"Quality of programming has gone down"

S

spicey

Supreme [H]ardness
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I came across this, Jon Hare of Cannon Fodder, Wizball and Sensible Soccer fame lambasts 'Americanised' games industry. I have to say having read his comments he has made some very good points. It left me asking myself, where will the next Bullfrog come from? Perhaps we'll never see small dedicated development teams again which is sad and the majority of the original ideas come from such environments.

http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=180045&site=cvg
 
Yea, it's true. There used to be so many great developers in Europe releasing awesome games, but now... I see big ass companies releasing games that totally suck, hate it.
 
lol you guys dont have a clue how teh industry works. what makes a game great is not the programers. its the people who design it. us programers do exactly what they the desigenrs tell us to do
 
jonneymendoza said:
lol you guys dont have a clue how teh industry works. what makes a game great is not the programers. its the people who design it. us programers do exactly what they the desigenrs tell us to do
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Thats what I always thought, but what is said in that link isn't entirely wrong, I think. With the big teams and projects people have, its more than likely harder to be close to your worker and gain trust and find out how someone works. That may or may not transfer into the game programming and end up not how the designer wanted it.

Just what I think, I don't actually have any experience with the actual thing.
 
I think the exponentially larger complexity of modern games is part of it as well.

Also, the scale of the industry along with corporate consolidation have likely increased pressure on developers to crank their games out. Not to mention the fact many must be released on multiple significantly different platforms simultaneously.

There are very high quality products being released, though. From the likes of Nintendo and Valve and such.

I'm not sure if the signal to noise ratio has really decreased all that much IMHO. There's always been more than enough broken garbage, be it E.T. or Hour of Victory.

I suppose maybe good games are a tad buggier on average but I think that goes back to the increased complexity of them and changes in the industry.
 
jonneymendoza said:
lol you guys dont have a clue how teh industry works. what makes a game great is not the programers. its the people who design it. us programers do exactly what they the desigenrs tell us to do
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I don't have enough fingers to count the number of games that've been held back, gameplay-wise, due to programming-related obstacles, and not the kind of obstacles that are a function of the language itself.

Can't even spell 'programmers', but somehow you are one? Right.
 
phide, Who cares if jonneymendoza can't spell, as long as his syntax is correct? ;)
 
It is all about the Concepts, not the programming. Look at Guitar Hero. The concept was genius.

The problem is that the concepts are coming from focus group MBA types, i.e. soul-less suits trying to turn a quick profit.
 
I don't think there is always a single point of failure in game dev, instead it's probably a combination of things that contribute to the problem, of course some more than others..
 
jonneymendoza said:
lol you guys dont have a clue how teh industry works. what makes a game great is not the programers. its the people who design it. us programers do exactly what they the desigenrs tell us to do
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Yeah well it used to be where the designer and the programmer was one in the same. The bigger the team the more idiots.
 
Heh, another "get off my lawn" post from an aging gamer. I'm not atari/colecovision age, but I forged my way starting from Nintendo and up and I manage to enjoy gaming.

It's no miracle, I prefer to enjoy things instead of hate on them all day. There have /always/ been shit games out there and I've played my share. You just learn to choose more carefully and not waste time on games once you decide you don't like them.

Look. Game design in the past was HORRIBLE if you take good hard look at them. "Continue" was not always an option beyond the power switch. Hell it wasn't even offered past death in many cases. Adds longevity? You can start new games from a fresh save too, they just don't FORCE you to load from mass effect's intro everytime you run out of health. There were definitely innovative and groundbreaking ideas in the past but the vast majority are no longer innovative and groundbreaking, they are at or below status quo since others have since paid their compliments through imitation.

Game design isn't like a game, where prototypes are somehow always more powerful than the new (and likely eeeevil) versions.:rolleyes: Prototypes get improved on. There's still crap but the crap tends to fail and self-terminate in favor of the good trends, it's the evolution of games over time. You want to take the good parts of the past and add to it, and failing to be new isn't necessarily failure so long as you don't fall below your personal bar.

I can load up a game and /play with other people/. I can /talk/ to them. I can even do it without entering a long incomprehensible code(though some companies failed to learn this lesson after close to twenty years...*cough*NINTENDO*cough*).

Play a good game. Play Smash Bros! Jeezus, play Portal. Low-quality programming my ass. It's just elitist mental-masturbation to assume you're from the golden age of videogaming where everything was just somehow better because it was "back in my day". Gaming can often take 3 steps forward and 2 steps back. You can get a mixed bag. I'll tell you right now, I thought Gears of War's art was horrendously bad(I have fun with the game anyway though). The technical achievement was great but the art was thoroughly generic, forgettable, and unimaginative. Everybody has the same enormous proportions and composed of the same boring color schemes. Locust and Cogs are the same shape, size, and color. The level of detail put in was amazing, but too bad they didn't put in the same amount of imagination. War-torn battlefield/city? Right, we've never been there before. But I'm not saying new games don't have any style. Katamari damacy had an extremely low poly rate, mostly square blocks, but the look was intentional and definitely distinctive. Okami? Again, definitely had big style points. Y'know, I'll even give style points to TF2's multiplayer-centered art design where the shapes and lines of silhouettes served the practical purpose of speeding up target recognition on the fly, independent of color!

I still have my old nintendo games, I just tossed them in the attic because I already enjoyed them and I'm ready to take on the new stuff. Many incidentally, are also nintendo games, just for the new system:D
 
yes there was a time where programmers also design the stuff they are doing but not any more in some places
 
Not to get off topic..

I do agree with the majority of your post kelbear, but people have a tendency to disregard time as a major variable when these “bitter gamer” posts come up. I don't think it's necessarily in good judgment to look at older games with your viewpoint from today. When yesteryear games came out they were so uniquely different and challenging. Different genres of play were coming every few years - which is now, for the most, stagnant. I'm not saying you cannot tell it like it is, but the feeling of a game during its initial release, or shortly thereafter, is where I think judgment is more sound. *But, judging older things with newer knowledge is where the innovation comes from.
 
The bigger problem is the release of good games that the developer refuses to fix. I won't mention names (EA cough cough) but titles like Tiger Woods 2008 for the XBox are GREAT titles, but have debilitating bugs (servers, course camera issues, etc...) that they refuse to fix, and make you wait for the next $60 version which, of course, has other different bugs that will never be fixed.

Software should be required to have a warranty IMHO. No more of this "works substantially as advertised" crap.
 
kelbear said:
Low-quality programming my ass. It's just elitist mental-masturbation to assume you're from the golden age of videogaming where everything was just somehow better because it was "back in my day".
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You, my "young" friend, put that very, very well and hit the proverbial nail right on the head with a ten-ton sledge hammer.

That exact mentality is what keeps people, with many things in their lives, stuck in a mental perspective that keeps them from enjoying anything new that they might actually get enjoyment from.

Yes, I'm "old school" with a lot of things, but because there are many things from "before" that are indeed far better than "now", with a different variety of things, forms of media etc. But, of course, I'm wise enough to be completely open to anything and everything new and improved, and actually am always hoping for it, to have something more to "feed" me.

Unfortunately, the "bad programming" issue seems to be just an excuse to bash the new, for the sake of "living in" the old. But, in truth, you cant deny that as technology progresses and it's becoming easier to create games, that too many people just "blast them out" these days, which is why we're flooded with the barrage of games that we are, and most of them are not memorable.

And, to further expand upon my point...

Master Blaster said:
*But, judging older things with newer knowledge is where the innovation comes from.
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...another very wise statement.

People in general, no matter what their medium of expression, could take a lesson from the past, in the fact that today too much of the human race is extremely dead emotionally etc. to create anything with any actual depth or aesthetic.

People have to reconnect with themselves to be able to really feel, and go back and get into something (to use a specific genre/situation) like Resident Evil II, and the incredible aesthetic that had, both "back in the day" as well as today. Great ambient sound and musical score, excellent direction and how scenes unfolded and played-out etc. Take those things and "reawaken" them within themselves today and start creating content that really has some memorable aesthetic.

Unfortunately, the concept of "today's shit sucks" applies to just about everything, including music, my most personal form of expression. "Back in the day", so much music released actually "had something to it", but these days...? Any fool can pick up an instrument, start a band, and further pollute the airwaves with the same old lifeless shit.

So, it's true... one should not live in the past and be open to the present and future, but perhaps much of the human race should take lessons from the past, when, you have to admit, many more things had much more to them than all of the shit we're constantly bombarded with in the present... with a few exceptions all-around, of course.
 
Someone make a Flying Carpet remake already! More than a decade went by and maybe 2-3 games have deformable terrain. How pathetic is that?

Anyway, it's true that back in the day, programmers were much better, but also it was because they had less to work with. Now NO ONE can even max out the quad-core and console CPUs so games are extremely inefficient and don't use up nearly as much of the computing power they should be using.

Not only that but games are getting bigger and bigger and few people even try to find better compression methods to keep file sizes down or ways of using efficient procedular textures (which can be infinitely detailled unlike texture maps). These days developers throw as many large textures and maps as they can around and if the game gets too demanding or takes up too much space they just wait for new hardware to come out so it can run it. No one tries to be efficient anymore since big companies only care about getting the game out the door as fast as possible.

I'm sure some of you have seen or heard of 64k demos (ie, http://www.theproduct.de). Using smart, efficient programming, they can create animations and even entire 3D games with great graphics that only take up a few kilobytes. Game companies don't even try those things. They just do whatever's easier and faster, regardless of how inefficient it is and they rarely try to do anything really new and innovative. (that's why so many engines are so similar and generally have the same features)
 
Oh come on. There are still some amazing European developers out there.

Crytek created the most visually impressive game to date, and it's very scalable on top of that! It might not run blisteringly fast, but it will be the benchmark for all games for a while.
Media Molecule seems to be doing some amazing things with LittleBigPlanet.
Critereon did a great job on Burnout as well.
Have you seen what Guerilla Games is doing with Killzone 2?

In America we have Insomniac, who are probably the most talented development team out there, pushing out one visually impressive AAA title a year. Naughty Dog did an amazing job on Uncharted as well. Infinity Ward did a hell of a job with CoD4 as well, bringing out the first truly great multiplatform product of the generation.

Epic also did an amazing job by bringing out Gears in mid 2006, and the current UE3 engine seems to be quite capable and performant (though I personally do not like the artstyle in any UE3 game).

In Japan there are some other talented developers as well.

Capcom just proved that you can make a visully impressive multiplatform game, that runs at a blistering 60fps. Devil May Cry 4 <3.
Polyphony Digital has created probably the most photorealistic game of all with Gran Turismo 5 Prologue (which should even be improved when the full game comes out).

---------

Sure there's crap games and a lot of shovelware, but generally I think we've seen some incredibly impressive things this year. Uncharted was, I think, the most visually impressive game of the year (yeah I know Crysis is more realistic looking and all, but the art style and art direction in Uncharted are far beyond, IMO).
 
I really don't see where he's coming from here.

We still have great people coming up with great games. Chris Taylor, Sid Meier, Will Wright...these guys are famous because their games AREN'T driven by corporate greed.

Even "buggy" games like Company of Heroes generally suffer bugs in reference tables (units doing too much damage to other units, accuracy multipliers being wrong, that sort of thing) and rarely have actual programming problems.
 
i think you are all missing the point. in the early days, game programming was "art". Now, it's become a commodity and game programming is just "labor" -- the same as making cheap pants in a chinese sweatshop.
 
kelbear said:
Heh, another "get off my lawn" post from an aging gamer. I'm not atari/colecovision age, but I forged my way starting from Nintendo and up and I manage to enjoy gaming.
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I'm not here to promote the old school but most innovations were made then, now it's stuff sligthly redone.

However what I meant is the designer usually doesn't even know anything about Computer Science and programming and will usually slow down the process.

It is always better to have a team of 10 smart people rather then a team of 2 smart ones and 200 idiots. (Which is what is happening now, not just with gaming companies but programming in general)
 
I would put the blame on the designers over the programmers. Sure the programmers have become lazier with faster and bigger(Hard drive) computers. But in most companies and especially in EA, the programmers do what the Designers/Suits tells them. Whereas before you had smaller teams and the programmers were the designers. That spirit still exists in a few developers such as valve and blizzard and it shows.
 
zmjone2992 said:
syntax=spelling...... I know it was a joke (or so I hope).

Sistem.out.println('Spelling is pretty fucking important");:D
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It was a joke, a poor one at that. But I couldn't resist.

And it was a post on a message board, as long as you understand what was being said, who cares. I get slightly annoyed with people that throw a fit and challenge other people's intellectual value or honesty over a minor spelling error.

back on topic. The size and complexity of games and the hardware we run them on has increased a great deal from the past. It is a lot easier to QC the code on a game that comes in under 300 megs than it is one that comes in over 3gigs. But yeah, pubs are pushing shit out the door b4 it is done more often now. And the level of completion seems to be sliding back further along the development curve every year.
 
jonneymendoza said:
lol you guys dont have a clue how teh industry works. what makes a game great is not the programers. its the people who design it. us programers do exactly what they the desigenrs tell us to do
Click to expand...

Yep, that's why programmers are called code monkeys and the graphics artists pixel pushers. Still, there are some game designers who do the programming and artwork too. It usually shows too as a jack-of-all trades is not usually good in all areas required.
 
ex0du5 said:
Sure there's crap games and a lot of shovelware, but generally I think we've seen some incredibly impressive things this year.
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I agree but that doesn't mean they're good programmers. Games might look and play great but why aren't any of them using all CPU cores or even close to it? Why don't they come up with any new compression methods and ways of making games run faster not slower? With older 3D games, programmers would come up with new ideas all the time...now we're just seeing better-looking games, sometimes with better AI, but none are optimized as well as they should be, none take full advantage of today's tehnology (multi-core processors mostly...keep in mind the consoles have 6-7 cores and we have 2-4 on the PC side) and few, if any, bring anything new to the table. Programmers don't try to be more efficient than before anymore. They mostly rely on faster hardware to run their games better.

milkweg said:
Yep, that's why programmers are called code monkeys and the graphics artists pixel pushers. Still, there are some game designers who do the programming and artwork too. It usually shows too as a jack-of-all trades is not usually good in all areas required.
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Yeah, the indie ones especially. The thing is when you work on a 20 million dollar game with 150 workers you just can't do graphics and programming for an entire game all by yourself. I sometimes still play Quake 3 and look at the short list of credits. They had like 5-10 people who did all the graphics and Quake 3 still has some of the best character model textures I've ever seen (look at the texture files sometimes). Much better than the ones in Doom 3, Quake 4, ETQW, etc. which mostly rely on normal maps for detail.
 
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