[QUOTE="NEStorianPriest"][QUOTE="DarkLink77"] It was a great OP, actually. Just more entertaining. ;) "let's do something that immerses us in a story while still retaining elements of gameplay we are familiar with, though are secondary to the overall experience." Gameplay is the experience. That's the whole point. Imitating other mediums doesn't push gaming in a direction I want it to go. DarkLink77
I guess you didn't read my second paragraph. Sigh.
I can always go back and play Wizardry, Mega Man, or Super Metroid. But I enjoy the experience of taking down the MAWLR in KZ3 and watching the game seamlessly blend into the cinema. It's not nearly as original, challenging or replayable as those other games, but I still manage to enjoy it as much.
Go figure.
I see you're changing what I said because you're still stuck in, 'Well, that's just your opinion," mode. Sigh. And I did read it, by the way. The best films are the ones that know how to make use of an image, of certain types of cutting, etc, because that's what makes a good movie.Best films don't follow any certain formula. Tarkovsky's Stalker is every bit as good as Bundarchuk's War and Peace, and they are two completely different kinds of film. Some films embrace symmetry and the play between light and dark, some stand on lighting paced dialogue and deep characterization. This all seems to go back to your inability to step outside of your own perspective.
Do you know how mediums evolve? Photography was stuck in a rut for a long time, because photographers were trying to imitate a painter's style with a camera.
Most people I know would argue that film has devolved because film has abandoned the concept of composition. Tarkovsky would shoot one scene, for example, with everything framed perfectly, no detail left untouched, so that the scene looked like a painting. It was the actors themselves that transformed, in a theory he called sculpting in time. So it is a combination of being influenced by japanese art, haiku and Aristotelian concepts of drama that forged the work of probably the greatest film maker who ever lived. All influences from other media which he used to evolved film making.
Books didn't come into their own until they threw off the restrictions of poetry.
Novels were called novels at the time because they were just that- not taken seriously. Poets were held in much higher esteem than novelists. Now we have V.C Andrews writing from beyond the grave. Evolution at work right there.
Films didn't begin to advance what they could do until directors started experimenting with the camera and other film techniques that are common today. No medium has ever evolved by imitating another one.
Technology is what helped films evolve, that and drawing influences from artforms from other cultures.
Games will not evolve by trying to be more cinematic.
I understand your frustration, but this is almost an absurd claim. There is no reason they can't evolve by becoming more cinematic. Should the gameplay suffer as a result? No, it shouldn't, but if it does no commandments are being broken so what's the dealio?
Interactivity is their attribute, and the sooner developers realize that, the sooner the medium will really begin to push forward in new directions.
I've been gaming since the early eighties. Really, this is not a new trend. Game development is not one straight arrow in one direction over time. It goes up and down, side to side. Some people keep doing the same thing, others try different things, then they change back again.
That's not to say that they shouldn't borrow from film in some ways. Or books, or any of that. It's a composite medium, like film is. They need to (see: cinematics) and they should, but it should not be at the expense of interactivity, because then you lose the attribute that makes a game a unique form that can do things that no media can.
I used to play D&D into the 80s. It was interactive, though it was pencil and paper. Lots of rules, lots of dice, lots of map drawing. Fast forward to the mid to late 90s, when White Wolf publishing was publishing Vampire: The Masquerade and such. They encouraged discarding the rules they themselves set forth to simulate a deep roleplay experience through acting out the "game". I knew people that got seriously injured doing this sort of thing. But it was an evolution, and a lot of people enjoyed it.
When you have a game like Uncharted that railroads you down a linear path and treats the player like a necessary inconvenience, you're limiting the power of the game. Now, that in and of itself ain't bad. But when the whole mainstream industry begins to do it (as they are now), and reviewers begin to put more emphasis on the "cinematic" elements than they do the interactive ones, it becomes an issue. The medium stagnates.
Look is doesn't stagnate. FFX did a lot of this, and I stopped playing FF games for awhile. But that doesn't mean the entire RPG genre stagnated, and I certainly didn't stop playing rpgs as a result. I think you're casting your net pretty wide when you make a statement like that. The whole medium isn't stagnating, because all games aren't doing this.
Hence the whole point of this thread. I'm not against adapting cinematic techniques into gaming. No one should be. But adapting so many that the game stops being a game and starts becoming a movie where you occasionally push X is not a good thing.
Look, I really do appreciate what you're trying to do here, and it is kinda fun, but you can do what you're doing without wonking up the history of film.
By the way, the definition of evolving is adapting to new variables and succeeding. SOunds like you may want to try to evolve as a gamer, because it doesn't sound like you're going to end up being a happy one if things don't go your way.
Seems like motion controls are too complicated for someone to grasp.
Someone hasn't played the game.
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