Since when has making sense been a prerequisite for having fun?
That's been my argument from the beginning, really. Games should focus more on fun and less on anything else that's not fun.
Ridley and Ridley
I agree for the most part, but I don't see why anything that attempts to be realistic (or tries to have a plot for that matter) shouldn't be allowed.
edited 19th Jul '11 2:23:51 PM by Beorc
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I'm an Irene!
My only point was that adding Dinosaurs to any game does not automatically make it fun. Nothing more. And if I contradicted my point earlier, my bad.
Quest 64 thread
Graphics do need to be improved. There's a lot of annoying graphical restrains right now that makes what would otherwise be beautiful games look ugly. Real Is Brown, for example. There's also the issues with the Unreal Engine's 'everything is laminated' appearance, and non-stylized character models being dangerously close, if not way down into, the Uncanny Valley.
That said, the biggest thing I think gaming needs right now is professional writers hired full-time at game development studios. Video game plots are terrible, enough that they can actually make the games less enjoyable than they would be completely void of a plot. Furthermore, for games to be taken seriously as an artistic medium, they're going to have to do a lot of improvement in terms of the stories they tell, and how they tell them.
edited 19th Jul '11 2:51:59 PM by Miijhal
Ridley and Ridley
Ugh. Blah blah stories blah blah serious blah blah art. I'm getting really sick of all that crap.
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I'm an Irene!
The thing is... video games are meant to be played. Story might be interesting to some, but a good story cannot save a game that is unplayable. Not every game needs a story either. Most Fighters are perfectly fine without it.
Let's take Sonic 2006 for example. The story was confusing, but interesting. They really tried. And despite all that, that's not where the game suffered. The game suffered because of gameplay issues. Now, let's say they concentrated less on the story, and more on the gameplay. The game would've been much better.
Quest 64 thread
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
Bwahaahaha! I love when people claim that "professional writers" would make gamers better. You know what a "professional writer" is, right? Because Stephanie Meyer is one. So's Christopher Paollini.
Games that DO hire writers primarily pull them out of geeky places like the comic industry. And you know what's considered professional writing there? One More Day.
For that matter, video game writing is a whole different ballpark from sitting down and writing a screenplay or a novel. Video game plots, even on good projects, are subject the demands and whims of the game design process and get jettisoned left and right.
Conversely, Bio Shock would have been a really flat shooter without its engrossing story. Also, do you REALLY think the story was Sonic 2006 the game had bugs left and right?
edited 19th Jul '11 3:13:22 PM by Rebochan
I'm an Irene!
I never played Bio Shock, but my point was that not every game needs story. Some work fine with it, though. Also, could you retype your last sentence?
And Sonic 2006's story wasn't that bad. The only problem was what happened with Blaze. It got really confusing. The rest is a Timey-Wimey Ball as is.
Quest 64 thread
Sorry, that's what I get for typing on the run. Should be "Do you really think the STORY was the reason Sonic 2006 had so many bugs?"
Because a game that launches with bugs is not because the designers just wrote a plot and didn't care about the game design. It means they didn't care about the game design (or Q/A for that matter). Take out the plot (which most people hated anyway) and I doubt they'd suddenly go "Oh yea, our game has horrible bugs!"
I'm an Irene!
Oh, no, I definitely don't. What I meant was that most of the best gameplay in Sonic games happen to have meh stories at best.(exceptions apply)
And with or without the story, the bugs were very obvious.
Quest 64 thread
Just like in the movies.
And what do you mean by the way they talk? Because Marston is actually pretty literate for a semi-illiterate guy. He has a tendency to fall into navel-gazing musings on politics, technology, and the government.
edited 19th Jul '11 7:04:52 PM by TravisBickle
Je Suis "Aware"
Away on the wind~
And look at how many people enjoyed their writing.
There are too many toasters in my chimney!
I'm an Irene!
Examples aren't the point. The point is that writing for video games isn't the same as movies or novels. They're quite different.
Just like in the movies.
Away on the wind~
Indeed. It just annoys me when people go all 'lol Steph Meyer is a proffessional writer so the title has lost credibility'.
Still, I think for most games, any writers would be better than the ones they have now.
edited 19th Jul '11 7:41:00 PM by CyganAngel
There are too many toasters in my chimney!
I'm an Irene!
Oh, we were on the same page then.
To be honest, I liked the old writing from something like Dragon Warrior 1. It did it's job fine.
Most of the problem that comes from writing in the Voice Acting itself. That can ruin the best written line very easily. Narm can help, but generally, a bad voice is unsaveable.
Pretty much. It is pretty bad, I mean, not as terrible as most people think, but isn't great by all means.
Away on the wind~
It is hard.
That's one reason I do prefer games without voice actors.
There are too many toasters in my chimney!
I'm an Irene!
Not every game is bad with voice acting. So far, I haven't had a Sonic voice with any bad ones. They're better than using a sound file like a beeping noise for an actual voice.(like a long beep to represent one particular character) Argh, it's hard to describe the style that Sonic Battle uses.
Of course, one time sound files can be very annoying. Most Annoying Sound, basically.
Quest 64 thread
SOPA? Lol wut? U Mad US?
Do video game graphics need to be improved? Yes, but not right now. What needs to improved now is the efficiency of making games. It's all fine and well having excellent and realistic graphics, but if games are becoming too expensive to produce, then that makes it so that producers and developers are less likely to take risks. That means that the developers are going to stick with tried and true gameplay formulas as opposed to being more experimental with their games, and this is where the problem lies for me.
In other words, with each generation, we are just going to get more first-person shooters, racing games, sports games, God Of War-style action/adventure games and Assassins Creed or Infamous-style Wide-Open Sandbox action/adventure games, and fewer games like Katamari Damacy or Lemmings.
Now, I'm not saying that God Of War and Assassins Creed aren't fun games, but I don't want every game on a given system that isn't a FPS to be a clone of those games. I want variety with my video games, and there doesn't seem to be an awful lot of that this generation has to offer in that regard compared to previous generations.
The direction of the first Nintendo DS is closer to my preferred direction for the games industry than anything else that debuted with this generation. It had a lot of unique and generally niche games for it thanks to the touchscreen controls, and I seriously doubt that improving the graphics of that system would help games like Elite Beat Agents, Picross DS, Professor Layton, Meteos or Phoenix Wright an awful lot, but it would have certainly made the platform more expensive to develop on, meaning we may not have saw these games in the first place, or at least made them strictly No Export for You affairs.
So I would like to see graphics take a backseat for a generation or two and have the console makers focus on trying to get development costs down so that we can see original and unique games spawn on them. This especially goes for the Wii U, with that touchscreen controller giving it the potential for a lot of unique games like the DS had.
I'm also a big believer in aesthetics, and while improving graphics would lead to improved aesthetics, the additional cost simply doesn't justify the amount of improvement you would see in the graphics of more stylized games.
edited 20th Jul '11 1:22:57 AM by flygon250
My standard Anime Theme song game variant rules: [Censored by ACTA]
Not Actually Indie
For large companies, I'm pretty sure this is already the standard. Part of the trouble is that professional simply doesn't equal good, but another part is that games tend to be a collaboration between too many writers. Square Enix lets every member of their creative team add something to each game, regardless of how well they fit together, as a matter of policy. Most companies probably aren't in such a lamentable state, but they still delegate different duties to different writers on the team for a single game, which isn't good for cohesiveness. Too Many Cooks, better one bad captain than two good ones, etc.
It's not like one person can't write an entire game. Last Scenario and Exit Fate have as much dialogue as most professionally done games, better written plots than nearly any, and the games are entirely the work of one person. But game companies don't want to have to slow down the release of their games, and the higher ups may also be tempted to say "let's let our best X'er do the X, and our best Y'er do the Y," etc. when they'd get a better product by letting one person have control.
edited 20th Jul '11 7:43:51 AM by Desertopa
...eventually, we will reach a maximum entropy state where nobody has their own socks or underwear, or knows who to ask to get them back.
[...]but it would have certainly made the platform more expensive to develop on[...]
One thing: increasing the graphical ability of a platform can't increase the cost of development of a game, assuming that the game is made exactly the same way.
Developing a PS 2-quality game on the PS 3 is actually significantly cheaper than developing it on the PS 2, because you don't have to spend nearly as much time optimizing the game to get it to run with an acceptable frame-rate.
2D games are a bit more complicated, in that increasing the resolution directly correlates to more work — but, if the DS had the Vita's innards and the same resolution screens, games like Phoenix Wright would have probably cost exactly the same (or even less) to make.
The real question is whether a more powerful system limits the selling potential of 2D games. =/
Professional Writer & Amateur Scholar
O...kay, this thread is getting more jargony.
I'm a (socialist) professional writer serializing a WWII alternate history webnovel.
My head hurts.
Face Time
Oh come on, I don't quite understand how Id Tech 4 handles specular and diff lighting maps and I still understand quite a bit of what's going on.
Really, I still think Source is a viable engine to use because of modding capability, plenty amounts of documentation for developers and free tools to play around with.
edited 20th Jul '11 10:57:07 PM by RocketDude
"Hipsters: the most dangerous gang in the US." - Pacific Mackerel
Actually, if it was set in the future, you could use some Techobabble excuse like they cloned the dinosaurs off of sample DNA or even they found another planet full of dinosaurs. If it's set in the present (or more importantly, a realistic portrayal of a point in time that wasn't hundreds of millions of years ago) it doesn't make much sense, on the other hand.
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