The New Golden Age of Games?

[Grim Warlock]

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWxGOHiTPzs]Special Award Winner in 2012: Markus Persson - YouTube[/ame]
Huh?

[_Smith_]

Golden era of games was obviously in late 90s. Most of the best games from genres I care about was created that era:
4x strategy: Alpha Centauri
'Immersive simulator' subgenre of action games: Thief 1 & 2, Outcast, System Shock 2
RPGs: Fallout 1 & 2, Planescape: Torment
and of course classic shooters: Quake, Duke Nukem 3D, Blood, Half-life, Unreal

Only hope for a new golden age I see in stuff like this

50k fans funds a game they want to play that has potential to sell digitally lets say 200k units more when shipped.

It's not something publishers will give a shit about. For small and medium game studios it may turns out however more profitable to serve niche audience that way than producing for a publisher a game that sell 1-2M and get nothing but a flat pay per man hour of work. There is no blowing money on marketing, high level execs salaries, CGI cinematics, scripting few hours of in engine cutscenes, celebrity voiceacting... with modern tools it should be possible to produce great games for few millions.

Imagine American McGee launching a crowd funding for Cthulhu inspired, no bullshit classic shooter, with crazy level design properly utilizing 3d space, with a toolset

Of course there is a large field for frauds and media will stop giving free publicity for these projects after some time.
I am really curious whether crowd funding good games will pick up, or fade away soon. I've also pledged 50 bucks for Wasteland.

As for The Witcher games, they have great art, atmosphere and writing, but gameplay is seriously lacking. W2 is a console game at heart, interface is from console hell and plays much better with gamepad than with mouse and keyboard. Beside making a decision that branch the storyline from time to time, there is no real freedom or emergent gameplay or interactivity with gameworld. I enjoy both good gameplay and good atmosphere, story and visuals. I accept that they rarely come in games both at once, so for me The Witcher is worth it. I can see how many folks here can not enjoy it, though.

[Mindf!3ldzX]

Thats the dark side to PC gaming eheh

[grave_digga]

Witcher 2, if you haven't tried it, then you've missed out on some epic gaming/storytelling.

I've seen your thread about it and watched some ingame vids. Not bad but that's not a "i must play this" title for me. And on the other side my rig is too slow for witcher 2 anyways and i'm not planing to update it soon.

[Mindf!3ldzX]

Witcher 2, if you haven't tried it, then you've missed out on some epic gaming/storytelling.

[grave_digga]

...They need to get back to making it about gameplay, I think Diablo3 will be a step in the right direction, but I could be wrong. That's probably the only game I'm looking forward to.

I don't think so, because to me it looks just like Diablo2HD. I loved Diablo2 but D3 looks only like an enhanced Version of it. Maybe i'll be surprised...

I had also lots of great memorys about gaming, startet with Atari 2600, then Atari 800XL/C64, Amiga, SNES, PC, PS3. Nowadays i only play a few Games on PS3 (God of War Series), actual Castlevania LoS, and from time to time a little Painkiller or Quake on my PC. I just don't have the time anymore and also there are not much games that get's me saying "i'll play this". Maybe it's also something about growing up and getting older but that i'm 40 now and still play games says "no" to that.

[ImperiusDamian]

Same here, Diablo 3... that, and I play a lot of Age of Empires Online. Just because it is to me a worthy successor to the inspired original.

[Rampage]

A lot of games nowadays are just unimaginative recycled crap, they tend to be a rinse/wash/repeat in a copy cat industry, everyone is just trying to earn mega bucks off a title (Activision).

Growing up, the sheer enjoyment of games that were purely for the gameplay and not so much the flash was what it was all about. I grew up on SNES (Killer Instinct tournaments in the basement, Street Fighter, and a plethora of wrestling games, Chrono Trigger, RPGs), N64 (4 player Mario Kart, NWO vs WCW world Tour, WCW Revenge, Mario 64, Goldeneye), and then your PC style games like Starcraft, Diablo, HL CS - TF - DOD.

I tried SC2 recently and its just such a joke, I have no idea why people like it.. quick to reward.. quick to build.. little strategy involved.. bulky feeling to it and just uninspiring.. SC was such a ground breaking game, and the mid 90's early 2000's era had a lot of those moments where you just marvel at discovering new things in video games, and discovering those with your friends (I used to lan/play locally with all my neighbors growing up/or we'd log online together and play Counterstrike or Diablo2).

I just find myself completely uninterested in any of the titles.. I try a new PC game and I just get bored of the same crap within a few minutes.. all the flash and everything doesn't cut it for me.. I couldn't take 4 days of the latest COD.. I play sports titles and Quake, that's about it.. but it used to be much better.. maybe there will be another golden age, who knows, but for now, it certainly has passed.

They need to get back to making it about gameplay, I think Diablo3 will be a step in the right direction, but I could be wrong. That's probably the only game I'm looking forward to.

[Mindf!3ldzX]

Golden age of gaming obv is 1996-present (its a Quake1 universe)

[Spiney]

For me the key game was Half Life. If you look from the mid nineties towards the early 2000's there was plenty of experimentation in the shooter genre. Half Life set the bar for a new kind of shooter, a more directed experience, and other companies followed suit. Even Id turned away from 'cyclical' map design towards a heavily directed linear experience.

One good thing from 2005 onwards though are sandboxed shooters like Stalker and Crysis, typically large open fields or forests with hotspots and objectives.

[ImperiusDamian]

The Golden Age was 1993-2000.

Doom
Doom II
Quake I
Quake II

'Nuff said.

[Bloodshot]

IMO story should never be the main focus of a game. One of my favorite games to fire up and play randomly is Crysis, and that's because you can have so much fun screwing with the koreans and blowing shit up, not because of the story. I'm okay with having a story, but I really don't get how people NEED a story for an FPS game to keep them "emotionally invested" as they would say.

I would like to see more games do it like Unreal - there's loads of story there if you look, but if you don't care you can just bypass all that shit and play the game to get a challenge and have fun.

My favorite Western RPG is probably Daggerfall, because even though there's a pretty good story in it, I can just fire it up and play, and do what I want.

[Korax]

I'm a huge fan of classic 90's FPS games. I don't care much for uber GFX and uber-realism. I love to fire up games like the first two Doom games via zDoom and some Quake via UQE and get my fix. I think the point most companies are missing is that most of the time we are playing games to have fun, not to direct a movie, or interact in one. Ok, with the exception of companies producing RPG games.

For me, the rest should all just be less story, more fun factor. Great graphics is a bonus, but it shouldn't be the #1 priority. I also like simple controls and UI. The UI was a huge turn-off for me when I played (read: tried) The Witcher 1. Infact, TW1 and TW2 was such a huge turn-off for me I have given them away. Thats even with their "great" graphics.

I still see games like the first two Gothic games as the best RPG games I've ever played, especially Gothic 2: Night of the Raven... heck, I'm getting in the mood to get those installed for a replay as I'm typing this! Oh, and I think TW1 & TW2's overall gameplay and graphics sucked bad for an RPG. I could have forgiven that if they were actual fun. In RPGs the theres 4 huge things that count for me: world freedom, storyline, graphics, level of interaction.

You know a game is bad when you are trying to convince yourself to try and stay in the game and see if its going to grow on you. The camera/player controls and movement was utter crap in TW1. I can't believe they actually have a world with that level of detail and never thought that the controls/movement is very crappy.

For modern day RPG games my all-time current favourite is Risen. (can't wait to get myself lost in Risen 2)

Even the few RTS games that I have. I don't care about the campaigns (story). I buy them just for the skirmishes, setting up a few CPUs and trying for hours to own the map. Don't get me started though on why game companies that released recent games and I cant get them working on my 1920x1080 display!! Seriously, BFME1 & 2 are not that old, yet they crash because I got a 1920x1080 display and I gotta hack the ini to get a crappy letterbox rez (which is all it supports) and to add insult to injury you gotta have the DVD in the drive to start it up, because they are worried that the 2007 reject game (cause they're not patching it) will still be pirated. I guess they got my money, no love for the game or the customer. That and games like Witcher is a big reason why I don't really buy much games at all, and worry if it shit or not evertime I do buy one.

In anything else, games can be like they were in the 90's, uber fun.
Since I feel so strongly about playing fun games for a change I decided to try my hand at actually making a 90's styled (gameplay) FPS game using the idTech4 engine. It should be very possible. I'm already a few weeks into the code development for it. The biggest change for me to have to do to the idTech4 engine is to get rid of that slow player movement and that "stiff" feeling when playing it. In Doom3 its great to have it like that, but for a fast-paced shooter where bodycount is the priority, you want speed, even if its unrealistic.

What I'm saying also is in slower games like RPGs the visual details are important, but the faster your gameplay gets, the less important the details of the game gets.

[Baker]

I think we'd get better games if the developers gave us more access to their games like certain companies do such as UDK.

I'm rather confident that won't be the answer.

Macroeconomics, history and product life cycles foretell a different future.

Digital calculators in the 1970s were expensive. Like $2000 [from what my Dad told me in a conversation about 6 months ago]. By the 1990s, they were children's toys in boxes of cereal.

Eventually game engines will be standardized and true development will be effectively in the public domain.

Large companies never look to "share". They look to dictate. Large companies generally cannot be trusted to develop standards because the nature of large companies means this is a conflict of interest. And the larger they are, the more this is usually true.

Let the community decide 30% what the game will be like using their engine(70%).

With structure and focus groups of course.

In a way, part of the problem with this is that most people can only imagine the way things are.

Usually, forward advancement comes from concepts that "most" people would never take seriously changing dynamics.

[Phenom]

I think we'd get better games if the developers gave us more access to their games like certain companies do such as UDK.

Let the community decide 30% what the game will be like using their engine(70%).

With structure and focus groups of course.