However, for competitive games, the current industry model kinda sucks. There's no time for games to be refined and balanced, before the sequel comes out that breaks everything again. And inevitably, even if the sequel is inferior, it usually splits the community, destroys any momentum, and signals the slow death of the better, original game.
In video games, there's a number of games which i call "Ten year games", that is, competitive games that have survived for more than a decade and still have a reasonable community, and haven't been "solved" yet:
Street Fighter 2 Super Turbo, King of Fighters 98 & 2002, Starcraft Brood War, Counterstrike (Is the original still played?), Quake 3 (in the form of Quake Arena? How similar is it?)
I'm mostly familiar with fighting games, hence more certainty in my examples.
These games have taken a bit of a hit from sequels and competitors, but still managed to keep going in some limited way. (eg. SF2 survived SF3, but didn't really survive SF4, despite SF4 being rather disliked by everyone, even its own players. But it's still played here and there.)
Of course, even these 10 year games pale in comparison to 100 year (eg. Poker) and 1000 year (eg. Chess, Go) games.
Professionals play these games for a lifetime and never master it, whereas for most video games, top players usually "break" the game and "solve" the optimal / overpowered strategies pretty quickly.
The sad thing is, I doubt any video games will ever reach 100 or 1000 year status. One the one hand, apart from me, probably very few players even want/care about such a thing. And adding to that, the industry itself isn't structured to cater for it. Finally we're all gonna die from nuclear war / global warming / alien invasion / meteor strike / mass uprisings / etc in a few decades anyways so it's all moot.
I vaguely recall hearing that the Sth Koreans were going to develop their own clone of Brood War when SC2 came out and Blizzard started to exert iron control over broadcast rights and stuff, but I can't even find it on google right now so it probably never went anywhere.
But that kind of thing is probably the closest we'll get:
- Pick a good competitive game
- Make an open source clone (or at least the game rules should be free from ownership)
- Ensure that graphics is seperated from gameplay. (Engine is seperated from game rules.)
--> This means that bugs/exploits/engine tricks are either promoted to real features or patched away.
- Constantly refine the gameplay, but as it matures, only in very baby steps, and only when it's critically needed.
- Keep the gameplay mostly static and regularly replace/improve the engine & graphics. Port to other platforms as necessary.
That's the only model I can see for a true "100 year" video game - it needs to keep up with technology, it needs to allow different implementations (just like how there are many computer chess games, etc) and it needs to be "pure" - free from engine-specific glitches and tricks.
So I guess the winner is.... TA Spring? (hahahahaha....sorry.)
But thinking about it, maybe DoTA is on its way... since it started as a mod and has now spawned a bunch of fairly similar clones? If it keeps being popular, perhaps one day rulesets will converge and mature? Or maybe DoTA3 or LoL2 will come along and wreck everything and kill the genre, who knows.
This concludes my rant.
Edit: This post relates to FAF because the "Forever" part of the title expresses a desire to be a 1000 year game
Statistics: Posted by AdmiralZeech — 06 Sep 2014, 08:57
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