Evil Genius 101: How to fix the games industry
The voices of discontent are getting louder and louder. Modern games, typically the single player ones, are "too short". At 6-8 hours for a single play through of games like Call of Duty 4, Army of Two, Heavenly Sword, Uncharted, Halo 3 and Gears of War, players who are Single player focuses are feeling cheated, especially at R600+ for a game. It's no surprise trading and renting has taken off in such a big way. The 'quick' solution is usually a tacked on Multiplayer mode that just recycles venues from the Single player game and some rehash game modes. That doesn't solve the problem.
Game development is tough. Development time & cost of these games is going through the roof. Just consider how long it took to make decent games, 2-3 years at best. Add multiple platforms and things get even scarier. The problem though is something that the IT industry as a whole has come to grapple with and is starting to find it's way clear. To illustrate the problem I'll quote a famous platform architect who's name I've totally forgotten "You don't build a Boeing with a hammer and a screwdriver", don't keep starting from scratch - reuse.
In other words the industry needs better tools, and I don't mean just engines, funnily enough that's the easy part. I mean things like object libraries, generators and even raw content like SpeedTree. How many times are developers going to redevelop the whole of New York for each game? How many different versions of an RX-7 can you model? While some may see this as a way of differentiating your product, frankly, the gamer in the street doesn't really care. These things are commodities, just buy the darn things from a specialist and get on with what's important.
I've been through something similar in Finance Industry. Basically the guys that tell you their game is better because their GT-R has a higher poly count have lost the plot. Games are about the gameplay! Instead of spending all your effort on building boxes for buildings, that time can be dedicated to tuning your off the self lighting engine to create a proper ambiance, and laying those buildings out logically so as not to confuse the user.
I'll tip a hat here to Mass Effect for trying to do something along these lines. There's a fair amount of obvious reuse in Mass Effect, but it's there only for those who want it, those who want their 50 hours of gameplay. It's obvious the majority of the development time has gone into the characters and the game, and even with its technical flaws it's still a great game.
On the other hand I want to take a special moment to had out a Noddy badge to Burnout Paradise. A game that went from being "awesome" to "bland, meh and annoying". Burnout Paradise had a lot of promise and for the first 10 hours of dedication is a lot of fun, the online co-op challenges are a brilliant. But, unless you're prepared to make the game your life, it's loses it's shine very quickly. A massive amount of effort has gone into creating a truly amazing world. But that wears off, to where the gameplay becomes stale and frustrating, the free roaming objectives become pointless wastes of time, and just trying to get into a suitable race becomes an exercise in frustration. If they'd spent more time on user feedback and tuning, it could stand up as the greatest achievement in racing games in a decade. But all that effort falls flat on broken gameplay.
