4 ms·

Refined technically, but not necessarily refined from a gameplay point of view. Look, I get it, it's cool to see hardware get pushed beyond what people previou

Refined technically, but not necessarily refined from a gameplay point of view. Look, I get it, it's cool to see hardware get pushed beyond what people previously thought was possible, it demonstrates ingenuity and can produce a captivating spectacle. But it doesn't make the games better (beyond the wishy washy 'immersion' stuff). To be honest, this sort of 'pushing the hardware' focus makes me look forward to the end of Moore's Law. When games can no longer meaningfully compete just by looking prettier, when there are no new console generations, I hope there'll be a renaissance of games as a form of expression and interesting experiences.

jaegerpicker 11y ago
There is already a huge renaissance of games as expression. The Indie game scene has been and will continue to be huge and a lot of those games approach the artform as something more than a tech demo.
- ZenoArrow 11y ago
  I'm grateful for the growth of the indie game scene for that reason, perhaps I just need to be patient as gaming takes time to evolve.
digi_owl 11y ago
Depends. While i perhaps gave a poor example initially, consider the difference between SMB1 and SMB3. The latter have all kinds of one off and crazy mechanics (walking behind the apparent background, a sun that attacks, windup shoes one and enter and exit) that keep the various worlds fresh, in part because they show off the greater understanding the developers have of how to work the hardware available. Then again i may be that working with two dimensions provided the ability to put in more elaborate game mechanics because the player had better situational awareness. 3D games seems to have a severe issue with this because enemies can walk behind the camera. Thus many games with free camera movement and/or zoom ends up being played in a kind of overhead position at the furthest zoom possible to improve situational awareness. something that ends up defeating all the work put into elaborate detailing on both characters and enemies unless there is heavy use of cinematic pans etc.
- ZenoArrow 11y ago
  > "Depends. While i perhaps gave a poor example initially, consider the difference between SMB1 and SMB3. The latter have all kinds of one off and crazy mechanics (walking behind the apparent background, a sun that attacks, windup shoes one and enter and exit) that keep the various worlds fresh, in part because they show off the greater understanding the developers have of how to work the hardware available." For the most part, the evolution of game mechanics doesn't rely on improving hardware usage. Using the SMB1 vs. SMB3 example, the ideas from SMB3 could've existed in SMB1, they might not have looked as good but they could've been done. If the 'hardware enabling game mechanics' hypothesis was correct, every new console generation would be able to add new mechanics just by being faster. Taking 2D gaming as a whole, I'd suggest the horsepower needed for 2D gaming peaked around the Dreamcast/PS2 era, I don't envision any 2D game type being built that couldn't exist on those consoles. If VR is to take off, gaming hardware will need to evolve, but beyond that we won't need new hardware to enable new game types anymore. VR/AR is the end of the road.
  - chipsy 11y ago
    The original assertion of "developers working the hardware better", and your rebuttal, are both incorrect. There was a literal constraint enforcing SMB1's design: ROM space. The developers of the first game had already had several years of experience on the platform, and they were straining to squeeze in the amount of content they had. It fits in 40kB. SMB3 uses 384kB, in comparison: 9.6 times bigger. Essentially, each world in SMB3 can contain 1.2 copies of SMB1. What changed was not a matter of experience, but that cartridge game technology grew massively more powerful and changed the whole nature of the platform within the span of a few years. This was very much a case of "more is more." You could get a few of the ideas in SMB3 in the space of SMB1, but not all of them at once. And development costs rose sharply in the latter half of the 1980's for precisely this reason - you could feasibly make a "big" game that evoked a whole world with a variety of interactions, and doing so was a huge spectacle which necessitated a team dedicated to content creation, rather than a solo dev, yet was also largely independent of the graphics fidelity. Sierra Online built its name in this period by capitalizing on exactly this quality - presenting a world just a little more fully realized than the text adventures preceding it. It was a golden era for role-playing games, too - Ultima, Wizardry, Dragon Quest, and Final Fantasy all had big entries during this period. The picture changes as you get into the 1990's. Most of the advances are pretty firmly on the side of "graphics treadmill." Games do keep getting more complex, but by the end of the decade, with stuff like Baldur's Gate, Jagged Alliance 2, Starcraft, Counter-Strike, or Deus Ex, you can find pretty much all of the design templates that AAA leans on. Design has mostly trended towards efficiency and simplification since then.

jaegerpicker 11y ago

There is already a huge renaissance of games as expression. The Indie game scene has been and will continue to be huge and a lot of those games approach the artform as something more than a tech demo.

ZenoArrow 11y ago
I'm grateful for the growth of the indie game scene for that reason, perhaps I just need to be patient as gaming takes time to evolve.

digi_owl 11y ago

Depends. While i perhaps gave a poor example initially, consider the difference between SMB1 and SMB3. The latter have all kinds of one off and crazy mechanics (walking behind the apparent background, a sun that attacks, windup shoes one and enter and exit) that keep the various worlds fresh, in part because they show off the greater understanding the developers have of how to work the hardware available. Then again i may be that working with two dimensions provided the ability to put in more elaborate game mechanics because the player had better situational awareness. 3D games seems to have a severe issue with this because enemies can walk behind the camera. Thus many games with free camera movement and/or zoom ends up being played in a kind of overhead position at the furthest zoom possible to improve situational awareness. something that ends up defeating all the work put into elaborate detailing on both characters and enemies unless there is heavy use of cinematic pans etc.

ZenoArrow 11y ago
> "Depends. While i perhaps gave a poor example initially, consider the difference between SMB1 and SMB3. The latter have all kinds of one off and crazy mechanics (walking behind the apparent background, a sun that attacks, windup shoes one and enter and exit) that keep the various worlds fresh, in part because they show off the greater understanding the developers have of how to work the hardware available." For the most part, the evolution of game mechanics doesn't rely on improving hardware usage. Using the SMB1 vs. SMB3 example, the ideas from SMB3 could've existed in SMB1, they might not have looked as good but they could've been done. If the 'hardware enabling game mechanics' hypothesis was correct, every new console generation would be able to add new mechanics just by being faster. Taking 2D gaming as a whole, I'd suggest the horsepower needed for 2D gaming peaked around the Dreamcast/PS2 era, I don't envision any 2D game type being built that couldn't exist on those consoles. If VR is to take off, gaming hardware will need to evolve, but beyond that we won't need new hardware to enable new game types anymore. VR/AR is the end of the road.
- chipsy 11y ago
  The original assertion of "developers working the hardware better", and your rebuttal, are both incorrect. There was a literal constraint enforcing SMB1's design: ROM space. The developers of the first game had already had several years of experience on the platform, and they were straining to squeeze in the amount of content they had. It fits in 40kB. SMB3 uses 384kB, in comparison: 9.6 times bigger. Essentially, each world in SMB3 can contain 1.2 copies of SMB1. What changed was not a matter of experience, but that cartridge game technology grew massively more powerful and changed the whole nature of the platform within the span of a few years. This was very much a case of "more is more." You could get a few of the ideas in SMB3 in the space of SMB1, but not all of them at once. And development costs rose sharply in the latter half of the 1980's for precisely this reason - you could feasibly make a "big" game that evoked a whole world with a variety of interactions, and doing so was a huge spectacle which necessitated a team dedicated to content creation, rather than a solo dev, yet was also largely independent of the graphics fidelity. Sierra Online built its name in this period by capitalizing on exactly this quality - presenting a world just a little more fully realized than the text adventures preceding it. It was a golden era for role-playing games, too - Ultima, Wizardry, Dragon Quest, and Final Fantasy all had big entries during this period. The picture changes as you get into the 1990's. Most of the advances are pretty firmly on the side of "graphics treadmill." Games do keep getting more complex, but by the end of the decade, with stuff like Baldur's Gate, Jagged Alliance 2, Starcraft, Counter-Strike, or Deus Ex, you can find pretty much all of the design templates that AAA leans on. Design has mostly trended towards efficiency and simplification since then.