I think this article pretty much nails it:
http://whatculture.com/gaming/15-good-reasons-to-hate-modern-gaming.php
http://whatculture.com/gaming/15-good-reasons-to-hate-modern-gaming.php
Civilization 5 Rants Thread
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Drakarska
Epic Dadness
Nice link.. And accurate as hell.
SnowKomodo
Deity
"loosing"
Can't really agree with all of that.
14. Day one patches - Would rather have a working game than play half an hour more. Are you really that impatient? Don't even know why the writer is complaining about how this might affect those without an internet connection, since you wouldn't need to download a patch then, no?
13. Achievements - Prolong a game's lifetime. I can see nothing wrong with that. They can be ignored if you are not into achievement-hunting.
12. Online gaming - There's no reason to hate revolutionary online gaming due to a minor problem. Besides, nothing is forcing you to listen to the twelve-year-olds on Call of Duty. Or you could just play with friends. Idiots will be idiots, no matter where you go.
10. Digital Distribution - Has opened new ways for rather unknown developers to sell and market their games through platforms such as Steam. Many times new indie games have grasped my attention, even though they would have previously gone unnoticed. Besides, physical copies are still very much available and I don't see them going anywhere.
As for manuals, ever since they've been transformed into digital form I haven't looked back. If I need information, I much rather resort to the internet than a paper manual, that most of the time could only scratch the very basics of the game. Sometimes the physical manuals offer just plain false or outdated information. I still remember reading the 100-page manual for World of Warcraft in 2005, that suggested that the player class "druid" could use spears. TOO BAD THERE ARE NO SPEARS IN THE GAME.
5. Internet connection - Major exaggeration.
The rest you could argue with
Socratatus
Emperor
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I see achievements as completely and utterly pointless. In fact I see them as patronising, like being awarded gold stars at school.
Is not playing and winning the game achievement enough?
Totally pointless fad.
Forced-Steam of course bad, especially with Mods if you like to play Offline, disconnected from the net. I wish Firaxis could`ve made a non-Steam PC version instead of thinking everyone loves Steam. Everyone does not love Steam. Give us the option, pleeeaase.
Absolutely on the button article. Spot on abbout the sickness in gaming today.
Is not playing and winning the game achievement enough?
Totally pointless fad.
Forced-Steam of course bad, especially with Mods if you like to play Offline, disconnected from the net. I wish Firaxis could`ve made a non-Steam PC version instead of thinking everyone loves Steam. Everyone does not love Steam. Give us the option, pleeeaase.
Absolutely on the button article. Spot on abbout the sickness in gaming today.
Since it was almost impossible to distribute a patch 15 years ago, releasing a buggy game was the developers biggest nightmare. Back in those days, you could buy a physical copy on release day, and know that you got the finished product. And if that product was glitchy, you returned it. Simple as that. This forced the developers to test the games very carefully before releasing them.
It's about trying to create an obession instead of creating a game that is fun to play. It's simple and dirty way of tricking the customers into thinking that the game has replay value.
May I ask how old you are? In the good old days, pretty much all games were inide games. For example, Ken and Roberta Williams, a married couple who founded Sierra. Roberta wrote the stories, Ken did the programming. Or Sid? He made Civilization and Railroad Tycoon basically by himself.
Indie games nowadays consist mostly of brainless "artistic" crap such as "Journey", "Flower" or "Shadow of the Colossus". Show me real games, where you have to spend several weeks just to understand the basic gameplay.
That's because new games usually are so dumbed down that you don't have to read the manual. And 100 pages? That's a pamphlet. My Railroad Tycoon Deluxe Manual is 180 pages and I still read it from time to time - Not because I have to, but because it's so good.
It wasn't just about getting info as quickly as possible, it was sort of a ritual. You were prepering for the big challenge. The manuals also contained tons of pages with historical facts other exciting information. There was a magic that can't be explained, only experienced. I'd say that if you didn't play the advanced computer games before perhaps 1995, you won't get what I'm talking about.
Um, no. I'm incredibly tired of the Internet. I usually work and play games on a computer that doesn't have Internet connection so that I can't be disturbed. And now they want to force into using it? Not gonna happen.
word. manuals nowadays are a joke. assume you do get to play a new game thats not dumbed down beyond belief, they don't explain anything that's not obvious from playing the game. I don't need a manual that says "to start a game, press the "start game" button". I need information on the mechanics, tips and tricks that can't be obtained from playing a game. I remember skimming through 100 pages of the victoria 2 manual for some really simple yet apparently unanswerable question that was imho neither far fetched nor unanswerable. on the other hand, I am confident that i would find some useful hint reading through the imperialism manual if i didn't know that game by heart
While I agree that some game developers set too ambitious, early release dates (Skyrim 11/11/11), you could also give a game one or two months before purchasing. If you were able to wait for a game to be polished before, why not do the same now? Nowadays, with the gaming industry setting record revenues each year, you possibly got millions of players testing your game and sharing their comments on the internet, and ironing out all the bugs and glitches the players are able to find would be a near impossible process.
There's always been ways for the game to challenge the gamer in different ways (defeat the game in a specific time period, win a game without losing a base/unit/whatever etc.) and it's much more enjoyable to aim for a goal set by the game than an imaginary one. Think about all the people who enjoy one-city-challenge on Civ. Achievements are not much different from that. Steam achievements, however, are rather poorly done, since sometimes it's very easy to "cheat" to get one.
Well, if all games were indie games, when you played a game you played an indie game. So technically even the major games were "indie games". It's difficult to compare since gaming has become such a widespread hobby.
All I'm saying that I would probably have missed plenty of small-budget games without platforms such as Steam, since they are mostly just buried under the major publishers and their massive marketing power. It's an easy way to discover and purchase titles such as Terraria, Magicka, Amnesia and Cortex Command that have no chance of being shipped around the world onto game store shelves. While not particularly complex, they are both fresh and interesting and above all, fun to play.
If you consider reading a manual a tradition or a ritual then I guess this is very unfortunate. But if a manual's primary purpose is to teach players how to play a game, they are rather useless in a 2012 game. They just can't compete with your favorite, regularly updated strategic Hearts of Iron/etc fansite, or even some game wikis all around.
But you're right, I'm 20 years old so I've never played a 1995 game on release. While I've read plenty of manuals, reading one never became a tradition for me.
While it is a minor annoyance, I don't see a one-time verification online as too much to ask.
salty mud
Deity
I don't see an issue at all with being connected to the Internet, unless you absolutely cannot play unless you are on the Internet. I also don't understand how being connected to the Internet leads to one being "disturbed"... if you don't want to be disturbed, don't open your browser.
Steamwerks
Warlord
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There was still an abundance of quality manuals being printed until at least '98/'99, but it's definitely true that the further back you go towards 1990, the better the manuals get! Some of my favorites were Prince of Persia 1 & 2 (which also had AMAZING box design), Simcity 2000, Warcraft: Orcs & Humans, Lords of Magic, Mechwarrior 2: Mercenaries (which had a monstrous text manual that I printed out in its entirety
), and Fallout 1/2. You still see decent manuals from time to time, but it's very rare. Off the top of my head, the last two tomes that really gave me that classic fix were Civ IV (Collector's Edition manual) and Vanilla WoW (Collector's Edition art-book).Gzz
Warlord
Why diplo victory is so dependant on City States and liberating ? I mean , even in Civ IV was difficult , but was because you didn' t had enough pop ,not because you destroyed an annoing city state , the leaders in IV ill sometimes vote you if you were enought friendely , here no : corrupt cityu state andliberate other civis or nothing
Brian Shanahan
Permanoob
In most industries having your customers test your products for quality control is not just bad practise but also illegal. The same theoretically applies to the games industry as well, though if you actually read an EUA with some legal background, you'd realise that intentionally selling substandard merchandise is not the only legal problem the games industry should be facing in front of a beak. Just because they get away with being lazy doesn't mean they should be lazy.
The generic war FPS thing drives me nuts too. The element of the equation that I really don't get is that the available hardware hasn't changed in 6-7 years. The basics of an FPS have been figured out about as long as I've been playing video games. Since they're set in real life even the setting/weapons/story doesn't have much room to change. So what could the new version that comes out each year possibly be offering? I can't imagine how it could be much more than a new UI and some fresh maps, but it sells a million billion copies anyway.
The whole thing was good and the writer was actually very reasonable. I agreed with everything but the day-one patches. They fix bugs and allow the developers to use the real world time it takes to distribute a game to do actual work instead of sitting around.
In theory, this is one way it could have played out. In practice, not so much. There's this whole rose-colored glasses thing that combines old memories with a self-righteous sense of how things ought to be that makes a person think things were a lot different than the way they were. In reality the game was buggy or "unpolished" a lot of the time, but they all were so the standard for "finished" was something a lot closer to merely "playable" than it seems to be today.
We did have a lot thicker skin about it. The kind of minutia of bugginess and balance that people obsess over today is nothing compared to what there used to be. If a game would just run smoothly without randomly crashing that was a great start. These days the existence of some obscure exploitative strategy that makes the game too easy triggers maniacal rantings about how the thing is unfinished and its release is criminal. The kind of bugs they're fixing with these day 1 patches are the kind of bugs that just stayed in games back in the day and we dealt with them
Heaven forbid the game should not be buggy, but simply not conform to your exact expectations (see Titler's post at the top of this page, seriously, you had to build and archer AND use your starting warrior to fend off a rush against some of the most aggressive AI? Clearly a hardcore wargame. But in spite of your condemnation of their attack you proceed to attack everyone and then complain that they don't like it. Finally, totally oblivious to the idea that strategy might require some balance instead of just doing one thing really hard then doing it some more, you drive your happiness into the toilet and lose. All while cheating like crazy on a middling difficulty level).
A short story to illustrate what I mean:
MoO2 is like one of the best games ever. Seriously, I love that game. I've played it in the last couple years and still loved it in all its SVGA glory. I beat it on the hardest difficulty on like the third time I played it through. Certain techs, certain weapons, certain custom race combinations were just ridiculous in that game. Once you saw how the mechanics worked it became pretty obvious that game left some strategies open that were just over the top powerful. Instead of ranting on the internet about it I stopped making custom races with all the best bonuses and most meaningless maluses (should that be bonii and malii?). I stopped making ships full of super miniaturized weapons. It was still a lot of fun. It was actually pretty good on my machine crash-wise, but it still crashed sometimes. I'm not sure what state Microprose ultimately left it in patch wise. It's been fixed up by die hard fans.
The whole thing was good and the writer was actually very reasonable. I agreed with everything but the day-one patches. They fix bugs and allow the developers to use the real world time it takes to distribute a game to do actual work instead of sitting around.
In theory, this is one way it could have played out. In practice, not so much. There's this whole rose-colored glasses thing that combines old memories with a self-righteous sense of how things ought to be that makes a person think things were a lot different than the way they were. In reality the game was buggy or "unpolished" a lot of the time, but they all were so the standard for "finished" was something a lot closer to merely "playable" than it seems to be today.
We did have a lot thicker skin about it. The kind of minutia of bugginess and balance that people obsess over today is nothing compared to what there used to be. If a game would just run smoothly without randomly crashing that was a great start. These days the existence of some obscure exploitative strategy that makes the game too easy triggers maniacal rantings about how the thing is unfinished and its release is criminal. The kind of bugs they're fixing with these day 1 patches are the kind of bugs that just stayed in games back in the day and we dealt with them
Heaven forbid the game should not be buggy, but simply not conform to your exact expectations (see Titler's post at the top of this page, seriously, you had to build and archer AND use your starting warrior to fend off a rush against some of the most aggressive AI? Clearly a hardcore wargame. But in spite of your condemnation of their attack you proceed to attack everyone and then complain that they don't like it. Finally, totally oblivious to the idea that strategy might require some balance instead of just doing one thing really hard then doing it some more, you drive your happiness into the toilet and lose. All while cheating like crazy on a middling difficulty level).
A short story to illustrate what I mean:
MoO2 is like one of the best games ever. Seriously, I love that game. I've played it in the last couple years and still loved it in all its SVGA glory. I beat it on the hardest difficulty on like the third time I played it through. Certain techs, certain weapons, certain custom race combinations were just ridiculous in that game. Once you saw how the mechanics worked it became pretty obvious that game left some strategies open that were just over the top powerful. Instead of ranting on the internet about it I stopped making custom races with all the best bonuses and most meaningless maluses (should that be bonii and malii?). I stopped making ships full of super miniaturized weapons. It was still a lot of fun. It was actually pretty good on my machine crash-wise, but it still crashed sometimes. I'm not sure what state Microprose ultimately left it in patch wise. It's been fixed up by die hard fans.
Steamwerks
Warlord
- Joined
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- Messages
- 101
I generally agree with this. Many amazing PC titles from the 90's were constantly riddled bugs, crashes, and corrupted save files, certainly far more than we're accustomed to these days. Blizzard was really the only company within the PC sphere that managed to consistently achieve Nintendo-level polish.
This comment only proves that you didn't play any real computer games from the early 90's. Nintendo was a joke and Blizzard, well... While I enjoy Warcraft: Orcs and Humans, it was FAR buggier than it's superior predecessor Dune II from 1992. And I can't remember any other big Blizzard titles from that time. The Lost Vikings maybe, but that was a platformer so it doesn't really count, because really, only the console kids with short attention span enjoyed those. You know, the guys we used to make fun of and almost felt sorry for when they actually got excited about a new Mario och Sonic game.
Too bad these cretins grew up and bought their own computers, which kinda helped ruining PC gaming for the the rest of us. If you haven't played titles such as Dune II, The Settlers or SimCity 2000, you should. They are, unpatched, much better than Starcraft II och Civilization V. And you don't need a super computer to run them.
Deaths Advocate
Prince
No DEATH stacks.
Steamwerks
Warlord
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This comment only proves that you didn't play any real computer games from the early 90's. Nintendo was a joke and Blizzard, well... While I enjoy Warcraft: Orcs and Humans, it was FAR buggier than it's superior predecessor Dune II from 1992. And I can't remember any other big Blizzard titles from that time. The Lost Vikings maybe, but that was a platformer so it doesn't really count, because really, only the console kids with short attention span enjoyed those. You know, the guys we used to make fun of and almost felt sorry for when they actually got excited about a new Mario och Sonic game.
If you haven't played titles such as Dune II, The Settlers or SimCity 2000, you should. They are, unpatched, much better than Starcraft II och Civilization V. And you don't need a super computer to run them.
Did you even read my posts? Heck, I mention SimCity 2000's manual as one of my favorites from the era, if that's any indicator. (As an aside, if you were lucky enough to have a Mac as well during those years, SimCity, Prince of Persia 1 & 2, and Myst looked AMAZING on that platform.) Regarding Blizzard, they had such a superb run of titles during the 90's (Warcraft 1 & 2, Diablo 1 & 2, Starcraft), that collectively, that body of work makes a pretty strong case for them being the "Kings of PC Polish" from '94 to '99 ('04 really). I love Dune II as well, but I'm not really sure how its superiority over Orcs and Humans extrapolates into Blizzard being an unremarkable studio.
What's kind of interesting about these two titles, however, is that they're great examples of two different studio cultures. In Dune II you have all the hallmarks of an earlier PC title - experimental design, intimate single-player, leveraging the power of the platform in terms of graphics and sound; while in Orcs and Humans you can observe the rise of the more modern approach - polishing of an existing archetype, stylized and appealing visuals which aren't necessarily technically demanding, and the inclusion of new forms of multiplayer (in this case, modem games). I'm sure many of you old school PC users will disagree, but I think there's room for both approaches. The real issue here is that the publishers have come to see the "industry" as more of a business opportunity than a creative endeavor, and thus the entire playing field has been skewed towards risk-averse, mass-market pandering. To be sure, corporate publishers have always been there, but initially they took such a hands-off approach to managing the studios (as evidenced by Ion Storm!), that when the eventual paradigm shift took place (spurred on by a growing market and skyrocketing budgets), the contrast was pretty stark. All the corporate backed studios are pretty much aligned towards pure profit generation these days.
Regarding your comments on Nintendo, I'm not quite sure how to interpret that, as their in-house titles were almost universally stellar during those years. Either you're really, really zealous in your loyalty to the PC, or you simply have very narrow tastes genre-wise. For my part, I never really got into the whole platform fandom. There were amazing games (usually platform exclusives) being released on every one of them, so I just wanted to get my hands on as many platforms as I possibly could!
If you've denied yourself the pleasure of games such as Super Metroid, Link to the Past, and Yoshi's Island out of some sort of exclusionary PC bias, I'd heartily recommend you get a decent gamepad and try 'em out on emulator. (It would be even better to grab them on Wii, but I'm guessing that's a hard sell!)
Not entirely sure if you're specifically referring to Civ5 here, but you may notice that, alongside the beta testers in the credits is the employed, in-house quality assurance. Having beta testers from the community doesn't mean QA doesn't exist, nor would it make sense to suggest that having additional testers actively detracts from quality control.
Brian Shanahan
Permanoob
Hiring a bunch of yes-men does not count as beta testers, whether you're a game company releasing a new game or a deranged lunatic trying to take over the world with the German army.
I'm sorry but I'm going with Sullla et al over at Realms Beyond here. They are an independant voice vis-a-vis Civ 5 and its development team (being neither too big for 2K to try to subvert, nor too brown nosed to willingly roll over), and when the massive general consensus from there is that most of those picked for beta-testing Civ 5 were picked for their ability to talk what 2K/Firaxis wanted to hear, and not for their ability to play the game, give independant in-depth critiques or willingness to break the game to improve it I generally go with the consensus (especially when there is lots of evidence shown to back up that consensus).
Oh, and the fact that any competent beta-testing would have resulted in 1UPT being removed from the game, seeing as it (and this is objective fact here, not "ranting" nor personal opinion) kills every other facet of the game, and turns what was a strong indepth long-term empire building strategy game into a very bad, insipid and uninspired tactical war map helps show my point as well.
And I'm not getting into the myriad game-breaking bugs, the total lack of MP testing or coding, the fact that the game was built for a graphics code which was itself untested, leaving it extremely badly optimised graphically, the fact that it was not optimised in most any other form, &c., all of which would have been dealt with by barely adeqate (not good, not even adequate, just simple clock-watching pen-pushing level) beta-testing.
Moderator Action: If you want to insult people who are actually doing something contributive instead of only ranting, then please go elsewhere.
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