The title are some of the truest words ever spoken by the great prophet Homer Simpson. Though he may have been talking about the secret of silky soft hair, his words are a far fetching statement to game designers that change can quite often be a bad thing. Modern Warfare 2’s release and near instant collapse amongst the competitive community has left me puzzled as to where competitive gaming goes from here. Can any new title really break into the world of eSports and survive longer than its shelf life anymore?
The statement of ‘always repeat’ is quite disheartening. It means gaming is already generic and it means that we will from now on always play the same games with minimal innovation, but when you look at the alternative... there is no alternative. First lets look at Wolfenstein at ET:Quakewars, both titles had a solid base to build on. Return To Castle Wolfenstein shipped over a 1 million copies, a success to ID Software according to their CEO. Its multiplayer sequel, Enemy Territory was a huge success by player numbers and SplashDamage’s biggest selling point as a developer. ET was not too dissimilar from RTCW, the purists (like myself) will always say RTCW was better but the fact is they are brothers and that is why ET succeeded. If ET is RTCW’s brother than both Wolfenstein and ET:Quakewars are their inbred hillbilly cousins, that both mentally and literally are slow.
I had great hope for Modern Warfare 2 because Infinity Ward have always done one thing very well, that is evolution rather than revolution. CoD1 to CoD2 was progression and Modern Warfare 1 maintained the true values of their fathers. Two successful sequels suggested that the third was going to be the same, but a combination of big business and far too many Class A drugs derailed my faith in Infinity Ward. When any game ‘Community Manager’ says the words – ‘we’ve been playing on 100ms and its been great’ then you know they’re related to the Iraqi Information Minister. In the case of ET:QW & Wolfenstein the competitive communities complaints mirrored those of the casual gamer, and a combination of ID Software and Activision will at some point take note when revisiting the series, however Modern Warfare 2 sold by the bucket load and our complaints will fall on deaf ears.
However the question for me comes down to where do we go from here? Should we all just sit back and play old games? If my argument is that changing the narrative of the game will in most cases fail then there is only one way for games to evolve and that comes from the engine. Whilst I am excited about the potential of Brink having seen the game demo at PAX in September, I am concerned that everything to have touched ID Tech 4 has been a failure. What excites me more is Rage and the potential of ID Tech 5 and where that might take gaming. The demo of Rage at Quakecon looked like a game that has much in common with Half Life 2, however I was more fascinated by the seamless transition of the engine. The same lightweight feel the IdTech3 engine gave Quake 3 (and in a modified sense, still gives MW) looks like it might be back, combined with phenomenal graphics and far great user interaction with characters and the world there looks like new games could well rise out of the old narratives. The possibility of playing mp_beach on IdTech5 is exciting, what new features could they add to the old story?
My conclusion is that the narrative and simplicity successful games have had can be repeated again and again, the evolution must come from the breaking down of boundaries to make the user experience ever more immersing. If you need any further proof that this is the case, then there is a very well respected literature theory that there are only 7 stories in the world that are retold in different ways (Tragedy, Comedy, Overcoming the Monster, Voyage & Return, Quest, Rags to Riches, Rebirth), perhaps in 10 years there will be a similar saying for video game narratives?
The statement of ‘always repeat’ is quite disheartening. It means gaming is already generic and it means that we will from now on always play the same games with minimal innovation, but when you look at the alternative... there is no alternative. First lets look at Wolfenstein at ET:Quakewars, both titles had a solid base to build on. Return To Castle Wolfenstein shipped over a 1 million copies, a success to ID Software according to their CEO. Its multiplayer sequel, Enemy Territory was a huge success by player numbers and SplashDamage’s biggest selling point as a developer. ET was not too dissimilar from RTCW, the purists (like myself) will always say RTCW was better but the fact is they are brothers and that is why ET succeeded. If ET is RTCW’s brother than both Wolfenstein and ET:Quakewars are their inbred hillbilly cousins, that both mentally and literally are slow.
I had great hope for Modern Warfare 2 because Infinity Ward have always done one thing very well, that is evolution rather than revolution. CoD1 to CoD2 was progression and Modern Warfare 1 maintained the true values of their fathers. Two successful sequels suggested that the third was going to be the same, but a combination of big business and far too many Class A drugs derailed my faith in Infinity Ward. When any game ‘Community Manager’ says the words – ‘we’ve been playing on 100ms and its been great’ then you know they’re related to the Iraqi Information Minister. In the case of ET:QW & Wolfenstein the competitive communities complaints mirrored those of the casual gamer, and a combination of ID Software and Activision will at some point take note when revisiting the series, however Modern Warfare 2 sold by the bucket load and our complaints will fall on deaf ears.
However the question for me comes down to where do we go from here? Should we all just sit back and play old games? If my argument is that changing the narrative of the game will in most cases fail then there is only one way for games to evolve and that comes from the engine. Whilst I am excited about the potential of Brink having seen the game demo at PAX in September, I am concerned that everything to have touched ID Tech 4 has been a failure. What excites me more is Rage and the potential of ID Tech 5 and where that might take gaming. The demo of Rage at Quakecon looked like a game that has much in common with Half Life 2, however I was more fascinated by the seamless transition of the engine. The same lightweight feel the IdTech3 engine gave Quake 3 (and in a modified sense, still gives MW) looks like it might be back, combined with phenomenal graphics and far great user interaction with characters and the world there looks like new games could well rise out of the old narratives. The possibility of playing mp_beach on IdTech5 is exciting, what new features could they add to the old story?
My conclusion is that the narrative and simplicity successful games have had can be repeated again and again, the evolution must come from the breaking down of boundaries to make the user experience ever more immersing. If you need any further proof that this is the case, then there is a very well respected literature theory that there are only 7 stories in the world that are retold in different ways (Tragedy, Comedy, Overcoming the Monster, Voyage & Return, Quest, Rags to Riches, Rebirth), perhaps in 10 years there will be a similar saying for video game narratives?
ZEG MAAR STOUDA JE KKR ZUS
thx
What I dont get is why the developers can't put a simple mod which would be perfect for competition. Can't be too hard and you have +- 10.000 extra people playing your game.
http://www.zimbio.com/member/the1truelegend/articles/4902904/The+decline+of+PC+gaming
No, I don't think competitive gaming has a future in those new games, but should rather stick with the old ones and try to revamp them so more new players discover them.
But hey at least the developers loaded there pockets with $$ and that is all that matters. Then its just a matter of time if they will be able to make a sequel that will not be much better but at least you will be fooled in buying it xD... again :s
True words :)
I know there hasn't been a single id Tech 4 game which felt right, but none of the games of this and last generation have felt right to me. CoD2 was the last game which felt "about right" to me, which was the best feeling I've had for a game since W:ET. To me ET:QW felt very ETish in terms of everything bare movement and the vehicles, sadly those two aspects killed the game for me and a lot of other people.
Brink will not have vehicles, but it won't have the ETish movement either, so I'm very interested to see how it turns out.
Games based on the Q3 engine (a very good engine) have all been successful (except for major fuckups like MW2). That's because they just feel right.
The thing about game engines is that they are just a pile of code, and the developer can basically change everything about them. That companies decide not to change those irritating things such as snail movement is part of the development process. Lack of time, lack of expertise, lack of will, but technology wise they could make id Tech 4 movement feel exactly like id Tech 3's.
I don't think it's an easy task to change the movement in an existing engine.
You are refering to Structuralism (originating from Russian Formalism) and yes indeed, it once was well respected, ..., in the 70s. After that, deconstruction, New Historicism, Cultural Studies, ... took over Literary studies and revolutionised its paradigm.
too bad rage won't have dedicated servers so u wont be able to load mods
.
MW2 is the first FPS to challenge Counterstrike in terms of daily player numbers. This makes it a Big Deal. Thats the market devs really want to chase and they did it while also ignoring the hardcore community which will not go unoticed.
Which leads to my next point - you can't wait on the next game to come along and give you a thriving comp community because its never going to happen now. esports needs to revive an old game or create its own free game.
@people asking why devs don't make comp mods: Anyone whos made a pro-mod will tell you its a lot of work and that the people you're making it for are ungrateful sumbitches. I think the only dev at this time is Valve who still update TF2 with bugfixes and cvars for comp and beta-test new guns with clans.
However, it's hard to attract newer players to old games, especially the ones that aren't free. People want fancy graphics and new bells and whistles when they pay for games. So, the existing PC games people like to play competitively are all going to slowly die off, and there wont be anything to replace them (for the "pro" community). I fear we're just going to end up with just WoW (or whatever takes its place) and console-gamers playing competitively, in a decade or so.
That's my take on it at least, and I hardly claim to know what I'm talking about.
I enjoyed the read though, well done.
e: it seems like, while the rest of the world is trying be "open" (e.g. social networking, sharing data openly from governments and all manner of organizations), the big game developers are trying close things up (no dedicated servers, no modding, no third party maps, etc.). It's not a trend I'm happy to see.