While it might appear that there are fewer and fewer truly good games being released, it’s probably only related to the amount of mediocre, at best, games being released. Fortunately, with online games at least, you can get one game that costs $50-100 (Orange Box, Ultima Online) and spend litterally hundreds of hours playing.

Give me one game as good as Ultima Online or Team Fortress 2 every 5-10 years and I don’t mind how many Gears of War or Assassin’s Creed they make.

To be completely fair, every so often a game comes along that bucks the trend. And to be equally fair, Ultima 7 was, in its day, a pretty intensely graphical game — certainly cutting-edge, and difficult to run well on a “run of the mill” system at that time.

It wasn’t quite the Crysis of its day, of course, but…well, if you ever spent hours trying to find a mouse driver that used two less K of memory because you needed every damn byte you could get, you know what I’m getting at.

I think the real point of the article is how the visuals have replaced all the things that really make a game compelling — i.e. the story, the plotting, the immersion. It is possible to have great graphics alongside all these things, but to do so means an investment of time that most companies aren’t willing to spring for anymore; why spend $50 million making one game over five years when you can spend $20 million per game to produce three games in the same span of time? Yeah, they might not be as good…but as long as they sell, and sell in good volume, how many companies are going to care about that?

Of course, every so often, a great game combines both story and graphics…but such things are becoming increasingly rare. There seems to be a glut of very technically sophisticated, but otherwise empty, games on the market at present.

And people wonder why I prefer to play with a game (NWN) released nearly a decade ago.