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Speaking on PAX: Is Casual Killing Core Games?
Posted by XanTium | August 23 01:03 EST | News Category: Xbox360
From Andre Vrignaud's Blog: [QUOTE] Just wanted to let you all know that Rob and I will be participating on a panel at PAX next weekend. The topic is whether Casual Game influences are "killing" Core Games, and we've been able to get some great panelists together for the event. They include Mark Deloura (who previously managed Sony's developer relations for Playstation and PSP), Jane Pinkard (of GameGirlAdvance fame), and of course everyone's favorite actor-geek Wil Wheaton (aka Wesley from ST:TNG and the guy who did the PAX keynote last year.) N'Gai Croal of Newsweek/Level Up fame was also planning to join us, but unfortunately can't make it due to a conflict.
The panel will occur on Saturday, August 30th from 6:00 to 7:00 PM in the Raven Theater.
Is Casual Killing Core Games? Are you annoyed because casual gamers and casual gaming mechanics are killing your favorite games? Are you too busy playing Puzzle Quest to care? Do you think casual gaming is finally culling the herd of outdated gaming sacred cows? Come and watch industry insiders, top press, and celebrities debate whether casual should be feared or embraced. [/QUOTE]
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I totally agree casual gaming is killing off the (hard) core gamers....
From the accountants to the rushing out poor quality games, to short story lines (cod4), to timiming everything to come out 3 months before xmas. Even down to the little school kids who play on live screaming down their mics pretending their black or swearing their heads off.
One of the many reasons most of my gaming has now gone back to playing on the PC where its free to play on line But even PC games are suffering the same where the majority of titles are just ported over from their console versions. Perhaps just like the music industry did the gaming industry will be the result of their own down fall??
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QUOTE(ca102455 @ Aug 23 2008, 02:39 PM)
Even down to the little school kids who play on live screaming down their mics pretending their black or swearing their heads off.
Kind of the opposite happened to me a few days ago. There was some retarded 11 year old white boy who kept shouting the nasty N-word at everyone especially after he got killed. He told us a lot of bull crap from British people being inbreds up to his opinion that people with a certain skin color must hang... Was quite hilarious cause he was so mental but I hate it in general as well it is pretty annoying. Thank God that there is a mute button .
Here where I am you are not allowed to play COD if you are under 18 if the police finds out the parents go to jail...
This post has been edited by Wilhelm_I: Aug 23 2008, 02:02 PM
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If "casual" means bargain bin games, then it may be true. But like the Atari crash showed us, pour enough of these onto the market and you'll eventually have a crash where the casual gamers stop paying attention to video games because they tire of it.
However developers can make core games more accessible to casual gamers. Witness Medal of Honor for Wii, it has an arcade mode that lets a few players share the same screen and go through the game in an on-rails shooter mode.
Alone in the Dark, though not a critically acclaimed game, has a great "chapter" feature where you can skip ahead to different levels in the game up to a certain point, and you only have to complete a few objectives to unlock later levels. This allows casual players to approach the game in a piece-meal way and they don't even have to be good enough to complete the entire game to see everything it has to offer.
There are many more ideas to make core games fun for casual gamers, and it just takes a few more ideas such as these to make core games please a wide audience.
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i agree. im pretty oldschool (31 years) and i have noticed that especially in between the psone and xbox, difficulty has slid down a notch. what was 'easy' is 'normal' now, so that when you play a game on 'normal' it holds your hand and walks you through it with little to no effort. and 'hard' is somewhat challenging, but never too hard. its pathetic if you think about it in terms of modern gaming though. playing gears of war (for example) on 'easy' is so easy you dont even have to understand the cover mechanic that makes gears what it is. on easy you can just run/gun your way through. wtf is the point of playing a game with a (somewhat) unique game mechanic if the game is so easy you dont even have to know how to play it to beat it? bahh. i like being/getting good at a game, as opposed to having a game hand me a reward just for picking it up.
seriously, if you dont already, try a 360 game on the hardest setting. if you previously thought 'this is too hard on this setting' and played on 'normal', you were wrong. play on hard and you will actually get good enough (adapt) to be able to play it because 'hard' is what 'normal' was 10 years ago.
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tbh I think Arcade and PSN (PSN to an extent) is killing of the retail business, slowly but surely. Every time an Arcade game is released on MN's pod casts I hear of the joy of how *easy* it is to develop a crappy 800 points game and release it on a download channel. Most are remakes of the old 80's/90's games that I think should be left alone.
I've been playing games since the Commodore 64, Amiga 600, Original Game Boy, PS1, PS2, Xbox, and now the current gen. I think retail disks have reached a point were they can not innovate further because from limitations on the disk (weather it be Blu-Ray or DVD9). I know AI can make a huge difference, but sometimes it can get so good it can almost ruin a game (look at Crysis PC for example).
Hopefully when Game Installs (albeit I hate them because the idea of a console is to put a game in and play) come to the 360 we will start to see some better or a new gen of games. It's hard to explain what I'm writing, but it seems FPS's for example have reached a stalemate, they can't go further, once a developer finds that niche tool (no not the Wii) will help them a ton. I just don't think developers should go down the Arcade route to much, it almost makes them look medicore tbh. I think the 800 points issue should be dearly looked at by MS, cause imho I feel PSN is indeed cheaper.
This post has been edited by bucko: Aug 24 2008, 12:08 PM
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Personally, i feel the only thing killing core games is core games themselves. There just isn't anything original nowadays, just the same brown-ish shooter games. If you're lucky, they make a sequel to a old game, which failes miserably (like turok, AITD, unreal 3 etc.) .
I don't feel like casual games ruin the industry, they don't really influence the 'hardcore' games. The games ARE easier, but i don't believe the wii or casual games are the cause: they've been making em easier for every new console generation.
I actually sold my 360 and ps3 and kept my wii: it may not have loads of great games, but the few that are on there are fine by me. It just pissed me off that every game on xbox/ps3 is so same-ish...
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If you're tired of brown shooters, then just wait until the brown RTSes start flooding consoles. The genre was successful on PC so they are going to try to open it up to a wider audience, and as soon as they find that one successful formula, the clones will start coming out and then we'll be complaining about that genre instead.
That's kinda what made the Wii interesting, you didn't know what they would try to make... so far only a few companies/games have tried to live up to that though.
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QUOTE(t0m @ Aug 24 2008, 07:05 AM)
i agree. im pretty oldschool (31 years) and i have noticed that especially in between the psone and xbox, difficulty has slid down a notch. what was 'easy' is 'normal' now, so that when you play a game on 'normal' it holds your hand and walks you through it with little to no effort. and 'hard' is somewhat challenging, but never too hard. its pathetic if you think about it in terms of modern gaming though. playing gears of war (for example) on 'easy' is so easy you dont even have to understand the cover mechanic that makes gears what it is. on easy you can just run/gun your way through. wtf is the point of playing a game with a (somewhat) unique game mechanic if the game is so easy you dont even have to know how to play it to beat it? bahh. i like being/getting good at a game, as opposed to having a game hand me a reward just for picking it up.
seriously, if you dont already, try a 360 game on the hardest setting. if you previously thought 'this is too hard on this setting' and played on 'normal', you were wrong. play on hard and you will actually get good enough (adapt) to be able to play it because 'hard' is what 'normal' was 10 years ago.
say 'no!' to easy games.
/old man rant
Kinda an "old" guy here too... 28.
While we're talking about the differences from PSone to Xbox... let's talk about originality. Have you been paying attention to the crap out there these days? Look at TechTv or G4... whatever they want to call it. I saw one of the game award shows... The had some games in just about EVERY catagory! MOH, COD, they were in every friggin' catagory 'cept RPG. And why wouldn't they be? The developers aren't taking too many risks over here (US) anymore. I spent @ a year over in Japan and played a few games over there with some friends... the variety of games there is redonkulous. Cooking games, sims out the arse, and some games I can't even begin to describe... buy they were all fun as hell. I get back to the States, 50 new Halo or MetalGear clones and a couple new miscs.
But it's not like we can just blame the developers for that, people keep buying these things and raving about how good they are! Well, besides story line progression... you've been playing the same game for almost a decade!
Where is the variety and originality that we used to have? How come when I'm bored, I think more of sitting down and playing a few levels of Tetris or Kid Icarus or Ninja Gaiden more so that I think about breaking out the Halo or MetalGear? Because even though it's MetalGear Solid Super Fantastic Fire-Crapping Snake of Doom or whatever the next one will be... it's pretty much the same game that I played all those years ago.
You can't really blame the dumbing down of games on what's going to eventually be the decline of the game market. It's us, it's actually, IMO, the hard core gamers that are leading down the path it's on now. When a new game sequel comes out, it's us who take off work early, or stay up late (for midnight releases) to get the newest installment of the $50-Same-Game-New-Storyline Game that we just go done playing last night! The casual gamers are the ones that will at least take a chance on a new title because they don't have the same FanBoy(or Girl) impulses we have. There's just not enough of them anymore to push the devs to take chances on more original games.
As far as how hard games are... the devs know they're dumbing down these things so that the monkeys have something to do while they're testing our cosmetics and cigarettes for us. Halo is a prime example of that. There used to be 3 settings, Easy, Normal, Hard... now with Easy being a setting that most rocks can complete a game in, and Normal being the old Easy... Hard being Normal... some games have XtraHard (Legendary, etc etc) for those of us that actually like a little challenge with our... what's turning into, eye candy.
... And while I'm complaining... JUST because a system can do amazing 3D environments, doesn't mean the game HAS to be full 3D (or 1st Person). Give me back my side scrollers! Stop reformatting classics already, and if you're going to, include the original version! The FFDS series is a prime example... great, now I have a 3D half crap version of a classic game... but if I want to play the "good" version I still have to wait till I get home, and get on the NES. Which yes... we old people still keep our old systems out and ready for action. I still have my Atari, Colecovision, Sega Master System, Genesis, SNES, PS1, N64, Dreamcast, and when I REALLY want a splitting migraine VirtualBoy on the standby.
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You young pups make me laugh ;^)
I'm 39, been gaming since the pre Atari 2600 days (and my Atari still works 30 years later damnit, not like my 2yr old 360).
Not sure if games are getting easier, or just when you have been playing them for 30 years that you are a better gamer so they feel easier.
Can't really complain about CoD etc. having short campaigns, the costs involved in creating the length of game they do is astronomical, making the game twice as long would almost guarantee they couldn't make their money back. development costs are insane now.
But yeah, innovation is lagging. Funnily enough, the most interesting hardcore looking game I have seen for a while is "mad World" on the Wii. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOAAVtpI2po
like was said before, just because you can make a game look uber realistic, it doesn't mean you should limit yourself to realistic worlds. I think there are huge opportunities for some really crazy mind bending games, *if* developers were willing to take a risk. It isn't a small ask, their company and all their staff's jobs ride on a game being successful, and a lot of us won't risk $50 on an 'out there' title, so it isn't surprising that people are reluctant to risk their livelihoods on the same.
But I *would* like to see something other than a fighter, a fps or a driving title, or at least give us some truly warped versions of the existing genres.
I am still amazed that they haven't gotten more into customisation, to let you put yourself and friends into the game if you have the skills. Have a face-builder module for your game that will take hi-res textures that you upload of your front and side views and let you have a go at building yourself. People that are good at it could offer it as a service for a few hundred points or something. People would love to have their team be their *actual* friends. Let you re-record the standard dialogue with your own if you want. I know that there have been games that sorta do this, but none seriously outside of the PC mod community, make it mainstream, the technology is available.
Just do *something*, as I am getting bored and may have to go back to 4 player gauntlet linkplay on the lynx if something cool doesn't arrive for the 360 soon.
Speaking on PAX: Is Casual Killing Core Games?
Aug 23 2008, 06:03 AM
But even PC games are suffering the same where the majority of titles are just ported over from their console versions. Perhaps just like the music industry did the gaming industry will be the result of their own down fall??
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