gumby_trucker said:
Fair question about Epic. What saddens me is not the fact that they exist so much as the level of mainstream success they have achieved and the influence they have over the industry. It is said that Epic were the ones who convinced Microsoft into doubling the amount of RAM in the 360, and now with this new tech demo for their engine it is most likely the cycle is repeating itself - Epic themselves aren't shy about calling the recent demo a "challenge" of sorts to next gen console manufacturers... The reason this makes me sad is that they are in fact encouraging an unhealthy trend in the games business in which the same games are made over and over again with only an increasingly inflated budget to distinguish between them... That may sound cynical to you but the fact is the variance in the so called game-space made up with this line of thinking is easily dwarfed by the potential versatility games as a whole can offer. Just think about the huge spectrum of games from tetris and defender and pac man to blaster master to sim city to jumping flash and you can see that this trend is suffocating creativity. And to make matters worse it causes an inflation of expectations by consumers across the board! Suddenly Tetris isn't good enough unless it's in HD like the other big boy games! What a load of horse sh*t! Tetris has proven to have quadruple the staying power of Unreal, if not more! But instead of encouraging developers to make crazy unproven concepts that nine times out of ten may make very little money (or fail even altogether) until that masterful stroke of genius that changes gaming forever, we are being pushed into a shiny, pixel shaded corner for the rest of time! This is the kind of thinking that brings people to make imbecilic statements like "but there aren't any more genres left to explore... all games are either FPS, TPS, RTS, platformers, fighters or racing games".... |
It's not like the graphics race is new to this generation. If anything now is the easiest time for people to take risks on creative games. Development was much cheaper 20-30 years ago, but you also had to manufacture expensive cartridges and be able to distribute them across the world. Between platforms like Steam, the app store, PSN/XBLA, XLIG, and even your own site, pretty much anyone who has an interest is able to make and distribute their own game.
Also Tetris is an odd thing to mention, considering the complete mess of its licensing in the 80's. There were companies that didn't even have the rights to Tetris licensing it to others who then sub-licensed it to even more companies. Plus the actual creator didn't profit off the game for more than a decade.
Speaking of Pac-man as well, the 2600 version was criticized for having much worse visuals (among other reasons) than the arcade version. It's failure was a pretty big factor in both the destruction of Atari and the video game market overall.
Also Epic's suggestion to add more RAM was great. 256MB of RAM would have been a major bottleneck. Hell, 512 isn't all that great either.
I have to wonder, did you feel the same way with every new generation? What makes the current predicament any different from Blast Processing, or 3D graphics, or FMVs?
