The Gaming Trends (rants)

[Living-In-Clip]

Alright, list trends in gaming that you find annoying.

[1] Any driving sequences or vehicles in a first person shooter (FPS). I think it ruins the pacing of the game . Take for example, I love Half-Life 2, but I cannot stand the driving sections of the game. Not only do they annoy me, but they take me out of the experience the game has tried so hard to create.

[2] Collect-a-thon\'s. I think the biggest offender of this is Rare. Don\'t get me wrong, a good platformer will always have stuff to collect, but when you do the collecting, a big part of it is the gameplay it is being built on. The game has to be solid on it\'s own, the collecting should be nothing more than a diversion for the player. It should not be the main focus. Take for example, Mario 64, a game that was great, but also had an added bonus, you could collect stars for a special bonus. You didn\'t have to collect the stars to feel like you got your money tho\'. The game was already long and fun. Now take most of any Rare platformer and you will find yourself going around collecting stuff, just for the sake of colleting stuff.

[3] Pay to play. I recently got into City of Heroes, a MMORPG (massive multiplayer Online Role Playing Game). As with most of these games, you pay your $50 for the game and then you pay a monthly fee. While I would not complain about this, due to server costs, I do have to say I hate the fact that this game and many other MMORPG\'s have no offfline mode. Which means, if you decide you want to cancel your account, you have a coaster CD / DVD.  It\'s wrong. It limits the game in so many ways and in the end, the player is the one who is being screwed. For example, I would love to pick up EverQuest 2 and World of Warcraft, but I don\'t want to pay monthly bills on both those plus City of Heroes, so what can I do? I could cancel my CoH account and pick one of the others, but that means a game that I enjoy, CoH is rendered useless until I decide to start paying again. This could all be solved with a simple offline mode, where you have bots for team or the option to solo.

[4] Steam.. \'Nuff said.

Limited number of lives leading up to a game over.  It\'s something that should be left at the arcade.

Whats your beef with Steam?

Originally posted by Ginko
Limited number of lives leading up to a game over.  It\'s something that should be left at the arcade.

Im guessing you werent too keen on the older generations huh ginko?

[Living-In-Clip]

Originally posted by The Hurricane
Whats your beef with Steam?

The fact that after I purchase a game I still have to go online to activate it? The fact I still have to have Valve unlock it? The fact they can take my right away to play the game at any time?  The fact that people have been banned from using the game for simple cd-hacks? Or maybe the fact that a lot of college kids purchased the game but could not play it because Steam could not access Valve\'s site due to a firewall? Or maybe it was the fact it took me four hours to actually get me game up and running simply due to Steam.

Steam\'s a bad idea with even worst execution.

[Viper_Fujax]

Kinda like what Ginko said, i hate when your playing multiplayer and you have 4 lives as a group. I hate the fact you lose after a certain amount of lives, but then to add it to that kind of crappy system makes it worse. Either your the jackass that screws your team, or you have to deal with the other person screwing you over.

i really got only 2 problems with games nowadays.

FPS and RTS.

There is about 2 new games of each types every month. this genre as been beated to death, and re-beated again and again.. How many "war" FPS there is... 4254332... all the same next to the other. Same with RTS... same old shit that was available 10 years ago.. of corse now you get roma settings, egyptian setting, martian settings... all the same bullshit.

PC hardware:

Manufacturer realeasing different type of the same product within few months with very small difference. how many ATI 800xt or nvidia gt6800 there is? how many P4 3.2 different model there is to fit with so may different mobo ?!

it would be neat if compagny would release less product with bigger gap in power between the 2, and less model of the same time.

When you are changing computer now, each 4-6 years, you almost got to buy a book if you didnt follow up what happened in between.

edit: double post.

This isn\'t really a trend, but I don\'t like it when any media outlet says "PS2 and Xbox" as if there is no 3rd console competitor.

A competitor that AFAICS is still no.2 in the world sales-wise.

Also, :gman:

^ How hot is the Cube doing in sales then lately ? Btw, Nintendo is getting lotsa media attention and praise with the DS.

As for games industry trends ; like the word implies, something comes and it goes and fades away in the background after a while again. This is an ever repeating process.

So, I hope Steam is a really shortlived trend. While I agree on the base of the idea to get the money directly to the developer without the \'middle man\' publisher, there are lotsa issues with it.
I\'m not gonna list them all here, they can be found applenty on gaming forums.

Speaking of publishers : I really dislike it when they force a developer to release a game when it\'s not really polished yet.
It only hurts the name and the content of the game, which could be very good in itself.

I also dislike publishers pumping out movie franchise games. Not always, but alot of the time such games fail to deliver both a good \'translation\' of the movie plot as also just a great gameplay expierence.
I love cinematic story driven games, but these Hollywood movies franchise games often fail at both aspects. They\'re only driven by franchise money.

Originally posted by Lord Nicon
Im guessing you werent too keen on the older generations huh ginko?

I just don\'t see the point other than being a cheap challenge.  The most recent example I can think of is Astal from the Sega Saturn.  Fun to play but it had some very challenging moments, the game would give you 5 lives.  Another is Super Ghouls N\' Ghost, what the hell?  That game was very hard and if you lost then that\'s it, start all over.

If I payed to bring the game into my home then I should get to play it out as much as I want.  

One other game I never understood is Samda De Amigo.  I love that game but I think it\'s stupid that after 2-3 songs it goes to game over.    

I much prefer the approach today\'s games take of no lives and well placed check points.  Let me try until I get it.

Blade, last sales figures from both companies this past summer said the Xbox had sold 300,000 more than cube world wide.

Xbox = #2

Fair enough. One has 10+ million and the other has 300,000 more than that.

It still deserves media attention when it\'s getting mostly the same games as the no.2. It\'s just annoying, is all.

As for other annoying things, I can\'t think of anything outstanding that other posters haven\'t put down.

Actually, the last sales figures posted were 15.5 million for Xbox and 15.2 million for Gamecube as of June of this year.