The future of gaming looked bright when saw games like Freelancer, Half Life 2, FEAR, Crysis etc. Sadly, it seems like today Game industry is too much focused on copying big games instead of coming up with something original.Original Half Life brought real time story telling in FPS that became a standard for video games to follow. On other hand, its sequel took things to a whole new level. The way NPCs react to your presence, the way they talk to you or respond to certain situations was ground breaking.
Valve even worked with specialists to achieve realistic facial expressions of HL 2 characters in different situations and smooth transition between different facial animations. Max Payne 2 that released in 2003 (one year before Half Life 2) brought environments to life. It was one of the first (if not the first) games to have realistic environment physics.
But later Half Life 2 took environment interaction to a whole new level and enabled players to play with objects. You could carry different items with the gravity gun, use them to make a way, or block enemies' path. You could even use them as a weapon and kill enemies by throwing these objects. These were small features that should've been standard for any game to follow but sadly that isn't the case.
Then just one year after that we got FEAR on PC (ported later to consoles). FEAR was a benchmark game for high end PCs. On maxed out settings that game still looks good. It featured great destructible environments and dynamic storytelling.
However, Artificial Intelligence was one thing for which FEAR is still remembered these days. Unlike other shooters like Call of Duty, enemies in FEAR do not charge at you like mindless drones, and even The Last of Us had this problem in 2013. Instead, they try their best to flank you, flush you out of cover, take cover, suppress you and so on.
Then we entered 2007 and played the next big thing aka Crysis. That game was considered as a huge milestone. Great AI, Beautiful visuals, Huge Maps, Non Linear Gameplay, Realistic looking characters, Destructible enviornments and so on.
People expected upcoming games to look at least as good as Crysis and have its features as a standard for upcoming games.
Crysis was almost as impressive as Half Life 2 was back in 2004. A lot of people were comparing it to Modern Warfare (mainly those who weren't able to play Crysis for some reason) and arguing that how Modern Warfare is a better "Game". In fact, Crysis was a lot superior to Modern Warfare and I loved Modern Warfare a lot.
And now here we are in 2014. It's been years since Crysis first came out. My question is, why we haven't seen something revolutionary like FEAR, Half Life 2 or Crysis for years? We keep hearing from publishers that games are becoming expensive to make and they just spent 100+ million dollars on X Game. Then why we are not seeing innovation on a big scale despite millions of dollars being spent on those games?Seems like most of the budget is for marketing and gameplay wise we are left with a corridor shooter full of QTEs and scripted events.
Hell, even Crysis sequels were not as good as original game was. Who should be blamed? Should we blame yearly releases, that have taught devs to make money easily without working hard? Why there is no game to give us better enemy AI than what it was in FEAR? I don't agree with people who say we've hit the wall. No we haven't because there is plenty of room to improve. On other hand, very few games that try something different are overlooked by people and press never covers them.Instead, today we have a biased gaming journalists who take cash to promote yearly rehashes.
Right now the only two games that make excited for the possibilities are Star Citizen and Witcher 3. Do you think one of these games will be able to become next Crysis? And what are the reasons for game industry to become worse than what it was before? What do you guys think?
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