What would you uninvent about modern games?

Darkglasses

Generally speaking, I'd be far more concerned with making less barriers to entry to multiplayer communities, rather than making really big ones.

Shiminay

Infernum wrote: »

People being able to jump into multiplayer without even playing the campaign first.

Online multiplayer should be locked until the single mode campaign is played through at least once.

I cannot possibly disagree with an idea more, if you made me sit through the gods awful sh1te that is a modern AAA "campaign" from something like CoD (awful) or Battlefield (spectacularly awful) then I'd never play it.

Darkglasses

Darkglasses wrote: »

Generally speaking, I'd be far more concerned with making less barriers to entry to multiplayer communities, rather than making really big ones.

This. Ive never played a ranked game of League of legends because of the barriers. Why not just put me in the very worst rank? What's the problem?

TetraxShard

Deleted User wrote: »

This. Ive never played a ranked game of League of legends because of the barriers. Why not just put me in the very worst rank? What's the problem?

That's mostly to stop smurfs from griefing, or at least slow them down.

Infernum

Digital Solitude wrote: »

Depends entirely on the game, the likes of Dark Souls would be pointless to have to beat the whole game before allowing online, most people would never even get that far

Okay, not for games like Dark Souls, Starcraft or any huge RPGs like that, but it's definitely necessary for games like Call Of Duty and whatever ridiculously overrated, monotonous FPS games that are out nowadays.

sheep?

TetraxShard wrote: »

That's mostly to stop smurfs from griefing, or at least slow them down.

I have no idea what this is, but I don't think the reality will live up to the images in my head.

Edward Hopper

Id uninvent the click bait "reviewers" of games so prevalent these days.

Think that would require the sterilisation of their parents though.

Polar101

- Season passes. "Buy a game for full price, and add 50% more to get a collection of DLCs of which only one will be any good"

- HD Remasters. "We just changed the resolution so you can pay for the game again"

- Annual sequels. "Now with almost 200 changes to the previous version, including a different number in the title. We will also shut down servers for the previous year's game."

- Franchise sequels in general - does anyone really want to play the same game for the 9th time? "This year we are announcing something new and exciting.. well, not really". Of course, a few sequels can make good sense.

- Idiot tutorials. "To move, please use WASD or the left analog stick"

- Whiny online communities. "This game sucks since patch 1.13, after that the developer lost the plot. I can clearly prove class/faction X is 1.5% better than the others, it should be nerfed. If only the developers read a million whiny posts like this, since I know everything".

The_Captain

Tutorials are a great idea, when they're skippable.

"Use RS to look around" Yeah, I've actually played games to look around thanks. Even worse if you're going for a second playthrough and have to redo the tutorial

I don't see why COD players should ever have to touch the single player. God knows I wouldn't play single player when I play them and would go straight to multiplayer

Online activation, need to be online to play game on your own PC

Retr0gamer

Bring back the quirky B-tier games. Everything now is either back room indie or massively expensive and safe triple A title. Back before the PS3/360 era there were dozens of quirky B tier games, full of inventive ideas but not quite knowingly indie. They've disappeared now and the only one I can think of has been the likes of Deadly Premonition and Dark Souls, which has mutated into a much bigger deal.

sheep?

Retr0gamer wrote: »

Bring back the quirky B-tier games. Everything now is either back room indie or massively expensive and safe triple A title. Back before the PS3/360 era there were dozens of quirky B tier games, full of inventive ideas but not quite knowingly indie. They've disappeared now and the only one I can think of has been the likes of Deadly Premonition and Dark Souls, which has mutated into a much bigger deal.

I'm in the middle of watching Twin Peaks for the first time at the moment. A friend mentioned Deadly Premonition to me. Worth playing if I can get it cheap?

rhabarbarum

DLC, for crying out loud.

kunst nugget

I would uninvent the hype machine that now surrounds triple AAA games and blockbuster movies. It only ever leads to disappointment.

Mal-Adjusted

-Massively reduce game development budgets. Sure, it'll mean games are much less polished but it'll reduce the needless feature bloat and force games to be better structured around the core mechanics. It will also mean risk adverse publishers might be more willing to experiment instead of just aping whatever's popular at any given time.

Digital Solitude

Locked control schemes probably don't count but they're pretty annoying, not much of a problem on PC as most everything can be rebound in some way, but older console games can be a lot harder to get into if they're a crap control scheme, even 2 or 3 alternatives would let you settle on what you like best

4068ac1elhodqr

2017's immersive VR games will prove to be a ethical minefield due to their much greater psychological involvement and embodiment.

Article from the newscientist

Robert ninja

Mustafa Fresh Road wrote: »

2017's immersive VR games will prove to be a ethical minefield due to their much greater psychological involvement and embodiment.

Article from the newscientist

You should not be able to shoot people in VR as you can in video games today, for example.

This guy can feck off.

4068ac1elhodqr

The NewScientist chap and other futurologists have a slightly valid point.
Wouldn't like to be the creators legal representation all the same, when full realism VR does actually take off...

Robert ninja

Robert ninja wrote: »

This guy can feck off.

He does look capable of murder in fairness

kunst nugget

Deleted User wrote: »

He does look capable of murder in fairness

He's like a cross between David Byrne and Andrew Wakefield.

Retr0gamer

sheep? wrote: »

I'm in the middle of watching Twin Peaks for the first time at the moment. A friend mentioned Deadly Premonition to me. Worth playing if I can get it cheap?

I loved it. It's incredibly janky, the combat is crap (shoe horned in at the last minute due to publisher pressure) and looks like a bad Dreamcast game but the writing and acting is excellent (no matter what people tell you). The story all comes together at the end beautifully. I really enjoyed it despite it's problems. I'd get it on PC or 360, the PS3 version has really bad framerate issues.

Links234

Retr0gamer wrote: »

Bring back the quirky B-tier games. Everything now is either back room indie or massively expensive and safe triple A title.

Eh, don't really agree with you there. While there's been a dearth of those types of games, I see plenty of things filling the gap between 'back room' indie and AAA. There are larger scale indie games, things like Soma, Rocket League and the like, smaller publishers like Klei or Devolver, and a lot of things funded on Kickstarter that seem to be nicely filling that middle ground between pixelart indie and €60 AAA games. Games like Hand of Fate, Banner Saga, etc immediately springs to mind.

Mr.Saturn

Actually, Retr0 brings up a good point. So much of the fun of collecting for a console is those near-misses, hidden gems and other generally B+ level of games. The likes of a Psychonauts, a Billy Hatcher or Monkey Ball come to mind. By no means AAA efforts, but have enough production gone in to make them top shelf efforts.

I like that gaming development have really opened up in the last couple of generations, but if you were to ask me if there's any bigger studios taking any kind of risks, I'd not be so quick to answer in the positive. The likes of Suda51 come to mind, and I'm not even sure about that.

Robert ninja

Mustafa Fresh Road wrote: »

The NewScientist chap and other futurologists have a slightly valid point.

What valid point? They're just saying stuff we've heard over and over and over again. Oh this instrument is so harsh, it makes you a degenerate. These lyrics make you a satanist. These comics turn your brain to mush. Violent movies make serial killers. Video games teach you how to kill. Let's put a sticker with a number on it from a private company with no auditing, that'll solve everything.

Now it's VRs turn. Can safely ignore this tripe. Someone fresh off a VR trip is miles off from what anyone should be concerning themselves over when it comes to anti social or criminal behavior. Call me when VR causes more issues than a hyped up football match on the weekend.

@Mr.Saturn
@Links234
@Retr0gamer

Yeah it's no subtlety that AA games are where it's at right now.

Retr0gamer

Links234 wrote: »

Eh, don't really agree with you there. While there's been a dearth of those types of games, I see plenty of things filling the gap between 'back room' indie and AAA. There are larger scale indie games, things like Soma, Rocket League and the like, smaller publishers like Klei or Devolver, and a lot of things funded on Kickstarter that seem to be nicely filling that middle ground between pixelart indie and €60 AAA games. Games like Hand of Fate, Banner Saga, etc immediately springs to mind.

Too much polish there for my liking! What I want is something like mr mosquito, glass rose, tail concerto. Labours of love that don't quite have the budget to realise their lofty goals but are more interesting as a result. Soma, rocket league, and. Stuff klei or revolver do are just refinements or twists on existing ideas. I kind of miss he left field crazy ideas, something like deception on PS1 where there's nothing else like it. Sometimes these crazy ideas hit a nerve with the gaming public or where too far ahead of their times but they made for a far more interesting gaming landscape.

Links234

Retr0gamer wrote: »

Too much polish there for my liking! What I want is something like mr mosquito, glass rose, tail concerto. Labours of love that don't quite have the budget to realise their lofty goals but are more interesting as a result. Soma, rocket league, and. Stuff klei or revolver do are just refinements or twists on existing ideas. I kind of miss he left field crazy ideas, something like deception on PS1 where there's nothing else like it. Sometimes these crazy ideas hit a nerve with the gaming public or where too far ahead of their times but they made for a far more interesting gaming landscape.

I don't know, I thought Invisible Inc. from Klei threw something very new indeed into the mix, turn-based Stealth is something that I wouldn't have even thought would work well before playing it, but it managed to be tough and challenging throughout and surprised me greatly. I think there's still innovation there, there's still left of field games being made. But it's hard for me to comment on what exactly it is you feel is missing in today's era, because I've never played any of the games you mentioned there. I looked up Mr. Mosquito there, and not to make any sort of judgement on the quality of the game itself, again, not played it and doubt I'll ever get the chance, but from concept alone it sounds like the kind of thing that these days would be thrown up on Steam Greenlight under the title Mosquito Simulator 2016. And even for all it's criticisms, there's games with some very, very crazy ideas coming out on Steam. Who's Your Daddy for example, where the whole concept is that one player is a baby, trying to kill themselves any way they can, and the other player is a father trying to babyproof everything. That's an utterly barmy idea, and seems to have gotten a very good reception.

I do think that there's plenty of games that are filling the gap between indie and triple A nicely. But I can kinda relate to feeling I suppose a nostalgia for a certain era in gaming. I kinda miss the oldschool survival horror games that I loved on the PS1, Resident Evil, Silent Hill, Dino Crisis, and even Alone in the Dark, or if anyone remembers it at all, the old PC game Nocturne. I think that's why I adored The Evil Within, in spite of it's glaring flaws, because it hit such a sweet spot for me.

Greenmachine

Text based adventures?

Robert ninja

@Links234

Liking good gameplay is not nastalgia, though - No matter what way people try to spin the whole rose-tinted glasses narrative. You can tell it's not nastalgia because it's the same for games one has never even played before. Older games are outright just more likely to be better in gameplay, ambition or going against the grain.

But I don't think TEW is like older horror games.It's 3rd person shooter with purposely bad aiming for difficulty, linear, upgrade path, simplified puzzles. The only thing classic about it is the setting. Boo, haunted house.



I would uninvent QTEs. Damn Japanese devs popularised QTEs by adding it to RE4 literally for the lols and now every western published game has it because muh cinematics. Pathetic.

Uninvent never-ending tutorials and control reminders. Yes, I know I open that locker with E. I've been playing the game for 12 hours, thanks.

johnny_ultimate

Re: the whole b-tier thing. It has semi-disappeared due to the emergence of the independent market, but mostly I think the 'replacement' has proven welcome. There's definitely a dearth of middle-budget 'quirky' Japanese titles out there - not entirely absent, of course, when you look at the likes of D4 or Japan Studio's output (<3 Tokyo Jungle) - sure, and I get the impression that's what Retr0 is specifically referring to. And let's not forget there are a few mid-tier studios working away on projects somewhere between AAA and low budget indie - Double Fine, Harmonix, Obsidian etc... But to me games like Kentucky Route Zero, Papers Please, The Witness or Sunless Sea are far more artistically ambitious and interesting than the likes of Deadly Premonition, and they're the sort of games that simply could not have existed before the emergence of a digital market.

Polish isn't a bad thing, either - plenty of small studios, sometimes even individuals, manage to actually follow through on their ambitions on tiny budgets. I enjoyed Deadly Premonition and all, but I don't quite hold it up as an example of something other games should be striving for - for its endearing formal eccentricities and overreaching but ambitious open world, it is still blatantly derivative of a superior work (Twin Peaks), straight-up mechanically incompetent and nowhere near as satisfying or accomplished overall as the best indie titles. There's definitely something to be said for titles that strive to achieve something different but can't quite live up to all their ambitions. There's even more to be said for the games that can live up to them.

It would be nice if more studios, small and large, did put resources aside for their weirder projects. Actually, that's one thing I would change: I'd love to see more big studios using digital distribution and DLC models to try new things. I still think The Last of Us: Left Behind was a more successful and idiosyncratic experiment than pretty much anything other AAA studios have managed recently, and think those sort of smaller side projects - whether as DLC or standalone titles - could have wonderful creative dividends.