Over the years, the gaming industry has changed. Some changes have been good and others have been bad, but as time goes on, games evolve and so do our tastes for them, as well as the way they are made and how they are presented to us. I'd like to look at both the good and the bad in the industry; how interactive gaming and less limitation has improved games and gaming, while DLCs and character models have put a bad flavor in the mouths of gamers.
Games have picked up from when the vast majority were sidescrollers, and have become more interactive in dynamic in certain aspects. We are able to do more with games, although that does not always mean that companies take advantage of these options. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is a perfect example of an older game that has much more gamer interaction with the world than many games of today. When other interactive games are looked at, such as the Assassin's Creed series, they are interactive, but in a more...stale way. They seem a bit more structured and less creative. This isn't to say that all modern games are like this. Games like Bioshock Infinite incorporated first person shooter and interactive gaming to a balanced level of creativity.
An example of a game that couldn't have been done in the older days of gaming is Minecraft; the game is incredibly large, and has many, many options for what the player may choose to do. The world is roughly 8 times the scale of the Earth...something that would have been very difficult to do on an older system.
A more modern concept though, the DLC, is one that is mostly for the companies to make more money(so it seems)by releasing a game piece by piece, making someone pay more than what they would normally pay for if they bought a whole game at once. This wasn't done, at least not to nearly the same scale, in the gaming industry years ago; it would have been unheard of(I would think)to release a game that wasn't complete, and release pieces of it one at a time for the consumer.
As far as character models go, one thing that hasn't improved, and might have actually gotten worse, is that most game characters, especially the main characters, are not that diverse. As far as character design goes, they have different looks, but there are so few female characters, or non-white characters. Now, I'm not one to normally complain about this, I think in many mediums, like movies, they cater to what they think is their target audience; that being said, we get excuses from the makers of the latest Assassin's Creed game, saying that it would be too much work to render a female character to play as...which is absurd. They make tons of money, and it really just sounds like laziness. I'm sure that there are some technicalities, but surely they could make at least one female character for the game to play as, especially since they already have character models from previous games.
I'm sure there's much more to these things than what I'm just seeing at the moment, but after further research, these articles will be more fine tuned.
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