Title says it all really. What are you sick of in modern games? and what would you like to see in new ones?
I’m famously sick of FMV, voiceovers, fullscreen-only games, busty elves, RPG and cyberpunk cliches etc etc. What about you?
I’m sick of hype about how wonderful graphics in games are and stuff, but the actual game is rubbish and you proably need a state of the art computer to play it.
Some of the games thus far get quite repetative. Sure eating the brains of humans is fun but really that’s all there is to “Stubbs the Zombie”. Another thing I hate is not being able to save as often as I’d like or moreso than once per level. Having to repeat the whole thing from dieing at the end is a pain in the nether regions!(“Blowout”) Other qualities include a lack of tutorial scenarios (“Shattered Union”), invisible barriers in First Person Shooters ("FarCry " and “Half-Life 2”) and high requirements for something that would look just as good on basic settings. I’ve only recently been able to play the first Unreal Tournament on full quality, and yet I’ve been playing Quake3 for a few years already.
And oh yeah, How many gamestores do you know with entire bins full of last years’ Sports game? 
Release ONE game and sell mini-updates
- Mike
Sports games piss me off. There is something pointless about a game of a game that you could just… go and play. 
I’m getting pissed off with expansion packs. I enjoyed the Sims 2 but they purposely included a poor selection of objects and stuff, so that they could release a load of crappy expansion packs almost as expensive as the original game.
A game I’d recommend you try Mike and Cliff is Shadow of the Colossus, only a couple of FMVs, and despite what amounts to killing a big monster 16 times, it never gets repetitive. Some people like Ico too 
expansion packs that are nothing but content do seem to be a bit overpriced. Especially if it wouldnt be that hard for modders to make that very same content. If I did an expansion pack for Kudos (or democracy) I’d make sure it had a lot of code changes and expanded the game.
Here here!
For those of us who can’t afford to keep their PC at the “latest and greatest” stage are usualy stuck with old games, in clearance racks, that are years old.
But then again, those are usualy the most fun, patched so nothing crashes, and can be endless fun.
New games, graphics so high that you barely move, waiting 10 minutes for a sword strike, or a laster fire isn’t worth it.
The Sims, I think the only game that’s had more expansion packs than that one was Everquest. Expansion packs, while are nice, usualy don’t add your dollar’s worth to the game until you’ve had 3 or 4 of them, and at the price, you might as well bought a new game. Just wait for 3 or 4 packs to be in one bundle, for less than what each one cost individually.
I’m sick of frustrating interfaces most of all! And games that make you cry if you die, cause saving is hard! And now I’m getting older, I find the modern stuff too hard, I guess I learn slower now 
Big shout out to Lux if no one’s played it, it’s rad.
On the plus side, multiplayer can be a great addon to a game, and it makes it much more fun knowing your up against a human. I played my favourite shooter mod (FH for BF1942) over lan with my brother for the first time the other day, on a map I had played a hundred times, and the difference was incredible.
I hate how games have swapped sheer enjoyment for flashy (gaudy) grpahics. Sure, I like looking at pretty things, but not if it’s boring to do it.
One of my biggest disappointments was after finally getting a copy of Civ4, finding that for all the complexity it offered, after about an hour of play, it took 10minutes for a turn to go. It was fun while it lasted, but there was no point in me spending 90% of the time waiting for the computer to think.
My ideal stragety game would tie in the graphics and playing nature of AoE, the vast capability of Civ4, and the management and involvement of Democracy. I prefer RTS to turn-based, but like the possibilties turn-based games have over RTS. Damn, won’t anyone make a perfect game for me??
Agreed. Civ3, even with a HUGE world and many large civilizations, you’re only waiting 2-3 minutes between each turn.
With Civ4, just to start, the game runs slowly on my Athlon64-3200, 2GB RAM and 256MB Video card. I honestly feel like I wasted my money in another sequal in what was, until now, an excellent game that ran well on the average computer for the time (and I’ve been playing it since the original Civilization!).
I would love to play Dungeons and Dragons online, but the specs are so high, it would choke my system. The same with many new games that are out today.
Not everyone can afford to spend $500-$2000 a year keeping their computer at the “latest and greatest” specs. 
Multiplayer is always a must of course. Probably the biggest weakness of a game like Democracy
I think uniqueness is what makes us love our games. Take The Movies, for example. I can just keep making whatever movies I want, whatever scene. It’s only limited by what i can think of. [I have actually run out of good ideas… Need to think more]
There won’t be a point where I’m saying “I’ve done everything in this game”. Perhaps I might get sick of using the same sets, but perhaps I’ll be able to download mods???
I think the popularity of the Sims is entirely down to its open-endedness. If you look at the communities on the internet based around it, there are goth sims, celebrity sims, alien or fantasy sims, sims that breed endlessly [!] , and real-life sims.
I love the facial-engineering you can do in the Sims and the Movies too. And although I know nothing about programming, it looks to me like there must have been long long hours put into all the interactions i can see.
Another thing is RPG’s. Fallout, Final Fantasy, Forgotten Realms stuff… [the F’s.] They have fantastic immersive storylines, and I think i saw mentioned somewhere around here about “wanting to see what happens next”.
Games should always make you say “God I can’t stop playing until I get to the next bit!”
Voice-overs are doing my nut in… For two reasons, the first being they’re in most cases bloody AWFUL (Dragon Quest for example has some simply grating voices, at other times you can’t even understand what some people are saying >.<)
And secondly, developers seem to think, voice overs = replacement for subtitles. While it’s all nice and buff, think of the deaf people out there, like say me, who rely on subtitles to follow the cock-and-bull story they’ve made to entertain me sheesh (Kingdom Hearts pissed me off no ends on this with an ending that was devoid of subs >.<)
Im sick of…
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People complaining about Graphics and how they are prioritised above Gameplay. If it was the other way around, you’d still be complaining.
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Finding out the hard way that a game is crap. (ie. Strategy RPGs)
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Forum-hype and me listening to it. (again…Strategy RPGs)
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The fact that demos deceive a potential consumer.
I would like to see:
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TONS of save points (ie. Prince of Persia: Sands of Time)
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Rewarding storylines in RPGs
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Simple ideas executed properly
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A steady progression in graphics, that people can afford to keep up with
OR
- Developers spending time to optimize performance with current hardware, instead of releasing games which require £300-400 upgrades every 3 months.
I wouldn’t complain about lack of graphics to increase gameplay. My favorite game is UnReal World, and those graphics may be small and cartoony, but you can see exactly what they are meant to be. C-evo may not have the cutesy graphics of the Civs, but its gameplay is streets ahead (research your own self-designed units, for example). Good old Smugglers (2 and 3) may not have much in the way of moving graphics, but you can do just about anything in those games.
I think people would mind in the long-run. Imagine in 10 years, you have been paying 30 quid for games all this time and they haven’t improved graphically at all. You’d be thinking, where has all the money gone to?
Personally, I’m pretty sick of current gaming trends.
FPS shooters are ten-a-penny now and I just can’t be bothered to try another one out.
I loved freeform games like GTA when it first arrived and recently enjoyed playing my way through Total Overdose - as shallow as it is - but they’re also getting a bit too common.
I think I’m probably showing my age here but probably my favourite games of all time have been Civilization, Masters of Orion 2, Constructor, Theme Hospital, Uplink, Dungeon Keeper, Dune 2, Star Wars Galaxies, Max Payne 1 and 2 & the movies.
Now that’s a pretty varied range including a lot of older games so it probably doesn’t really show me to be a favourite of any particular genre but nowdays I’m definetly inclined to play games that run at my own pace. As in I can dictate how quickly or slowly I play them.
Classic games from other computers I’ve had before PC’s that fit into this are things like Alter Ego (which I suspect Kudos is based on to an extent) and Supremacy - although that did run in real-time so doesn’t strictly count.
Basically games that make me think and aren’t either impossible to play or too bloody hard for their own good.
One of the most addictive games I’ve ever encountered is actually a really old PC game that will run on an 8mb 486 or something stupid like that and probably written in the first incarnation of Visual Basic. It’s called Gazillionaire and didn’t rely on fancy graphics, musics or clever effects. It was - like Kudos - a click on buttons and gadgets to make decisions with random events happening to make things interesting. And it was a game with a sense of humour that didn’t take itself too seriously. Another good approach I think.
To sum up I think it’s all about the idea and the implementation. A game has to be playable and compelling rather than pretty on the eyes and pleasant on the ears. I’ll take gameplay above anything and everything else any day.
Funny that everyone mentions alter ego, because I never played it, or had heard of it until half way through developing kudos. I do remember gazillionaire though, although i didnt play it much, I recall a great game on the commodore pet, i think it was called banana republic. it was like a text version of tropico / Democracy. Those were the days…
I tried Alter Ego, to be honest. I wouldn’t really call it a game. Its more like, a website which allows you to make choices, and then has the ‘games’ writer judge you based on those choices and give you ratings on what he deems to be socially acceptable or not.
The game promotes a sort of, goodie goodie attitude and rewards you for having ‘good morals’ and basically being a spineless, generic drone lacking any personality, which is what society is trying to train their kids up to be.
Yeah, that’s basically what the game was about. The website is just basically a clone of the original game which came out on the C64 on six 5 1/4 inch floppy discs back in something like 1984. It was stunningly original for its time but got boring pretty quick.
Would love to see Kudos extended to follow a longer life pattern than just 10 years like Alter Ego does but it would need to be a much bigger game for the greater content required.
Id prefer Kudos to have more features within the 10 year period, instead of a longer period - but that’s just me.
Has anyone played Master of Defence? I’ve got the demo and its a great game. I keep coming back to it, to see if I can do a ‘perfect’ run, without letting any enemies through. No game has ever made me want to play it perfectly before.
The towers are really cool and well designed, the animations when they upgrade are nice, especially when you see your tiny little Level 1 tower evolve into a Level 10 beast that shoots fire!