A lot of innovative, sometimes even termed revolutionary, games have come out recently, or are currently in development. Huge games, with detailed artwork, customized game engines, massive playing worlds or storylines, often resulting in hundreds of hours of play. A lot of games (literally THOUSANDS of games were released in 1998, yet even your hard-core gamer has probably only been exposed to a few hundred) have come out to great hype or expectations and simply flopped. Some people, including myself, and Smoke'n'MirrorZ (whom I owe a great deal of credit for suggesting the idea for this column) have begun wondering if there's a practical ceiling to advances in game development. Is there some point of diminishing returns, where the amount of effort and resources going into the development of a game begin to outstrip the earnings potential of the same game? Are we about to hit some plateau where things will begin to stagnate and more and more of "the same, but just a little different" (which is already a death-knell assessment for a new game) is served to gamers in $45 packages?

Cause For Concern

Relatively recent games such as Wing Commander: Prophecy, Baldur's Gate, and Final Fantasy VII have released requiring up to 5 CDs for the game. Diablo II is to sport four Acts, each as big or bigger than all of Diablo, and is expected to ship on 4 CDs. Simply in terms of media costs, these games are more expensive than their single CD contemporaries. Flux of DiabloII.net posted an article entitled Diablo II -- At What Price? that touched on many of the concerns of not only creating and releasing such a massive game, but also the continual support its online component will require in terms of hardware and manpower. The recent controversy surrounding ION Storm, which has yet to release an AAA list title (half a million copies of sell-through, or retail sales of a game to qualify for this distinction) despite multiple millions of expenses is another, though perhaps extreme, example. Clearly, there is some point where companies have to look at how much they can afford for game development before calling it enough so that they can still release a product that will be profitable for them.

The Cutthroat Gaming Industry

The computer gaming industry, even with an ever-widening market, is intensely competitive. Companies have had their shot, failed with a game (which many of us may have never heard of) and disbanded or went bankrupt. Success with a title is nearly immediately imitated - sometimes improved upon, but often merely copied and changed enough to avoid legal entanglements. Many of these game clones (how many Command and Conquer or WarCraft like RTS games exist?) are even inferior to the product they're trying to copy. It is also a very unpredictable market to an extent - a game nobody expected to be more than moderately successful in its small demographic has more than once suddenly skyrocketed to jaw-dropping sales numbers (the Deer Hunter and Bass Fishing games, the original Tomb Raider). Huge Game Publishing Houses buy out and seemingly gobble up game companies (it is little surprise that Microsoft has also done this, of course . . .). Publishing or development houses seem to revolve in a form of digital geek soap opera, with ION Storm, G.O.D., GT Interactive being the stars in a story involving experienced programmers or sometimes even entire development teams jumping ship and heading elsewhere. The almost insane instability and fragility of the industry gives some cause for concern for the development of good games, which is really what we're all most concerned about.

Better Off Than We Think?

Despite the unstable nature of the gaming industry, and the very substantial realizations that game companies essentially have to find a workable development budget that limits what they can do with a game and still make money with it, I believe that we, the gamers, are in pretty good shape. The gaming industry is getting smarter as the industry itself evolves and learns from failures and successes. The last few years have given rise to a lot of ideas and concepts which make tremendous financial sense, yet are only really just beginning to see fruition.

Incremental Design Advances

To an extent, the idea of "if something works well, why change it?" is very much a two-edged sword in the gaming industry. Tomb Raider, up to three games, which have all been very successful sellers, has offered very little in real advances in playability with the second and third editions of the game. Yes, there are better graphics involved, vehicles, and so forth, but the basic play style and ideal that made the first game a hit are still the core of the second and third Tomb Raider games. The entire Id Software "first person shooter" series, from Wolfenstein to Quake 2 has basically served up the same game idea, refining and improving the technology some with each new advance. While Id seems to have a magic touch when it comes to games, there have been questions raised about Quake 2, which despite its advances in engine and technology, is seen as being not as fun in its playability as the original Quake by many gamers. Id's next offering, Quake 3: Arena, once again builds upon previous game designs and an idea of what works and what doesn't to bring a new game (and a fairly new concept of a multiplayer-only shooter) to gamers which should be the best and most advanced yet, while giving them the best gameplay, all within a very realistic development budget targetting a smaller market.

Blizzard North had a strong base when Diablo was finished to build the sequel upon. They knew what they'd like to have done, or what to do differently, and already had ideas on how to improve things, as well as a very good basis for a game engine to start from for creating a sequel which promises to far surpass the original game. Basically, the idea is that it's often easier to create a product when you have a successful and working basis already in place, even when it is massively more ambitious than the previous effort, than it is to create such a game starting totally from scratch. Even if the game engine is rewritten from scratch, there are still elements that are known to work that will be incorporated into the new product.

Licensing and Game Engines

Another trend that we're beginning to see occur more frequently amongst the game development community is the development of not only games, but also of game engines designed to be easily usable as the basis of other games by other developers. The Quake engine which was originally made just to drive probably the most successful deathmatch game of all time was made to be adaptable, and has thus far spawned the largest number of total conversions, add-ons, and entirely new games all based on or around the Quake engine. Hexen 2, and even Half-Life, have their origins in the Quake engine, and the multiplayer-only Windows-based QuakeWorld is possibly even more popular than plain Quake itself, offering Capture the Flag, Team Fortress, Future vs. Fantasy, and other game options built around the Quake engine. Other Quake and Quake 2 engine games have come to market lately, such as Heretic 2 and SiN. Unreal pushed hardware to the straining point, offering new visual complexity and depth, and has several games under development (or in the case of Klingon Honor Guard, even released) based on the Unreal engine, including the Wheel of Time game.

LithTech, the makers of Shogo: MAD created their LithTech engine specifically with the aim of licensing it to other game developers, and work closely with those developers to integrate new advances in game technology into the engine. Dark Reign's creators Auran developed the engine which drives Dark Reign (and evolved into a more advanced version which will drive Dark Reign II) to be a licensable commodity as well. Even the tremendously ambitious and popular Baldur's Gate has notices - in the game - that the BioWare engine which drives the game can be licensed to create other games of similar power and complexity. What all this boils down to is that a great deal of the heavy duty, "under the scenes" portion of game creation can be tremendously reduced by simply paying a license fee for an engine, allowing game designers, programmers, artists, and so forth to get into the making of a fun and cool game, rather than spending months and months of engine development and groundwork before the first playable version of a game is achieved.

Bankrolling Games

As much as "serious" gamers cringe and cry in outrage or simply mystification when something like Deer Hunter II (what Smoke'n'MirrorZ calls "one of those games that succeeds only from mindless simplicity") releases and then sells several hundred thousand copies, there is a sort of perverse justice that these games can in fact HELP the development and release of serious games. "Fluff" games like Deer Hunter which probably have 4 month development cycle and about as much original content as a 1976 Reader's Digest are extremely profitable titles to produce and release. With low development costs and a smaller target sales number for profitability, these games rake in money for game development companies which can be used to bankroll the development of a much more costly, complex, and "serious" game (doesn't "serious game" seem to be an oxymoron?). Isn't it worth putting up with people who probably won't ever play the same games as the rest of us claiming shelf space for "Office Bound Fantasy Hunter VII: Barrel Fish Dynamiting" knowing that part of the money they shell out for such drivel may be funding the next Half-Life or Civilization?

Mastering Underdeveloped Markets

Another thing to consider in the continuing evolution of games is that there are markets which are vastly underdeveloped for, and/or the attempts to develop for them have simply been mediocre or complete failures. In my last column I touched on the "hidden, silent demographic" of older and female gamers. The selection of "girl games" that has been produced has been generally along the lines of the pink or purple boxed, Barbie's Fashion School type thing. While there are other games which are developed to be just general appeal games which female gamers enjoy (adventure games seem to be a strong category here) a lot, there is a much greater proportion of games developed with the "15-25 year old male" in mind. Surely there can be good games developed with the playability and fun of these games that aren't insulting or degrading to females.

Another very notable underdeveloped market is online (internet) multiplayer gaming. While QuakeWorld, Tribes, Age of Empires, WarCraft, StarCraft, Total Annihilation, and a few other titles, mainly in the Real Time Strategy and First Person Shooter genres have strong online followings, there is a pretty apparent lack of strong multiplayer communities, and games to support them, in other areas. The multiplayer online adventure game is nearly nonexistent, and the online multiplayer RPG's best successes thus far are Diablo (and some people cringe at classifying Diablo as an RPG) and Ultima Online. Ultima Online could hardly be said to be the ideal model of an online multiplayer role playing game, even though it is clearly profitable for Origin. The near future holds other ventures into this realm with EverQuest and Asheron's Call, both of which are very much experimental and probably things which, even if highly successful, will be improvable. With perhaps the exception of Mankind (another first of its sort experiment) there isn't really a good multiplayer online space flight/combat game either, and that's yet another avenue which has plenty of room for mastery.

Hardware Advances

Another thing that takes a great deal of load off of developers, and offers them greater flexibility and freedom, is the ever increasing power of PC hardware. 3D accelerators like the NVIDIA Riva TNT allow for hardware rendering of games in Direct3D or OpenGL with the predefined abilities to achieve really cool effects with less effort. The processor wars, essentially only between Intel and AMD now, offer us faster, better, cheaper processor options, with the second-generation Celerons, the K6-3 and K7, and the Pentium III. Greater processing speed and power allows for more complex games (and yes, to an extent it tends to create sloppier programming *cough*Microsoft*ahem*). One of the biggest bottlenecks for online gaming is the lack of an easily available, affordable, high speed internet connection for the masses. Over the next few years ADSL and cable modems will fight it out and a winner will eventually be established, with all gamers benefitting from an eventual high-speed internet infrastructure. Such high speed, widely available internet access will open up greater possibilities for online gaming as the PSTN dialup bottleneck will be slowly eradicated. All of this is good stuffs for the gamer, and for the game developer.

Summary

Even with the legitimate concern of reaching a point where reuse and rehashing becomes a mainstay and original and innovative game development is simply too prohibitively expensive for notable - and fun - advances in games, I have a very positive outlook on things. With incremental advances that continue to offer better gameplay and technology while keeping what works, game engine licensing, new and underdeveloped or untapped markets, and the equally frenzied advances in the hardware that makes the computer games we love possible, we have a long time before we're faced with a dread of no advances or fun new games. If anything, I think the next few years will come through with some of the best changes in computer gaming, as new processor advances, the spread of 3D acceleration, and the eventual improvement in high speed internet infrastructure will allow for a new age of computer games similar to the advances made when VGA graphics and CD-ROM drives were made a standard for PCs.