Is the decline of gaming permanent?

Here's the list of programmers who worked on oblivion:

Programming Brendan Anthony, Erik Deitrick, Scott Franke, Ahn Hopgood, Christopher Hynes, Chris Innanen, Mat Krohn, Mike Lipari, Steve Meister, Nathan Nordfelt, Brian Robb, Jeff Sheiman, Dan Teitel
Additional Programming Joshua Andersen, David DiAngelo, Joel Dinolt, Michael Dulany, Kurt Kuhlmann, Davor MrKoci, Matt Picioccio, Jean Simonet, Orin Tresnjak, Jeff Ward

What did they do, exactly? This always puzzled me a great deal.

Now I understand a little better though because the same thing happened to the places I was working at, as long since happened to gaming.

Now by any stretch of the imagination, besides the game engine there's no programming complexity involved with Oblivion. It's actually pretty childishly simple software. Later hearing about the sort of ridiculous design it has internally I had even less respect for them.

So how can a game like Jagged Alliance 2 have 10 times the complexity and 1/3 as many programmers?

Something called software engineering. With C and especially C++ this is pretty easy. It's a simple paradigm actually. Everything is up to the programmers. A few good C++ programmers would make some data entry tools for the quest designers and that is it, BAM. No more coding for quests. Tasks like pathfinding and AI etc. the programmer takes care of and maybe he gives level designers ability to assign various AI packages to each enemy or party member.

In 'modern' corporatized programming everything they do is geared to not having to have people who know what they are doing. It sounds strange until you understand the corporate mentality of treating everyone like cogs and the fact that management doesn't necessarily know anything about the business they are in. In corporate world, management is just marketing and finance people who managed to get a ton of money out of wall street, not people who ever worked in software or games directly.

So instead of the above scenario, the C++ guys make a scripting language addition to the engine to allow less able programmers to make a quest and be sure their incompetent coding doesn't cause any game crashes. C++ is amazingly good for making GUI but instead they will make some scripting for that, too.

So in essence the whole game will be made in scripts, the game itself. So now anyone who ever used scripting languages like perl and LUA knows they are wholly unsuited for a big project. It's throwaway code.

So that's how a bunch of tweenagers hired by the corporate world can spend 40 man years on coding a rat-ass simple game like oblivion. Anything impressive you see on the screen is due to the game engine anyway, so don't credit them with the shiny graphics.

I don't think it's hyperbole to say that my game is ten times more complex, and I only spent about half my time on code, and it's just me doing every single thing. Gaming now is run by suits and this rears its ugly head when it comes to game complexity on a whole lot of levels.

Now by any stretch of the imagination, besides the game engine there's no programming complexity involved with Oblivion. It's actually pretty childishly simple software.

Yeah, and besides the running there's hardly any athletics involved in a marathon. My grandma could do it!

Everyone's so hard on Oblivion. I think Oblivion's one strength is the simplicity of the game's inner workings. It means the game is easy to mod, and with some patience and know-how, you can turn it into whatever experience you want to have. You can make it as immersive as you want, make your character whoever you want them to be, make the world whatever you want. It may not have a lot of the structure of some of the better-loved RPG's in history, but it's amazing in the level of freedom it offers.

As for nostalgia and how it blinds us to incredible RPG's coming out now, well…Dart laid it out very well, and I don't think I have anything to add to that. I could wax beatific all day about the hours I spent in my cool bedroom in the summer of 1994, playing Realms of Arkania and listening to Stone Temple Pilots' second album, but I'm not gonna stick my nose in the air and talk about how no game will ever be the same. Of course it won't. But if one is open minded enough, and if one sets themselves up for positive experiences, they can absolutely enjoy a lot of games just as much as they did "back then". And they may even be able to look at them for their own merits, calling out a good, complex RPG when they see one.

Older doesn't always mean better. Sometimes it does, but not always.

STP is an excellent choice for music to listen to while gaming. See, bands like that, Lacuna Coil, Tool, and many others are why I disable games sounds ).

Oh, and as far as games declining, that's been going on since the very first shooter came out. Thankfully, we don't all worship at that altar. There are plenty of Vogels and Larians to keep all us crpg's happy and giggly for the rest of our lives!

I think that's what I'm trying to say. In my view we're really not out of the woods yet, due to the endless proliferation of digital games and funding difficulty. Even Larian is one flop away from potential ruin and bankruptcy.

Jeff Vogel had a blog post a few weeks ago where he said the indie scene was starting to fall apart and he doubled the price of his games because it wasn't sustainable anymore. And this is a company with a long history and three employees who can survive on a shoe string budget.

Originally Posted by Humanity has risen!
…whereas a limited system is more a level playing field, and you cannot make anything wasteful.

I remember when I first looked 'behind the scenes' at some of the coding and the parser created by Infocom for text adventure games. It was amazing to me how much possibility and variation they squeezed into amazingly small spaces of RAM.

I tried once to create my own text adventure game and succeeded to a varying degree. But it was a bloated mess and many times I had to write the equivalent of a custom script to get some story-telling done… back in the 80s my code would have needed 100 C64s to run it and it was anything but elegant.

I think there's some truth there that limited resources can sometimes inspire greatness. I still love to play a game of Enchanter or Zork 1/2 every now and again.

My view on the current state of gaming is that while I have enjoyed a good number of video & computer games over the last 10 years, with the advent of the 3D card, there has been this long running love affair with visuals that has taken the forefront of mainstream gaming. Kind of like how CGI in movies has sort of killed story telling because so much effort goes into visuals.

My hope is that the honeymoon with 3D visuals in computer games and CGI in movies will soon come to an end (NOT go away, but just be of less importance) after nearly… what has it been now… about 15 years… and consumers start demanding more than just pretty pictures.

Originally Posted by JDR13
It's called nostalgia.

You beat me to it.