Sometimes I feel games are progressing backwards

[Don]

Steam sales is on so I bought this game: https://store.steampowered.com/app/8672 ... _Conquest/. It's got a 87% positive rating out of 3500 reviews and the basic features all check out. I installed it and it's basically a clunky version of HOMM3 that somehow has even inferior graphics (and the graphics look even worse than they do on the video and screenshots). There might be some cool idea behind the concept and it's possible that after investing a lot of time some of the gameplay might be as good or even better than HOMM3, but I figure it's unlikely for this game to have a higher ceiling than HOMM3 just on graphics and that the interface is fairly clunky.

Now, being inferior to HOMM3 isn't a terrible sin. Unlike most of the games I post about this game isn't some kind of crime against humanity. Like I said it's possible that the game even turns out to be pretty okay. Or you can just get HOMM3 for $3 which is a lot better than just sort of okay. Especially with 'retro graphics' being sort of a thing these days, it feels like you're getting games that are still inferior to stuff 10 or 20 years ago even on things like graphics where it should have definitely moved forward. I mean, I don't think we're supposed to have inferior stuff that still charges you $20 or more. ROTK 11 looks a lot better than any similar turn-based game of the same type and it plays extremely well. Age of Wonders 3 again is an example of a game that looks modern that actually plays well, and even when the game doesn't play well, like Age of Wonder: Planetfall, but at least the game looks nice and you can tell the stuff that didn't work out is more like design issues where they thought they're doing something cool that turned out was not. Civilization 5 and 6 looks perfectly fine and plays perfectly well too.

For some reason it seems like these days half of the time the price you get for 'focused on gameplay' means it looks like it's got graphics worse than a SNES, as if you made some sacrifices to the polygon god you'll get better gameplay. Yes, I know it's hard to come up with games that have very solid gameplay systems, but I don't think sacrifice polygons is the way to go. Besides, it's really not that hard to look at something like Civ 5 or ROTK 11 and figure out what was good and what was still lacking and then improve upon it. I know that doesn't mean you end up with a better product. That's kind of what happened to Planetfall when it tried to improve on the AoW3 formula but at least you can see where the devs are going, and some people might even agree with the direction they're taking and all the more power to them.

[Julius Seeker]

My response is a mess, more of a stream of thought on the subject. Sorry

During the 8-bit, 16-bit, 32/64-bit, and the PS2 generation (where open world exploded), we saw a solid curve of advancement in the video game industry, but then that mostly stopped by the Xbox 360. So, what happened?

The story is interesting too, by the late 1990s there were a lot of once popular genres on life support. 2D platformers, being the main example—while the genre thrives on NES, SNES, and Genesis, between the N64, Saturn, and Dreamcast there was Mischief Makers by Enix; only memorable because it was the only one. Even earlier than that point and click adventures were just about dead as well with Shadowgate 64 making waves for being a throwback to a genre most western fans had forgotten by the late 1990s.

Now, every week I log into the new releases article for Switch and there are often 5 or 6 new 2D platformers and usually 1-5 point and click adventures. The 8-bit and 16-bit aesthetic is popular with the platformers, although the adventure games are leaning in to be 2D animated show quality.

But why did this begin?

I think Nintendo mostly got it right, the game industry was expanding too rapidly, development costs and hardware costs were exploding. A lot of it had to do with the fact that the development staff wasn’t there to meet the demands of the audience. I’ve worked for studios that basically fell apart because we (supposedly) couldn’t hire enough quality devs to maintain our output, we began contracting parts of the game out to partners, and that became expensive, and eventually, most of our development resources were some place in Texas. Similar thing happened to BioWare.

———Side Story———
Little story about a guy from BioWare: when I was young in my design career, and working for a studio on the rise, I got placed on a nice little team. I worked as kind of a junior designer under someone who I felt was absolutely brilliant in the craft (by that point I had worked with a number of other designers), and things were nice and happy on our content pushing team. On our team we had several artists, scripters, and an engineer (or maybe 2 or 3, long time ago now), and our goal was to pump out content for a game. Things were going smoothly, but we had some glaring holes, so we needed to fill them.
One of those glaring holes was the QA team. Usually we hired new people into the studio as QA, but then they’d almost inevitably show some great aptitude for another position we needed. This included QA Directors who never lasted long because they’d get hired as a Producer or Director elsewhere in the studio. So, we hired this guy from BioWare who we all thought would be great. BioWare was kind of like spoiled rotten EA Royalty. But there was this mirage of excellence and professionalism and superiority around these guys (BioWare guys). Anyway, he had a loud voice, I’d often hear him shouting at people down in the QA room.
One of the things I did was handle XML scripts, but unfortunately this led to a lot of overtime for me because I was also handling all the side quest writing and research efforts. So, one of the people I recommended to take over scripting entirely happened to be one of the QA leads, someone I liked working alongside since back when I was QA Director a year or two earlier (I worked this weird QA Director/Marketing Guy/instructions author/Balance Spreadsheet owner/Device library/XML scripter/designer role before eventually becoming a full time designer, whole other story).
Anyway, time went on, things were fine, BUT there were some overly familiar relationships between our new scripter (who was formerly QA), and his former boss (the BioWare guy). So this ended in some corner cutting where our scripter began asking QA to help him experiment with something. But he was breaking new protocols by doing this, so this brought the wrath of the BioWare Director who came up to our room and started shouting at him—as though he were still a QA guy. No one was going to do anything, so I stood up defended the scripter telling the BioWare guy to calm down, and I thought it would be over, but the BioWare Director talked back to me, told me to stay out of it and we got into an argument. Long story short, I banned him from the entire floor unless it was for meetings (note, this may sound weirdly above a junior designer’s authority, but the studio culture hierarchy and the actual professional hierarchy were two different things).
Later on, I was out with people at a bar, and he was with some of the QA people. For some reason he approached me to bring up our earlier confrontation at the office… and if you know me, I can be a bit of a jerk when I was drunk, and I really wanted to be a jerk to this guy. The talk ended with him punching me several times… only I didn’t actually realize that’s what he trying to do. He wasn’t hitting me in the face, and he wasn’t very strong (I’m talking weaker than being punched by teenage girls), more like soft blows to the torso. The only way I knew he was trying to hurt me was the fact that his face was going red… He probably outweighed me by about 200 pounds, but I was taller, maybe by eight inches to a foot. Again, I got mouthy at him and, basically told him he better sit down if he knows what’s good for him. He didn’t come back to throw a drink at me, he just left the bar on his own. I think he was wearing a tee-shirt despite the temperature being like -9 degrees (Celsius).
The next time I saw him was likely about two weeks later when he was exiting the company without fanfare (Likely fired, possibly because he was miserable working there). This experience shaped my opinion of BioWare as being full of a bunch of pompous entitled weaklings. So whenever I hear something like “EA ruined this BioWare game” I always think what likely happened is that EA gave the BioWare guys all the resources and infrastructure they needed, and it’s like setting an otherwise rugged hunter gatherer in an all you can eat cake and ice cream shop.

——End of side story——

Anyway, to wrap up my previous thought and get back on track. I think the gaming industry hit a point where the money they threw at dev resources didn’t matter because the talent wasn’t there. There was a bottleneck. It’s probably worse in Japan.

So where I think things really changed was when Namco and Sega began releasing their classic game packs and Nintendo released the Virtual Shop on Wii. The Wii was already going in a different direction, although still saw more innovation than PS3 and Xbox 360 saw over the previous generation, but Wii was also looking back at the classics. Another thing was Wii and Xbox 360 both became home to very interesting indie games. Steam would follow, and then mobile, and Sony probably got onboard at some point too—but anyone who remembers the ~2005-08 era knows that Sony was becoming almost as much of a victim of their own arrogance as Nintendo had been in 1995-03 or so… Nintendo was worse, and the consequences were worse, but then Iwata came along and fixed the company. YouTube and streaming was a big part of it, people began playing these old games that looked like a lot of fun.
With Steam and mobile platforms available, dev costs were lower, and the bar for entry into the industry was lower, so it allowed the industry to decentralize at a rather rapid pace. Decentralization wasn’t new, it began with the NES at the advent of third parties with more autonomy (Namco, I believe, was the first, being they were an industry leader), but it was very slow. Nintendo has their dream team, and Sega was trying to copy, and Sony caught them both with a bat to the back of the head when PSX jumped in without all the restrictions. But while Sony had lower barriers, by the end of the PS2 generation they were locked into a philosophy of striving toward AAA style studios. That’s where Iwata’s Nintendo, Apple, Google, and Valve were able to run around them rather than into them and challenge for supremacy. The gaming market expanded as though by some kind of dark energy, but Sony has kind of stagnated—and again, it’s not from a lack of monetary resources, but because their philosophy led them into bottlenecks in software and hardware production.

What’s new on Switch this week? Apart from the bigger games (like the new Pokémon, Soulstorm, Resident Evil)

There are nine 2D platformers, an Oregon Trail game from Gameloft, four retro RPGs, a pixel game maker (Gameboy graphics), two retro sports titles, a port of the 90s arcade game Metal Black, one 8-bit racer, two card-based games (I guess those are a more recent thing), and maybe more because some of the games here aren’t obvious what they are by their covers.

There are 49 new games for last week, which is fairly regular for Nintendo Switch… I remember back on the N64 and Gamecube when 49 games in a YEAR would have been one of the better years. Part of the reason is that Nintendo limited game releases in the past to specific studios.

Sorry, another detour and this is a bit of a clarification of something I said above, but am a little too lazy to edit: ————During the late SNES and early N64 era Nintendo had something called the Dream Team (which several studios left, including Squaresoft, Enix, and Capcom) that included Rare, DMA (became Rockstar North), Midway, Acclaim Iguana (the core of Iguana split off into Retro Studios… remember them?), LucasArts, and a few others. Yeah, I know I was a big supporter of this back in the mid-1990s, and it turned out to be a disaster.————

In short, I think a lot of the reason for seeing backward trends in gaming is the decentralization of the video game industry and companies tapping into markets that were assumed not to be as big as they were. The home console industry made a huge mistake in assuming the triple A market was the spearhead. I think Nintendo probably had their eyes open the most with the Wii, given Gamecube bombed and GBA/DS were massive success stories. All of them should have saw the mobile game explosion coming—now Apple, Google, and Tencent are the three biggest success stories in gaming, and two of those companies are just platform owners, they don’t even develop games. Nintendo played a bit catch-up, but I think they did well in embracing the Wii direction and letting Switch become more or less a portable Steam alternative—much like Steam, there are bundles galore and around 2000 discount sales running in any given day, some of them up to 99% off or just “free for the next three days” although, these games are usually bad and seem like something ported out of 1982-1985.

I mean, the AAA games are there, but casual gaming dominates. This began with Brain Age back on the DS. And by casual games, I don’t mean “Games with no guns and blood” as it’s sometimes used, but in its actual meaning: a game you play for short sessions of a few minute, but login daily (usually multiple times) over a long period of time. It’s usually a live service type game. Animal Crossing is kind of a casual game, and the current most popular franchise on any dedicated console, but doesn’t fit the usual 1-3 minute play session time, it’s more around 20 minutes to about 45 minutes per day. And casual games, the ones made well, allow for communities where people can keep engaging for hours if they want. But generally, it’s not about high level graphics either for these games. But I’m drifting off topic. So I’ll end my thought stream/rant, here.

[Don]

I think it definitely got harder for the game that was between like a niche game and a blockbuster. Megaman X sold around 300K if I recall, and that was obviously enough to turn a profit so that they made quite a few more games after that. It seems like it'd be pretty hard for a retro game to sell more than that (that was when SNES carts sold for $60+), and yet development cost these days are much higher. As a result similar 2D platformers, even stuff like Gunvolt or Might No. 9 which had significant budget behind it, don't necessarily look even better than Megaman X and I have no idea if they made turned a better profit compared to Megaman X.

But you'd think after years of experience you'd have templates for an action game or a RPG that can save most of the cost where you just need to fill in the blank. Well you see a lot of RPGMaker games that probably have low cost but the template is probably way too low of a bar. Maybe there's just a lot of lost knowledge out there, like Capcom may have had a Megaman template but they sure aren't sharing it with anyone so for everyone else they still have to work from scratch, and when they do so the game doesn't sell well so they just dump the project and don't continue any further. I guess if you end up having to reinvent the wheel each time you probably do get things that play and look worse than stuff from 20 years ago.

[Don]

It just occurred to me that there are plenty of good mods/hacks of existing games that looks like perfectly serviceable games, and I'd assume if a few random guys can do this then an actual company can definitely do it better. Of course, you run into copyright issues if you try to modify stuff you don't own, but you would think there would be stuff you previously owned or stuff that's kind of free like RPGMaker out there. So I guess people don't actually keep their own assets around for whatever reason.

That said I remember there are Chinese companies that will sell like some basic mobile game to a lot of different companies and you're obviously free to modify the base game, so I'd think such service must exist somewhere. Granted the stuff you get from that is never really good, but they're usually still functional games. Maybe it'd be cool if someone decided to make the base game engine for something good like Civilization 5 for free, but I think even with a lesser game you can do pretty well. I've seen hacks of ROTK 11 and they actually managed to add a lot of extra stuff that wasn't in the original game. Given KOEI seems to have no interest in doing another turn based ROTK game it seems like they could offer the source code for free even though I know they'd never actually do it.

[Julius Seeker]

Modders are mostly focusing on script-side stuff, that’s a lot shorter than the rest of the engineering. Some of the more in depth mods will go far enough to edit UI and art.

I’m not sure the depth of which a lot of these “hacks” go, but I think most of the coding remains relatively intact, and they’re focusing on the scripting, which changes how the content is relayed to the user.

RPG Maker is much easier, the game is basically built, and the experience is using a highly developed interface which more or less works as a highly user friendly method of doing art and scripting. Instead of writing lines of script to determine element locations and such, you’d just point and click and the game will automatically write the script out in the XML. One game I worked on had dev tools that weren’t quite so easy, but were largely menu based so people without an aptitude for scripting could do a lot of the work without having to study what the coders had done and their syntax, or knowing how to script in an xml document (usually it’s a lot of different xml docs).

the users of RPGmaker aren’t even scripting—they’re using an interface to stick things where they need to go. I’ve not actually played RPGmaker before, but I’m guessing using console commands to implement some elements of the game—at least in earlier iterations; and perhaps they have the option for scripting open for those who want to do more advanced work.

But either way, long answer short: the reason why it only takes a single person or a few people to do these mods and hacks is because they’re only editing the surface level of the work done. Basically, they’re doing the job of the scripter on a dev team, and they’re doing it with a finished set of commands, syntax, and xml docs. When working in the development process, a lot of that is changing and being added to - so you need to keep up to date on it to know what you’re doing. A modder just needs to learn this stuff once, and since it’s at the end of development, usually the easiest version of it—and by far, because the devs are going to want it to be easy to understand for patch teams. Many games are made easy to mod, it surprises me some times that certain mods take so long to do (like the CK2 Middle Earth mod, which took over 6 years and remains unfinished. Of course, they had to incorporate a lot of game changes that were coming in every few months. But again, these modders aren’t going outside of the parameters of the game, not adding new features that need to be coded in.


——Note: I kind of drift topics here, which reminds me, one of the main roles of a producer is to cut all the feature creep the designers come up with——

I’m only speaking on what I know about development from the end of the 1990s to present. So, processes might have been very different in the 1980s and earlier 90s. And I’m only speaking from someone who lived in design/QA/Scripter space. But, in short, a lot of these hackers/modders/platform game spinners (RPGmaker, and those sorts of things) can give the impression that a lot less work is needed for a game than the reality.

Even big AAA dev teams can give that impression because they’re basically iterating on a single game to improve the graphics or various elements. The Xenoblade Chronicles team is small (Monolithsoft is only 275 people, currently, and about 1/3rd to over 65% of them are working on Zelda at any given time), but still out these massive sized games in relatively moderate sized dev times. It’s because they’ve been iterating on the Xenoblade engine since Xenosaga Episode 1. Big changes occurred on the Wii to make it more open world, Disaster Day of Crisis was essentially a demo that became a finished game for some markets, and Xenoblade Chronicles itself was actually a bit of an advanced prototype using a story stripped out of Xenogears and reimagined for this new world of two large vertical worlds (Fun note about that below). But Xenoblade Chronicles 2 was done by a small team of about 60 people (rest were working on Breath of the Wild), the game is massive, but they didn’t build the game from scratch, much of it was Xenoblade Chronicles X under the hood with some iterations to allow for the different engineering and features of the Nintendo Switch vs the older Wii U chipset. Xenoblade Chronicles X was probably their biggest project to date, being about 6 years in development and with their largest team to date… Monolithsoft has been constantly growing, but they work on more products.

The bit I wanted to talk about before on the vertical world of Xenoblade Chronicles: Bionis and Mechonis are kind of like Faxanadu’s World Tree and Dwarf Mountain. That’s no coincidence. Tetsuya Takahashi, creator of Xenoblade Chronicles (and also Xenogears and Xenosaga), got his start working at Nihon Falcom around Faxanadu’s release. Another bit of trivia: Kunihiko Tanaka, the head character artist of Xenogears, Xenosaga Episode 1, and Xenoblade Chronicles X, also began at Nihon Falcom at the same time as Takahashi. They’d both move onto Square, and Tetsuya Takahashi was basically their mech guy, he liked the idea of the FF War Mech, and he became the main proponent for pushing the role of FF6’s Magitek armour. That whole intro scene was directed and the art created was by him. Sabin and Edgar were created by Tetsuya Takahashi’s wife, as were their stories, and they were reborn under their middle names (Roni and Rene) in Xenogears as the ancestors of Bart. Anyway, this is kind of old news, so I’ll stop here