- Joined
- Sep 4, 2008
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I recently got invited to a local tournament and decided i'd play just so I could have a shot at a title. It was for a Halo 3 tournament at a local lan center. Anyway I borrowed a copy of it from a friend and within a day I realized why I traded that game in and never played it again.
Recently i've noticed that quite a few new games designed specificly for online gaming have become incredibly terrible and it seems those games become insanely popular either due to being a certain genre or because its the cool new game and it never seems to die out. Examples... Halo 3, Gears 1 and 2, and Left 4 Dead. I know some of you are like OMG L4D!? No way. I'm going to tell you why and hopefully shed some light on the recent design trends that people tend to get into now from a designers standpoint (yes i've worked with a lot of games and created content).
Halo Syndrome :
The game started out good, solid design and decent level design. Then Halo 2 emerged and the level design started to go sour, the old stuff was still solid and kept it fun, but the new stuff was really lacking. It was just uninspired and really didn't show good balance.
Then 3 happened. Everyone was so excited about the story, gameplay, and most of all, multi. Well... the story until that failure of a final level with the jeep... my god was that awful, and I think everyone knew it but decided they didn't care since the rest was good. As far as level design for Halo 3... well lets just say from my standpoint they failed harder than i've seen in most games, even third rate free shooters. Most are unbalanced by a huge margin, the focus being on where teams start and no attention is paid to how many players will be in it. In addition, the weapons are placed badly overall. Just tonight I noticed a sword placed in a secluded room and then realized it was the same room that was next to where the invisibility spawned... then got killed by a guy stealthed with a sword. I noticed that he never left that area of the map and stayed invisible the entire game, and got the high score because the nubs in the game never got the idea that he was going to sit there and kept running in and dying. Another problem with the level design is that many of the new maps are based on being up above the ground level on elevated platforms and make you try to move your extremely slow and inaccurate crosshair around wildly just to check for enemies that don't show up on the lacking radar. Which brings up another two points. First, why have radar if it only shows enemies half the time and frequently manages to make them disappear off the radar when they get close. Second, the elevated platforms are often really badly made so that you get stuck, grenades get stuck, and you often end up falling off before you should, making your shots/melee's miss a lot of the time. People tend to overlook this as they spend so much time in the same maps and get used to these errors and don't look at them in the same light as I do, which is poorly placed static objects from a cookie cutter in the level designer, which adds up to lazy designers enjoying the fame of the franchise, thus producing mediocre designs.
Finally, there are a lot of flaws in the actual gameplay mechanics, such as the aiming, movement, and P.O.V.
First, the fact that the game uses a mandatory auto-aim feature (yes it is built into the code and cannot be turned off, I don't care what you've heard). Most console games feature this and even if they don't tell you about it, it is there, this is to compensate for the poor aiming ability of a controller as opposed to the precision we rely on so much in PC games. This makes console gamers feel like they are amazing at getting the crosshair over players heads, when really all they did was move the crosshair toward an enemy and touch it up a little to aim at the head. This makes console gamers feel like PC shooters are impossible, which i've recently heard this from a friend that tried out BFH and said the aiming was too hard and they sucked, however I played Halo with the last night and their aiming was great. I think I know why now.
Second, the speed at which you can turn and move the camera is just plain bad. It makes people play their character more in reverse rather than turn to aim, thus making another instance of where we see console games rewarding repetitive gameplay rather than skill or strategy. This is why you see so many videos of people in halo jumping backwards and meleeing people or shooting them point blank after they jump over the person backwards, rather than simply spinning and shooting. And yes, I do understand that this can be viewed as just a different playstyle, my problem with that is that it is a playstyle that limits the way the game is played, and forces players to play the maps in a more circular fashion rather than a strategic manner. Which is one way the developers control how the actual game is played and use repetition to keep players coming back, so that they feel like they've gotten better.
I really started to notice that people tend to get caught up in the hype of the game and ignore all the issues with this game and start to think that really boring gameplay and barely thought through strategies, that almost every pro team uses are really amazing and thus, forget about the great games and don't realize how much more skilled some other gamers are when they see the same kind of kills and strategies succeeding in other lesser known games.
Last.
Matchmaking. Wow, what can I say. This is probably the biggest fail at a multi game setup interface that I have ever seen. I mean c'mon. Your options as far as what your going to play go as far as lan or internet, how many players, and what the teams are like. Other than that, your going to play the map chosen, which is generally not going to be what you want to play, and often a map you want with a set of rules you do not want. Early on, you couldn't even veto the game chosen, now you can. And often you are stuck with another setup that is equally as bad, which is then accompanied with angry kids yelling into their mics about it. On top of that, the host can drop very easily, since it picks a player to run the game off of their connection, rather than a dedicated server, which then resets the weapons and unbalances the map even more so. And what is the point of choosing a slayer match which then is turned into king of the hill? Shouldn't that be a seperate game option, or did i miss something there? As far as ignoring players and avoiding them through the xbox live system, well bungie doesn't factor that in, and I frequently end up in games with little kids that scream into the mic the whole game and have to mute them every time they get into my game. Shouldn't that feature work with the actual games? Do I really care if they're avoided in my single player games or dashboard? Honestly, the matchmaking alone is enough to make me never want to look at halo again.
In the end, what i'm saying is that Halo tends to force a certain gameplay style and thus makes players play the same thing over and over so that they memorize things and do the same thing over and over so that they feel accomplished rather than actually getting good at the game and really having skill.
Gears...
Yes the lovely and small minded game that seems to make players feel like strategical gods for figuring out that they need to take control of certain weapons on a map.
First I want to address the graphics in this game as it is something i've worked a lot with and spent a lot of time figuring out all the tricks to making such high-res graphics fit into a small format such as xbox discs.
The textures are flat. Normal Mapping is a technique which fakes depth and resolution. I won't go into detail but that is what your seeing. It is a model with a low number of polygons which has a texture with special formatting making it look like a higher resolution model (more polygons). A lot of players said that they thought that Gears 2 had worse graphics than the first one. Know why? Well it is because 2 has a lot more content with brighter lighting, which doesn't mask the normal mapping as well. The graphics are the exact same as the first with a few adjustments. The engine is the same, and it is actually lower resolution than what you see in Unreal 3 on your PC. Much, much lower.
The fact that the maps are so small and the number of players in a multi game is limited to 4 is because the textures are so large they could only fit a small amount of data onto the game discs. This creates the small feel of the game and forces people to look at things up close and in more shadow, hiding flaws.
Level design. Well what can I say. They made the maps based around weapons and didn't pay much attention to the ability to move around the map for an objective. This is why you see players using the same strategy over and over. Get the good guns, sit in this spot and use said gun. The players are forced to meet at certain points due to the design of the map and the flow created by choke points and gun placement. Generally, whoever has the better gun wins, unless they're a nub or just plain miss, which doesn't happen often as you have the fore mentioned auto-aim feature. Which failed in Gears 1 on PC btw, since it interfered with the precision of a half decent mouse, which most people have now. I've spent a lot of time in the map editor and I can tell you that the pieces they made were created with a specific use intended and if they aren't are completely awful. This killed modding and custom level design, unlike unreal 3 or even CSS.
The actual ground in the game is my biggest problem with this game. You are supposed to run around and take cover. Well anytime you have to step down from a ledge or even something like a curb sized obstacle, you notice your player stutter or pause. This is because the game wasn't meant deal with that kind of gameplay, so gamers just ignore those parts of the map or dive over them.
Matchmaking... Well just don't try to play with your friends too often, it's hard to stay on a team together if your not on the phone with them or vent...
The game is just too linear in terms of design and choices for gameplay. Why would I want to play a game that I have play a certain way or just fail and have angry kids yelling at me?
Yes, finally. Left 4 Dead.
This game should have been amazing. It has good design, and a fun feel to it. But guess what, your only going to play the same few maps, fight the same handful of enemies, and guess what, use a shotgun or be at a disadvantage. Enjoy that sniper rifle. You only can use it once in a while with any effect at all. Why is there a sniper rifle for close quarters combat again?
The design is good, the levels are alright overall, and the graphics are pretty nice. But your gonna see a lot of the same thing, really, a lot.
I noticed that when you play online, you really want to be on the zombie team. If your not, your probably going to get bored really fast, after all, you played this level like 30 times yesterday with your friends in co-op. The zombie side offers a different playstyle which everyone wants. And in my opinion is the best part of the whole game. Unfortunately your going to have to be a random class, and hope to god it isn't something you suck at playing. Which is probable, seeing that you aren't really given the chance to get good at any certain one since its random and you have to really try to be on that team. Then you have to deal with the quitters that don't want to be a survivor, which just ruins the game for everyone. On top of all this, if you get stuck as a class you aren't good with, well your going to die really fast, do nothing really, and then wait a long, long time to re-spawn as the same class and do it all again. How do people find that fun? I fail to see why everyone spends so much time playing this. I mean yeah, I like 2fort, but atleast I can play pyro if I get bored of sniper and not hope that I spawn as one.
Overall, fun game, don't see the point in multi at all. Why is this game so popular again?
So this brings me to the conclusion and the main point of this thread, other than to blow of some steam at the current state of console gaming.
The fact that all the hype with gaming is based on consoles. The only games that are really a factor at all in competitive gaming at all are old, really old. Starcraft and CS:S / 1.6 (even older).
While many of us are extremely good at games like TF2, DOD, Ins, we're sitting back watching people play Halo and Gears and even Rockband for monkey's sake! Really? $500,000 for playing a game based on muscle memory? Please explain that to me. The way that gaming is going is making the outside world laugh. They sit and watch the players do the same thing over and over and just ask, why is that even appealing to them? That is why people see gaming as something for kids and failures. Because there isn't any focus on real strategy. I won't even comment on the drama that goes on in the inside of tournament players, it's just a waste of talent. I hear people say "why do people watch football and think that gaming is lame?" Well it is because football, basketball, baseball even rely heavily on complex strategy and so much of it is behind the scenes. Then people can focus on individual skill and find players they like, unlike gaming, where people are forced to just watch and try to understand why they don't do something else.
The fact that gaming is so hyped on console gaming now is really hurting the competitive side of the industry and why you don't see much of it primetime TV or even known about by the public. Its kind of like rollerblading compared to skateboarding. Yeah, they both take skill and are fun to watch, but since everyone knows how skateboarding works, they accept that and can really get into the individuals regardless of how good they may actually be. PC gaming is really left out of competition right now, and in my opinion is doing terrible things to the gaming community as a whole.
Sorry for such a long post, but i've been thinking about this quite a bit lately and thought you guys, and girls, would get more out of this than anyone else. As a side note, I would be happy to discuss anything i've written about in this post with anyone personally through IM or PM if you feel i'm incorrect about something, or just want to discuss something .I don't mean disrespect to anyone, or any group, I just wanted to post my thoughts on the subject, and hopefully put a little more information out for everyone to see and consider.
Recently i've noticed that quite a few new games designed specificly for online gaming have become incredibly terrible and it seems those games become insanely popular either due to being a certain genre or because its the cool new game and it never seems to die out. Examples... Halo 3, Gears 1 and 2, and Left 4 Dead. I know some of you are like OMG L4D!? No way. I'm going to tell you why and hopefully shed some light on the recent design trends that people tend to get into now from a designers standpoint (yes i've worked with a lot of games and created content).
Halo Syndrome :
The game started out good, solid design and decent level design. Then Halo 2 emerged and the level design started to go sour, the old stuff was still solid and kept it fun, but the new stuff was really lacking. It was just uninspired and really didn't show good balance.
Then 3 happened. Everyone was so excited about the story, gameplay, and most of all, multi. Well... the story until that failure of a final level with the jeep... my god was that awful, and I think everyone knew it but decided they didn't care since the rest was good. As far as level design for Halo 3... well lets just say from my standpoint they failed harder than i've seen in most games, even third rate free shooters. Most are unbalanced by a huge margin, the focus being on where teams start and no attention is paid to how many players will be in it. In addition, the weapons are placed badly overall. Just tonight I noticed a sword placed in a secluded room and then realized it was the same room that was next to where the invisibility spawned... then got killed by a guy stealthed with a sword. I noticed that he never left that area of the map and stayed invisible the entire game, and got the high score because the nubs in the game never got the idea that he was going to sit there and kept running in and dying. Another problem with the level design is that many of the new maps are based on being up above the ground level on elevated platforms and make you try to move your extremely slow and inaccurate crosshair around wildly just to check for enemies that don't show up on the lacking radar. Which brings up another two points. First, why have radar if it only shows enemies half the time and frequently manages to make them disappear off the radar when they get close. Second, the elevated platforms are often really badly made so that you get stuck, grenades get stuck, and you often end up falling off before you should, making your shots/melee's miss a lot of the time. People tend to overlook this as they spend so much time in the same maps and get used to these errors and don't look at them in the same light as I do, which is poorly placed static objects from a cookie cutter in the level designer, which adds up to lazy designers enjoying the fame of the franchise, thus producing mediocre designs.
Finally, there are a lot of flaws in the actual gameplay mechanics, such as the aiming, movement, and P.O.V.
First, the fact that the game uses a mandatory auto-aim feature (yes it is built into the code and cannot be turned off, I don't care what you've heard). Most console games feature this and even if they don't tell you about it, it is there, this is to compensate for the poor aiming ability of a controller as opposed to the precision we rely on so much in PC games. This makes console gamers feel like they are amazing at getting the crosshair over players heads, when really all they did was move the crosshair toward an enemy and touch it up a little to aim at the head. This makes console gamers feel like PC shooters are impossible, which i've recently heard this from a friend that tried out BFH and said the aiming was too hard and they sucked, however I played Halo with the last night and their aiming was great. I think I know why now.
Second, the speed at which you can turn and move the camera is just plain bad. It makes people play their character more in reverse rather than turn to aim, thus making another instance of where we see console games rewarding repetitive gameplay rather than skill or strategy. This is why you see so many videos of people in halo jumping backwards and meleeing people or shooting them point blank after they jump over the person backwards, rather than simply spinning and shooting. And yes, I do understand that this can be viewed as just a different playstyle, my problem with that is that it is a playstyle that limits the way the game is played, and forces players to play the maps in a more circular fashion rather than a strategic manner. Which is one way the developers control how the actual game is played and use repetition to keep players coming back, so that they feel like they've gotten better.
I really started to notice that people tend to get caught up in the hype of the game and ignore all the issues with this game and start to think that really boring gameplay and barely thought through strategies, that almost every pro team uses are really amazing and thus, forget about the great games and don't realize how much more skilled some other gamers are when they see the same kind of kills and strategies succeeding in other lesser known games.
Last.
Matchmaking. Wow, what can I say. This is probably the biggest fail at a multi game setup interface that I have ever seen. I mean c'mon. Your options as far as what your going to play go as far as lan or internet, how many players, and what the teams are like. Other than that, your going to play the map chosen, which is generally not going to be what you want to play, and often a map you want with a set of rules you do not want. Early on, you couldn't even veto the game chosen, now you can. And often you are stuck with another setup that is equally as bad, which is then accompanied with angry kids yelling into their mics about it. On top of that, the host can drop very easily, since it picks a player to run the game off of their connection, rather than a dedicated server, which then resets the weapons and unbalances the map even more so. And what is the point of choosing a slayer match which then is turned into king of the hill? Shouldn't that be a seperate game option, or did i miss something there? As far as ignoring players and avoiding them through the xbox live system, well bungie doesn't factor that in, and I frequently end up in games with little kids that scream into the mic the whole game and have to mute them every time they get into my game. Shouldn't that feature work with the actual games? Do I really care if they're avoided in my single player games or dashboard? Honestly, the matchmaking alone is enough to make me never want to look at halo again.
In the end, what i'm saying is that Halo tends to force a certain gameplay style and thus makes players play the same thing over and over so that they memorize things and do the same thing over and over so that they feel accomplished rather than actually getting good at the game and really having skill.
Gears...
Yes the lovely and small minded game that seems to make players feel like strategical gods for figuring out that they need to take control of certain weapons on a map.
First I want to address the graphics in this game as it is something i've worked a lot with and spent a lot of time figuring out all the tricks to making such high-res graphics fit into a small format such as xbox discs.
The textures are flat. Normal Mapping is a technique which fakes depth and resolution. I won't go into detail but that is what your seeing. It is a model with a low number of polygons which has a texture with special formatting making it look like a higher resolution model (more polygons). A lot of players said that they thought that Gears 2 had worse graphics than the first one. Know why? Well it is because 2 has a lot more content with brighter lighting, which doesn't mask the normal mapping as well. The graphics are the exact same as the first with a few adjustments. The engine is the same, and it is actually lower resolution than what you see in Unreal 3 on your PC. Much, much lower.
The fact that the maps are so small and the number of players in a multi game is limited to 4 is because the textures are so large they could only fit a small amount of data onto the game discs. This creates the small feel of the game and forces people to look at things up close and in more shadow, hiding flaws.
Level design. Well what can I say. They made the maps based around weapons and didn't pay much attention to the ability to move around the map for an objective. This is why you see players using the same strategy over and over. Get the good guns, sit in this spot and use said gun. The players are forced to meet at certain points due to the design of the map and the flow created by choke points and gun placement. Generally, whoever has the better gun wins, unless they're a nub or just plain miss, which doesn't happen often as you have the fore mentioned auto-aim feature. Which failed in Gears 1 on PC btw, since it interfered with the precision of a half decent mouse, which most people have now. I've spent a lot of time in the map editor and I can tell you that the pieces they made were created with a specific use intended and if they aren't are completely awful. This killed modding and custom level design, unlike unreal 3 or even CSS.
The actual ground in the game is my biggest problem with this game. You are supposed to run around and take cover. Well anytime you have to step down from a ledge or even something like a curb sized obstacle, you notice your player stutter or pause. This is because the game wasn't meant deal with that kind of gameplay, so gamers just ignore those parts of the map or dive over them.
Matchmaking... Well just don't try to play with your friends too often, it's hard to stay on a team together if your not on the phone with them or vent...
The game is just too linear in terms of design and choices for gameplay. Why would I want to play a game that I have play a certain way or just fail and have angry kids yelling at me?
Yes, finally. Left 4 Dead.
This game should have been amazing. It has good design, and a fun feel to it. But guess what, your only going to play the same few maps, fight the same handful of enemies, and guess what, use a shotgun or be at a disadvantage. Enjoy that sniper rifle. You only can use it once in a while with any effect at all. Why is there a sniper rifle for close quarters combat again?
The design is good, the levels are alright overall, and the graphics are pretty nice. But your gonna see a lot of the same thing, really, a lot.
I noticed that when you play online, you really want to be on the zombie team. If your not, your probably going to get bored really fast, after all, you played this level like 30 times yesterday with your friends in co-op. The zombie side offers a different playstyle which everyone wants. And in my opinion is the best part of the whole game. Unfortunately your going to have to be a random class, and hope to god it isn't something you suck at playing. Which is probable, seeing that you aren't really given the chance to get good at any certain one since its random and you have to really try to be on that team. Then you have to deal with the quitters that don't want to be a survivor, which just ruins the game for everyone. On top of all this, if you get stuck as a class you aren't good with, well your going to die really fast, do nothing really, and then wait a long, long time to re-spawn as the same class and do it all again. How do people find that fun? I fail to see why everyone spends so much time playing this. I mean yeah, I like 2fort, but atleast I can play pyro if I get bored of sniper and not hope that I spawn as one.
Overall, fun game, don't see the point in multi at all. Why is this game so popular again?
So this brings me to the conclusion and the main point of this thread, other than to blow of some steam at the current state of console gaming.
The fact that all the hype with gaming is based on consoles. The only games that are really a factor at all in competitive gaming at all are old, really old. Starcraft and CS:S / 1.6 (even older).
While many of us are extremely good at games like TF2, DOD, Ins, we're sitting back watching people play Halo and Gears and even Rockband for monkey's sake! Really? $500,000 for playing a game based on muscle memory? Please explain that to me. The way that gaming is going is making the outside world laugh. They sit and watch the players do the same thing over and over and just ask, why is that even appealing to them? That is why people see gaming as something for kids and failures. Because there isn't any focus on real strategy. I won't even comment on the drama that goes on in the inside of tournament players, it's just a waste of talent. I hear people say "why do people watch football and think that gaming is lame?" Well it is because football, basketball, baseball even rely heavily on complex strategy and so much of it is behind the scenes. Then people can focus on individual skill and find players they like, unlike gaming, where people are forced to just watch and try to understand why they don't do something else.
The fact that gaming is so hyped on console gaming now is really hurting the competitive side of the industry and why you don't see much of it primetime TV or even known about by the public. Its kind of like rollerblading compared to skateboarding. Yeah, they both take skill and are fun to watch, but since everyone knows how skateboarding works, they accept that and can really get into the individuals regardless of how good they may actually be. PC gaming is really left out of competition right now, and in my opinion is doing terrible things to the gaming community as a whole.
Sorry for such a long post, but i've been thinking about this quite a bit lately and thought you guys, and girls, would get more out of this than anyone else. As a side note, I would be happy to discuss anything i've written about in this post with anyone personally through IM or PM if you feel i'm incorrect about something, or just want to discuss something .I don't mean disrespect to anyone, or any group, I just wanted to post my thoughts on the subject, and hopefully put a little more information out for everyone to see and consider.
