Opinion: Has Gaming Stagnated?

The newest issue of Game Informer includes a lengthy look at the new Unreal Engine 4, with Epic disclosing their expectations for its lifespan being a decade long. Is this a good thing? Or is it an indication of the sorry state of recycled AAA titles and the diminishing ambition to innovate left in our biggest publishers?

For years now I've noticed my excitement for new games - and the gaming world in general - begin to slide, with new releases never achieving the same level of nerdgasm I once felt. I put this down to growing up - I wasn't going to be a kid forever and part of becoming an adult was the expectation that I wouldn't care for silly little games any more. But is it really that simple? Gaming's always been my most loved past time, and most of my time is still put into it, so why would I start to feel more distant from the games I once loved? Well, that's the thing. I didn't. The games I grew up with through my teenage years, the ones that instilled such emotion and passion within me still DID rekindle those levels of excitement. It was just the current crop of titles that left me feeling so dry. But why?

LOOK AT THE BOREDOM IN HIS EYES. LOOK AT THEM.

It's no secret the current generation of consoles has been the longest ever, and PC gaming has been heavily affected by that. At the end of the 90s and into the new millennium, PC gaming was a completely separate entity. You wouldn't find new console releases on PC, and vice versa. The PC was allowed to evolve without restriction, and it flourished. To stay up to date with the latest technical enhancements, you really had to buy a new graphics card at least every two years, and consider a full upgrade to the newest processor architecture every three. The games were taking advantage of this, with previews of next year's releases taking your breath away, consistently being a substantial upgrade and raising the bar of what you expected from games.

I know what you're thinking, "Graphics alone don't make games good you pathetic little cretin!". Hey! Calm down! Where did that come from, man? Not cool. I know graphics aren't everything, but they're an excellent guideline for tracking the progress of the medium. Better tech and fancier graphics brings with it more investment and hard graft, proving the dedication and love of the industry. At the root of this of course is the massive boost in popularity gaming has achieved. Oh, and the money it brings. Yes, mostly the money. Why bother having to write completely new code on new, bespoke engines for every iteration of your game, when you can simply churn out the same game each time for a fraction of the cost and shovel the rest of the cash into world-consuming advertising campaigns?

Even when new IPs are announced, they rarely come with brand new tech or ideas, and will use a modified version of an existing engine instead. This results in them all having the same general feel. It's not hard to identify the engine a new game uses - with the iconic brown, motion blur saturated visuals of Unreal Engine 3 instantly obvious - resulting in a subconscious familiarity with a brand new game, stealing away those initial moments of surprise that in the past would take your breath away. I can still enjoy the games if they're well made, but there's never that feeling that what you have in your hands is a small fragment of the future.

He's just been told there are 9 Call of Duty games

So hearing that Unreal Engine 4 is going to be what you'll probably see in well over 50% of titles over the next 10 years is depressing. I'm sure the first two or three will be exciting, as developers start to figure out its secrets and flashy new internals (the UE4 dev kit is said to be released "soon"), but they'll soon find the cheapest, quickest way to implement most of its features and then stand a brick on the 'Copy FOREVER' button and call it a day, as the shareholders high five each other while drinking the blood of aborted foetuses. (That's the appropriate level of evil, right?). Meanwhile, PC will once again be crippled by the limitations of its underachieving classmates. The genius kid with bags of potential, and an unquenchable thirst to learn, constricted and forgotten because the teacher is transfixed on getting the misbehaving, popular kids at the back of the class involved, emphatically denying they have no future.

I'd love to see the PC break away from consoles again and no longer even have the same multi-format titles developed for it, but with the popularity of consoles now I worry that may mean a massive reduction in the amount of titles we see. PC exclusive developers are really only Indie studios now, and even a lot of them are developing their games for consoles after the coming of age of LIVE arcade and PSN (Notch announced that the 360 release of Minecraft was profitable within 1 hour).

E3 starts tomorrow and I look forward to it as ever, but I'm certainly not giddy with excitement as I once have been. I know it will be the same IPs showing off their new sequels, looking the same as ever for now. I pray that Microsoft and Sony's flat out denials of showing any new hardware are disgusting, downright lies, and they will actually show the new generation of consoles, but that would be incredibly optimistic which isn't my style. Until they do though, the PC will continue to suffer, and more importantly gaming as a whole, as we see the same AAA and soon to be AAAA (I'm interested to see how long they keep this going for, 2035 = AAAAAAAAAA?) titles chain birthed out of our sluttiest publishers.

Thanks to Neogaf and vg247 for UE4 related news

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