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

[Crimson Paladin]

Isometric perspective in modern RPGs. I can forgive it in older games like Fallout or Baldur's Gate because at the time, isometric pseudo-3D graphics were probably the best choice they had at the time, but times have changed and now it just feels needlessly constraining to a camera control freak like myself, its only virtue being the retro appeal that is lost on me.

[ghastley]

Isometric perspective in modern RPGs. I can forgive it in older games like Fallout or Baldur's Gate because at the time, isometric pseudo-3D graphics were probably the best choice they had at the time, but times have changed and now it just feels needlessly constraining to a camera control freak like myself, its only virtue being the retro appeal that is lost on me.

On the other hand, if the game is not aiming for photo-realism, but more the formal representational style of say, chess, then the visual clue is useful. It says "do not make assumptions based on reality, it might not apply here." Does Tetris need to look like real rubble?

What I don't like is when they mix-and-match conflicting things like that in the UI. Games that strive for realism, but put floating health bars over enemies heads, or worse than that, numbers. It's OK for the Player Character to have a game HUD for things you can't visually evaluate otherwise, but keep it minimal, and use a game-related style, and at least try and provide a reason for it (as in Fallout). Blood-spatter on the screen is OK if I'm logically wearing one, such as a visor, space-suit etc. but not if I'm bare-headed.

I'm on the fence about the glows that Skyrim spells add to affected actors, as you could expect magical effects to show somehow, and fire, frost and shock have reasonable target effects, so the other spells deserve something.

tl;dr no unrealistic realism.