidate/


Red dead redemption 2 which is coming out in October took 8 years to make, and all of Rockstar in-house teams worked on it.
Just shows what it takes to make those kind of games now.


The development cycles are reaching Grimoire levels of development.

And this is why:

Rockstar Games has been crafting it by hand to create “a more detailed, immersive, and interactive open-world,” where fun as every bit important as visual fidelity.

Can't have a decent game without dem modern top tier graphics, gotta have those fit in with what they really want uber alles, so they chose to have it both ways.

Imagine cutting out the AAA graphics requirement and think about what that consolidated team could accomplish.
 

Vault Dweller

Commissar, Red Star Studio
Developer
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Jan 7, 2003
Messages
28,024
Games went mass market which has never been a symbol of quality. If I need to make a game that must sell 2 million copies to break even I can't take any chances and must play it as safe as possible, while making sure that literally anyone can play it.

It's not like things weren't mass marketted in their own ways given the limitations of the time. It was the era of shareware and "100 games on one CD".
There is a difference between trying to sell your game to more people who might like it and altering design, often radically, to tap into much wider market that wouldn't even look twice at your original design. That's what I meant by going mass-market.
 

Gord

Arcane
Joined
Feb 16, 2011
Messages
7,049
The audience has surely changed (although pretty "normal" people/kids have been heavily into gaming as far back as the 80s thanks to comparably affordable home computers like the C64, Amiga or Atari), but it's the developers that have changed just as much.

My impression is that it used to be far more about making the game you'd like to play yourself and actually used to play in other forms (often trying to replicate PnP or tabletop experiences in case of RPGs). Even more thant the audience itself, the developers heralded from the more nerdy circles of society.
When gaming became SERIOUS BUSINESS!, with bigger investments and expanding audiences, marketing started to take over, while at the same time game development became more accessible, too.
So if the audience has declined, the devs have the same, if not more.
 

Whalenought_Joe

Whalenought Studios
Developer
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Apr 11, 2014
Messages
215
Location
Nosgoth
Thanks agris Staying vigilant.

IMG_4037.png


Knowing we only appealed to a tiny crowd of the market we had an easier time spending so many resources on r&d to make a weird, completely new type of gameplay system, considering they'd probably be willing to check it out anyway. That also made the last couple years stupidly risky and stressful to not be releasing something, but it's all now modular enough to keep adding to in the future for different settings and campaigns. With just the two of us developing we only need a tiny fraction of those players still interested in these kinds of games to keep on, we've been able to stay afloat with just Serpent sales and the Copper Dreams KS, but we're about to find out if the risk is about to pay off soon. Which is good, because I could use a drink.
 
Joined
Jan 18, 2018
Messages
1,301
Grab the Codex by the pussy
Even more thant the audience itself, the developers heralded from the more nerdy circles of society. When gaming became SERIOUS BUSINESS!, with bigger investments and expanding audiences, marketing started to take over, while at the same time game development became more accessible, too. So if the audience has declined, the devs have the same, if not more.
This. It seems that the supposed wider audience is also a convenient excuse for developers to dilute cRPG mechanics altogether.
 
Joined
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Messages
5,871
I was just happy knowing enough to launch a game in DOS. :|

If you were using Windows 95 like me, you had to reboot in DOS mode to play DOS games. A hassle, but not really a challenge for an eager kid.
I don't think you know what he meant by that statement.

Many of the later-game DOS games had quite absurd base memory requirements to run (this is the first 640k of memory, before protected mode executables were a thing) - examples that pop to mind from my youth are Alone in the Dark 3 and Falcon 3.0. This was tricky because you also had to have enough base memory to load device drivers - such as MSCDEX for CD-ROM, sound card and even mouse. Although only a few games had extreme requirements (I remember AitD3 requiring something like 617kb or some stupid shit), many games wouldn't run without some optimization. The way to accomplish that was to edit your autoexec.bat and config.sys files in such a way as to sequentially load the drivers into memory in neat blocks (the order mattered because memory was allocated in 'chunks').

Later on, there were programs like MEMMAKER.EXE in DOS 6.0 which purported to do this automatically, but they never worked properly and optimizing by hand was always better.

This was a sort of barrier of entry that kept mongoloids at bay. And remember, this was the era before the Internet, so answers weren't just a search away.

I miss those times.
 

Ladonna

Arcane
Joined
Aug 27, 2006
Messages
10,639
I think the power of the publisher and big name game stores is being forgotten and is the missing link in this discussion.

In the 80's, there were a few big publishers (EA, Broderbund, etc) that came across to games from business and productivity software. EA, even back then, was the shark in the water, but others made their own publishing houses and things worked out, for a time (SSI, Origin, Sierra, etc).

Once the big name game stores started asking for more rent money with shelf space in the 90's, this effectively starting knocking the smaller players out, or into the arms of the big sharks, who fairly quickly began devouring them through various devious legal means and ownership of IPs. Since the big boys were calling the shots now, with virtually no smaller houses, and no way else of devs selling their wears except shareware, number of units shipped and sold was the be all, and everything needed to follow certain formulas in order to be funded. Anything IP or dev that had a good thing on their hands was snapped up and milked to death. And the game stores, that were busy swallowing anyone smaller than themselves in the retail space, also became greedier, making it likely that only the big publishers could afford the shelf space. Chicken and egg.

This toxic culture was defeated by digital distribution, though even here I see Steam as slowly suffocating most opposition. The amount of digital distributors has decreased markedly in the last decade, with Steam having an obscene amount of the digital market share, and only those with a different slant on things (good old games for example, with their DRM free business) able to nibble away at the periphery.

In any case, just thought I would add this in, as nobody else seemed to identify it as a big factor in the decline.
 

Cael

Arcane
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Nov 1, 2017
Messages
20,295
I was just happy knowing enough to launch a game in DOS. :|

If you were using Windows 95 like me, you had to reboot in DOS mode to play DOS games. A hassle, but not really a challenge for an eager kid.
I don't think you know what he meant by that statement.

Many of the later-game DOS games had quite absurd base memory requirements to run (this is the first 640k of memory, before protected mode executables were a thing) - examples that pop to mind from my youth are Alone in the Dark 3 and Falcon 3.0. This was tricky because you also had to have enough base memory to load device drivers - such as MSCDEX for CD-ROM, sound card and even mouse. Although only a few games had extreme requirements (I remember AitD3 requiring something like 617kb or some stupid shit), many games wouldn't run without some optimization. The way to accomplish that was to edit your autoexec.bat and config.sys files in such a way as to sequentially load the drivers into memory in neat blocks (the order mattered because memory was allocated in 'chunks').

Later on, there were programs like MEMMAKER.EXE in DOS 6.0 which purported to do this automatically, but they never worked properly and optimizing by hand was always better.

This was a sort of barrier of entry that kept mongoloids at bay. And remember, this was the era before the Internet, so answers weren't just a search away.

I miss those times.
LoL! I remember those days. I had separate boot disks for Crescent hawk's Revenge, Ultima 7, and a bunch of other games. I can't remember most of it now, but there were two types of memories and you don't want to enable both if you want a base memory in the 600s.

Now that I think about it, I think it was the config.sys file that I was mucking around in with the keyboard buffers and lowering resident memory crap. I recall the keyboard buffer was the major headache when I was trying to play Star Control 2 in MP melee. The 10 key buffer wasn't big enough and one of the players ended up shafted if the other guy kept holding down a key :D

Dang, I am feeling my age...
 

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