Then again, neither is reason number two.
This is simply that there were no games I was even remotely interested in being displayed. I really get the feeling of 'seen-one-seen-em-all' from what is on offer at the moment. I should add from mainstream gaming. That is in itself to say what now passes for mainstream.
It was always going to happen eventually, but when Games started appealing to the wider market, an inevitable slide toward formulaic fluff initiated. Much like Hollywood, the quality of a modern AAA title lays more-or-less squarely in the realms of visual fidelity over quality of gameplay and storytelling. I know it seems like a fairly generic argument, but there is a point to it, honest.
You see, in the end I did attend the show. Influenced in part by the promise of meeting up with some old friends, and the hope that there might be a hidden gem, I stepped through the doors to the expo with my critical cylinders on standby.
For 'The biggest Games Industry trade show in England' it sure was sparse. Literally and figuratively. Granted it was the Sunday but that is not the point. There were large open spaces where lonely booths stood, bordered by large plasma-screen set ups surrounded by small groups. Alright, it was a good opportunity to get my hands on some games. I sat down; I played, observed, and considered. The end result was a once more largely uninspiring experience. It was pretty much all wall to wall sequels, or franchise reboots. Only a smattering of really intriguing offerings bobbed to the surface of this stagnant pond. Some quite surprising.
Formula one was one of those games. Now I don't know jack-diddly-switch about Formula one, aside from that one of its head honchos is a gnome, and one of its former bosses had a rather public exposing as a fan of WWII themed *cough* entertainment. A friend of mine does follow the sport though and knows more than I care to find out. We both played on separate cabinets and I instantly found the game fairly difficult to get to grips with. I crashed, and span, and drew nice big tyre pictures all over the place as I struggled to actually get how to control it. Let me be clear that I am not levelling this as a criticism...quite the opposite. What little of Formula One I have seen told me that I simply didn't get how an F1 car drives. If you ever see the in-cockpit footage during a race then you will see that it is literally a battle between man, car, and physics in every corner. When I applied this principal to my driving, I found I fared better.
When I stepped away, I was thinking how much better it would be with a steering wheel. It was infact my friends first observation when he stopped playing. He was, from an F1 fans perspective, extremely pleased with what he had played. I was extremely pleased from a game design perspective. This was a game which unashamedly was what it was. It would have been easy to make this an arcade impression of F1 to appeal to a wider market, but it stuck to its guns and makes perhaps a ruthlessly exclusive gameplay experience. It is not a game I would pick up personally (maybe I’d dabble if I had a steering wheel) but I feel positive about the game for F1 aficionados. Call me warm and fuzzy.
The next game play through I ventured into was Gran Turismo 5. It immediately made me ask what they were doing for 5 years. Let me add that I have never seen the appeal of Gran Turismo, and cannot really understand the fervent support it receives from its main audience.
When I played GT4, which came out at roughly the same time as the very first Forza: Motorsport, I found the games were technically identical but instantly worlds apart from each other, much to the detriment of GT. Aside from the obvious lack of car damage (at the time), GT simply felt cold, showroom polished, and lifeless by comparison to Forza's very personal and balanced racing experience. It really is a case of the same parts creating very different pieces. Ironically, like cars themselves, these games were made totally different by the finer details. I found the career mode of Forza rich and rewarding compared to what I have always felt was a grind-fest in the Gran Turismo mode.
The lack of soul is still very much evident in GT5 and in the 5 years it has taken them to produce one title, Turn 10, the developers of Forza, have nearly reached their fourth iteration and really found a groove. Unless Polyphony Digital have really done something outstanding, the mere fact that Forza has had more release to the public in the intermediate years than GT puts them in the box seat in terms of refining features. Having played (admittedly not that thoroughly) all the previous GTs I can say I have never really felt a truly extensive improvement from one version to the next.
I would like to add I am a total believer in the 'If it ain't broke don't fix' ethos. My query here is not with the quality of the gameplay, which is generally solid, apart from the always robotic A.I. I simply wonder what they have been doing, when the gameplay is synched in, that took 5 years to do? I was left indifferent to the driving experience I understood in GT, compared to the one I struggled to comprehend initially with Formula One.
From uninspiring but admitted quality, to a simply awful game. Pro Evolution Soccer is, for all intents and purposes, as dead as its ISS predecessor. Konami have fulfilled a years-old prophecy that they would hand EA back the lead in the footy game ranks with a good few years of low quality pretenders to the throne. This year’s churn out feels like they took a bunch of world stars and placed them on the muddiest ploughed-field pitch they could find. Control is sloppy and unresponsive, feeling as though it is lurching between its old system and one it is trying to adopt. The fundamental issue of this series, for a while now, has been the absolute lack of footballing sense displayed by your A.I team mates. Things like a defence all chasing the ball, makes defending aggravating, whilst conversely your attacking players inability to make runs means attacking becomes needlessly one-dimensional. Let us not forget that the current FIFA is built, it would seem, off the basis of a long forgotten 2004 UEFA Champions League tie-in, so its own improvements lay in fairly old set ups.
Avoid Pro like the plague, or like an early 2000s FIFA game.
Now I move to what I want to call the real point of this piece. In describing what I saw gameplay wise, I have gotten off the topic I initially began with. That being that the new mainstream of games being driven by its visual power. This was never more evident than what nvidia offered up.
At last year’s Eurogamer Expo I was treated to a first-hand look and play of a game running on nvidias new 3D graphics technology, and was totally blown away by how truly pointless this all was! I spoke briefly to a programmer at SEGA, who explained that they had had the kits in their labs for a while, and had not felt it was an avenue really worth exploring, more hassle than anything else. However, a year later I found myself ready to be treated to a more mature, sophisticated technology which was sure to have found itself in the year it had had to learn from strides in 3D cinema.
I say that, but I knew already what lay ahead.
Reps from nvidia gave the assembled the super-hi-tech glasses that would propel us retina first into the breach. I thought at this point I would entertain this, as we were to be treated to a Rage demo from Tim Willits afterward; plus Willits had moments before given me a nice T-shirt, before I mistakenly took another one, in a moment of false 'but it's a different colour' confusion.
So the lights drop and a fancy nvidia logo pops up and dances a little before my eyes. I barely even notice the 3Dness and wondered what lay ahead. It kicked off with footage of 3D-Avatar:The Video Game (cos nothing says 3D like Avatar) where our lead character stands out in 20-20 clarity, whilst the entire subject of the view, the level and surrounding components, are all relegated to a hazy blur. Great Stuff!
Then they showed footage of a music video shot in glorious 3D. The big roll of bubble wrap, an incidental actor in the scene, pops out as though it is on the brink of dramatic soliloquy. It remains mute and lifeless. Great Stuff!
Then we are shown tech which can make even your pathetic holiday pictures interesting by making them 3D. Even greater stuff!
Then they tell us that we can stream and watch live TV in 3D and promptly show us a video package of a basketball game where two kids in the crowd pander to the camera, which promptly make them 3D. Only they don't appear 3D at all...they just look like they have been cut out and pulled forward a bit. When the video ended, it was met by luke-warm applause, more polite than anything else, from one corner of the room. Maybe they were nvidia employees.
You see, Humans have something which lets us see 3D...it's called depth perception.
The only thing '3D' does is force your natural ability to perceive depth in any given 2D image to break, giving you something that only advertising can tell you is '3D'. The problem lies in the fact that the image you are seeing IS 2D, the surface you see it on IS 2D. I turned to my left at the conclusion of the video and was met by a simple enough statement:
"What a load of bollocks."
The illusion of depth works on a painfully arbitrary basis. Real 3D would give you a feeling of depth which ramped back like depth does, smoothly describing the shape of the surface and its properties. If 3D gave the ability to focus on what you choose to, then I would be impressed. What I saw was more-or-less what I have come to expect from depth of field in games. These are lens effects, which have nothing to do with the eye or how it works.
So why are they pushing this so hard?
From what I can tell, we have reached something of a plateau in terms of visual quality in games. The holders of major platforms (In this I only include PS3 and X-Box 360) are looking to extend the life of their consoles, not least because of the cost of R&D on the next generation. Along with this we have the fact that producing a game of 20 hours with hi-resolution everything is also a costly business. We could get to the place we are now because of time and space saving breakthroughs offered by programmable shader technology. These have allowed us to create wildly realistic visuals in reasonable time frames. There is no such major breakthrough on the horizon; you just have to look at how the industry has positioned itself. Emphasis has moved to gimmick control schemes and now even gimmick visual tricks. This predicament comes from the emphasis placed on visual fidelity in the run up to the current generation of consoles. Just think... how many graphics cards were released in the year or two prior to the X-Box 360s launch and beyond. PC gamers were hailing things like Crysis as the next big thing solely on how it looked. Think about how we currently judge a PC made for gaming: 'Can it play Crysis on highest settings?'
We find ourselves in a position where we are going to be sold the same stuff again, only this time it will be 3D...instead of HD.
I went on the Friday and Saturday and the entire place was ridiculously crowded :P
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