Co-Opp

We all love the top of the line graphics and excellent voice work that you find in games today, unfortunately that progress has had it’s own unique effect on game design and is the exact reason you don’t see games with the amounts dialogue and background as games like Baldur’s Gate or Planescape Torment. The reason behind this is pretty simple; time and money are at a premium in any business and implementing a large amount of dialogue costs both. Animations are more complex and often require the use of expensive mo-cap systems, there is an out cry if every single line of dialogue is not voiced (See Dragon Age: Origins which attracted criticism for not voicing the PC’s lines).

What this means for developers is that every extra option they put in for the player to do something a different way costs a lot more money than back when Black Isle were producing some of the greatest RPG’s to ever be produced, so every one has to be justified within the main story and random encounters are discouraged. Sadly this has caused a considerable deterioration in the quality of series like Final Fantasy (Compare the complexity and depth of a game like FFIX to a FFXIII) and an overall decrease in the playtime of pretty much every single player game on the market because you just cant afford to animate, design and voice a 100 extra hours of sidequests.

The other big detriment that all this technology has on game development is in reducing innovation from the big developers, its hard to justify to shareholders and investors risking millions of dollars on an untested IP or a new game play style when you can be like Activision and push out pretty much the same game every year like they do with the Call of Duty series. Fortunately it does have its advantageous side in that with the advent of digital distribution options reducing the cost of entry into the market Indie developers have been able to push into these niches with games which while not looking as pretty as Crysis or Final Fantasy XIII give you something new and refreshing to enjoy (See games like Audiosurf and Magicka).

There are however some great pieces of work on the horizon like LA Noire from Team Bondi that are making the games industry a much more varied and interesting space and bending the lines between Novel, Movie and Video Game because of technology.

L.A. Noire

It has allowed them to bring real life and emotion to the characters through an amazing technology called Motion Scan to capture the expressions of real people, however as you can see while the game looks good, they have obviously sacrificed top end graphics to push more resources in to telling the story.

Progress is a great thing, I just wish more developers knew when they didn’t need the latest and greatest technology and shifted the resources to other parts of the product instead.