Gaming trends you would prefer died off..., ...what do you want the modern game industry to stop doing? Options

[Thomas Kaira]

To kick things off, allow me to provide an example:

---The Full-Price Expansion Pack---

Ubisoft has done it again: they have announced Assassin's Creed Revelations. If anyone remembers Brotherhood, you can see where I'm going with this. What happened in Brotherhood was they took Assassin's Creed 2, added multiplayer, and a new, short single-player, changed nothing and released it as a full title with the full $60.00 price tag. The trouble was, Brotherhood was not a full new game release, it was a rehash of a previous title with some new bits and pieces attached to the side (like Shivering Isles was for Oblivion, for example). A few years ago, this would have been released as an expansion pack (again, like Shivering Isles), but that is exactly the point. An expansion pack for an existing game, by definition, must cost less than the actual game it is expanding on, and this means less money in the developer's pockets. Now, though, many developers have taken to using a workaround: create an expansion pack, and release it as a full game. Ubisoft are doing this with Assassin's Creed, and Activision are notoriously guilty of doing this with Call of Duty (where they change so little between titles they don't qualify as full games anymore in my eyes). And let's not forget Fallout: New Vegas, either, that title is a case-in-point of what I'm talking about.

Why can't expansion packs be expansion packs anymore? I am getting sick and tired of paying $60.00 for a title that is great when compared to the series it expands on, but on its own looks completely half-*shablamz!*. Sequels are supposed to take every component of the original game and either tweak or overhaul it to make things better, or feel a bit different. New mechanics are added, and new ways to have fun that expand on what what made the old game fun. That is not what is happening anymore, nowadays, the developers simply take a game, add a bit more to it, and toss it back into the market to refresh the premium price tag and hope that the core gameplay that has held it up for the past three years will be enough to attract the buyers (A.K.A. the Call of Duty strategy).

I'm sorry, devs, but your idea of what makes a sequel does not hold up under scrutiny. Eventually, the lack of effort being put into these titles where you constantly pump them full of expansion packs marketed as sequels is going to cause them to fail when the gamers realize that you are not actually putting any effort into your work.

That is number one on my list of gaming trends I want to die. Developers who do this are lazy, unimaginative, and stagnating the market.

So, what trends do you want to see ended?

This post has been edited by Thomas Kaira: May 10 2011, 12:51 AM

[Thomas Kaira]

The problem is people trying to "grade" morality and convert it into numbers. This was a real deal-killer for the Mass Effect series, for example, (particularly 2) because in order to obtain the various persuasion options, you needed a certain amount of good or bad points, which was absolute MURDER to the roleplaying aspect. Attaching values to your morality system is a violation of the concept of morality. Morality has no value, at least not in a numeric sense. Morality is not a currency, it is determined by the decisions we make as human beings. By turning morality into currency, you turn our human player characters into robots. It's the kiss of death for a roleplaying game, and frankly I'm astonished Fallout 3 managed to avoid that (though it did, by making Karma just be there and not really have any purpose aside from governing NPC reactions).

Skyrim is actually going about this in the right direction by not allowing the PC to see what his fame/infamy ratings are, ergo the PC does not know for sure how the world will react to his actions. But it's still there, operating in the background. And this is exactly what should be done. If you cannot see the impact your decisions have on the game world right away, but instead are forced to experience them firsthand (as you should be), the decisions you make will matter more to you as a result, and your attachment to your character will deepen.

It's really that simple that I cannot fathom why people still managed to screw up morality so badly. Not much needs changing, just DON'T TELL THE PLAYER WHAT IMPACT HIS CHOICE HAD!!!!!!!!