What cau$ed the decline?

[zwanzig_zwoelf]

It feels like that pictures is sprite based.
The point of actual 3D was to make things easier (at first) as someone else mentioned.

What? No. The point of 3D rendering was that it looks cool.

Sure, this:

looks definitely cooler than this:

 

[AwesomeButton]

I think it was also a strong selling point - you last game was 2d but your next is in awesome 3D. Even Age of Empires had 3D. And to think the best inplementation of 3D in a non-FPS/non-Thief game I'd played was in the Myth: TFL and Myth: Soulblighter. I think they were way ahead of their time, especially the first one.

Sure, this:

looks definitely cooler than this:

Damn, this looked like a giant cock at first! :D

 

[Xenich]

It feels like that pictures is sprite based.
The point of actual 3D was to make things easier (at first) as someone else mentioned.

What? No. The point of 3D rendering was that it looks cool.

Sure, this:

looks definitely cooler than this:

I disagree. The first looks like a child made it. /shrug

 

[*-*/\--/\~]

Growing popularity of games. The more popular anything becomes, the more retards it attracts... and quality goes down to match the audience.

 

[naossano]

I mean for devellopper.
It seems easier to work with 3D models than with Sprites. (As long as those 3D models aren't Overly complex)

 

[Clockwork Knight]

3D usually looked wicked cool back then even if we can see some of it was objectively ass, because of the novelty. Most of current "realistic" 3D will look like ass in a few decades, too.

 

[Icewater]

Most current 3D already looks like ass.

 

[pippin]

Graphics in general stopped evolving like 10 years ago, for the most part, and today we only have a glorified instagram experience.
I'd say the uncanny valley factor has something to do with this. Devs will always go for the lifelike experience (in both body movement and facial expressions), with mocap and stuff like that, but in my opinion only LA Noire has managed to bring some sort of "vitality" into their characters, and it was only because they did an exhaustive mocap work.

 

[Norfleet]

There is no decline, most of the old games that you guys praise aren't that great when looked under the non-sentimental microscope. In 10 years people here on this forum are going to be talking about the golden age of DA and Skyrim and how TESVIII and DA: Morrigan's Revenge totally don't compare to their predecessors.

That's how decline works, yes. Things become progressively more shit until the thing which came before which was originally considered shit starts to look good. Because the new shit is even MORE shit, making current shit look good in comparison.

But the decline is inevitable and inexorable. Entropy must always increase. Omnia Merdae Sunt: Everything is shit.

 

[Telengard]

Games tech was due for a stall, no matter what. People don't buy luxury items during a downturn. When people don't buy, the tech can't move. So, from 2008 there was going to be a stall for 5+ years, and that's whether or not consoles existed.

This is a spurious argument because there's no reason for people to buy premium tech. There are no games made for it.

Since we've been tracking hardware data since the 80s, there's been data collected now across several downturns. And during each downturn, computer sales collapse. Which is only understandable, since so do car, appliance, rec equipment, and a whole lot else. So, during the beginnings of a downturn, a whole bunch of electronics shops disappear, as was 2008 and the total carnage that hit the big box and small electronics shops, sending a whole bunch of them the way of the dodo.

The large publishers and even a number of devs track hardware data, and it's much easier to do now that you don't have to send out surveys and get people to fill them out. Just snarf it straight through the net.

Now, there was a brief period in there during the high where people believed: "Build it and they will come," but that didn't last long after a couple high-profile fizzles, like Crysis, which missed its gateway weekends by a longshot, even if it finally did become a rousing success after a couple years (which is not what investors want, by any means).

 

[Apexeon]

Old developers sold there companies and then turned there focus to more important tasks then making
a dungeon crawl blobber classic.

---> hookers and coke (and maybe wine when they ran out of cash I should know).

There it is boys close the thread.

 

[:Flash:]

How many RPG series even made the jump from early 90's to late 90's, other than the big three? I can't recall any.

Precisely. If you follow the criteria established by MRY's question, you only get 'the big 3' of Ultima, Wizardry and Might & Magic. (Series like the Elder Scrolls and Ravenloft started in 1994, so they don't count.)

We have to go into JRPG territory to get a different answer, with Final Fantasy 6 being released in 1994. That isn't considered decline by me or most others, and I don't even like JRPGs. Final Fantasy 7, on the other hand, is pure decline.

This raises a really interesting point, one that we all may be overlooking. The commonly blamed culprit seems to be consoles, and while there's a lot of truth in that, it would also seem that jRPGs have also suffered from their own decline, as there are few oft-cited classics in the jRPG genre emerging from the PS2 era and onwards. You would think that, given that jRPGs have always had their home on the consoles, jRPGs would then thrive with the onset of consolisation, perhaps rising up and eclipsing their cRPG brethren.

What this seems to indicate is that RPGs simply fell out of favor across the board, with the vast waves of incoming players simply preferring a more streamlined, more action-based experience.

I think that was also the case during the mid-90's decline. Ultima Underworld and Wolfenstein 3D were released at the same time (UU being 2 weeks earlier, or something). Ultima Underworld even had the better graphics engine (something that didn't happen again in the RPG vs. FPS department). Yet Wolfenstein outsold UU by a large margin. So why wouldn't a publisher rather invest in action games, which were easier to make and had larger selling potential? And how many RPGs of the early nineties were real hits (compared to action based games)?
Ultima Underworld had another effect on RPGs: From the point of UU, gaming magazines docked points from RPGs for not having a true 3D engine (and for being turn-based), as "Ultima Underworld has shown how a modern RPG should be done". Thus, for developers, the cost of developing a competitive RPG increased, without increasing the potential sales.

The "Baldur's Gate resurgence" had probably more to do with the success of RTSs at the time, providing many new players a familiar interface for RPGs.

 

[turul]

There are so many wrong answers in this thread.

There was 3D graphics in the 90s
There were consoles in the 90s too.
There were games made for the mainstream since the 80s.
There were plenty of bird-eye or isometric rpgs made for consoles too.
There were shooters, space fighter, airplane, mario and tomb raider in the 90s too.

Consoles were actually the risky business, not the PC. There were consoles popping up every other year or the big ones (nintendo, sega) were pushing out a new one or changed something. And there couldn't be bugs on them, since there were no way to patch a cartidge or a CD rom based system.

One of the major culprit has to do with developers were either bought up or driven into bankruptcy. And large distributors like EA wants a quick cash ASAP. Not only because they are assholes, but also, because they know the risk of loosing. There were times, when EA almost went underwater, because of slow sales. While there were hundreds of small computer programmers littered all over the world and making games, pc gaming was still in infancy and computer games were something new, just like "personal computers" were something new.
Developing games for PCs was like a circle jerk for programmers, who had a dayjob of making scripts and simple programs for machinery and office in DOS. While these people were the ones, where the geek and nerd stereotype originated, these guys were actually smart. They were not only "game developers", but skilled programmers, well aware of the capabilities of the the PCs as well as educated enough not to write immature BS crap for 10 year olds as the main audience.
Actually that's another reason. Games were not made for 10-15 year old little bastards, laying on their belly front of a 60" plasma TV with XBOX controller - all day, chewing on Fritos and gulping down 7Up. Those are the main audience of games today, while 20 years ago, owning a PC was a serious investment, and whoever had one was probably at least in his mid 20s.

So, in a nutshell here is what I think:

1. PC gaming was in infancy, as a new thing, hundreds jumped as an oppotrunity and there was a healthy competition
2. The makers of games were better educated and more intelligent
3. The maintream buyers were an older age group
4. Making games for consoles was another branch of digital entertainment vs PC game devs.

On a final thought, I still think PC gaming is in infancy. If you understand how computers are made and built up, we barely tapping the potential of multi-cores and all the gigs of memory. Only our graphics cards and hard drives pushed to the limit.
And this has to do with the bastardization of computers, to be used as a Facebook viewer; picture and video storing device and chatting tool.

Notice how game developers are shoveling games out, with huge Video RAM requirements and taking up 20 gigs of space on the hard drive, while their Artifical Intelligence scripting is stuck in the 80s. I can't mention a game with an AI better than something I haven't seen already in the early 90s.

But i got good news! The mainstream Facebook generation is finally moving off the desktops to tablets and phones, leaving a vacuum behind them, while the console-tards got good enough hardware to last another 6 years.

The bad news is, don't expect mainstream developers or distributors (Electronic Assholes) to start pushing more meaningful games out. They are in for a quick cash, so they need to be dismantled or have them completely leave the PC gaming alone.

 

[Transfiguring Roar]

I thought it was a generational thing/breaking into the kid market where there are ridiculous amounts of dollars, i.e., population growth. Games are still seen as an immature pastime where I live, mostly for kids and teenagers, most of which aren't that bright, and a lot of the kids who started gaming in the late 80's and early 90's still haven't grown up or become more intelligent.

Having said that, I don't really know, and the points that are raised in this thread are eye opening. thread.

 

[naossano]

You missed the point of console Turul.
Even if there was consoles in the late 70s, the point is that in the recent years, most games are multiplateform. Not just a few, the majority of them.
They are multiplateform because now, console and computer became so similar that it makes me wonder why they keep selling consoles. If It provide no difference, no exclusive content, why bother buying console, if you could have everything on a computer ?

Anyway, multiplateform mean games stripped down on controls (the gamepad must be able to do everything), interface and memory. It doesn't mean that the story has to suck, but that the options becomes limited. Limited games and limited genres. It isn't the only thing but it matters a lot.

 

[zwanzig_zwoelf]

It feels like that pictures is sprite based.
The point of actual 3D was to make things easier (at first) as someone else mentioned.

What? No. The point of 3D rendering was that it looks cool.

Sure, this:

looks definitely cooler than this:

I disagree. The first looks like a child made it. /shrug

Congrats on making yourself look like a moron.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

There are so many wrong answers in this thread.

Quite possible, but your answers aren't helping either.

3d graphics, how long consoles had been around, the target audience, gameplay mechanics, education levels of programmers, diet preferences, etc. None of this matters as in what caused the decline. It was a certain set of actions and circumstances.

Consoles were actually the risky business, not the PC.

Hmm...no. At least this particular comparison is false.

Name me a console developer that's still around since the 1990s. Bonus points if you can name a console developer since the 1980s.

It's easy to come up with SEGA and Nintendo from the 80s, and Sony from the 90s, but whom else?

Then come up with a PC developer that's still around since the 1990s, and again from the 1980s.

What names come up? EA and Activision from the 80s, possibly even Atari. From the 90s there's Blizzard and Bethesda.

Here comes the clincher: How did the PC developers survive all these years, compared to the console developers?

The console developers that are still around today are megacorporations that trace their origins DECADES before their console involvement, in other fields. They launched successful consoles, but also unsuccessful accessories. The thing was, they had other markets to sustain them even if the console itself would fail. SEGA had to restructure itself after the failed Dreamcast launch, but they're still the biggest developer/distributer of arcades. Nintendo and Sony have taken their hits, but they're still around.

Now look at the home computer developers. Bankrupties, mergers, takeovers, acquisitions, mega-conglomorates, etc. ALL ACROSS THE BOARD. EA shifted its focus from being a developer to a publisher, with disastrous results for every studio brought under its wing. I honestly have no idea how Activision managed to survive into the 21st century, but it wasn't on the quality of their own games - they bought their talent from elsewhere, with Blizzard being their flagship. Atari has been restructured and reorganized so many times no one barely knows what's left of them, and Bethesda were bought out by ZeniMax, a media-orientated corporation.

You can bring up maybe two dozen consoles that failed due to the risky console market? I'm certain I can bring up over a hundred PC development studios that have failed due to the risky PC market, I can double that number if we expand that to include the now-deceased 'home computer' market in general.

This is because the entry-level capital needed to get into the console market, compared to the PC market, is so much higher. But the payoff is also so much higher, to the point that it's only the biggest and fattest cats that can afford being on the console market nowadays. PC developers, back in the day, didn't need to worry about developing hardware, so that's a large chunk of expense they escape. It's only today, when there's so little difference between PCs and the consoles, and with digital retailers being the de facto standard, that this is changing.

PC gaming today is built upon a mountain of corpses of development studios. The consoles, by comparison, have a few noticeable landmarks.

But back to the topic at hand.

Another factor no one seems to have noticed or addressed: Before Microsoft announced that they were entering the console market (1998 or thereabouts) the consoles and PCs were not really fighting one another, market-wise. PCs had simulators, grand strategy games and large, but slow-paced role playing games, while the consoles were focused on platformers, beat'em-ups, shoot'em-ups and 'hot seat' multiplayer games. Two seperate markets, one can claim. There were overlaps, sure. Popular console titles got converted to the PCs, but very few PC titles got converted to the consoles, it was mostly a one-way street.

Until Doom came along. People seem to forget how much Doom changed PC gaming. Suddenly a PC game was making console-level amounts of money. Better yet, it was a PC game that appealed to the console market. This got everyone's attention. Within 2 years Doom was available on every (major) console. This opened up the floodgates for PC titles to be either converted to consoles if they appealed to that market, or were developed for both markets simultaneously. Suddenly PC developers, with their lower level of capital requirement, were getting a foothold in the more lucrative console market. This led to many different people trying to come up with ways to combine the two markets, or become dominant in both. Guess who came up with the 'best' solution? Microsoft, by announcing that they, a gigantic OS developer with a small game design studio on the side, announced that they were entering the console market full-force, with a console that combined the best of both worlds.

It all sounds great until you look at the afterfall and the "side-effects": Everything that did not cater to the new X-Box would be left behind. If a game was too large, it was out, if a game had a control scheme beyond the capabilities of the X-Box controller, it was out. Niche genres that couldn't find a market on the console were out. "Conform or die" was the message of the day, and it was sent out to both consoles AND the PC. It didn't help either that the role model games for the X-Box console were FPS games, a genre that had already become diluted and overcrowded by the turn of the century on the PC. Here we had a console that not only created a bridge between PCs and consoles, but used that bridge to attack the PC market directly.

This is what Sony did NOT do, which is why the PSX and early-years PS2 are full of cool and innovative games - that mostly didn't see release on the PC. But by around 2005 even Sony and Nintendo were struggling a bit. Remember Buzz, Guitar Hero and Singstar on the PS2? That's Sony struggling to fight against the PC+console behemoth. Nintendo's Wii controller? The same. Eventually Sony caved in, released the PS3 and tried to cash in on the invasion of the PC market that Microsoft had spearheaded several years earlier. That kept Sony in the loop, but at the cost of a lot of the unique identity of the Playstation catalogue. Nintendo's market share may be dwindling, but they keep relevant because they're not following the leader like lemmings, they stick to their guns and have a good focus on the hand-helds...at least for now.

tl;dr - Doom was the herald, Microsoft the culprit, and the X-Box the weapon that brought along the decline, forcing others to contribute to it.

 

[Infinitron]

Unkillable Cat

Activision started out as a console game developer - it was founded by a bunch of ex-Atari guys. But the company was basically rebuilt from scratch by Bobby Kotick in the early 90s so that doesn't have much to do with the Activision of today.

EA has always been a publisher.

Bethesda was never really "bought out". Chris Weaver, the founder of Bethesda, created Zenimax as a kind of shell corporation after raising money from investors to rescue his company from bankruptcy. "Zenimax" never existed as a profit-making entity outside Bethesda.

In general, you seem to be conflating console manufacturers and console game developers.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

True, and I'll admit that's because I'm not as knowledgable about the consoles as I am about the home computers. I'm not doing this to detract or belittle them, just trying to compare the two with what I have.

EA has always been a publisher, true, but in the early years they also developed in-house titles.

Thanks for clearing this up. The big question is, however, does any of this change what I'm saying?

 

[Avellion]

2 main reasons.

First: Rise of development costs, higher development costs meant that games would have to target bigger audiences and risks may have no longer been deemed worthy of taking.

Second: It is my fault as a consumer, we consumers were willing to forgive bad business practices and cave in as long as we could get the game. We bought oblivion, showing we are absolutely fine with dumbed down RPGs, then we made Gears of War a blockbuster showing that we want popamoles, then we bought fallout 3 in droves, telling devs we want our beloved franchises butchered as long as they carry a prestigious name, then we made Dragon Age 2 a success teaching devs that RPGs should contain awesome buttons, then we were responsible for skyrim selling 20 million copies leading to nearly every game dev wanting a piece of the skyrim pie, and now we are being apologists for games like Evolve, Destiny and The Order 1886, demonstrating once again how much we like being screwed in the ass. All while doing this, we barely supported development studios like Troika.

 

[Telengard]

80s companies that I know of - Codemasters, Disney Interactive, Farsight Interactive (sports), Konami, Panther Games, Ubisoft

But once again, Microsoft didn't enter the console market until 2001. Traditional crpgs died out in the early 90s. Rtrpgs were already on their way out by 2001, replaced by adventure rpgs (as we are now apparently calling Biowarian epics) in 02 with NWN. Only arpg diablo-clones really survived through 00s. Adventure games also had already died out in the mid-90s.

So, when Microsoft entered the market, it did act the bully (as it always does), and forced over a bunch of market share from FPS, 3rd person action, and Biowarian adventure RPGs. But seeing as this is a crpg site, what the hell do we care about that? The games we cared about were already dustbinned before Microsoft even began looking into buying Sega. (Which they were doing, according to them, because Sony was using its market clout to freeze them out of the console market.)

 

[pippin]

Yes, Activision started as an alternative to Atari, since iirc Atari had strict development contracts, like Nintendo did and does.
In fact Pitfall was probably the first game which told me it was made by someone; back then devs were never credited but Activision's logo was embedded into Pitfall's ui.

 

[Cadmus]

Guys can somebody fucking explain to me how the development costs have risen so much? As far as I understand it, the development cost is the salary of the people in the office, the office itself and the shit like free coffee mugs for every office worker. Where is the rise? What more do they need than they needed before? I don't believe these claims about the humongous costs through the roof. All the money goes somewhere else, most likely the PR and some internal corruption.

 

[pippin]

Guys can somebody fucking explain to me how the development costs have risen so much? As far as I understand it, the development cost is the salary of the people in the office, the office itself and the shit like free coffee mugs for every office worker. Where is the rise? What more do they need than they needed before? I don't believe these claims about the humongous costs through the roof. All the money goes somewhere else, most likely the PR and some internal corruption.

Music, voice acting, cinematics, getting third party devs to do ports and other stuff, etc.

 

[Cadmus]

Guys can somebody fucking explain to me how the development costs have risen so much? As far as I understand it, the development cost is the salary of the people in the office, the office itself and the shit like free coffee mugs for every office worker. Where is the rise? What more do they need than they needed before? I don't believe these claims about the humongous costs through the roof. All the money goes somewhere else, most likely the PR and some internal corruption.

Music, voice acting, cinematics, getting third party devs to do ports and other stuff, etc.

hm, so the older games didn't have music, cinematics and ports?