I don't want to be a gamer any more...

[kali o.]

This gen fucking sucks, in every concievable way..

- buggy releases requiring day 1 patches
- countless old releases, with upscaled res for full retail
- packaged redeemable unlock codes
- gamergate
- uplay / ea access

The worst aspect is the DLC. Practically every game is trotting this shit out. Season passes? Day 1 dlc?

The biggest offender is Evolve. That scam of a game has what? $100+ worth of dlc? So I am expected to pay nearly $200 for a game now? The fuck... The devs even have this explaination page, which is probably the funniest (saddest) shit I have ever read:

http://evolvegame.com/news/how-does-evolve-dlc-work

The industry is awful right now...I honestly want it to collapse again.

[Oracle]

The worst aspect is the DLC. Practically every game is trotting this shit out. Season passes? Day 1 dlc?

Yes yes, a fucking thousand times yes!!!!

Kali for gaming president. I'm OK with a dictator.

[Oracle]

http://evolvegame.com/news/how-does-evolve-dlc-work

So I started skimming this...

What. The. Ever. Loving. Fuck.

That studio needs to be killed with fire.

[Zeus]

You clearly don't play Nintendo-released games. No issues with these things there. DLC is so minimal in scope (Hyrule Warriors) or amazingly valued (Mario Kart 8 ) that you may actually be forced to buy it.

Either way, they NEVER feel like they've taken out a part of the game to nickel and dime you later (stares at Assassin's Creed 2). And the games never, ever require day 1 patches to work properly, even the online ones (Mario Kart 8 and Smash online are really well done). You get a very well-polished, complete, expansive game every single time.

[Don]

I think people just got used to release incomplete stuff because people will put up with patches or pay money for patches. Like I said, Civ 5's Gods & Kings major combat revamp involved changing HP from 10 to 100 and that was like $30. Okay there might have been other stuff added but the combat system revamp was supposed to be a big selling point. But obviously people must be supporting this kind of stuff or it wouldn't continue to work. If people stop paying for incomplete stuff you'd think the practice would stop at some point.

[Eric]

It's mostly a problem with complacent AAA titles, newer IPs tend to take less risk with doggy DLC practice(Though they're still there), but the biggest ones give no fucks and will gouge you for money.

Nintendo stuff

At least that's one positive side to Nintendo ignoring most progression in the industry over the past 15 years.

[SineSwiper]

Never play a game on launch. Never settle for Day 1 DLC. Always read the reviews first.

[Zeus]

At least that's one positive side to Nintendo ignoring most progression in the industry over the past 15 years.

"Progression"? Is that why retro-style games are so popular nowadays because of "progression"?

The problem with the industry nowadays is that it costs so much to make games (specifically coding and art) that it's extremely stagnant in terms of variety. They don't make games with a vision, they make games to cater to the widest audience (that also explains why games are so damned easy nowadays as well). The benefit of a company like Nintendo is they just slowly build upon established gameplay mechanics and provide very high-quality versions of the genres (Mario 3D World may be the best 3D platformer ever made) while still experimenting much more than the rest of the companies creating "AAA" titles which, not coincidentally, all play the same (how many FPSs DON'T use CoD style controls and even game mechanics?).

You look at their games and you say "those are kiddie" whereas when you play them, you see just how polished they are. And they're actually games. They actually have things that most games don't anymore: defined goals, progressively increasing challenge based on established and evolving gameplay mechanics, and rewards for progression. How many times do you play a game (CoD as an example) where the gameplay is static, doesn't change from the very beginning to the very end. Even the situations or areas you're put in are basically the same shit. Heck, I played Assassin's Creed 3 for almost 10 minutes straight by doing nothing other than pushing forward on the stick and holding X.....and I was "accomplishing" things and pulling off crazy jumps through tree-lines (remind me sometime and I'll tell you about Ubisoft's infamous spreadsheets and you'll see why their games are so similar to each other).

There's no sense of accomplishment just a sense of completion. That's very different from what gaming has traditionally been and that change (you use "progression" as a synonym) ain't a good thing IMO. That's not to say that these games aren't fun or enjoyable (I still play CoD every year) and there are some great game coming out, some even have such excellent production values that you can even overlook the very sparse gameplay (like any Naughty Dog game). But the industry as a whole is moving away from games and more to the old idea of "interactive movie". I guess I'm just an old gamer, I like progression in gameplay and a challenge. The increasing popularity of retro-style games and success of games like Super Meat Boy and Shovel Knight tells me there's lots of others with the same feelings. And no one provides that on a more consistent basis than Nintendo, not even close (gap is even widening). I'm secure enough in my maturity to not let the cartoony graphics bother me if it gets me to the highest quality and most fun gameplay.

[kali o.]

I was just venting...this nickel and diming shit is wearing on me.

As for Nintendo - I simply dont enjoy their games. Luckily, I see hope on the PC...for now. (I wonder if piracy plays a part in keeping devs "honest" but perhaps its just the far larger selection of games competing for mindshare)

[Blotus]

CD Projeckt Red is releasing 16 pieces of DLC for Witcher 3 and they're all free. So that's a plus.

I finally played Witcher 2 and loved it. Witcher 3 is gonna rule.

[kali o.]

I wish I liked the witcher more. I want to support CDPR (and will) but I am just not into witcher lore...yet.

I have witcher 2 installed and I am going to give it a shot again...I remember really liking the beginning but found the combat tedious.

[Replay]

Hahahah! You think any of this is going to stop?

And you folks call me crazy for protesting Wall Street and the system we live in. They don't give two shits about you.

You know some analyst suggested re-releasing Mario as a freemium title? This article is a joke; but the analyst who suggested it originally was not joking. He literally suggested that players could pay more to make Mario jump higher.

http://www.techeblog.com/index.php/tech ... game-today

[kali o.]

The fuck does this have to do with Occupy (stupid movement btw)?

Devs/Pubs can do what they want...I don't deny them that right. I don't want anything to do with it though. Personally I think the industry will implode on itself (consoles at least).

[Don]

I think the staff on games are just too big. I remember after beating Shadow of Revan for SWTOR I decided to look at the credits and they just have a tab from A-Z presumably because it'd take too long to scroll through all of them and I doubt that's hardly a unique case for the big titles. But even for fairly small game I remember seeing the staff list on Megaman 9/10 was at least 50 guys. And since they've such a bloated staff I guess they need to try to get a lot of money to justify paying for all these guys.

[Julius Seeker]

Typically in a modern dev space not everyone on a game is going to be working only on that particular game. There are just particular points in the development where throwing more people onto the project for a limited time can speed up the dev process and improve the final product. A good example is the milestone review process, a few extra artists will get on to review assets, and a few extra design staffers will get on to review mechanics; in addition, producers will be there to review the total package; and directors are there to organize the whole thing - different companies will have different structures, but this is a general strategy used in all three major industries. The result is a boost in the number of total credits.

Also, it is not a Nintendo vs. non-Nintendo thing, it is more of a popular trends in the North American industry vs. European/Japanese industry thing. A lot of North American devs have been "outsourcing" their QA to the paying customer; and many strategies are used to camouflage their efforts, including "early access." I don't want to say that all NA companies do this, and no EU/JP companies do this, but this trend has definitely been by far the strongest among NA developers. Although, I see bullshit in games FAR more in the PC industry than the console gaming industry. In fact, I almost never come across bugs in console games, although admittedly, almost all of my gaming console games are made in Japan while my PC games are pretty much all Europe and North American.

Although it can be clearly seen on mobile as well. If a mobile game is made in Japan, chances are it's bug free. North American games tend to be filled with bugs and crashes aside from a small few at the top.

[Don]

Yeah, there's definitely an NA tendency to ask people to pay for beta testing stuff. I can see Kali's sentiment about the industry imploding on itself but for some reason people still are totally fine with that. I mean, it's fine when you're paying to beta test something revolutionary like EverQuest 1 or WoW but very few games are both that good and revolutionary at the same time. I posted on the Early Access stuff in Steam and it looks to be an extension of this concept. Make a buggy game and just expect some suckers to test it for you.

I think Japan tends to embrace the 'cult game' concept more, as in if you know your game isn't really that good and only a few suckers will pay for it you might as well acknowldge this. The strategy games like Nobunaga's Ambition/ROTK from Koei is pretty niche even in Japan and I think they cost about $150 or so, but they're tailored to the guys who like to play this stuff so people who like this stuff do pay for it. It seems to me a lot of games are no more niche than a dating sim but they seem to think they're going to have a broad appeal like WoW and that might contribute to the staff bloat too since you'd need more people to do more features, and miss the boat on what the guys who really are into whatever genre you're doing wants.

I don't buy this huge staff is because they're working on multiple games. Obviously they're doing that but it's not like say if you need 100 people to do a game then having 300 guys working on 3 games intermittently is the same thing. Simple studies in multitasking would suggest having 100 guys dedicated to each game is almost always better and sure you occasionally need a short turn ramp-up but that can't be a viable model going forward, and a company wouldn't be very stable if they're randomly hiring a few hundred guys just because they're on crunch time. I think EQ1's guy working on raids is probably 1 guy (their dev team seems to be well under 10 guys total), compared to know how many hundreds of people in other games. Now EQ1's graphics are primitive but the raids aren't necessarily any less complex and even account for added complexity of fancy stuff you don't need tens if not hundreds the times to do a raid compared to a game that always have very solid raid mechanics. I mean, it's not like having 10 guys design a raid concurrently is even that good of an idea especially if you're reasonably confident one guy is particularly better than anyone else you got at doing it. The only reason I can see to have a lot of staff for roles that aren't related to manpower (e.g. graphics) would be if you're not sure any of them are any good so you hope at least one of them will get lucky.

[Julius Seeker]

It depends on a studio's resources and structure.

If you had 300 people working on 3 different projects intermittently, then those three projects would not have 100 credits, they would have 300 credits. If a project had 100 credits on it, it might be that only 20 are on the core team, and the other 80 are people brought in to work at certain milestones or on specific components.

Using Mega Man 9 as a specific example - http://www.mobygames.com/game/wii/mega-man-9/credits

Right off the bat, all of the credits under Capcom, Capcom Entertainment, and Capcom Entertainment Europe are not dedicated resources, they only come in at very specific times in the dev cycle for very specific roles. Many of those people are working on between 3 and 10 projects per year.

Inti Creates is the dedicated dev studio, there are 27 credits under that, but even there, 6 credits are given to Audio alone - and that likely has to do with specialization. Usually people involved in audio are not dedicated resources, very often they are staff contracted from outside of the company. Two more of those credits are "special thanks. That lowers the number to 19 dedicated which are divided between design staff, background artists, a character artist, 7 programmers, and embedded production/direction staff. Of those 19, I doubt all of them were dedicated all the way through. They wouldn't need artists to continue on the project once the assets were signed off on; I am unsure what roles each of the programmers played, but some of the 7 may have hard coded, while the others scripted together the levels.

[Don]

All those people need to be paid. It's not like they consulted this board for some 'special thanks' and got free advice. If there are 8 guys in the 'sound' department all those 8 guys didn't work for free and whether they're your direct employees, someone working on another project, or something you sub-contract out to someone else, that cost still goes into the game. Having guys that work on stuff intermittently is probably what drives up the cost. Suppose in Capcom there's a special 'Hadoken' department that specializes in dealing with moves that involves inputting down, downforward, forward, and some button. So you make Street Fighter V and you say we consulted the Hadoken department and we put that in our credits but they're technically not part of the team, but they're still fully staffed guys. Even back when Capcom was making multiple fighting games you can say that the Hadoken department is probably mostly there for Street Fighter series even if a game like Rival Schools can leverage the same help. Now that'd be a fairly specific example but I think in general when you see those huge list of credits for marketing or voice acting or whatever they need to stop pretending that all those guys only exist for a couple of flagship games and should definitely be considered part of the cost. After all it's not like if I go to Blizzard and make Hello World I'm expected to leverage their considerable resources. If we assume the guys in the credit really did put in significant effort toward the game, then the game or something else has to be paying for that time.

[Julius Seeker]

They still only need to be paid for the duration of their work, and not for the duration of the project. You're not going to hire 8 music guys full time for an entire project, you're going to hire them to take pieces of a job, or to perform different roles essential to the process; they might only be required for a 2-3 week period for a project that may take a year to complete - and you wouldn't pay them for a year, you'd pay them for their 2-3 week job. Throwing more bodies on tasks won't necessarily increase project budget; but what it can do is increase work efficiency, quality, and allow the team to hit their deadlines.

[Eric]

They still only need to be paid for the duration of their work, and not for the duration of the project. You're not going to hire 8 music guys full time for an entire project, you're going to hire them to take pieces of a job, or to perform different roles essential to the process; they might only be required for a 2-3 week period for a project that may take a year to complete - and you wouldn't pay them for a year, you'd pay them for their 2-3 week job. Throwing more bodies on tasks won't necessarily increase project budget; but what it can do is increase work efficiency, quality, and allow the team to hit their deadlines.

You do realize this is the reason that as soon as alot of these games are done the development teams get purged? Worst practice in the industry today, these studios ain't loyal. Kotaku does some horror story articles about mass layoffs regularly, heh.

[Anarky]

The worst aspect is the DLC. Practically every game is trotting this shit out. Season passes? Day 1 dlc?

The biggest offender is Evolve. That scam of a game has what? $100+ worth of dlc? So I am expected to pay nearly $200 for a game now? The fuck... The devs even have this explaination page, which is probably the funniest (saddest) shit I have ever read:

http://evolvegame.com/news/how-does-evolve-dlc-work

None of the DLC is pay to win, it's purely cosmetic. Plus the game sucks anyway.

[kali o.]

I agree with you that the game sucks, I disagree that it is cosmetic only. The entire game is based around the hunter and monster expansion model (which is why it feels like a shitty half a game). Behemoth might be free preorder, but it is also dlc. Those are the big ticket items "in the pipeline" and the cosmetic is insult to injury. If the devs were not so busy figuring out how to monetize everyone, it may have been a fun COMPLETE game.

[Shrinweck]

I've been ignoring Evolve purely on the idea that the gameplay/premise doesn't interest me, but it's nice to know there are so, so many more reasons.

[Replay]

It has nothing to do with Occupy. Why'd you bring it up?

It has, however, plenty to do with Wall Street. I was at E3 one year when some haughty banker was at a panel I was attending, and imperiously asked when the game industry would provide "sustainable revenues". The panelists wisely told him to get out of the game industry if he were looking for that; but other financiers continue to promote DLC as a way to "stabilize revenues".

[Anarky]

If the devs were not so busy figuring out how to monetize everyone, it may have been a fun COMPLETE game.

It's not a complete game though. Even if all the items were included the game feels bad. If you have a bad monster or a 4 stack you win super quick, if you have a good monster it's 10 minutes looking for it. Left 4 Dead felt and still feels so much better. You had an objective and in the Humans vs Humans mode is great. The asymmetrical game model could be good, but Evolve is just poorly thought out in terms of gameplay.

[kali o.]

If the devs were not so busy figuring out how to monetize everyone, it may have been a fun COMPLETE game.

It's not a complete game though. Even if all the items were included the game feels bad. If you have a bad monster or a 4 stack you win super quick, if you have a good monster it's 10 minutes looking for it. Left 4 Dead felt and still feels so much better. You had an objective and in the Humans vs Humans mode is great. The asymmetrical game model could be good, but Evolve is just poorly thought out in terms of gameplay.

I *think* we are in agreement, I was just speculating had the devs not been so busy planning monetization, it may have instead developed a better game. The game, as is, sucks and gets boring quick.

As for L4D, I guess Turtle Rock does not have those rights (which is probably good)...correct? I did like L4D and would be down for a sequel.

PS - Other people have brought up other things I forgot in my original rant...early access aka paid alpha, on disc dlc, preorder / edition "bonuses", GOTY / Super Mega Complete re-releases, gamble packs, the continual fight against "ownership, and kickstarter (I am looking at established devs already funded like Moleneaux at least). It's just really disheartening to me, as a gamer. I'm worn out.

[Replay]

Very few developers love DLC for anything but episodic content. It is publishers and financiers that push it on the industry. Eric's mention of the "clear-cut the developers after every ship date" process also is a factor; though really I see it as just another symptom.

In my opinion, financiers and publishers have taken control of too much of the industry; you want a pushback, reject DLC purchases of all non-episodic kinds and support games that are released as complete titles.

[Replay]

As for Gamergate...I have heard it described as "angry dateless young men versus dishonest feminist journalists" before, and everything I've seen bears that out.

The threatening cadre of gamers are indeed the portrayed abused, powerless, angry young men who can't get dates or understand their own feelings past a high school level, and wrongly take it out in violence against the world and hate for women.

However, the feminist journalists have been rather credibly accused of sleeping their way ahead in journalism, going to repeatedly harass boards full of male virgins just for being virginal (I can't imagine the flap if that one got reversed), and Zoe Quinn literally also was accused of relating to some coworker once about having stabbed some guy who wouldn't leave her alone, or stabbing to death a rapist, depending on how one reads the story.

The less attention given to all of those people the better; then they can learn that, contrary to popular belief, being a huge asshole doesn't make you a lovely date.

[kali o.]

I like Angry Joe's review of evolve:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8ziNKCURbQ

[Anarky]

I like Angry Joe's review of evolve:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8ziNKCURbQ

Yup, spot on. Fuck Evolve.