I just recently found your site through a link from another blog and I’ve really been enjoying your articles, especially the stuff on disruption and the illusion of the casual gamer. Really good reads. Thanks for putting it all out there.

That said, there’s a lot I disagree with on your site, which is fine, I don’t need my opinions to fall perfectly in line with someone before I can appreciate what they have to say. But I was wondering if you could elaborate on your opinion of 3D games. You offer a lot of criticism, but I didn’t spot any real solutions to the problems you were perceiving.

Is there any game you would cite as an example of well done 3D gaming? Do you think 3D games have core issue that run too deep to ever be effectively resolved?

I’d love to hear back from you on this, if you have the time to spare.

It is said the ’3d Revolution’ occurred during the 32/64 bit generation. But I think the 3d Revolution is actually spanning multiple generations and we aren’t even 50% into the 3d Revolution.

The hardware was able to render a 3d world back during the 32/64 bit generation. However, other elements were broken. Controllers, despite the analog stick (and we had analog sticks even during the Atari Era), were still fundamentally 2d. The N64 controller, for example, was insane. Games were in 3d but the controller was not.

Motion controls is not so much about the motion but about creating a 3d controller. This made 3d games much more accessible such as Wii Sports. It is much more natural to swing the controller in a 3d space than to try to do the same with a controller with its sticks.

There are other broken elements that need to be fixed. The next one up is the display output. Televisions are pretty much 2d displays. This is why I see the 3DS as a natural step in the right direction. I think it will be decades until the 3d Revolution is finally ‘complete’.

It is not that I dislike 3d games. It is that I dislike favorite games mutating themselves into an unrecognizable form in order to become a 3d game.

Some forms of gameplay adapted to 3d very well. Racing games used to either be a top down or a pseudo behind the car look like Rad Racer or Pole Position. Racing games have worked extremely well with 3d. I don’t want to go back to the pre-3d days with racing games.

But let me stop here for a moment. It was easier to make 2d games ‘tight’ and not have useless space. For some reason, many game types that do transition well to 3d forgot this part. For example, Mario Kart 64 has very long tracks with lots of empty space. When Mario Kart DS was made, the aim was to get back to the action roots of the SNES Mario Kart. Even though Mario Kart DS is in 3d, it still retains the tight arcade action that was in the SNES version. Sales of Mario Kart DS went through the roof.

My complaint isn’t that games are 3d but that they are not ‘tight’ in 3d and have lost that arcade centric action. This is why I believe First Person Shooters, another gametype that works very well with 3d, sells so well is because it has retained its arcade centric action. But unless a company is careful, they can see it degrade. Ask any Unreal Tournament player about the quality of the games and they will often point to Unreal Tournament as the best followed by the 2004 version and then think Unreal Tournament III is not fun at all.

Another example, my problem with 3d Zelda is not that Zelda is in 3d. It is that 3d Zelda resembles a very different game than was in the 2d Zeldas. 2d Zelda was an action/RPG game. 3d Zelda is a puzzle/story game with some action elements and many scavenger hunt elements. I think this shift occurred because game development massively changed. I also think the game developers have changed. They have gotten old, gotten out of touch.

The magic of console games came from the arcades. Most of the big console games were arcade ports. And those that weren’t arcade ports had something in common with that arcade gameplay. Legend of Zelda, for example, was marketed as an arcade game that had the depth of a computer RPG back in the 1980s.

When I complain about 3d Mario, I am not complaining that it is 3d. I am complaining that it isn’t a Mario game at all. The gameplay doesn’t resemble the Super Mario Brothers games. In the 2d Mario games, you do not hunt ‘stars’. You do not play the same level half a dozen times.

Warcraft 3 is a good example. When Starcraft 1 came out, reviews panned it for not being 3d. Remember that Starcraft 1 came out around the same time as Total Annihilation. So Blizzard swore that the next RTS would be 3d. And that would be Warcraft 3.

Unfortunately, computer technology had not advanced to the point where a 3d RTS could have many units running around on a map (unless you want those units to look like polygons). Blizzard, taking great pride in the artistic appearance of their stuff, reached a dilemma. While they were toying with the idea of a RPG/RTS, developers had eventually rejected it and wanted the game to be a straight up RTS. But there was the large number of unit problem.

So what Blizzard did was that they totally rewrote Warcraft to become hero centric. Unlike Warcraft 2, the game focused more on micro instead of macro. If you want more evidence this was the case, note the existence of upkeep where you got penalized for making too many units. This is because the Warcraft 3 engine couldn’t handle it. And when Starcraft 2 was unveiled, when the producer and lead designer were asked about why they were making SC 2 now, their answer was that now they could make a RTS that has many, many units in 3d.

So my point is that in order to make Warcraft into a 3d game, they had to redefine the Warcraft RTS experience. When Mario was made into a 3d game, it got hammered into such a strange state that had few enemies in it, re-using the same levels over and over, and didn’t resemble anything of the Super Mario Brothers line.

Too many games transitioned to 3d before the technology was ready. Now that the technology is here, do they go back and make the game as it should have been made? No. They leave the 32/64 bit version as the ‘standard’ formula.

The technology exists today to make a Super Mario Brothers game in 3d. Nintendo does not wish to make it. Instead, they are stuck in the past and see the definition of 3d Mario as only through the formula of Mario 64. And that makes no sense to me at all. Or look at Zelda. Why must every Zelda game be modeled after Ocarina of Time? Technology has risen to the point where they don’t have to use the archaic 64-bit formulas.

I’ve always loved 3d gaming and was an early 3d gamer when they were coming out on the PC. Games like Descent were very cool. Racing games are a dream in 3d. 3d games can add very much to the immersion. Some gameplay took time before technology caught up with it. RTS games, for example, needed more time as did some 3d platformers.

Here is a stark example. These two games came out at the same exact time.

Ultima 9 adopted ‘modern technology’ meaning it was a RPG fully in 3d. However, technology wasn’t ready. Ultima 9 was a buggy mess in part as there wasn’t even a clear 3d card standard at the time. The game constantly crashed. But worse, the content of the gameworld was much, much, much smaller than previous Ultima games. Considering the time the game was made, it was well done. However, the technology wasn’t there.

Then consider Planescape Torment which was a 2d game. The game was much better received. Today, people talk fondly about Planescape while everyone tries to forget about Ultima 9. This is what I mean by how many games were not ready to go 3d just yet.

The common practice of when a game goes 3d is for it to lose its roots in order to cram in the 3d technology. This occurred with Mario 64. It occurred with Ultima 9. It occurred with the 3d Castlevanias.

I remember when Dark Reign 2 came out. Dark Reign was a fun game, but Dark Reign 2 HAD to be 3d. The game ended up being very green and looking awful. The technology wasn’t ready.

The problem is not 3d (because the technology, for the most part, has caught up). The problem is people behind the game either the developers or the business side. There has been this stupid belief that a game must be made in 3d in order for it to sell. This myth has persisted until being blown to smithereens this generation (in thanks to flash games and Mario 5).

Some game types don’t seem to fit well with 3d at all. Such as Tetris. Who wants to play that in 3d? But a 3d Tetris was made because EVERYTHING MUST BE IN 3d. The problem wasn’t the 3d. The problem was that the game totally changed in order to be 3d.

You know the annoyance you feel when a Wii game uses motion controls but shouldn’t be using them? For some games, motion controls are not at the precise level to work with them just yet. And some gametypes do not need them. But either the developers or business side said, “It must have motion controls!” and the game is totally changed to have them. Very annoying.

This same annoyance occurred to many of us when 3d games were ooming out. It is exactly the same thing between 3d games and motion controls as BOTH are about playing games in 3d. But 3d games had the graphical wow that made people excuse many of the problems 3d gaming created (such as insane controller).

In another line of thought, if you are going to make a 3d game, embrace the 3d. It is pointless to make a 3d game become pseudo 2d at times. And this is one of the issues I have with both Galaxy games and why I respect Mario 64 more. If you are going to make a 2d game, make a 2d game. If you are going to make a 3d game, make a 3d game. But don’t try to make both in one title. You’re wasting everyone’s time.

My solution is to go about it from a content centric direction instead of a gameplay centric direction. It is because of the gameplay centric decision, people start thinking up all sort of ’3d processes’ and then try to cram in the content later. Such as with Ultima 9, if they went a content centric direction, the game would have been 2d because technology was not at the point of making a vast Ultima world in 3d yet.  For Mario Galaxy, again, the focus was on the gameplay “Spherical gravity is soooo awesome!”. The result is a game that makes no sense. I do not feel any adventure when playing the game. I just feel like going through one arena after another of ‘gameplay tests’. Boring.

Focusing on the richly textured game world and on the arcade elements (where they apply) will be a lantern to avoid wrong steps using 3d technology. For some reason, using 3d technology makes games drift toward being more bloated with less flow with a much, much smaller game world.

I think we are at the point where we need to re-examine the ‘formulas’ that were defined with the first 3d games. Are these ‘formulas’ correct in this day and age? Or were they made because of the contraints of technology back then? With Mario and Zelda, the 3d games gave these series a radicallyl different formula than the earlier games. I get the impression Nintendo is in denial about the disinterest in 3d Mario. They think 2d Mario people don’t play 3d Mario because 3d is difficult or the controls or the camera or something else. They never have suggested one obvious thing: that 2d Mario fans do not consider 3d Mario to be a Mario game at all. The problem isn’t that 3d Mario is in 3d. The problem is that 3d Mario is not Mario.

Imagine Super Mario World, same exact gameplay, in 3d. Does that resemble anything going on in the 3d Marios? No. And this is why 2d Mario fans keep rejecting it. In the same way, the problem with 3d Tetris isn’t that the game is in 3d. The problem is that 3d Tetris doesn’t play like Tetris.

None of them had any gameplay footage. A lot of people thought it was some kind of interactive movie. I remember seeing and hearing people sold it back and would say it was boring or didn’t know it had reading in it, hated that you had to wait to attack, etc. Sony did that on purpose and I am surprised you didn’t point that out in your blog.

I wasn’t an active gamer during that time so I’ll take your word on it. One great thing about emails and people asking questions is how they lead you down a road you didn’t think was there or forgot. I was unaware of just how massive a marketing budget and developing budget Final Fantasy VII had to previous Final Fantasy games. I also forgot just how slighted Western gamers felt when many games from Japan were nerfed or ‘dumbed down’ because ‘Western audiences aren’t as smart as Japanese audiences’ (which is identical to the ‘hardcore/casual’ issue going on today). Nintendo of America deserves much blame for not bringing over many of those Japanese titles and could be a likely reason why Final Fantasy never got big in the West until the franchise went to Sony. In context, however, NOA had major things they had to do back in the 80s and early 90s such as rebuild a market that had been crashed, fight off insane litigation from Atari and even the United States Congress, and in the early 90s fight off the Sega Genesis. This generation, NOA has had the sunniest time it ever has had. Bringing over new titles could spark a new phenomenon. Lately, the only news I hear from NOA is what new office they are making and how it has Mario themed rooms and roof top gardens.

I frequent a gaming forum, which I will not name out of pity for the poor souls there, where a great number of opinions are beginning to coalesce around the idea that the recent moves by game companies to wring as much money out of gamers as possible is not only acceptable but expected. Apparently game developers have been able to convince gamers that they have the right to do whatever they want, legalities be damned.

I remembered one of your posts about how games haven’t been able to keep their value in recent years and so I did a quick search for an inflation calculator and what I found not only confirmed this statement but also showed me just how much the value of games has plummeted. Excuse my usage of the NES for my beginning calculations as I wasn’t around in order to know the original cost of Atari or even earlier system games. All years are from the US launch of the systems:

The average cost of an NES game in 1985 was $50.00.
The average cost of an SNES game in 1990 was $50.00.
The average cost of an N64 game in 1996 was $50.00.
The average cost of a GAMECUBE game in 2001 was $50.00.
The average cost of a Wii game in 2006 was $50.00

Let’s look at those numbers using inflation:

The average cost of an NES game in 1985 was $50.00.
The average cost of that same NES game in 1990 would have been $60.70.
The average cost of that same NES game in 1996 would have been $72.68.
The average cost of that same NES game in 2001 would have been $81.02.
The average cost of that same NES game in 2006 would have been $92.56.
Today that same NES game would cost somewhere around $100.00 (the inflation calculator I used only allowed dates up to 2009 at which time it would have cost $98.37.)

Apparently, as games have gotten exponentially more expensive to make their value has dropped by nearly %50, and yet no one is asking the question of why? No one is asking why the used market has grown to such proportions while even though games cost half of what they used to gamers still seem to think that they’re not getting their money’s worth. Not even Nintendo has been immune to this value loss even though they are more immune to resale than most developers.

Why is no one talking about these numbers? Why has no one looked this up and realized just what a bad position the video games industry is in? Sony and MS this generation have tried to counteract this drop with a modest increase (to where games should have been in 1990) and yet gamers protested. Is it because they were just used to games costing $50.00, or was it because the games themselves weren’t worth the cost increase?

Why haven’t developers simply raised the price of their games over the years? Why all this cloak and dagger stuff where they slip in extra costs under your nose like having to pay for online separately or DLC or the worst of the lot unlock codes for features already on the disk?

Something far more dangerous and sinister than simply lost revenue from resale and pirates is going on…

The cost for making video games hasn’t always ‘risen’ (only the cost of development). Discs made video games much cheaper to producer and much less risky from a financial standpoint. As a gamer, I love cartridges because they will always work. I love how there is new hardware inside some of them such as the chip to play those drums in Super Mario Brothers 3. As platform owners, companies like Nintendo and Sega also loved cartridges because all third parties had to buy their cartridges from them. People do not remember but the NES software sales were repressed during the height of the NES Era because of cartridge shortages. Nintendo could not create enough cartridges to fill the demand of third party companies. Nintendo couldn’t even make enough for their own games as Super Mario Brothers 2 and Zelda 2 kept selling out.

I don’t think the average price for N64 and SNES games were $50 for new titles. Many of them were $60 to $70. I remember Final Fantasy II being $80-$90 (and totally worth it I might add). This is why we rented games so much back then because they were so expensive! Though I do remember prices would drop. I bought Star Fox for $20 due to it being a type of ‘player’s choice release’ type of thing. I also picked up Super Metroid $20 and Mystic Quest $20 since retailers were trying to get rid of them as those games didn’t sell too well.

Game companies have been good at cutting costs on the production side. Going from cartridges to discs really lowered costs. Since then, many companies have merged and grown large (like EA or Actvision) which means they can leverage costs better than a smaller company could (e.g. more resources to pool).

Distribution costs have lowered to such an extent that all there is now is just the disc, a very thin plastic case (which may or may not have holes in it!), and the cost of the retailer. The big cost sticking out today is the retailer cost. So it is very tempting for these game companies to want to get rid of the retailers along with the plastic case and disc by going digital distribution. Of course, they could lower their development costs, but they won’t do that.

With the price increase from $50 to $60, I think it shows that game companies are between a rock and a hard place. They cannot cut distribution costs any more unless they somehow remove the retailer from the equation (which is a drastic change in how video games would be sold). HD gaming has forced costs to go up. I think all the movement toward DLC illustrates that they knew they cannot move to digital distribution (look at the PSP Go for example).

I don’t think the price remaining the same, despite inflation, is the indicator of a drop of value in games. This is because the Games Industry has been good at reducing costs in many areas. I think the indicator of the drop of value in games is the erosion of customers and, more importantly, the less and less frequency of phenomenons occurring. We have to keep things to a context of their times. Comparing today’s games to the past means we must remove additional territories games, today, sell at, and we must account for population growth (and gamers growing older who have more disposable income). This generation I believe we have seen only five entertainment phenomenons:

-World of Warcraft
-Call of Duty/ Modern Warfare
-Wii Sports
-2d Mario (both DS and Wii)
-Wii Fit

These games have moved well beyond ‘high sales’. They are something else entirely.

For the NES Generation, you could have as phenomenons….

-Super Mario Brothers
-Zelda (it’s a cereal too! Nin-ten-do…)
-Tetris
-Gradius (and other shmups)
-Mega Man
-Final Fantasy (Japan)
-Dragon Quest (Japan)
-Punch-out (one of the top selling NES games)
-NES Sports games (Nintendo remembered this phenomenon which is why Wii Sports exists and why Wii Sports Golf has tracks from the NES version)
-Classic Arcade Series (these sold ridiculously well)
-Kirby
-Contra
-Metroid
-Capcom’s Disney games (these were ridiculously popular probably because they were so well made. Ducktales and Chip and Dale’s Rescue Rangers are ones everyone probably remembers.)

And that is just on one console. Not even going to try to do other consoles or computer games that were phenomenons at that time period.

Or to put it another way, think of all the really amazing 16-bit games. Now look at PC Gaming as it was creating phenomenons with the invention of FPS (e.g. Doom) or RTS (e.g. Warcraft and Command and Conquer) as games were exploring LAN play and even Internet play at that time. So much was going on in gaming. Since I can count all the phenomenons this generation on one hand, this is a big problem. Without phenomenons, new audiences will not be brought in and gaming will cease to be exciting. No one will say “Wow! This is new! This is amazing!”

As I understand it, how Nintendo looks at the gaming market is not how they can sell the most but what can they do to create an entertainment phenomenon. A successful phenomenon will, of course, sell very well but also create excitement that will rocket a console’s momentum.

The question is why are there less entertainment phenomenons in gaming today? Let us play doctor and put the thermometor into gaming. Let us place the stethescope to gaming’s heart and listen. The patient is not healthy.

What is the antidote? Or better yet, what is the virus?