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And what do hardcore gamers appear to want, as evidenced by sales numbers and – of course – cheers? More of the same. But bigger. Like, with more dudes and cooler guns. Oh, and graphics! Don’t forget those. Never forget those. Don’t worry, though; E3 delivered in spades.
My favorite bit occurred when Sony announced its new worst kept secret ever motion controller, and immediately proceeded to shy away from innovative, interesting uses for the bleeding-edge tech, instead opting to show us how it could be used for a – you guessed it – first-person shooter.
But what else would Sony have demoed its take on the waggle wand with, you ask? Surely not casual games, you probably wince, as the words dance through your Mountain Dew-hardened hardcore body like some kind of foreign virus. Well, to be perfectly honest, yeah – I’d have been much happier if most companies hadn’t treated their casual titles like attic-dwelling high school dropouts who don’t even get a place on the family Christmas card.
At least casual gamers haven’t been “solved” yet. Hardcore gamers are two parts FPS, one part RTS, one part Action, with sequels scattered liberally throughout, but casual gamers aren’t so easy. So long as non-gamers and casual gamers still exist, developers and publishers will have to try. Creativity and new ideas are the only way to lure in potential buyers who, thus far, have proved impervious to the industry’s advances. And for now, I’m thinking tiny timewasters and other games typically dismissed as casual fare will provide the best – and maybe only -- glimpses of novel gameplay ideas we’ll get from big, triple-A publishers. Which is a huge shame, because whether you like their games or not, those big-name studios are bursting with talent, a resource that – unlike the bland tastes of the hardcore gamer – isn’t being adequately mined.
Maybe when (if?) the economy is resuscitated back into stable condition, big-budget games might get a new infusion of creativity, but even then, companies like money. So long as we keep spending, they’ll keep dishing out the same stale goods. But beyond that unlikely avenue, is there hope? Perhaps. Maybe, due to increasing development costs, major publishers will eventually scale back development anyway, hopefully leading to more innovation. Or maybe this is the beginning of the fabled Indie Revolution, where indie games become our only source of innovative nourishment while multimillion dollar corporations, well, do exactly as I outlined in this article. Who knows?
All I can say for sure is this: Hardcore gaming as it is now – at least, in the eyes of big-name publishers – is caught in a big, uninteresting loop. Companies have solved the hardcore gamer puzzle, and now they’re receiving their monetary prize. Hardcore gamers, from what I can tell, couldn’t be happier.
Man, getting exactly what you purportedly want really sucks.
Comments are closed on this article
the_crowbar
June 17, 2009 at 10:28am
I completely agree with the article. As far as the term hardcore goes, I simply see it as a way to distinguish between games like "Stalker", and games like "Sam and Max". If developers want to use it for marketing purposes, I could care less. But I really think the sequels and clones need to end. I am really excited for games like Splinter Cell: Conviction, but what we really need are more games like Alan Wake (although even that game has some similarities with Silent Hill and such)
Logisys area-51 case, SLI nforce 570, 3GB ddr2 RAM, Pentium D 3.0GHz, Geforce GTX 260 Core 216, OCZ modXtreme psu.
jediken21
June 12, 2009 at 4:03pm
Another God of War clone...if your refering to god of war 3 as a clone of god of war 1 and 2...well no shit its a fucking sequel for christ sake, you people are the cancer killing video games.
bigbasspa
June 11, 2009 at 12:38pm
If modern gaming is too softcore for those hardcore badasses that love nothing better than to frag our softcore asses, let them join the fucking Marines, go to Iraq or Afghanistan and do it the fuck for real!! You talk the talk gangstas, why not walk the walk?
triclops41
June 11, 2009 at 10:19am
elitist videogame assholes are still elitist assholes.
"back in my day, we had to walk 12 miles uphill both ways in the snow in my videogames!"
if games are soooooooooo easy now, you will have to create your own challenges, like speed runs or no-death runs.
people want graphics to improve, and that is a selling point. sorry, that is the way it is
you should be happy more people are playing videogames, and that its mainstream. you shouldnt need to define your selfworth by being a "true gamer".
many of the peggle and wii haters dont realize this, but more mainstream videogames mean more money for the industry, and more hardcore games, not fewer. these games may have their difficulty curves eased, but again, find your own challenges. if michael jordan could find his own, you can find your own.
and lastly, you can never go back. those days are gone. move on, its okay.
habuza
June 11, 2009 at 7:34am
Riiiiiiight. See below / above messages. Hardcore as I know it doesn't exist anymore. It's commercialized an otherwise socially outcast hobby. Gamers like myself didn't beat every fucking game in existence, get that last level, memorize thousands of passwords, killer combos, secret item locations, etc etc, to watch our hobby get bastardized into some commercial and mainstream bullshit where everyone thinks they are a "gamer".
Guess what. Peggle doesn't count. Popcap games don't count. To quote another poster here, you window licking fucktards who don't PAY ATTENTION IN GAMES, dont' count. All of the asshattery that is bullshit regurgitated clones, multiplayer clusterfucks, and so on, have ruined and set my hobby to flame.
The only positive thing that has come out of it is when I play video games and utterly destroy everyone I come across to hear them curse and squeal in anger, that is fun. Hearing the fat little soda drinking cheetoh gobbling bitch titty fan boys scream, that's where it's at.
I believe scott ramsoomair said it best on www.vgcats.com with his most recent comic.
/endrant
comptech08
June 11, 2009 at 8:19am
wow some of you people need to get a life. like i said earlier its a GAME. Why so serious?
pastorbob
June 11, 2009 at 4:59am
I confess that though I enjoy playing an occasional game I am not a hardcore gamer by any stretch of the imagination. In fact the last game I played completely through is Unreal and that only after I bought it at Big Lots for $6.00. I still haven't installed and played the copy of Quake 4 that I picked up at the same time, for the same price. My main desktop uses the integrated Intel graphics chipset as does my wife's PC. Our CPU's are low end Core 2 Duo processors. But I am a computer power user in every other way and I recognize that many of the major advances in PC's over the last twenty years have been tied to innovation in games. And when games stop moving forward then advances in PC hardware and software slow to a crawl.
majorsuave
June 10, 2009 at 5:34pm
I consider myself hardcore, not in the fact that I enjoy games on Modder created, god defying, harder than hell difficulty setting. In fact I don't.
I'm hardcore because I play much more than the usual Joe. I'm paid at least 40 hours a week to do so (QA testing) and I can play another 40 hours on top of that. I'm glad I get to play AAA titles at a discount price (employee store).
What I saw on E3 is fine with me. In part because it gave me what I want or, mostly, more of what I liked. But also because it brought some surprises, now I knowI'll have to buy a PS3 eventually (LBP and Infamous looked alright but it's not enough) a Rockstar North exclusive might be it.
I was anxious about Mass Effect 2 (we knew all along it was a trilogy) now I am cranked.
I am excited about Natal.... not that I want to play gimmick games waving my arms around. But, adding slight movement options such as "raise your arm as you were looking at your watch" brings the HUD/inventory/whatever in games. Reach out your back to reload and such things. I like a controller, I dislike Wii games. But, slight movements might be it.
And we all know it'll have drivers for Windows too.
Netram
June 10, 2009 at 3:33pm
Games these days are anything but hardcore. The downfall of the amount of skill needed to play games went down around the period of the release of Call of Duty 2.
With the release of Call of Duty 2, it was clear that developers where much more interested in making games that could be accessible windowlicking fucktards where anyone can be "pro". An example I'm going to use is the Call of Duty franchise. When vCoD came out, the competition in that game was immense, PAM was pretty much the perfected version for Call of Duty which was great for both pubbing and scrims.
With the release of Call of Duty 2, all that changed. The game was clearly developed for consoles and this ended up raping the PC. Smaller maps for crappy consoles that couldn't host big servers, grenade indicators for windowlicking retards who can't LISTEN to where grenades land, next to no recoil on weapons because pads can't handle it, minimap bips so you can see where people are shooting from (Again, because console retards apparently can't hear where enemies are).
"Hardcore" gaming is dead, there's no skill in games anymore. It's just about having shiny graphics and C-Grade story. I long to see another game like Quakelive which is all about gameplay, but the now we just have an army of consumer zombies who will buy into some of the most trashy, no skill, lack of gameplay, crappy story driven games ever.
Yes, I'm saying Call of Duty 4, Halo and all these other console-made shooters are trash, they're garbage and I have no idea why people play them. I long the day for another quake. You know why people play Quake? Because it's like chess. It's gameplay is perfected.
</rant>
anonuser
June 10, 2009 at 4:11pm
Ditto.
Hardcore? Nah, not at all. No way in hell this is hardcore. They call it hardcore, but what it really is, is mainstream. They made everything so easy that anyone with a cell or two will be able to pull off everything. Skills not needed, go right through the game at most difficulties. You, me, my 5 years old neighbor can all be called hardcore gamers now.
The harder difficulty levels will be full of cheesy mario like added difficulty. More ennemies, ennemies that take 1 more hit to die or ennemies that see you as soon as you go around the corner. This isn't hard, this is an insult to a gamer to create a game that is not even theorically feasable for the sake of adding a harder level of difficulty. A place holder if you will.
I don't play shooters anymore, if only for the novelty of some (time-warping and the likes are relatively new and untapped ideas). I don't play shooters professionally, after being formally invited for years in a row at QuakeCon. I'll be over there, waiting for real hardcore games, that are deep enough for me to improve after my first playthrough.
Sorry Nathan, but you're totally off the track. Or you're totally where companies want you to be...
Walnut
June 10, 2009 at 4:03pm
Wait, so you think games should only be accessable to "pros?" Because that's what you're implying. If games can't be hardcore unless they're on a PC and force you to listen to sounds as soft as a grenade landing ten feet away from you, then that's fine by me. Games, on the whole, may not be as competitive as they used to be, but if you want to play competitively, with your shiny motion sensors turned off, it shouldn't take you more than a few minutes to find groups that do just that. If that's still not competitive enough for you, go join a football league. Games these days are accessable to a larger audience. That's the industry's goal, and the only way for it to keep itself alive. The "death" of hardcore gaming which you speak so negatively about is a necessity if the game industry is to thrive and move forward.
Times have changed, and so have games. There are plenty of opportunities for "hardcore" play, but the "if you don't play constantly to keep your skills up you don't stand a chance" methodology has faded throughout the majority of the industry. If you can't live with this and adapt, then you 'ought get back to your Quakelive. Quakelive is not "all about gameplay," it's "all about gameplay trends from five years ago." It feels just like UT2004. While that's not a bad thing, it's certainly not progress. You seem like the type of gamer that this article is addressing. You want more of the same. Unfortunately, you want more of the same from ten years ago.
nekollx
June 10, 2009 at 3:33pm
Dude this column is Hardcore. You hit the money right on the head. Sequal after Hardcore Sequal. But maybe that isn't a bad thing.
Hardcore.
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Five teenagers, one alien ghost, a robot, and the fate of the world.
