The state of gaming in 2006

I'm totally unimpressed with the state of gaming these past few years. Allow me to explain.

I've been playing FPS type games since Wolfenstein. No, not Wolfenstein 3D, the original one that could fit on a floppy. I've seen Doom 1 & 2 come and go, all the various Quakes, Half-Life 1 and all of its mods. It was great back then. When you got a game, you were pretty much assured it'd run on your PC, and you didn't have to worry about the fact that next year the sequel will be out and nobody else will be playing it anymore. I never even spared a thought about any of that. Sure, Doom 1 was a bit slow on the old 386, but it ran fine overall and graphically looked the same no matter what you played it on.

Back in the day, if someone made a custom map for Quake or HL1, and they did a messy job of it so that it ran sluggishly on low-end computers, people blamed the person who made the map for his sloppy work. Nowadays if someone makes a game that runs slowly on an older system, and that person should dare complain, people laugh at them and mock them for not upgrading "when they should have", as if you can't be a "gamer" at all unless you get a new uber-PC every year.

Let me use my favourite example. Doom 3. I think that's pretty much when all of this madness started in the first place. I remember a leaked demo of Doom 3 being showed off at a LAN back in 2001 or somewhere around there... the guy had a Geforce 2 card or something, and was getting about one frame per second. That's all fine and dandy, Doom 3 was still a long way from release. When I got to play the full version, I had an XP2000+ with a Radeon 9500 and 384MB of RAM. It ran like utter crap on my system, even on very tweaked, ultra-low settings. That's to be expected, right? Then how about this: Unreal Tournament 2004, on high detail, reasonable resolution, runs very smooth, and get this: it LOOKS ten times better than Doom 3 did on those low settings I used.

Who cares? Exactly my point! Nobody cares! The gaming industry has turned "gamers" into upgrade-whores, drooling over the fancy graphics of new games every year, spending ludicrous amounts of cash on new hardware every year. Who's winning? Not the gamers. Not the people who would choose fun games that last long over fancy graphics. They're losing out. It's made me sick to the point that I don't even WANT to be called a 'gamer' anymore. I don't want to have anything to do with all these new games anymore. I know none of them will last long - sequels are basically like advertisements for new hardware masquerading as games. New features? Improvements? Oh, sure, sometimes they do add those. Half-Life 2 was quite clever about that. The updated graphics and physics actually served a point in HL2. Maybe Valve still cares.

I'm not even going to start ranting about Crysis, because all I've seen are movie clips and screenshots. So far it looks like Far Cry, just with 'better' graphics that will probably crawl on every system that currently exists. Quad-SLI might stand a chance though, but who knows.

The saddest part of all of this is, it seems that 'gamers' nowadays even enjoy seeing their current uber-hardware get raped badly by new games, they still drool and go "Oooh! I'm SO gonna upgrade for that!". I remember when F.E.A.R. was still pretty new, one hardware reviewer said something along the lines of: "This game pretty much rapes all high-end cards, but that's the way we like it!". Why? I played the F.E.A.R. demo, it didn't look all that different graphics-wise from HL2 if you ask me, and HL2 runs a helluva lot faster in general. Sloppy code? Perhaps. More like they made it run slowly on purpose so that the game would be more popular - because everyone gets a kick out of seeing their expensive hardware suffer these days.

Every time a new game comes out I think to myself: "Games really don't need to ever look better than this. They can stop now. Really.". UT2004, does it really need to look better than that? UT2004 actually had crisper textures than MOST newer games today even have. Go, start 'em all up one by one and go look at the walls up close. See what I mean? Who needs a million polygons when one well-made texture will make it look awesome without sacrificing all that much speed.

Wouldn't it be great if you set a new game's graphics settings down, they look more like last year's games high settings, instead of looking worse than something from 5 years ago? C'mon - even Quake 3 on high looks better than Doom 3 on low.

But they won't do that, will they? It's more profitable to make it look awesome only on high settings, to be sure that as few people as possible will be satisfied running it on lower detail. They WANT you to upgrade. They probably get paid by nVidia or ATI to "convince" people to upgrade more often. Ever see those nVidia logos that show up in most games these days? Do you think the people who made the game would put that in there if they didn't get anything out of it?

Still not convinced that they make games run slowly on purpose? Fine. Go upgrade now. Get 4 GeForce 7900GTX's or whatever. Then cry in 6 months time and buy 4 of whatever the hell else is the next thing to drool over. See if I care. I'll just keep on playing GTA: San Andreas, a game that looks good, runs well, and is one of the most fun games I've played in years. I hope some game designer out there is taking notes.