Gamedesign Hollywood
Hey!
Since a lot of people around here are actually professionals, I wanted to ask about the current videogame development in general.
It seems to me like the gamedevelopment scene became something like hollywood. Franchises are done to death, everything that used to be somewhat good in the past gets a sequel (usually with better graphics and dumbed down gameplay...the gothic series for example) and a lot of new games look and feel like a ripoff of a former successfull game. Of course! We get starlights like Skyrim, the new deus ex, heavy rain and the list goes on. But I have the feeling that videogames run towards the wrong direction in terms of innovation and creativity.
This is not aimed at call of duty 422 and battlefield 540 but at all other first person shooters that simply copy these concepts/looks and gameplay.
An awful lot of midclass videogames look and feel exactly the same.
But while browsing through this website, I saw some really awesome designs and ideas. You know... characters and scenes that already tell entire storys just by the way they look like. How come that we get all the mainstream pigslug and some really >> good << ideas dont get realised.
Well, I would blame the fat, jaded XBox generation that are the majority of modern gamers. ...or the producers.
You as an artist: how many artistic freedom do you have for your designs? Is your general response "yes sir!" or can you make suggestions, propose changes?
Is the focuse generally to give players what they are used to to sell more copys or are there still a few studios out of the indie sector that dare "something else"?
To cut a long story short: Are you allowed to produce what you as an artist concider to be best or do you have some consultant monster on your back that gives you orders?
I dont know much about the workflow and production of an AAA title.
Since a lot of people around here are actually professionals, I wanted to ask about the current videogame development in general.
It seems to me like the gamedevelopment scene became something like hollywood. Franchises are done to death, everything that used to be somewhat good in the past gets a sequel (usually with better graphics and dumbed down gameplay...the gothic series for example) and a lot of new games look and feel like a ripoff of a former successfull game. Of course! We get starlights like Skyrim, the new deus ex, heavy rain and the list goes on. But I have the feeling that videogames run towards the wrong direction in terms of innovation and creativity.
This is not aimed at call of duty 422 and battlefield 540 but at all other first person shooters that simply copy these concepts/looks and gameplay.
An awful lot of midclass videogames look and feel exactly the same.
But while browsing through this website, I saw some really awesome designs and ideas. You know... characters and scenes that already tell entire storys just by the way they look like. How come that we get all the mainstream pigslug and some really >> good << ideas dont get realised.
Well, I would blame the fat, jaded XBox generation that are the majority of modern gamers. ...or the producers.
You as an artist: how many artistic freedom do you have for your designs? Is your general response "yes sir!" or can you make suggestions, propose changes?
Is the focuse generally to give players what they are used to to sell more copys or are there still a few studios out of the indie sector that dare "something else"?
To cut a long story short: Are you allowed to produce what you as an artist concider to be best or do you have some consultant monster on your back that gives you orders?
I dont know much about the workflow and production of an AAA title.
Replies
You have an art director, and that art director's objectives may be influenced by what the suits want delivered. It's also part of their job to make something that sells.
Its up to to the art director to hand out jobs and to make sure its "good enough" and going the right direction. Your assigned a piece, with a deadline and milestones you have to have get checked off or approved, or make changes until it gets approved.
It doesn't matter if a game is good or innovative - a lot of the time, if it doesn't sell, it sinks. Or depending on the relationship between the developer and the publisher, the developer will lose that license. A lot of smaller studios are usually at the mercy of their publisher and what the data says is the best direction to go in. Innovation and "new" is risky business.
Thankfully, we still live in a world where this isn't always the case, and we get small independent teams (or big ones!) that come out with great, innovative projects.
Well when all's said and done its the nature of the entertainment business.
when you produce art/games/anything for yourself you only have to please yourself.
when you take a paycheck, there comes benefits and costs to that agreement.
You lose may absolute control and may end up creating something that no longer pleases you, but which otherd like/love/hate/daikatana.
good art is time consuming, but games are made to a deadline generally.
As to why there's lots of uncreative looking stuff well thats business. people see an amazing product(the car, doom whatever) and eventually start making rather spurious clones of the original to varying grades of success.
and what you'll find on polycount is game art, made for the sake of it. without deadline and budgets and management and priorities. of course it going to make some commercial stuff look bad, its filled with love.
sorry, looks like i got out of bed on the rambly side this morning. no idea if this even made sense.
No! Not at all, your post wasnt that large
Yes, I understand that if a lot of artists work on the same scene and the concepts, they have to follow orders.Otherwise it would be an endless argument between them.
What spawns these people? are they ex-3Dartists or something from the belly of the alienqueen of bureaucracy?
If you knew the number of proposals that get turned down every year you'd probably cry.
The hilariously obvious result is more of the same on the internet to be trawled.
This isn't just games - it's also used in films and much more - for example Amazon will use it to determine the pricing of their products; which occassionally goes berserk and gets things horribly wrong. Stock market machines for example actually have a kill switch in the event that this happens xD
I grew up on mario and zelda. It's always been that way to me.
Don't really see how these are exceptions.
I've heard a few people with similar kinds of views you have but it just sounds like you don't like CoD, everyone has their tastes.. but I wouldn't see it as everything turning to crap that your posts seem to suggest.
Mirrors Edge flopped?
I believe you...I believe you
I never had any nintendo thing, so games on PC and the first playstation (mostly pc) where far more original back then. And we rarely saw sequels/prequels/spinoffs/remakes...
I just noticed that myself as I found my old games collection with some title that simply had amazing ideas
Deus Ex has a daring plot and is simply breathtaking. Of course, it origins from a successfull game that used to be that way. Skyrim is the new elderscrolls game. It looks like it feels really harsh and real in an open world which I salute. TES Games where always very major, it felt grown up and well developed. A good counter example is the newest gothic. You can FEEL that it aims to please many while being...nothing but boring.
I like COD. 4 was awesome. After that I lost grip on it, but I didn't hate it. I think that all the cinematics are very well developed and really getting you into it. But the game itself isn't that interesting. Instead of my sloppy english...have an image explaining it:
I didn't say that everything is turning into crap. I just say that this mainstream okaydoke didnt exist back in the days.
-Serygala
I don't disagree at all - a lot of my favourite games are amongst that 'generation'. Sadly though, how many of the more risk-taking developers from the Ps1 age are still out there?
Yup, selling over 2 million copies just doesn't cut it anymore.
Yeah, POP2008 "flopped" in the same way despite being the best PoP game since The Sands of Time.
Speaking of the new games; ever since this console generation started I found myself rather disappointed with new titles. I try to enjoy them, but I simply find the majority of them to be much less fun than the titles from PS2/PS1 era. That said, previous gen had it's share of shitty games, but when they were good, they were GOOD.
Nowadays? I play a lot of AAA titles and I rarely finish them, they just feel bland. There were some games I did like and enjoyed for a while, but I can't think of any game this gen that really blew me away. There were some games that came close, but they always had one of those things that just seemed out of place (like gunplay in Mirror's Edge and would throw me out of the experience.
What's really bothering me is that games used to make a strong emotional impact on me; I would get attached to the world, characters and simply wouldn't want to put the game away. When it comes to newer titles I hardly experience it anymore (there are exceptions of course).
It could be just nostalgia or the fact that I'm just getting older and more bitter, but I do have my doubts about it. I can watch a film and feel affected by it, I can play and older game (regardless of whether I played it or not) and be affected by it. But when I play something new, most of the time it just doesn't feel like much at all. It can be fun, but it often feels like there's no one behind it and like all decisions were made by a committee. I try to immerse myself, I try to truly enjoy them and sometimes it work. But I feel that if I have to force myself to do that, then in a way, the game had already failed.
Just don't get me wrong here, there are still games that I enjoy and I wouldn't go as far as to say that new games suck. There are plenty of games that have impressed me. But I feel that I'm not too far from truth if I say that they lost a bit of their charm; I feel that they lost this tiny element that would make me stay up all night because playing the game just felt so good.
Or maybe I just judge them more harshly than older games?
This goes to show how nothing has really changed at all, we're still getting great games.
I do feel that games are dumbing down to the point of becoming boring to play. Mass Effect 2 is the best example of this I can think of, and anybody who played the first knows just how "dumbed down" the second was. It was still an amazing game, don't get me wrong, but it was as simple as it could get, sadly
But the problem is, as much as we all may cry for different types, looks and styles, this shit still sells... And its not about what makes people happy, its about what makes INVESTORS happy. I'm all for taking a risk, some of the best games I've played this gen were risky games that tried to break the mould a bit... But those games, they make share holders itchy... And when you have shit loads of money in something, you don't want to be itchy.
So the bottom line is, as long as we have publisher breathing down our necks to create $$$ over new ideas, gaming will stay this way. Look towards the indie scene if you want to see people taking risks, and look towards retail for 99% "copy paste" formulas.
Just read the interviews that talk about having 'more shooting and action' in 3 compared to the 'RPG elements' in the second
I only liked Mass Effect as much as I did, because my decisions had weight. I didn't like the second one at all - it was very weak.
I wouldn't dismiss this as a nostalgia so quickly. There are some design trends that are undeniably different than what was common 5 or 10 years ago. Accessibility is one of them and though it's a good idea, more often than not we end up with games that offer no challenge at all (complexity issues aside; I have nothing against streamlining).
There are plenty of games nowadays that favor the "minimum effort" approach and that's something I can't stand behind. AC Brotherhood is in my eyes the best example; all those flashy finishing moves are so easy to execute, that after a while they just become boring. Had the combat been more difficult I would have felt the satisfaction every time I managed to pull it off.
Personally (and I believe that's also true for a fair share of gamers) the element of overcoming challenges is incredibly important for me; winning after a series of failures is much more fun. Games that reward me all the time, even when I make mistakes become boring very quickly. I can't do anything about it, that's how it always was for me.
And now, single-player blockbusters seem to be going in the opposite direction. The elements of challenge and frustration are almost non-existent, unless you play on higher difficulty modes; which generally suffer from the same balancing issues they always did. Personally, I find it rather disappointing.
And then there are graphics, which I think have a huge impact on how I perceive characters in games and how I immerse myself in a story. As graphics get more realistic, we're getting closer to reaching the uncanny valley. In fact, in some instances (let's say ME2) we're pretty much there. The quality of writing didn't change all that much in the past 10 years, but somehow I found the characters more believable when they looked less like real people.
Even now that's the case. Since we're talking about the ME2 already, I don't think it's a coincidence that characters who are fan favorites are almost always aliens. Their personality plays an important role of course, but I always found human characters in the ME series to be a bit...strange. Ashley from ME1 is a good example I believe; plenty of people hated her and so did I. I don't think she was badly written and in fact I think she was a realistic character, but I simply couldn't relate to her at all. She just felt like a wax figure.
On the other hand, I loved GlaDos in Portal 1. Even though it was just a voice, I found her more human than I was supposed to (she was an AI after all :poly142:). I also thought that Wheatley had showed much more emotion than any other game character that I saw in the past few years.
This.
Sorry folks! I just saw the chance of asking real gamedesigners in the industry and took it.