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

[ghastley]

If you're buying the sort of games that you play once and "beat", then Steam is a good proposition. You'd have sold the disk to somebody else if it was sold the old way, so Steam providing it a lower price and eliminating your need for a buyer is a decent trade-off.

However, the TES games are the kind you keep playing for years. There are people here currently playing Arena. That's not the same match.

And don't get me started on the whole paid mods attempt. I'm waiting to see what happens when the FO4 tool is released. I expect it to be totally controlled through Steam Workshop, using exactly the same model they tried to introduce for Skyrim, and failed. It might get shot down again, as the Nexus already has free mods (textures and other replacement-only things so far).

[SubRosa]

And don't get me started on the whole paid mods attempt. I'm waiting to see what happens when the FO4 tool is released. I expect it to be totally controlled through Steam Workshop, using exactly the same model they tried to introduce for Skyrim, and failed. It might get shot down again, as the Nexus already has free mods (textures and other replacement-only things so far).

Bethesda has already said that FO4's mods won't be available through Steam Workshop. They will be done in-house from Bethesda.Net. Whether that means they won't allow mods to be hosted on any other site I do not know. They also plan to make mods available for the consoles too, not just the PC.

[mALX]

Bethesda has already said that FO4's mods won't be available through Steam Workshop. They will be done in-house from Bethesda.Net. Whether that means they won't allow mods to be hosted on any other site I do not know. They also plan to make mods available for the consoles too, not just the PC.

Yes, I've been watching to see if they cut Nexus out. I guess it will be January/February before we will know for sure.

What my worry with Steam is that they have displayed an extreme greed on three occasions since Bethesda ran Skyrim through them; and our games are locked into their good will. Who is to guarantee they don't decide we should pay a monthly fee for using their service?

I have been wondering when they will drop that axe on us; and would all but bet it will happen one day in the distant future.





This post has been edited by mALX: Nov 13 2015, 10:54 PM

[mirocu]

What my worry with Steam is that they have displayed an extreme greed on three occasions since Bethesda ran Skyrim through them; and our games are locked into their good will. Who is to guarantee they don't decide we should pay a monthly fee for using their service?

If you have thought it, so have they, and that´s all I´m gonna say about that...

[mALX]

What my worry with Steam is that they have displayed an extreme greed on three occasions since Bethesda ran Skyrim through them; and our games are locked into their good will. Who is to guarantee they don't decide we should pay a monthly fee for using their service?

If you have thought it, so have they, and that´s all I´m gonna say about that...

Exactly my point. If it hit my brain once, it hit theirs many times first and long before I could ever have thought of it.




This post has been edited by mALX: Nov 13 2015, 10:57 PM

[Callidus Thorn]

What my worry with Steam is that they have displayed an extreme greed on three occasions since Bethesda ran Skyrim through them; and our games are locked into their good will. Who is to guarantee they don't decide we should pay a monthly fee for using their service?

If you have thought it, so have they, and that´s all I´m gonna say about that...

Exactly my point. If it hit my brain once, it hit theirs many times first and long before I could ever have thought of it.

On the other hand, considering how long it's taking Valve to get around to Half Life 3, even if they have had the idea, they'll probably never getting around to doing it

And on the subject of gaming trends I want to die off:

Dumbing Down. I'm not referring to the player base, as is so often shouted whenever the term is brought up, but the removal of functioning systems in games and their replacement with simpler systems which do not do the same job because they're too simple. Off the top of my head examples: The perk system and loss of attributes in Skyrim, Fable 2 and 3(too many examples to cite specifics), Mass Effect 2s leveling system.

Another one that bugs me, albeit in a similar vein, is the watering down of genres in the name of the vague idea that they can hit every demographic at once. DA2 being a prime example of that, on many levels.

This post has been edited by Callidus Thorn: Nov 14 2015, 12:59 AM