Quote:
Originally Posted by insane_cobra
Something being "hardcore" is not necessarily a good thing. It means being hermetic and accessible to only the select few.
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True, but I still find it sad that there is a marked dumbening down of the audience in many game genres these days. The reason is of course the attempt to sell to more and more people who just play the games causually. I mean, look at the adventure games for examples. In 1990, The Secreet of Monkey Island presented us with a number of different actions we could perform(Give, Open, Close, Pick up, Look at, Talk to, Use, Push, Pull). In 1993, Sam & Max - Hit the Road, they had removed the long list of verbs at the bottom of the game, and replaced it with a handy action cycling instead, but they also limited the amount of things you could do, which I found refreshing. Then on Broken Sword 1, you suddenly had only two actions... looking at things and using/interacting/doing something with the object action. Then on Sam & Max - Season 1, suddenly you no longer had looking either. You just pressed and object, and the game knew what to do.
Of course, this is a result of the game producers trying to appeal to people who wouldn't usually have picked up and played games, which is good for the broader audience who like casual/light games, but bad for me who feel the world becomes more alive the more options I have and who doesn't mind spending a few extra hours figuring out the story behind the game. The cause of this attempt to reach a wider audience comes from the success of the consoles, because if the consoles never got that popular, and if the game producers hadn't seen that many younger people, and people who would normally never touch a game on PC, were willing to play games on consoles, then this "dumbing down" as I like to call it, of the audience never would have happened. But of course, this development is not bad for the game developers nor the mainstream audience. But I still have a right to express my opinion that I don't like that kind of games, and even though there are some newer adventure games, not to say RPG as well, which balance very nicely between appealing to a broader audience and appealing to their old fanbase, there also are adventure games and RPG which really can be seen as a crime against everything adventure games and RPG games used to be about, because they are so oversimplified that a person who hadn't been around to play adventure games or RPG games for a while would've had a hard time seeing that it's the same gender.
Anyway, to lead this all back to what the the thread is about. I felt Morrowind balanced very nicely on the line between appealing to older RPG gamers, and appealing to those who really don't want to worry about XP's and how to build the perfect character, (especially considering that you need a express course in RPG lingo just to be able to understand what the characters does in most "classic" RPG games). Still, I had a great time playing Oblivion, and even though I was a little upset to see that they hadn't fixed stuff I thought was a big issue in Morrowind it's still a good game(why doesn't Kvatch get rebuild? and why does people never move to other towns, unless it's part of a quest? Why does it seems like the nature is so wild that no normal person could have lived where they live, without needing police escort just to get to to the closest town?) Even though they did a lot of progress in terms of making the world alive in Oblivion, the world still feels dead once one get under the shallow impressions the characters are sending us by moving around, pretending to do stuff. But, when I watched the trialer for Oblivion, I saw many of the things I missed in the retail version. I really think they were planning to make the A.I. even more sofisticated, but that they ran out of time, because there are many things I saw in the trailer for Oblivion which it seems they had to pull out at the last min.
Update: the video I was refering to was this one:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUtvj_pqxvs (oh, yeah, you have to check out the part 2-6 as well to see the entire movie).
http://www.youtube.com/results?searc...&search=Search to see them all
