Is the real evolution of gaming sleeping in the past?

At least 10 - 15 years ago, one could easily tell that every gamer was really hopeful about what was to come in the future as the end of a great gaming era was near. It is understandable that many people (especially younger gamers) would say that games back then had bad controls, primitive attempts at 3D graphics, awkward animations and similar faults, but on its core it was a very advanced phase in gaming history ruled by game design and story writing, meaning that for 50 dollars those video game aspects brought you some deep and compelling experiences that are still legendary up to this day. The problem is that somewhere along the way, everything that had been built up to that moment was just forgotten and replaced with half-baked practices. Don't get the wrong impression, gaming on this day and age is still great, but calling it an "evolution" is a little off, considering many of the things that were left behind and here are some of them.

Sad situation that happens even to the most famous of designers.

Freedom of design

The backbone of any video game is its design, it is something similar to making the layout of a stage on paper, drawing some platforms, some power ups, enemies and there you go, you have your own stage. Of course game design in the industry is not that simple, but it is as important as it has ever been. What happens with game design nowadays is that it should had stayed as it was, free. Writers and game designers make the hell of a team when they can work their ideas on a hassle-free environment, without somebody telling them that their ideas cannot be used because of some "market issue". For the writer it becomes very hard to come up with focused material if his/her ideas get blocked by the people upstairs. As for the designer itself, the time constraints, market trends and resource limitations have diminished what once was the biggest process in the making of a game and turned it in to an over-simplified version of itself.

 The making of Silent Hill 2

If you watch some "making of" documentaries about some older games, you can see how much creativity the developers poured into their projects when left loose with their creation.  These creative liberties are something that should had kept going in order for a real gaming evolution, as the creative minds would had met modern technology and would had been able to make wonders. There are some occasions in today's industry where games are designed as they should be, but you will have to look around a little in order to find them as it is not longer the rule, but the exception.

Cutscenes vs game play. Which one you prefer?

Freedom to the player

Once upon a time, seen a cutscene or CGI video was something that was seen mostly as a reward. It was that small moment you had when you saw the story line advancing along with some eye candy, all in cinematic fashion. It was the graphic artist moment to shine and we all loved it. The problem right now is that sometimes if feels like some long cutscenes should had been game play instead. At other times a "quick time event" is all that it takes to ruin the game mood and leave you feeling like you should had played through that situation instead of pressing some button combination. 

Things like these take freedom away from the player, making the game shorter and throwing away some of the thrills that would otherwise be challenging and fun. It is as if they sometimes borrow things from the "on-rails" game play style to save some time or just try too hard to make it look like a Hollywood movie. As time passes there should be more game play and not less, that is one important thing in any game that claims to be part of the gaming evolution.

Censorship should not be part of our modern world.

Freedom from cultural limitations and censorship

Cultural limitations have always existed, that cannot be denied, but for some time it seemed as if the line that divide games developed in different countries was blurring. Foreign games were trending in the west as well as American games were doing good in other places in the world regardless of topic or style. This train of cultural diversity in gaming was up and picking speed until censorship got tighter and it made it grind to a crawl. Now every game that is ready to be released suffers intense scrutiny that looks into the smallest of details in order to classify them as "not appropriate" for certain cultures. 

The acceptance of fiction for what it is has become something that the censors refuse to accept and this causes problems when a game tries to get a localization process. Along with censorship, another cultural problem is profiling. Marketing people have created this "rule" that basically profiles each region of the world and embed them to certain types of games and themes. This is also something that was at the verge of dying off, but made a comeback and (sadly for us) it is stronger than ever. It is hard to understand why haven't we parted ways with those things. Many other markets in the world have adapted to globalization, so why haven't the gaming industry done so?

The angry super "hardcore" gamer strikes again...

Freedom from ourselves

The consumer is a great part of what drives an industry and the gaming scene (that's us) is doing a poor job at it, even if it isn't entirely our fault. There was a time when a gamer's only concern was playing games and sharing experiences. At that time social networks weren't as popular, we relied a lot on magazines and word of mouth and all the tools we had as video game fans were simple, but at the same time a gamer was just a gamer, which helped to sustain an industry that was tailor made for us as gamers. Yeah, there were fan boy wars and things like that, but the community was not divided in niches, hardcore, casuals, "gamer wannabes", "real gamers", "dude bro gamers", "geeky gamers", "frikis" (in Spanish), "hipster gamers" and other labels that just seemed to turn it all into a game of factions, which gave game companies an incentive to divide the market as well and just give more attention to the "faction" that seems stronger instead of just the simple task of making games regardless of groups.

We as the consumers, got led by the marketing people into believing that we were all separated into groups, entirely working to their advantage instead of ours. Before that, they did not had a clear view of the market so that forced them to remain at a high level of quality at all times, but now they can just lay back and do whatever they want, following the easy money because they know what is trending and what is not. It is very unlikely for this to happen, but for a real gaming evolution to occur, we need to go back to been as single unit, gamers. This way we can throw a little fog of war in to the market and recover some of the advantage we had.

If some of these characters have stood the test of time, other things must as well.

Wrapping it up

In conclusion, the real gaming evolution is all about making the gaming industry to be pro gamer again. It is the return of different things that we used to have a long time ago. It is the freedom of the past + the technology of today which equals a leap in gaming that we haven't seen for a long while. Graphics get better, systems become more powerful, but the core of the gaming industry is what needs to take some things from the past in order to really move forward, anything less than that is just a new version of the same thing.

Video game releases that never come. Why does this happen?

Right now, If you can think about one or more video games that you have been waiting for since like forever, then you are one of the many that ask themselves why do sometimes some game franchises just vanish, leaving only good memories and a pile of game release rumors.

At first it may seem to be just coincidental business decisions, because like every business, video games must evolve, but if one looks a little further, one can see that almost every game company has a game (or several) that they just abandoned, even when it was a big hit money printing machine.There are many possible reasons that we can think about and we are going to see some of them along with some theoretical solutions. You will be amazed on how different it could be and how perplexing it becomes as the opposite happens.

Note: This article is just a theoretical analysis based on common sense and it does not claim to be a video game business guru. This is more just like one of those thoughtful conversations that you could have with your friends when talking about games over some slices of pizza on a gaming afternoon.

Some companies easily become the Ted Dibiase of the video game industry.

All about the Benjamins

This one is the most obvious reasons so let's get it out of the way. Some games are left in development hell because there are no financial means or financial will "to do it correctly". This happens a lot with games that were pretty ambitious at their time and were only possible because they were cheaper to do back then. By ambitious it doesn't necessarily mean giant worlds or branching game play with a lot of options. It could just mean a game with a style of game play that is complex to do (even on a linear game standard) and takes time and resources in order for it to be interesting which seems to be a problem due to rising development costs.

Solution:

They need to stop thinking about those games in terms of the latest graphics, sound and effects and just make them prettier than their original versions without making a crater on their bank account. Make it look nice enough, but focus on building upon the game play that the game already had. So in summary, the solution is to re-route resources to the core elements of the game itself instead of the visuals and technical aspects. The fans will not mind if the game doesn't look like the a graphic powerhouse, they just want to continue the story, enjoy its game play and just have fun. Gamers fell in love with their creation, meaning story, characters and game play and not its polygons and resolution. An example of this is the new Legend of Zelda for the Wii U that was shown on this year's E3. The game looks gorgeous even on a platform that has a lot less power than the other rival consoles.

A quote that seems kind of hard to accept nowadays.

Change for the sake of change

This one came like a wave that drowned many of the previous fan favorite game franchises, specially between the DC/PS2/GC/Xbox and the PS3/Xbox360/Wii generations. Be it because of a change of president, CEO, owner, etc, some companies dumped great gaming franchises just because they did not fit into their new philosophy even if the game was almost guaranteed to be successful up to that point. Others killed franchises by changing them so much that they became rejected, thus turning them into franchises that did not sold copies anymore. The worst thing is that at the end of the road the blame is put on game itself and not the decisions made by the game company. It's like an army blaming a soldier for a blunder caused by something they ordered him to do. Change is good, but not every time. Sometimes it is best to not try to fix what is not broken.

Solution:

For them to explore the notion of NOT abandoning money making franchises just because they have an urge to make things different for the fun of it. The best thing to do is to assign small teams to make those games while keeping moderate production values and changing formats if needed (digital is cheaper). Make a study of where the fans of that game are lingering and aim for that, followed by clever marketing strategies, viral advertising and a good dose of screen time that could attract new crowds, specially on the web. Take for instance what Square Enix did with Bravely Default. The game was released on handheld where development is cheaper, but carried everything that their JRPG games are known for and became a great success that even changed the philosophy that the company had at the moment.

Moral of the story: Do not play with your fan's feelings.

Games held as trump cards

Some companies give the impression that they know they have a wanted game on their hands, but they sit on it because they expect to use it at a later time if needed. So they hold the game for a long time, limiting themselves to make small announcement and comments just to keep the fans happy and speculating. They let some "leaks" to go public and spawn some articles on the gaming media or maybe make a reference to the game on some random interview, all done with the purpose of keeping the game alive on stasis, sort of like Han Solo frozen in carbonite.

Solution

They need to realize that freezing or delaying a game is something that will only work for 3-5 years tops. Games that go longer than that away from the spot light start to fade, as gamers take refuge in other games and little by little lose interest in the original idea, up to the point when they can begin to see it as something "passe" and just plain ignore it when it finally comes out. This is the case of franchises like Duke Nukem and even the notorious Daikatana in the 90's. If they need to take a temporary break from a franchise, that is understandable, but coming out of the blue with a 10 year old concept and expecting gamers to go crazy over it would be like leaving a lover and saying "I will be back later" then come back 10 years after and expect that person to be single and waiting for you, it just doesn't work that way. So the bottom line is... If history has told us that something doesn't work then why do it?

War never changes, not even on the office.

A civil war of games 

This is one very theoretical reason, but quite possible if one takes into account how humans think. It is in human nature to protect our own things and with video game new I.P's (Intellectual Property) it isn't any different. New developers and rising talents will want to bring their ideas to the table and will most likely repel anything that means them living under the shadow of a successful franchise from the past. One example is the rumored problems that Hideo Kojima was having with the team assembled to create a new Zone of the Enders game as the group was not following his vision and this ended with Kojima losing interest in the project which is now dead. So things been like this mean that newer designers and project managers will try to influence the company into making new things, their things instead of building upon the already established. It is a natural instinct, but it is not always productive.

Solution

To be mindful of each of their employees on the creative/development department and see what are their influences and vision as game developers. Be sure to put the right people in the right projects. Do some assessments to get to know the members of their company and see how they react to different development options. Also get their strongest developers to feel comfortable with what they are doing and see how they influence those around them. Then when they finally have a profile of each of the members of their development team, they can assign teams more efficiently and have an all around better working environment which will make games to turn out better and be developed faster and with greater passion. Otherwise it would be a random affair, like putting plumbers to work as clothing designers.

Some of our childhood heroes are not there as we knew them anymore.

The heroes of the past been long gone

This one is all about the passing of time. As years come and go, some of the great developer teams that made some of our favorite games are little by little disbanding or changing. Other times, big-time developers retire or go into making their own developing studios for various reasons (some of them included in the things previously mentioned). Like Team Silent (original Silent Hill development team) disbanding,  Hironobu Sakaguchi (original Final Fantasy creator) forming his own team with Mistwalker, Shinji Mikami (Resident Evil creator) going solo with The Evil Within, Keiji Inafune (Mega Man's creator) leaving Capcom and even Koji Igarashi (Castlevania creator) leaving Konami in order to make games he wants to make without creative constraints and limitations.

Solution

The masterminds behind games can easily move to greener pastures, but sadly the franchises can't as they are property of the company itself, so what it would be good thing to do is for the game companies to publish the game, but lease the development of that game to its previous creator so that the game keeps its potential and both parties profit from the deal. It is something that will be barely noticed by gamers and all the popularity and loyal following the game has will be left unchanged, making it a win-win situation for everybody. In the case that the artist is not available any more, the best course of action would be to study his creation and come up with a game that feels fresh, but is true to its roots.

Wrapping things up

If you have a game that you crave as a fan, but never see it released, that game could pretty much be part of any of the situations previously explained. The industry is a hard place and the battle between business and creativity still rages on. As gamers, the least we can do is use our greatest weapon which is the net and show the gaming companies that these games are wanted and still mean business. If it worked for the Mass Effect 3 ending and made Microsoft backpedal from of their notorious policies, it could also work to see your favorite game franchises brought back to life.

Become the cavalry!

Don't just reminisce about the games, become active!

Here are some links to communities/petitions you can join/sign to help in the effort of bringing some lost games back to life:

100,000 Strong for Bringing Back Mega Man Legends 3

Operation: Akumajo (Castlevania Demon War)

Final Fantasy VII Remake Request

The Last Guardian Petition: Make Toriko fly

Shenmue 3 500K: All Fans Needed

Various miscelaneus video game petitions