Decline When did decline start to you?

[oldbonebrown]

As I look out across the sand, the desert reaches 311 years back into me

 

[samuraigaiden]

3D platfomers are a non-entity, it's even generous to call it a genre. It was part of the wave of 3D adaptations of 2D genres of the mid 90s and the result was so bad the entire "genre" had already disappeared from consoles - the only place they ever existed in the first place - a decade later.

 

[JarlFrank]

When the XBox became the primary platform for most western developers, leading to crippled PC ports and sequels that couldn't reach their predecessors' complexity even if they tried. Consolized interfaces and casualized mechanics infested everything.

Morrowind was pretty complex and had a great mouse-driven interface. Oblivion removed 90% of the features and the interface became terribly consolized.

Deus Ex is widely considered to be one of the best games ever made. Invisible War was a terrible sequel which had tiny shoebox-sized levels thanks to both an un-optimized engine and the low RAM of the XBox.
Thief 3 is the same as Deus Ex Invisible War: tiny levels because they had to run on an XBox.

Multiplatform FPS were usually less challenging than PC FPS because controllers suck for playing FPS. Also, terrible interfaces and no leaning because controllers don't make leaning as easy as a keyboard. Oh, and weapon limitations. You can only carry 3 weapons now, primarily because controllers don't have the convenient numbers row for quick selection of 10 weapons.

So many decline features were introduced because console hardware and console controllers can't do all the cool stuff PCs with their better hardware and mice & keyboards can do.

 

[DJOGamer PT]

3D platfomers are a non-entity ... the result was so bad the entire "genre" had already disappeared from consoles a decade later.

So many decline features were introduced because console hardware and console controllers can't do all the cool stuff PCs with their better hardware and mice & keyboards can do.

Yeah but also alot of great games came out on consoles that most probably wouldn't have enjoyed much sucess on PC

 

[DalekFlay]

Thief 3 is the same as Deus Ex Invisible War: tiny levels because they had to run on an XBox.

Thief 3 was a lot better than Invisible War, to be fair. Invisible War is probably the poster child for Xbox influenced decline.

 

[Falksi]

You've not taken my point into context with regards the simplicity & ease to pick up as mentioned. From the off it's sluggish as you have to really get to know your whereabouts with the 3-D environments.

The game is super easy to pick. Sure not as easy as 2D mario game would be, but that's only expected given the additional layer of depth given by the new perspective. But still the simple controls and top-notch movement ensure that anyone can pick that game up and immediately know the all the fundamentals. This is proven by the fact that the only "tutorial" you ever get is about 3 small hints in the starting area of the game and that's enough to know the fundamentals decently even before entering the castle.
As for the game "seeming" sluggish, that's the mark of a bad player. Since, like I already showed you, a good player can perform some great stunts and complete any level with immense speed and precision. All because the gameplay mechanics are that good to allow such a difference between skill.

3-D killed off the side scrolling Beat 'Em Up.

Side Scrollers were always arcade stuff. That's why they died, not because of 3D but simply because arcade's were killed in late 90's by the home console (outside of japan that is). This is because consoles allowed for "meatier" game experiences that the arcades couldn't provide.
Platformers were the only ones to survive because of the popularity and success they found on consoles.

As for 1-on-1's they did eventually better the formula, but like I said the initial 3'D introduction still bought decline on it.

It didn't.
Again when 3D was intoduced to the genre, 2D dominated it and kept dominating until 3D had been perfected in the early 2000's.
In fact even to this day 2D figthing games are the most successful in the genre.
The only noteworthy 3D figthers are Tekken, Soul Calibur and Dead or Alive.

Which CRPGs are better for 3-D? Fallout?

You mean what 3D RPG's are better than the 2D ones, or which cRPG's series improved for transitioning to 3D?

But you need to put that into context of the timeline. Here you'd got a generation of teens who had spent 5-10 years playing 2-D games and so weren't experts at 3-D platforming from the off.

You need to take the time to become a good player on any game, and SM64's initial "appeal" didn't warrant that time. Seriously, me & my mates were all game devotees from Master System to Amiga to 16-bit to PC right through to the N64. SM64 arrived and not one of us could take to it out of around 15 mates. Me, Oz, Fish, Robs, Birdking, Bucko, Annie, Matt, T-dawg, Hose nose, Toki, Nick, Chris, Dora, Chris 2 etc. all of 'em were gamers through & through and all of 'em dropped it like it was hot when SM64 arrived. No-one at that age is gonna spend time retraining themselves, there's a million other things to do & experience. We just dropped it and moved on.

How old are you mate? Did you live through that era, or play SM64 retrospectively?

If side scrollers were arcade stuff, then why are they making a comeback now? I've not seen any arcades appear in the areas lately?

Proving my point that 3-D was initially a hindrance.

 

[Verylittlefishes]

When RPGs became 3D and ugly (when was that, 2003?). Or probably when Troika died? Around 2005 it was all over and The Age Of RPG Decadence started.

For adventures, probably, when FMV was no longer a thing ("FMV eventually disappeared because of the limited gameplay options it allowed", lmao now in the age of walking sims and immersive cutscenes).

Upd: it would be interesting to compare the commentator's age with his definition of "decline line".

 

[JarlFrank]

Yeah but also alot of great games came out on consoles that most probably wouldn't have enjoyed much sucess on PC

I don't care about consoles, they can do whatever they want. Back in the 90s the SNES and PS1 had some good games made for them, too, it didn't impact PC gaming at all.

XBox selling itself as a western console bringing PC-style games to the couch destroyed PC gaming by making every major developer go multiplatform and consolize & dumb down their games.

Entire game series got ruined by that.

Fuck the XBox.

 

[taxalot]

The Decline never happened.

 

[DJOGamer PT]

How old are you mate? Did you live through that era, or play SM64 retrospectively?

I was born in 98. One of my earliest memories regarding games is my brother playing SM64 in one of his friend's N64. So I guess I am don't find the transitioning at all jarring.
But none the less the game is good.

If side scrollers were arcade stuff, then why are they making a comeback now?

They are?
Seriously, aside from maybe a couple of shmup's, I haven't seen any side scrolling beat 'em up released lately...

I don't care about consoles, they can do whatever they want.

And there's my point. PC audiences would've been unwelcoming to alot of those games despite their quality.

XBox selling itself as a western console bringing PC-style games to the couch destroyed PC gaming by making every major developer go multiplatform and consolize & dumb down their games.

Sure, but that's also the devs fault for being too greedy. Microsoft didn't force them to make their titles multiplat, they just did what every big corporation does, they lied in order sell their shit. The devs are adults they should be able to recognize when someone is trying to sell them snake oil, and as game devs they should be able to recognize when something migth force them to compromise.
Also destroyed is a strech. Even in the decline era we had PC centric games coming out every year.

 

[samuraigaiden]

Betrayal at Krondor (1993) was released a 6 months after it was originally supposed to and the planned period of 3 months play testing was extended to 9 months as the developers felt there was more to be done in order to shape up the game for release. The publisher was Sierra.

In February 2004, Troika co-founder Jason Anderson publicly stated that they were working with an early 2005 deadline for Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines (2004). Activision enforced an earlier release date, which actually wasn't met due to contractual obligations with Valve regarding the use of the Source engine. They couldn't release it before Half Life 2. VTMB allegedly had less than a month of play testing.

Now it's common to release games in a unfinished state. It has become the industry standard, especially on PC.

Decline isn't just about dumbed down game design.

 

[Cyberarmy]

I was shocked when first played KOTOR and started to curse them consoles.
Peak was Fallout 3 ofc.

 

[JarlFrank]

I don't care about consoles, they can do whatever they want.

And there's my point. PC audiences would've been unwelcoming to alot of those games despite their quality.

So how did XBox contribute to these games being made? The only thing XBox caused was multiplatform becoming the standard and games being dumbed down and consolized across the board.

Good console-exclusive games made specifically for console hardware, console controllers and console audiences were already a thing in the NES, SNES, Sega Megadrive, Playstation 1, etc days.

One could even argue that the XBox ruined both PC and console gaming because of how it streamlined both and made multiplatform the standard.

 

[Azdul]

Decline was always there. ZX Spectrum had a lot of uninspired movie tie-ins that sold really well. Amiga had plenty of pretty looking titles with poor gameplay that often reached top of the charts.

PC games were sophisticated only because Hercules / EGA + PC speaker were poor match for action games.
I guess it was the same could be said for Unix workstations, only games that used text terminals were even more sublime.

And then some dude discovered that REP MOVSW on 386+VGA could really turn those noble office boxes into stupidly fast arcade hardware, and all went downhill from there.

 

[DalekFlay]

And there's my point. PC audiences would've been unwelcoming to alot of those games despite their quality.

There were popular platformers back in the day on PC, like Jazz Jackrabbit. I don't know their sales numbers compared to stuff like Mario though, and I assume they were much less popular. I think 2D platformers were so much better on console at that time that PC kind of gave up and focused on other things.

 

[DJOGamer PT]

snip

I wasn't talking about XBox specifically with that quote. Was just saying that good games that found sucess in consoles wouldn't probably have found it much on PC's. So consoles weren't really the most responsible for decline like you said earlier, but rather devs that became less and less concerned with taking their time and designing quality stuff.

But as for XBox, again it's entirely the devs fault for compromising their games by wanting to port them to consoles.
Plus multiplatform consoles games already existed in the N64/PSX era and where going to inevitably increase in numbers with the next generation.

There were popular platformers back in the day on PC, like Jazz Jackrabbit. I don't know their sales numbers compared to stuff like Mario though, and I assume they were much less popular. I think 2D platformers were so much better on console at that time that PC kind of gave up and focused on other things.

PC audiences where used to relatively big and complex games. Smaller, more focused games that you find on consoles like platformers, figthers and action-adventure games wouldn't have really caugth PC gamers eyes when they had Fallouts, Thiefs and other classics coming out.

 

[Falksi]

How old are you mate? Did you live through that era, or play SM64 retrospectively?

I was born in 98. One of my earliest memories regarding games is my brother playing SM64 in one of his friend's N64. So I guess I am don't find the transitioning at all jarring.
But none the less the game is good.

If side scrollers were arcade stuff, then why are they making a comeback now?

They are?
Seriously, aside from maybe a couple of shmup's, I haven't seen any side scrolling beat 'em up released lately...

.

Explains your POV on it then mate. To get to that goodness folk had to switch round their way of thinking & playing platform games, which for us was jarring at best. You have to remember the context of all this, a shed load of genres trying to transition to 3-D, some successfully but some very unsuccessfully too and even the successful ones took tmie to settle. Hence the point in time of decline.

Dragons Crown, Streets of Rage 4 + Streets of Rage Remake, River City Ransom: Underground, 99Vidas, Mother Russia Bleeds, Fight ‘N Rage, Castle Crashers, Dungeon Punks, The TakeOver etc. The 2010's have seen a mini revival of the side-scroller. It's still gathering steam, but there's certainly been WAY more of them made than the initial period after 3-D choked the genre. Just like we're now seeing way more isometric CRPG style games too.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Mario_64

Genre(s) Platformer

???

 

[JarlFrank]

But as for XBox, again it's entirely the devs fault for compromising their games by wanting to port them to consoles.

It is partially the devs' fault (or, more specifically, the publishers' - devs rarely got to make their own decisions back in the mid 00s, indie studios were rare and most devs were dependent on publishers, who also tended to grab the IP rights to whatever game the dev studio was developing), but also partially Microsoft's for the way they marketed the XBox.

The rise of the console as a direct PC competitor/PC alternative in the mid 00s is majorly responsible for the decline. Stop trying to downplay it by saying there are good console games.

 

[DalekFlay]

PC audiences where used to relatively big and complex games. Smaller, more focused games that you find on consoles like platformers, figthers and action-adventure games wouldn't have really caugth PC gamers eyes when they had Fallouts, Thiefs and other classics coming out.

I guess. I know when I was 14 and switched from the SNES to the PC in 1994 I just left platformers behind. I play one here and there for nostalgia reasons, but I mainly left them behind. I don't know if that's a depth thing or just my tastes changing though. I know when I played stuff like Lands of Lore, Doom and 7th Guest I was just like "wow these are so much cooler than console games!"

 

[Zboj Lamignat]

I would love to blame decline on consoles, but I can't. To me the decline started with games like Neverwinter Nights, Heroes 4, Fallout Tactics, Myth 3. Games released in early 00's made by well-established companies, often sequels (direct or indirect) to great titles, that had nothing to do with consoles. Games that I would back then, coming off the back of 90's, simply deem impossible to disappoint before release. And yet they did disappoint and more than disappoint in many aspects. It might seems like a hyperbole now, in current year, when tactics genre = nuxcom and its clones, something like FT would feel p amazing, but to me it was period when I really felt things are going to shit and seemingly there's no stopping it. I never really analyzed what happened exactly and I don't know to this day. PC and consoles becoming one lowest common denominator based market is undeniably a thing, but it happened when my favorite genres were already in deep trouble.

Also, a minor point, but one tangible thing that contributed to decline in potato were gaming mags, some of them at least. These guys had a huge influence on gamer demographics in the nineties and were often championing for consoles, jrpgs, animu etc. There was also stuff like essays about how tb is a relict of the past and rt is super realistic future and lots of other examples of pure retardation.

 

[DJOGamer PT]

devs rarely got to make their own decisions back in the mid 00s, indie studios were rare and most devs were dependent on publishers

If devs weren't the ones deciding how to make their games, then it wouldn't have mattered if consoles existed or not, those devs would've still failed.

The rise of the console as a direct PC competitor/PC alternative in the mid 00s is majorly responsible for the decline. Stop trying to downplay it by saying there are good console games.

The only thing that consoles contributed to the decline was by limiting graphical/technical aspects of the games until the next generation of consoles. But a limited scope does not excuse bad game design, that's entirely the devs fault.

 

[JarlFrank]

The rise of the console as a direct PC competitor/PC alternative in the mid 00s is majorly responsible for the decline. Stop trying to downplay it by saying there are good console games.

The only thing that consoles contributed to the decline was by limiting graphical/technical aspects of the games until the next generation of consoles. But a limited scope does not excuse bad game design, that's entirely the devs fault.

And here we're back at two examples I cited in my first post in this thread: Thief 3 and Deus Ex 2, both sequels to amazing PC games that were crippled by the hardware limitations of the XBox, leading to shoebox-sized levels that had loading screen transitions in them despite being not even half the size of the levels of the original games. When I played both games I noticed touches of level design greatness, but they never developed into anything full and proper because of how tiny the levels were.

And then there's console-focused interfaces like Oblivion's horrendous interface compared to Morrowind's customizeable mouse-driven one. Also directly caused by consolitis.

 

[anvi]

1999 was the peak of gaming, as proven by wiki. I think within 3 years the rot had set in and gaming was in the worst point for about a decade. I had a stream of disappointments not just in RPGs.

 

[Alpan]

Oblivion in 2006 was a terrible disappointment for me, particularly so as it followed the amazing highs of Bloodlines and KOTOR 2 (both formative experiences for the 15-year old I was at the time), and I had pretty much wasted many summer months playing Morrowind beforehand. So the hype was also there...

I remember really enjoying WoW as my first MMO in 2005 -- it coincided with me having broadband internet for the first time, and as a Warcraft fan I can't in good conscience regard it as decline. Definitely went to shit following Cataclysm, though. If I somehow turned back into a NEET today I would certainly maintain a WoW Classic account for some healer goodness. I enjoyed being a healer, and in whatever guild I found myself in, I was good at it.