The quality of video games has declined over the past 10 years.

[Violetta]

If you look at the golden age of gaming back in the late 1990s, and partially in the early 2000s, you'll see that companies released games that would last forever, or atleast, a very long time. For instance look at the original StarCraft, which is over 12 years old and still has millions of people who play it online. Or just about all other pre-WoW Blizzard games, Diablo, Diablo 2, Warcraft 2, and Warcraft 3. It's not just Blizzard games though, look at Counter-Strike, Total Annihilation, Half-Life, Descent, Team Fortress Classic, Resident Evil, Metal Gear Solid, Medal of Honor, Age of Empires, Civilization, Command & Conquer (during the Westwood days), and other games that are very high quality and still have active communities to this day.

 

Now it seems like all of the companies release a bunch of low-quality games that they intentionally kill off the following year or so. A prime example of this would be the Call of Duty series, which I admit, I have fallen victim too. I do realize that everything after Call of Duty 2 is supposedly garbage, and I know for certain that MW2 is garbage, and yet, I've bought these games myself. Not because I approve of Activision, but because I want to play online with my real life friends and family. Sadly it would seem that it is impossible for a game to be be successful unless it has 'Call of Duty', 'Halo', or more tentatively, 'Medal of Honor' in it's name. And even those "successful" games are replaced every year by a sequel, with the exception of Medal of Honor, but there will probably be a sequel to that in 2011 or 2012 anyway.

 

Is it really too much to ask that video game developers and publishers make their games stand the test of time? Do you really think 5 or 10 years from now people will still play Modern Warfare 2 online? Most likely not, atleast not in large numbers. Hell, Modern Warfare 2 most likely won't last 3 years. What's even worse is that almost everyone already sees that the gaming industry is being ruined, just like the movie industry is being ruined. The only games that may stand the test of time are the massive RPG and single-player FPS games. I love multiplayer as much as the next guy, but multiplayer only (for all intents and purposes) games like Halo (excluding Halo CE, which actually had a story) and Call of Duty die within a year or two.

 

Whether you want to admit it or not, Microsoft started the downfall of gaming when they developed the Xbox. I admit, I purchased an Xbox 360, because I wanted to play with a hot girl I had a crush on at the time, and she plays Halo 3 and other games for Xbox 360. Then Electronic Arts and Activision started their long-term low-quality game release programs. Look at StarCraft II, Blizzard let down the majority of it's original fans by releasing that product that lacked in what StarCraft is known for, the multiplayer. StarCraft II used the terrible Battle.net 2.0 system, when their Battle.net (original) system was and still is praised as "the closest thing multiplayer can get to perfection, assuming this isn't perfection in it's own right,". They also killed off the map making community by using the flawed "map popularity" system, censoring maps, and it's professional scene never really got off it's feet. Everyone always complains about low-quality games, but those same people are the ones who pre-ordered Call of Duty: Black Ops. Yes, I pre-ordered it too. Society "requires" we buy the latest Halo/Call of Duty game, since that's what everyone in society is playing.

[Volourn]

Disagree. Overall, quality of games has been improved. Oustide of a handful of classics, older games simply were not as good.

 

 

"Whether you want to admit it or not, Microsoft started the downfall of gaming when they developed the Xbox. "

 

Simply not true. Custer's Revenge was made well before xbox came out. Case closed.

[Vilhelm]

It's not in the favour of publishers and developers to make games that last for too long, because eventually the market will become saturated, or people will start getting the still-popular games off the second hand market. There is a reason why Call of Duty is on a one-game-per-year model: Because it sells, and everyone will buy it.

 

The video game business is simply just business.

 

Oh, and in the past years there have been great hits released over and over again, so I disagree that the quality of video games has declined. It has improved, in my opinion.

[Llyranor]

Call of Duty: Black Ops. Yes, I pre-ordered it too.

1) You're the problem.

2) It's only actually a problem when you only preorder the latest and biggest Hollywood game.

Edited October 22, 2010 by Llyranor

[Hassat Hunter]

Society "requires" we buy the latest Halo/Call of Duty game, since that's what everyone in society is playing.

 

Good thing I am an outcast then...

[Oblarg]

Society "requires" we buy the latest Halo/Call of Duty game, since that's what everyone in society is playing.

 

Good thing I am an outcast then...

 

 

Agreed. Only CoD game I've ever bought was CoD4 (which I still occasionally play, because it's a fairly good game), and I haven't played Halo since the original.

[Rostere]

If we do not take into account some things regarding custom maps, I think BNet 2.0 is actually an improvement.

 

And no, I've never bought any CoD, MoH or Halo game... Blame yourselves.

[GreasyDogMeat]

I couldn't disagree more. Good lasting games come out all the time and if anything, more games now days have been delivering for me. Games that have been trashed in major reviews like the recent Alien vs. Predator & Alpha Protocol have been thoroughly enjoyable for me. Grand Theft Auto IV, Red Dead Redemption, Mass Effect 1 & 2, I've been playing the heck out of these games and I'm not tired of them yet. Red Dead especially. I have put over half a month of game time (as in actual time played, I've been playing it since it came out in May) into it and I still love it.

 

I've actually have a hard time playing some of my old favorites for nostalgia as I really feel games have evolved so much recently. Gaming has been fantastic for me recently. So fantastic that for the first time in a long, long time I haven't been able to keep up with all the games being released.

[Krookie]

People buy the newer CoDs, Halos, ect. because they are good games. Often better than their predecessors.

[Slowtrain]

Back in the late 90's I would buy 20 games a year; currently Iv'e bought one game in the last 2 + years.

 

So yeah, as a hobby it ain't what it used to be.

[Gorth]

The quality of video games started declining when PC gaming became popular. Suddenly games had to be dumbed down so they could run on the low tech equipment that was PC's with it's inferior operating system, inferior performance, inferior visuals/sound, less memory, just bloody awful...

 

(Old C64/Amiga 4000 gamer)

[RPGmasterBoo]

I generally agree with the OP.

 

Its a logical process. Gaming expands > games are made easier to accomodate a wider spectrum of the audience. Also, games get more expensive to make > experimentation becomes much riskier than before > many games stuck in pre defined, sellable packages.

 

The bigger gaming gets the worse (more simplified, rigid in structure) games are gonna get. Since games are a product, market logic rules the day.

 

Still good games will always get made as long as there are people who have a passionate,no nonsense approach to their job.

Example: Relic.

 

1999 Homeworld

2003 Homeworld 2

2004 Dawn of War

2006 Company of Heroes

2009 Dawn of War 2

 

While they have their ups and downs, the overall commitment to quality can't really be questioned.

I didn't like Dawn of War 2, but I couldn't help but be impressed that they dared change a working formula so much when they could have easily sold the same thing all over again.

Edited October 22, 2010 by RPGmasterBoo

[Maria Caliban]

I find it odd that of the classic games the original poster listed, I've only played three and only consider one a classic.

 

I also find the idea that society requires we play these game strange. I know a large number of people who have never played Halo, either because they don't games or because they don't do FPSs.

Edited October 22, 2010 by Maria Caliban

[Thorton_AP]

I'm a bit confused.

 

If there's these old classic games that have stood the test of time that everyone still plays, then how is everyone buying up the latest games as well?

 

Wouldn't a game be more likely to "stand the test of time" simply because no other game of similar quality gets released for a significant period of time?

 

 

I would also disagree that many of your games are big games that "stood the test of time." I think that nostalgia might be playing a large role here as well.

[LadyCrimson]

Do agree that a business, over time it's (generally) going to move towards whatever seems to generate sales & this can definitely affect what ends up on the shelf. Happens to everything. Sometimes I like a 'trend', sometimes I don't. Goes up & down.

 

If you're using 'length of time a game is still played by huge numbers online' as the marker of quality, then perhaps it's less. Hard to measure non-online game longevity, obviously. But I see the degrees of quality in games as being more like books. That is, there are books that I really enjoyed reading once or twice but have no desire to read again, and those that I read over & over for years. Not every game/book has to be an outlandishly long-lived product in order to be a good product.

[LadyCrimson]

I'm a bit confused.

 

If there's these old classic games that have stood the test of time that everyone still plays, then how is everyone buying up the latest games as well?

 

Wouldn't a game be more likely to "stand the test of time" simply because no other game of similar quality gets released for a significant period of time?

People can, and do, play older games AND buy/play new games as well, you know.

[entrerix]

to op: (and everyone else too)

 

rosy colored backwards facing glasses. i wear them too, and sometimes forget thats what they are. then games like red dead remind me that great games do still come out. i, as an experiment, tallied how many "great games" (totally subjective based on my own fondness) came out each year since 1996. there have been spikes in a few years, (1999 and 2000 were very big spikes), but there was even a spike in one of the last 3 years as well (it surprised me too but when i added all the games up it was almost as many as 99, but way fewer than 2000)

 

now im no statistician but i realize that a lot of these spikes were possibly (probably) occurring in years where i just plain played more games, and so a higher number of them got permanently branded as "great" in my head.

 

but nonetheless, after said experiment, i found that generally the quality has NOT changed much at all. games have better things nowadays, and worse things too, the overall fun factor hasnt really changed (some years are much better than others though, one year had 11 i think, another year only 3 - which granted was a more recent year)

Edited October 22, 2010 by entrerix

[WorstUsernameEver]

There has been a slow move to design choices I personally don't like, some genres have fallen out of the mainstream and writing hasn't really got any better (while more and more games start to focus on it, with often hilarious results). Aside from that, I don't think games have got noticeably worse in the last 10 years.

[mkreku]

Well, it is true that gaming seems to have had a golden age (1990-2005 or somewhere there). Before that, games were mostly really annoying (as in, no saves, extremely simple mechanics, extremely high difficulty) and pretty short. Then something happened, and we got games that had 100+ hours of game time, fascinating mechanics, open worlds and so on; the golden age. I had a lot of fun during this time with my Wasteland's, Ultima's, Daggerfall's, Gothic's, Fallout's, etc.

 

The last couple of years, the trend has been to improve graphics and cut back on the actual game. The reasoning seems to be that the player has to have fun at least every 30 seconds, the player should never feel any remotely bad feelings (as in being punished for dying, being able to fail a quest, having game mechanics that they don't understand within 10 seconds) and completing the game (with a full 1000 points achievement list) should be accessible to everyone. This is what's referred to as "streamlining". Quest arrows, mini-maps, breadcrumb trails, constant checkpoints, one-button combat, these are all part of this streamlining process. It's like game developers are climbing all over themselves in their attempts at coming up with the next aid to remove the last shred of challenge in the games.

 

Basically, I think the problem is that game developers don't know what streamlining is supposed to mean. Making an interface slick, intuitive and uncluttered is good streamlining. Making it impossible to fail a quest is bad streamlining. Writing quests that makes players interested in solving them is good streamlining, making quests where your only reason to go talk to someone is the big golden arrow above their head is bad streamlining. Creating a world that's interesting and accessible is good streamlining, having to have your players rely on a breadcrumb trail is bad streamlining.

 

To say that quality only has declined is wrong though. Graphics, physics, the technology as a whole has shot through the roof. What we see in games like GTA4, Crysis, Halo: Reach, Killzone 3 etc. is stuff we could only dream about a decade ago. Fallout 3 is a great example of this: I remember playing Wasteland as a kid and imagining how it would be to actually wander the wasteland on my own, seeing it through my own two eyes, trying to survive in a war torn, highly radiated, wild world. Now I (almost) can. It's amazing.

 

I suspect that it's somewhat of a scenario where the technology has outrun the rest of the development stages. The technology has gone so far so fast, and so much is needed for a game to be considered an AAA title, that almost all the budget and resources has to go to making the game look amazing. But once the technology has stabilized and this kind of graphics and functionality becomes standard (as in, available for a more reasonable prize and with less work), game developers again have to distinguish themselves with more than fancy graphics and physics. Maybe that's when the second golden age arrives?

[greylord]

I agree, the gaming market IS dying with quality games, at least for the PC. Part of that is that the PC producers killed the market. In their angst about Piracy, they inflicted such drastic measures to stop it, that they stopped legit customers from buying games. Online doesn't account for even part of what retail still can sell, but these days a majority of major games for the PC are sold online.

 

It used to be that you could go to a Game store, or Walmart, and have an entire row of PC games...these days you are lucky if you get a shelf and a half. The days of PC games is dead already overall.

 

Part of the decline then is that there are less gold standard PC games being made. When you have more games being created, you have more chances for great games to come about. You had a ton of games being made in the late 90s and early 00s for PC...but those days are past.

 

You still get gems in the water however...but these are now normally catered to older and mature audiences, instead of the more teen and twenties audiences of yesteryear...perhaps because those same teens and twenty year olds are now the twenty, thirty, and forty year olds of today.

 

You still get classic games being made however. The Indie scene is hotter then ever, and some of the small games are rising...and are MORE suitable to the online distribution model than the Gold Standard games are. I'll download an Indie game that's free...and that is small enough to download in seconds to minutes before PAYING to download a Full sized game that will still take 30 minutes to d/l on my 1 MB/sec internet (slowed to who knows what, NOT on MY SIDE...but the d/l servers don't go faster than some speeds apparantly...) and then refuse to work until they continuously update themselves...etc.

 

You still get a few Gold Standard games I think will stand the test of time as well. I think Dragon Age Origins is good enough to stand the test of time...I think Torchlight is an up and coming franchise that MAY stand a chance depending on what happens with Torchlight 2. They are fewer and farther between though. Last one before those that really struck me as great was Sins of the Solar Empire.

 

However, with the indie games you are getting small hits that take off on their own, but classics in a different way (Mine craft may stand a chance of this...hard to say).

 

The big scene now days is on the consoles...but I think they have degraded in quality as well. Prime example is the Final Fantasy series. FF XIII looked better then any FFXIII before it...but the gameplay was deplorable overall in comparison to the others. It was just...lacking.

 

You still get classics...but with the consoles it seems that they are pumping out SO MANY GAMES that there is a TON of junk out there that is just dross. On the otherhand with so much being released there are games that I think are up there in quality and will last for years...if not decades. They are building fanbases that will be just as devoted as the Diablo and SFC and BG fans of today.

 

Super Street Fighter IV is a sequel...but it's going well with it's fans. Resonance of Fate was an OUTSTANDING GAME which I think will have a bunch of hardcore fans in it's niche spot...even if it never hits it big like some other games.

 

So I think overall you are correct, especially in regards to PC games...but I don't think that means no quality games are being made. They are still out there and being made. The Witcher series is another that people are pretty in love with...though that fits my description above of games being made for the older and more mature audiences today as opposed to what was done in the past.

 

So I agree with you for the most part...but with reservation

 

PS: ON Starcraft II...on my second copy already due to their stupid DRM policies and computers...I have to say that the gameplay for SCII is MUCH better the the original SC in my opinion. However, I think the DRM that they've put on it, or at least the protection policies have done MORE harm then good. I for one probably will NOT get the sequels/expansions simply due to the pain that this first one has been with authentications, playing SP online...etc. However I feel that if it weren't for the DRM...and maybe even with it...it is all the greatness of a Gold Standard game.

 

DOW II COULD have been an epic game...but the DRM for it killed that thought completely. I see it already dying if not dead in the PC world in relation to other games...but it's older brother...the original DOW...I still play that one.

[Humanoid]

I'd nominate the late 80s to early 90s personally but that's subject to the same, uh, light magenta tinted glasses most of us wear. (Rose-colour wasn't available in 16 colour graphics).

 

 

Still, a quick peek at the output of the time (picking a headline game of each year) shows:

 

SimCity (1989)

Wing Commander (1990)

Civilization (1991)

Ultima 7 (1992)

 

 

Only one of which is a sequel.

 

 

 

 

The stories you hear about the nature of game development back then though - probably wouldn't be sustainable today. There's the story of how months of progress on Strike Commander was lost when a developer unwittingly deleted the contents of a hard drive - one that contained the *only* current version of the source code - while attempting to test the installation routine. Then there's the fairly well known story that there was not a single copy of the Ultima 7 source code to be found when the developers went looking for it a scant few *months* after the first release. Fun times at Origin headquarters.

Edited October 22, 2010 by Humanoid

[Labadal]

I have never bought as many games as I do this generation. Only this year I have bought more than 50 games. Most of them have been quality games in my opinion.

[Malcador]

Nah not declined, just that most of them don't interest me that much. Well, since more people started playing I find myself in the minority for preferences most of the time, seen my favourite genres just die or disappear (sims and adventure games), seen game series that I did like get..heh..adjusted (R6, GR, SupCom). But luckily I can keep going back and replaying or playing old games - played Anachronox for the first time last year and liked it.

[Orchomene]

I think a good comparison would be with the movie industry.

You can see the mainstream of Hollywood movies with lots of epic/drama/special effects/lame stories and dialogues on one hand and on the other hand, movies that have some depth and real value in itslef (whatever the kind of movies, even action movies can have an artistic value).

 

I don't think this is the end of good games, just that the market is evolving toward a mass industry market that requires us to be more attentive to the good products that may be less advertised, less visible but can be true gems.

Like the movie market.

Edited October 22, 2010 by Orchomene

[Purkake]

What if I like old games and new games?

 

What then?