What induces nerd rage in you?
Games dumbing down.
Games favouring MP in the design of it’s SP gameplay.
Games not being as good as they used to be in the olden days.
Fans of the prequel Star Wars ;)
What does ‘dumbing down’ actually mean?
It usually means ‘not making the systems so byzantine, and the UI unnavigable’. Using dumbing down in this manner induces the nerd rage in me (not accusing you of that Zak, just most of the time I see that phrase I see it being used poorly)
But I do agree about games favoring MP at the expense of SP, particularly games that are not going to garner serious MP (I see you Metroid Prime: Echoes)
Yep, if it’s just going to end up as a bullet point, just spend the time & effort on better single player.
I could write a thesis on this, but you know, i’m lazy and time etc. What i can tell you is it is a modern thing, and by modern i mean after the 1990’s - early 2000’s. In particular it is related to the rise in prominence of mainstream console gaming; the PS one and two era (roughly) being the earliest signs in an industry wide change. Games started simple (Pong my personal earliest game experience) drifted to the complex and are now mostly moving back to simple, for a whole variety of reasons.
It is not 100% true all of the time, obviously, but a noticeable trend that has increased over the years to the point where, for example, i rarely have interest in a AAA PC game these days, as it will have been designed for console first and ported to PC after, and that in itself brings a lot of compromises to a games design, most of them i find impossible to look past in terms of what i’m looking for in my game ‘fun’.
‘Dumbing down’ more specifically includes streamlining, which is often a reduction in complexity over a wide range of possible things that make up a game, from in-game variables (like stats in a crpg) to the deeper interactions from game choices (e.g. where Moo3 was overly complex to the destruction of itself once it’s principle inventor was dropped vs SotS with a it’s streamlined approach perhaps (there are probably better examples!) - as way of better depicting the issue?), to on-rails design required due to the expense of AAA visuals. Or I-pad/mobile gaming vs PC gaming? A ‘reduction’ in complexity is the general theme behind ‘Dumbing down’. It is not always a bad thing, but when endemic to the levels of becoming the norm, the medium suffers in it’s ability to reach out and grasp it’s audience in that deeper level that can elevate it from being just a ‘hobby’ and of no real importance beyond killing a few hours of our time. That kind of stuff.
It is often (these days) a decision of economics, games with AAA graphics are horrendously expensive to make, very risky to fund, and by making games more simple (dumbed down) it gives you more profit margins vs the main meat of the dev budget, graphics and marketing. So it is the Accountants fault ;)
On the wider scale it is not just a game issue, but a societal issue, in that we can see ‘dumbing down’ in many aspects of life, mostly related to education and our widening inability to improve our minds and ourselves, or atleast the perception from the creators/funders being that, which results in ‘dumb’ entertainment for the masses. In that respect it is the fault of the Elite vs the ‘proles’. That fact we lap it up in ever increasing quantities may prove they are right in their judgement of the rest of us? But being all about the lowest common denominator hurts us all, drags us all down, which we should fight to liberate ourselves against perhaps?
I will stop there. It’s a big subject full of many specific things, many examples to be given, and many vague ‘instinctive’ interpretations. Many better educated and good writers have written great stuff in greater details than i ever could on much of this, Critical Distance often has the links for those. It’s a perspective that i suppose naturally will mostly be coming from the older gamers like myself, as it also has that ‘broad brush of history’ aspect, something that is hard to grasp fully unless you have lived it (i.e. simply playing old games out of their time will mostly just convince a new gamer that old games suck) through it’s natural time span. But it is a thing for sure, and has effects in the industry on many levels.
This “dumbing down” should not be an issue at the moment as most new games are designed for PS4 and XBone which have near-PC specs…
… for now.
In a few years it’ll be dumbed down, again, due to fixed specs. But this is a golden era we are entering.
The longterm viability of most modern games beg to differ. The other ‘issue’ in modern game dev is they are fully purely commercial concerns. We’ve had a good decade and a half of the publishing accountant departments working out the perfect play time/per hour cost. Again like with the whole dumbing down issue (which i thought i’d made clear was not hardware related (except where the push for graphics has cost in other area’s?)) it is not a blanket 100% of the time thing, but a wider general rule to modern game design (AAA’s i’m talking about mostly).
If you want to make the better hardware argument, we should all be playing the best games ever made from the newest titles, and this is clearly not the case, often quite the opposite if you are willing to remove graphics from being the only thing that makes a game good? GUI is much improved in general, but that also suffers from the dumbing down thing where you need less from the GUI as there is less in the game in general, but the overall implementation of GUI (and graphics and sound) have been the only real improvements in games in the modern era (and i personally have all sorts of canny valley issues with top of the range current AAA graphics).
Buy a game, maybe you saw the glossy adverts on TV or read the glowing shill pre-view on any number of ‘gamer’ review websites, play it over a weekend being all sweaty palmed at the ‘visceral’ action and effects. You as the average gamer sink maybe 20 hours into it (10 hours in the SP ‘campaign’, the rest in MP PvP). You then look around for the next fix. That is 90% of modern AAA gaming.
Me. I still play CivIV (+mods) as nothing better in it’s genre has been made. I’ve played hundreds of hours of that game and predict hundreds more until the day i die. Likewise SMAC gets plenty of play time still.
I still play modded Morrowind, as perhaps the pinnacle of the TES games if you want a deep and complex first person crpg that can be made to look very nice.
I still play Sierra’s Pharoah (plus expansion) as perhaps the best of that genre of historic city builders, as it feels ‘historic’ and believable as an experience from the time it is based on (Caesar III would also be my other choice here).
I still play Moo2 or GalCiv II (getting into SotS a bit recently, after bouncing off it as ‘not complex’ enough) or Space Empires IV Gold or Ascendancy as the pick of that genre of 4xspace games.
I do get to play new games, friends have the latest consoles etc, but to be honest most of the time they are on to a hiding to nothing, in part because they are up against some very tough opposition (see above), but mostly because the whole approach to AAA game development is not about doing what games used to be good at doing, and all about a fast turn around and quick instant ‘visceral’ entertainment, all pretty samey, all mostly forgettable in the glut of similar ‘safe’ game experiences. Anyway until modern games stop me mostly playing older ‘great’ games, they will have ‘failed’ in my book. Progress should be just that no?
“What induces nerd rage in you?” - Seeing a rather annoying forum-named poster posting in more than one gaming forum that you read regularly. Just when you think you’d finally had enough of one forum and will not ever visit again, at least partially because of said poster, and you’d be rid of them, you find them now starting to post in one of the very few forums you still actually care to read. ;)
I hate when an anti-virus or firewall program acts like a virus. Long story short, Commodo did not go quietly. I spent more time than I’d like to admit doing the Regedit/file folder/process explorer dance. Fuck them.
Oh man. That reminds me of the day BitDefender got the most toxic update of all time. As a result of this untested piece of software genius, it decided that every single .exe file on a user PC’s was a virus and deleted them. You can imagine the results. After I rebuilt my hard drive, I switched to Webroot.
I finally thought of something that bugs me enough to write it down! Probably more of a pedantry rage than anything else, but I keep seeing confusion between the words “defuse” and “diffuse” and it just irritates me every time I see it. A bomb crew will defuse an explosive device. A woman’s perfume will diffuse throughout a room that she is occupying.
Sorry, this one’s been bugging me. Seeing it quite a lot lately, even in professional writing. Just read an article about horror movies recently, mentioned a “diffused bomb” in The Devil’s Backbone. Blew my mind. Probably because it hadn’t been diffused.
Well if not defused in time, it will diffuse itself rather efficiently.
An unplanned rapid diffusion event?
edit: why, yes, I am playing Kerbal Space Program lately. why do you ask?
Going to the supermarket and when paying having to tell the cashier i don’t want the (New) Star Wars free gift card things. (in my mind it was much less polite, along the lines of ‘No. I will never, ever want any Star Wars Junk post the original trilogy, get digging the landfill for all these toxic toys to go in already!’).
I think they even had a picture on the packet of that stupid lightsaber cross hilt, trolling me. I hate Star Wars, now.
Being ‘right’ about stupid smart phone users:
‘People are in denial about using devices while walking and being bad at it’:
Ooh, Zak, you resurrected this thread in timely fashion!
The way Microsoft fragments their product keys is goddamned infuriating. I so wish I could just deal with the (generally quite good) Microsoft media creation / Windows-repair-from-bootable-USB situation than whatever fuckery Dell was up to in the year they shat out my sister-in-law’s laptop.
For the 1,000,000th time… Microsoft (among others) printing 25 digit activation codes in tiny type and using the full alpha-numeric keyset. To wit… an 8 or a B; 0 or an O; even 6 or a G sometimes.
Hexidecimal I don’t mind because you know only letters A to F are involved and for some reason I don’t trip on the 8/B as much probably because they chose to print it in type visible to the unaided naked eye.
Amen, Mr_PeaCH.
People may not know this, but car VIN’s since 1981 do not have the letters “I” and “O” in them. It’s really not that hard, folks.
Reverse nerd rage time.
Wife believes the child’s room is 34 degrees centigrade because the baby monitor temp sensor which has never, ever, ever been accurate says it is. Even though walking in the room it is plainly not 34 degrees and there is cool air coming out of the reverse cycle air con unit. More like low 20’s, oddly enough within cooee of the aircon setting.
Now I’m the wanker because I am arguing with electronics known to be inaccurate. Worse, she is unwilling to accept the information her own physical senses are collecting.
I strongly believe that our wives are related. Probably clones.