Justdaveisfine@midwest.social
on 19 Jun 13:58
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There’s definitely weird people making games on itch and sometimes in the depths of Steam.
By its very definition weird isn’t going to sell to mass market. That being said I do agree that we need more weird AAA or AA games.
Auster@thebrainbin.org
on 19 Jun 14:16
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Looking from another angle from Yoko Taro's point, I'd say that, in fear of failing due to being too big, companies would rather play it safe, but that causes creations to grow sterile.
And as consequence, people allegedly "weird", which I wouldn't think are necessarily people with curious antiques as Yoko Taro himself, but simply people whose game ideas are far from a safe ground, go for making indie titles instead as then they can be free to do whatever they want.
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world
on 19 Jun 23:06
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i am so glad that only costs 2 bucks because flying through rings is giving me serious n65 superman flashbacks. they’re so bad i can’t find the number 5 on my computer. the one next to that.
The Alters just released, is AA, weird, and very good! Indies are definitely the home for weird experimental shit but I feel like there are going to be more strange, niche games being made for larger budgets as the AAA space splinters and devours itself.
Part of the issue is that AAA still hasn’t learned how to manage and produce passion projects, which most great games are. They keep wanting to use what’s working elsewhere with no regard for what makes sense in their own game.
Yeah really. They should be more like campuses funding a hundred small teams each trying to make something they’re individually passionate about. Hell, even give them the IPs to play with and see what they come up with.
Makes sense. AAA games are finance projects more than creative projects. Yeah there’s a lot of art and writing and stuff, but it’s all calibrated to make the most money and anything that threatens it is jettisoned. This makes them formulaic to a fault.
Indie games are passion projects, so you see a lot of weird stuff out there. Most of them are utter failures, financially, but the ones that survive are truly something special.
prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 19 Jun 17:01
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Not dissimilar to what happens with big studio films
Fear of failure becomes self fulfilling, yeah. You get so worried about making the wrong move and losing money that you can have your spotlight stolen by a challenger doing it fresher for 1/10th the budget.
Yes, being “safe” means you won’t make the next Minecraft, where a hobby budget turns into the best selling game of all time. But it also means that the people who buy every instalment of Fifa or Assassin’s Creed will also buy it.
These popular franchises almost always turn a calculable profit as long as they don’t experiment and do something new that bombs.
As sad as it is, it actually does work out.
That’s why we gamers shouldn’t trust on AAA titles bringing something great to the market. If you want to play a game like you watch linear TV (plonk down on the couch/in front of the PC and to whatever to relax and waste time), then AAA is great. If you want to play something new, something exciting, something that you haven’t played before, then go with lower-budget titles.
AAA is the McDonalds of games. You don’t go to McDonalds for the freaky hand-crafted vegan fusion kitchen bacon burger with crazy Korean curry mayo and caramelized lettuce.
drosophila@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 19 Jun 22:47
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20 years ago people were complaining about the same lack of creativity in the AAA scene, saying that gaming was better in the 90s. In fact I remember it was a common talking point that AAA gaming had gotten so bad that there would surely be another crash like the one in '83.
Here’s how I see it: From a gameplay standpoint:
My perception of the mid to late 2000s is that every AAA game was either a modern military shooter, a ‘superhero’ game (think prototype or infamous), or fell somewhere in the assassin’s creed, far cry, GTA triangle. Gameplay was also getting more and more trivial and braindead, with more and more QTE cuts scenes. The perception among both game devs and journalists was that this was a good direction for the industry to go, as it was getting away from the ‘coin sucking difficulty’ mentality of arcade games and moving towards games as art (i.e. cinematic experiences). There were of course a few games like Mirrors Edge, and games released by Valve, but they were definitely the exception rather than the rule (and Valve eventually stopped making games). Then Dark Souls came out and blew all their minds that a game could both have non-braindead gameplay and be artful at the same time.
Now I would say we’ve actually seen a partial reversal of this trend. Triple A games are still not likely to be pioneers when it comes to gameplay, we’ve actually seen a few mainstream franchises do things like using Souls-like combat or immersive-sim elements, which IMO would have been unthinkable 15 years ago.
From an aesthetic standpoint:
My perception of the mid to late 2000s is that everything was brown with a yellow piss filter over it. If you were lucky it could be grey and desaturated instead. This was because Band of Brothers existed, and because it was the easiest way to make lighting look good with the way it worked at the time. As an aside, Dark Souls, a game where you crawl around in a sewer filled with poop and everyone is a zombie that’s also slowly dying of depression because the world is going to end soon and they’ve lost all hope, had more color than the average 2000s game where you’re some sort of hero or badass secret agent.
Things are absolutely better in the aesthetic department now. Triple A studios remembered what colors looked like.
From a conceptual / narrative standpoint:
I don’t think AAA games were very creative in this department in the 2000s and I don’t think they’re very creative now. They mostly just competed to see who could fellate the player the hardest to make them feel like a badass. If you were lucky the player character was also self destructive and depressed in addition to being a badass.
Then and now your best bet for a creative premise in a high budget game is to look to Japanese developers.
From a consumer friendliness / monetization standpoint:
In the 2000s people were already complaining about day one DLC, battlepasses and having to pay multiple times just to get a completed game.
Now its worse than its ever been IMO. Not only do AAA games come out completely broken and unfinished, really aggressive monetization strategies are completely normalized. Also companies are pretty reluctant to make singleplayer games now, since its easier to farm infinite gacha rolls from a multiplayer game (although this was kinda already the case in the 2000s).
Overall I think we’re now in a golden age for indie games, and things like Clair Obscura and Baldur’s Gate 3 give me a lot of hope for AA games.
Assassins Creed 1 came out in 2007, less than 20 years ago. It was mindbogglingly fresh and innovative back then. An open world where you can’t just run anywhere you want, but also climb anywhere? And your character dynamically climbed up walls, finding places to hold onto everywhere? That was amazing back then. It was the first game that even attempted anything like that, and it was really, really good. AC only became lame when they started doing the same over and over again with little change.
Similar story with Far Cry. FC1 came out in 2004, only FC2 was also released in that decade (2008). Both FC1 and FC2 were doing something new, fresh and genre-defining. Looking back from now, yes, these games look like everything else that followed it, but because these games defined it.
But in this decade we saw a lot of other genre-defining games, like Warcraft 3 (2002/2003), WoW (2004), KOTOR (2003), Bioshock (2007), Crysis (2007), Fable (2004), Batman: Arkham Asylum (2009), Portal (2007) and also a lot of AAA flops that happened due to too much experimentation and shooting for the stars, like Spore (2008).
And most of the games I listed above don’t have a piss filter.
drosophila@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 19 Jun 23:37
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You’re right, as is so often the case when people talk about a decade I’m thinking more of its latter half and the beginning half of the next one.
But in my defense I did say “the mid to late 2000s”.
I have a few more thoughts, but I’ll have to make another reply in a bit.
drosophila@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 20 Jun 02:16
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So, when I mention the Assassin’s Creed / Far Cry / GTA triangle I really mean to say the poor imitators of those games. They did do some very innovative things when they first came out, but just like modern military shooters took regenerating health and the two weapon limit from Halo while leaving behind all the other gameplay mechanics that made that work, so too did many games adopt the open world and the general way you interact with it, while removing anything interesting. By “the way you interact with it” I’m referring specifically to the map unlocking, the collectables, the village / territory faction control, and the “heat” system that spawns enemies depending on how much attention you are generating.
IMO those sorts of games were very much the other side of the coin from CoD-likes, and the problem was that while the extremely linear levels of CoD-likes were too restrictive, these open world games had no structure at all. In games like Blood, Quake, or what have you, encounters are designed to flow in a certain way, with each one having its own flavor and favoring certain approaches over others. In some games you can even think of enemy encounters as a puzzle you need to solve. Level design and enemy placement of course form the two halves of encounter design. In good games this sort of thing extends to the structure of the game as a whole, with the ebs and flows in the action, and different gameplay happening in different sections so the formula keeps getting changed up. But in games where the level design is an open world that let’s you approach from any angle, and where enemy placement is determined on the fly by a mindless algorithm, there is no encounter design. At the same time the way enemy spawning works is actually too orchestrated to have interesting emergent gameplay. For example, if an algorithm made an enemy patrol spawn an hour ago, and the player can see it from across the map, they can come up with their own plan on how to deal with this unique situation. If the player gets one bar of heat and the algorithm makes an enemy spawn around a corner they can’t anticipate that at all, its just mindless. This has implications for the gameplay itself (no enemy can be very tough or require very much thinking or planning if you’re just going to spawn them around a corner) but also, as previously stated, the entire structure of the game.
As for the other games you mention, I want to bring up Bioshock in particular. Its true, that game is a master class in presentation and aesthetics, and a game I would highly recommend, but its actually one of the games that I remember people complaining about when they said gaming was better in the 90s. Specifically the way Bioshock is very dumbed down compared to its predecessor System Shock, both from a general game and level design standpoint, but also because of the inclusion of vita chambers and the compass pointer that leads you around by the nose. (One place I will give Bioshock points though is that it has way more of an ecosystem than most imm-sims with the way enemies interact with each other; it even beats out imm-sim darling Prey 2017 in this regard).
This is admittedly a way more niche complaint than people complaining about QTEs or games being piss/brown, but it was definitely a smaller part of the much larger “games are getting dumbed down” discourse.
I could talk about Crysis and Spore too, but this comment is already really long. I haven’t played the rest of the games you list, so I can’t offer an opinion on them, though I have heard that KOTOR was very good.
So, when I mention the Assassin’s Creed / Far Cry / GTA triangle I really mean to say the poor imitators of those games.
That only happened in the 2010s. That’s when the Ubisoft formula really took off. Assassin’s Creed 1 was only released in 2007, Far Cry 2 in 2008 (FC1 was a quite different game). GTA also only started to get imitated in the 2010s.
Open World in that sense (non-scripted encounters that can be approached from many different angles, with a “living” world) only became a thing in the late 2000s, precisely because of games like Assassin’s Creed and Far Cry 2.
I remember reading a pre-release article about Far Cry 2 in a game magazine, where were all hyped about the many different ways a player could take out an enemy camp, e.g. go in guns blazing, or set a fire that would spread to the camp, or startle wild animals which then would stampede through the camp.
While I do get your point about hand-crafted deterministic enemy placement, it’s just two different kinds of approaches that work for different players.
When you say “dumbed-down”, I understand you mean that the difficulty was too low, is that correct? While some players love or even need punishing difficulty levels, others play for other reasons. (Maybe check out the Bartle taxonomy of player types. It’s a bit outdated, but it shows some of these different reasons quite well.) If you want to just kick back and relax after a hard day of work, punishing difficulty might not be the right thing. Some players want to have to learn (or even memorize) levels/bosses/encounters and repeat them repeatedly until they know exactly which button to press when, and that’s fine. For others that’s just tedious busywork, everyone’s different. I quite enjoyed Far Cry 2 and its random encounters and having to adapt to different scenarios all the time.
I haven’t played the rest of the games you list, so I can’t offer an opinion on them, though I have heard that KOTOR was very good.
Forgive me for saying that, but it’s quite harsh to call a whole decade of games uncreative if you haven’t played a lot of the greatest and most creative games of that time.
To get back to the original point:
20 years ago people were complaining about the same lack of creativity in the AAA scene, saying that gaming was better in the 90s. In fact I remember it was a common talking point that AAA gaming had gotten so bad that there would surely be another crash like the one in '83.
That was in the 2010s, not in the 2000s. In the 90s, game development was pretty much completely low-budget, with games rarely having more than 5 programmers on staff, and maybe 5-10 content creators. In the 2000s games started getting bigger, but the studios were still led by game developers, not by finance dudes. Budgets were still not nearly where they are today. Assassins Creed 1, for example, had a budget of $20mio. Compare that to e.g. the $175mio that AC Valhalla cost to make. And AC1 was comparatively expensive back then.
It was only in the 2010s when finance really got into gaming, budgets ballooned and risks were lowered to nothing.
drosophila@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 20 Jun 23:23
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I remember reading a pre-release article about Far Cry 2 in a game magazine, where were all hyped about the many different ways a player could take out an enemy camp, e.g. go in guns blazing, or set a fire that would spread to the camp, or startle wild animals which then would stampede through the camp.
So, that’s the thing, that’s interesting emergent gameplay.
Compare that to Just Cause (2006) or Just Cause 2 (2010). It has neat traversal mechanics (paragliding, and in the second one the grappling hook), but it has neither the emergent gameplay of Far Cry or the carefully crafted level design of a less open game.
Or compare Far Cry to Red Faction: Guerrilla. That has cool destructible buildings, but otherwise it just falls within the triangle. In my opinion they didn’t do enough with the building destruction (compare it to how destruction is used in a tactical way in the multiplayer game Rainbow Six Siege, or how its used as the basis for a puzzle game in the indie game Teardown), but the real ugliness of the game design rears its head in the driving missions. I remember being able to flick my mouse back and fourth and see vehicles appear in a space in the split second it was off screen. That wouldn’t be so bad if it wasn’t for the fact that these were timed missions, and a vehicle could literally spawn directly in front of you, or directly to your side off camera and plow right into you.
But beyond being really annoying and goofy looking, I have to ask if that sort of system even fit the concept they were going for. The GTA games were satire games, if the spawning system and the wild car chases were a little bit goofy that was part of the joke. And while Red Faction was not the most brutally serious game I’ve ever played, it was one of the most political, especially for the era that it came out. In the first Red Faction you are part of an armed labor uprising very reminiscent of the Battle of Blair Mountain (the workers are miners). In Guerilla you basically fight in a SciFi version of a middle eastern war, on the side of the middle east. So where is this goofiness coming from?
Sorry, that was a bit of a tangent, but I think game design and narrative/themes are intertwined, and IMO this is another instance of taking the open world formula and leaving elements behind while not doing anything to replace them or transform the things you took to make it work in the new context.
When you say “dumbed-down”, I understand you mean that the difficulty was too low, is that correct?
Not really, no. Certainly a lot of people complained about games getting easier and easier, but in regards to Bioshock in particular I mean that its level design and gameplay mechanics were literally more mindless for the player to interact with, conceptually simpler, and less intellectually interesting, than its predecessor System Shock 2. This doesn’t really have anything to do with how mechanically difficult it is to execute an action in either game (although SS2 was more difficult, in a bad way, it was enormously more clunky than Bioshock).
Its kinda hard to explain what I mean by this without writing a giant essay on the game’s designs and the philosophy of the immersive Sim design ethos. The most succinct way I could describe it would be to say that an immersive sim tries to merge an action game and an open ended puzzle game (as in a puzzle game where the player can come up with their own solution) into a seamless whole. Another way to describe is as a game that tries to maximize the potential for emergent gameplay while still having finely crafted encounter design (something that in most games is antithetical to one another). Another way to describe it would be a game that has those sorts of finely designed encounters, but with systems that are intentionally made to be exploitable in a way that many games do on accident. Or in other words the encounters are intentionally made to be cheesed and broken, and and the act of figuring out how to do this was made to be fun, and because of that the games were still usually fun even of you broke them in a way the developers didn’t anticipate.
So, to put it simply Bioshock just did these things much less than its predecessor (the places where it still did was the enemy ecosystem, and to some degree the way you had to plan to take down a Big Daddy). Unless I can dig up some really old YouTube videos you’ll have to take my word for it that there was a sentiment among certain circles, at least in the early 2010s, that was lamenting the death of games like System Shock 2, Thief, Arx Fatalis, and Deus Ex, and Bioshock was held up as an example of that.
At the same time there was a less niche complaint about the death of what we would call “boomer shooters” today. Specifically how they had keys, secrets, and nonlinear levels. The sentiment was
The huge majority of indie games never make any money at all. This link is a little older, but it claims that 50% of indie games on steam never make more than $4000, only 25% ever make more than $26 000 and only 14% cross the $100k mark.
Considering the cost of developers, that’s about 1-2 man years for the $100k mark, and then there’s only a 14% chance of even recouping that.
Passion projects work out because the people making them don’t value their time as work time, don’t make a salary from it, and even then in the huge majority of cases, it doesn’t work out financially.
Imagine having 10k employees and not setting aside an indie dev team or two for passion projects.
This statement holds true for pretty much every other corporation. Imagine owning a huge farm and not setting aside a few farm hands to grow old artisan vegetables. Imagine owning a supermarket chain and not setting aside a few shops for exotic sweets from Central Africa. Imagine owning a fast food chain and not setting aside a few restaurants for artisan burger variations.
Yes, every corporation could afford to do stuff like that, but they aren’t there to advance humanity by investing in arts and crafts, but for making every last drop of money they can. And yes, there’s much to criticise about this goal, but making little indie passion projects doesn’t work well with corporations.
ogmios@sh.itjust.works
on 19 Jun 14:38
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Weird people were forced out of the industry over the past decade or more, for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with making games.
Happens with any industry that gets big, I think. More profits=more suits/vampires coming in and replacing artists/scientists or whoever is more qualified to make key decisions.
This won't stop unless infinite wealth hoarding is tackled by governments, if ever.
ogmios@sh.itjust.works
on 19 Jun 15:39
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You’re not wrong. I still remember the day I picked up a newspaper and saw the headline “video games earn more than movies for the first time ever,” and I immediately knew where the industry was headed. In retrospect, I was 100% correct.
Happened even with Boeing. I think it should be illegal for anyone with an MBA to be CEO or CTO of any company. They can be CFO if they want to, but not any role with actual decision power over products.
But then you get those people opening studios like Sandfall and creating masterpieces like Clair Obscura…
LainTrain@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 19 Jun 14:40
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Can you blame them for not taking risks when these games get punished time and time again for doing so?
TLOU Part II had a mildly unlikeable character who gasp was a woman and it killed the entire franchise and sparked mass controversy so hard Naughty Dog now is making some bland and generic soulslike (but in space) GOTG ripoff slop with product placement in it.
Brylant@discuss.online
on 19 Jun 15:33
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False, Tlou part 2 was peak normie writing
LainTrain@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 19 Jun 17:19
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Care to elaborate? You play as the person who killed a beloved iconic video game character and last game’s protagonist for 13 straight hours - I don’t know if it’s good but I’d hardly call it anything resembling “normie writing”.
To me - normie writing is something like those new switch Zelda games or Yakuza games or those Jedi Fallen Order/Survivor dark souls clone games or something like Watch_Dogs 1 or hell insert any ubisoft game apart from FC2, WD2 here
To me - normie writing is something like those new switch Zelda games or Yakuza games or those Jedi Fallen Order/Survivor dark souls clone games or something like Watch_Dogs 1 or hell insert any ubisoft game apart from FC2, WD2 here
This. And none of these games with their totally predictable normie plots get any shit for that, let alone anything major.
And Watch dogs 1 was such a terrible game, it would deserve getting major shit.
RightHandOfIkaros@lemmy.world
on 19 Jun 16:01
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TLOU2 controversy wasn’t because the unlikable character was a woman, it was because the writing was garbage. If the unlikable character was a man the reception would have been exactly the same.
Also, woman characters in games hasn’t been a risk since Metroid came out in 1986. It seems nowadays that the tables have turned and the vast majority of main characters in more than half of games from the past 5 years are women.
LainTrain@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 19 Jun 17:18
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Whether the writing was garbage or not isn’t relevant to be honest - because controversy was spun by people who only knew the game’s story through hearsay of the leaks before the game even came out, and majorly it was to do with accusations of “wokeness” and other brainrot - so yes clearly it was an issue, of course it was an issue.
It wasn’t really the substance of the game that the usual outrage grifters latched onto so it’s not relevant to the discussion of the controversy.
As for more women being protagonists - sure, idk how you can say that so confidently, I suppose you have a convenient framing for what counts as “big games” to support your point, but I think the quantity was never really an issue.
Honestly more men being protags in games is okay, what I take issue with is that whenever something interesting happens, like oh I dunno, a game makes a woman kinda buff and mean looking, people bitch about it like no tomorrow.
So of course it’s an issue. It always has been.
In 2013-ish, Anita Sarkessian made some exceedingly light feminist critiques of video games in and it was an issue.
In 2014-ish, A woman made an indie game that’s honestly really good even to this day (Depression Quest) and it was an issue.
In 2020, a game came out where a fictional character (Abby) had muscles and it was an issue.
Nowadays I guess the most famous example would be the “FUCKING GENDER AMBIGUITY” screaming guy who didn’t like Starfield’s pronoun selection screen or some such.
Then people went truly psychotic in a deranged hate campaign against some random inclusivity consultancy Sweet Baby Inc. over games they were reportedly never involved with because there was women, or something, somewhere.
Hopefully you get the idea.
It was precisely the issue that a woman was the main character in a video game but was not in fact “Metroid from Metroid 1986” but a buff, angry, unattractive, hateful and morally grey character who does shitty things, sorta like Joel - in other words - she was something a lot more like a real person in a mature story, not a single digit frame twist from 40 years ago that amounts to an Easter egg turned geek culture cringe factoid parroted by the kinds of people who wouldn’t understand RLM’s “Nerd Crew” show is satire.
You can see some of the worst examples here, cherry-picked as they are, juxtaposed with what actual critique is: www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVQcZa4O01A
You can also visit the steam store page and look at the negative reviews, or peruse the cesspit subreddit /r/TheLastOfUs2 posts the time of the game’s leaks and release to see people bitching about everything from pride flags in Seattle(!) to Abby being made too likeable to accusations of this or that character being le ebil transgender or whatever else that sounds like it came out of a /pol/-themed magic 8 ball.
Hell, there are utterly deranged people in the steam reviews for this game now bitching about the show - about the actress that plays Ellie and one guy even implies she is “down syndrome representation”.
Like, what the actual fuck?
As for the game, the game is ok, I’m playing it right now, it’s less boring than the first so I like it a lot more, the AI actually lives up to the bullshit promised in the first game’s trailer, but it’s too long and yeah the writing is too on the nose sometimes, though I do like the characters and the atmosphere a lot. Idk if I “love” it, but I do find it way more fun as a game and far more interesting from a story perspective.
What it definitely is though is controversial as fuck and that’s just reality. People made a whole subreddit just to hate on the game that’s active to this day and most of their issues aren’t even to do with the game - they even pretend to hate the TV show they haven’t seen too.
In 2013 I was much younger and believed ahit I read, so I was swept up in the “Sarkessian wants to destroy games” crap (as if she could and/or mattered enough to actually affect change in any way).
A few years ago I looked up her videos (cudos to her that she still kept them online) and I was honestly almost disappointed in how bland and obviously true her points were. Sure, her research wasn’t perfect and she could have presented them a bit better, but what these videos deserved would have been mostly bored acknowledgement. Similar to TLOU2. It wasn’t a super exciting game. The story wasn’t great but also not terrible. The characters were adequately interesting for the most part. The gameplay was again not great but ok, and certainly not worse than part 1.
Could it have been better? Sure, no question. But it also didn’t nearly deserve the hate it got.
Same with many other similar media, like e.g. the Ghostbusters remake or Twilight.
But what happened there was that people got seriously offended by these games/shows/movies and then made it their mission to destroy it. And that’s ridiculous and pathetic, but it happens all the time.
samus12345@sh.itjust.works
on 19 Jun 16:02
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Killed the franchise so much that the original game has been remastered twice, the second game once, and a TV series has been made out of it…?
LainTrain@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 19 Jun 16:39
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Killed so much that the game will never get a sequel it’s clearly meant to have, yes.
The remaster of the first game came out before Part 2. The subsequent remake of the first game is made using Part 2’s assets and mechanics as well as assets from the original and had much smaller production costs, it was clearly made to recoup the loss of IP value perceived by Sony, same with the relatively low budget HBO show, compared to making a game the caliber of TLOU it costs peanuts and if at all - that will be the only way the saga will see a conclusion sadly.
So yes absolutely TLOU was killed off by the controversy and they’re now working on a new IP that looks significantly more safe and uncontroversial in every way sans maybe featuring a black lady in it.
samus12345@sh.itjust.works
on 19 Jun 16:53
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I imagine most game IPs wish they could be as killed off as TLOU.
LainTrain@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 19 Jun 17:26
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Yeah, doesn’t change the fact though - it was Sony’s flagship from their oldest most well known first party studio and it effectively got cancelled and pawned off to HBO to be milked on a budget.
Most movie franchises wish they could be Star Wars but it doesn’t change the fact the sequel trilogy did immense and obvious damage to the brand due (primarily) to the controversy, though in that case those movies actually also sucked which I’m sure didn’t help things. TLOU Part 2 on the other hand was by no means as awful as any of the sequel trilogy SW flicks.
The thing I miss most about handhelds is all the mid-budget experimental spinoffs made for them. That was where weird truly flourished, and I'm sad that there's not really a place for that in today's market. Hideo Kojima's Boktai trilogy is one of my favorite games of all time, and there will never ever ever be another game remotely as weird as that.
tiramichu@sh.itjust.works
on 19 Jun 19:32
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I suppose it happened because from a mainstream perspective handhelds like the DS and PSP were far behind dedicated systems in terms of graphics, and so the expectation was never there to have “triple A” visuals - neither from consumers nor industry.
Made for very fertile ground in terms of games that had budget, but still had a long leash to go and get wacky.
SaharaMaleikuhm@feddit.org
on 19 Jun 19:01
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No worries. There is plenty of weird to find with indie games.
andros_rex@lemmy.world
on 19 Jun 20:24
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Yeah, but how survivable is making indie games? Unless you make it big, you aren’t paying rent that way.
redwattlebird@lemmings.world
on 20 Jun 00:21
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That’s why you need public funding to support and nourish the industry. We’ve got that in our state where we can get grants to start up studios. This allowed for studios such as Massive Monster to be created.
VC funding isn’t great because they can pull out if the project or investment doesn’t suit them. See League of Geeks.
This take sucks. There's a clear cap on what indies can do because they have a limited budget. Whatever their output is, it's not comparable to big studios output.
What the market lacks is quirky games on a medium budget, which's not what indie scenes provide.
blazeknave@lemmy.world
on 19 Jun 19:08
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That’s why bg3 felt so special. For us by us at that scale
ijedi1234@sh.itjust.works
on 19 Jun 19:15
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There are plenty of weird people making weird games if you know where to look. itch io and DLSite, for instance.
FeelzGoodMan420@eviltoast.org
on 19 Jun 20:22
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That was literally his point…that the weird people make indie games and not AAA games.
And it’s for the better, the AAA games industry devours talent and spits out mediocrity and burnouts. I would prefer that small indie studios keep control of their creative output rather than being devoured by the money machine.
outhouseperilous@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 20 Jun 04:02
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There is a space between ‘itch.io freebie that runs in terminal’ and ‘TROUT: Sacred Band 8’ and the unprecedented level if sliders for dicks in character creation
tisktisk@piefed.social
on 19 Jun 20:10
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"Do you think video games are silly little things?"
I don’t think you need to be weird to make weird games. I mean, it wouldn’t hurt but it’s not necessary. Just do what Fromsoft does: make the game first using the rule of cool, then write the story around it instead of the other way around.
I stopped playing AAA games years ago. They are all trash.
Indie games are where it’s at
Edgarallenpwn@midwest.social
on 19 Jun 23:45
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I’ve mainly been an Indie gamer since 2012 or so. My last gaming build is almost 7 years old, but I think the last AAA game I played was during lockdown and that was just because it was a way to hang with friends. At this point I just play indie ports on my phone.
Funny enough, after going through my Steam recently played, the last AAA game I enjoyed was Nier.
maniajack@lemmy.world
on 20 Jun 00:16
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I dunno I like elden ring and rdr2. Some are still good, just not most, anymore
Regrettable_incident@lemmy.world
on 20 Jun 13:14
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Yeah I’m playing cyberpunk for the first time and really enjoying it. i don’t know how much it innovates, but I’d say it was certainly a good game.
vrs got some cool unique stuff, vtol vr is solid gaming still got some really cool stuff coming out, I wanna live in a world where vtol vr is as popular as cod
They’re polished, but nearly all of them are too safe.
The ones that subvert things a little are always best for me, and these always get mixed reactions from people who went in with a set idea of what they wanted from it.
Red Dead Redemption 2 being a slow paced wild west simulator rather than Grand Theft Horse is a prime example. It didn’t play by safety and doing popular things. It did what they wanted it to be, and it’s all the better for it.
Everyone should go check out The Alters, it is a pretty weird game but a lot of fun with a great story and atmosphere. It’s a space survival, resource/building, race against incoming death game.
Shardikprime@lemmy.world
on 19 Jun 23:58
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After Spec Ops The line, everything went to shit, the bar was too high
Because there were still plenty of good games that came out after that?
pugnaciousfarter@literature.cafe
on 20 Jun 01:53
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Yeah, personally a huge fan of the game, but if you think spec ops the line is the last best game, then you really haven’t played that many good games since.
There’s also such a thing as subjective tastes and I believe that it’s more so significant in games because of how diverse they are.
That’s true. I was more commenting on how good a game it was though, but I do think it’s peak story for me. KCD series is second. There hasn’t been another game for me that had such a crazy twist in it than spec ops.
outhouseperilous@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 20 Jun 03:58
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More than ‘story’, the way they made every part of the game about it.
It was mediocre/workmanlike when viewed entirely as a shooter. But most of the gameplay just used ‘shooter’ as framing.
some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org
on 20 Jun 00:36
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That’s the entire tech industry. I got in at the tail end of it being full of nerds who were interested in computers. Then jocks and the like found out it pays really well and now it isn’t fun anymore.
AnalogNotDigital@lemmy.wtf
on 20 Jun 05:51
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Yeah man all those well known jocks like Spez and Zuckerberg sure did a number on tech.
burgerpocalyse@lemmy.world
on 20 Jun 10:12
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hey mark does ju jitsu and he’s totally really good at it and all the other martial artist guys love hanging out with him
AnalogNotDigital@lemmy.wtf
on 20 Jun 18:14
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Is he actually good at it or are guys who want to hang out with a billionaire saying he’s good at it?
+1 to this, I feel like having a ton of money is what corrupts leadership, not necessarily their technical background.
Maybe Spez and Zuck haven’t changed much, but I feel like some others started out as relatively reasonable people who were also technically brilliant, but eventually their companies started doing shitty things and they are both aware and apparently unwilling to stop it.
Perhaps corruption in the Soviet Union is a good example of how even people from normal hard working backgrounds (i.e. not billionaires who have never worked a day in their life) can still be corrupted by power and a lack of accountability.
Yeah, it was nice as long as it lasted, now it’s all meetings and stupid “agility” (as agile as DPRK is democratic) and measurings of your percieved productivity.
I’m still looking, maybe some c/c++ old legacy system needs a geek somewhere?
The weird people are still there, but development teams are much larger now, so their input is not as prominent. Plus the budgets are so large that a flop can heavily damage a company or even ruin it, so they’re very risk-averse. We need more AA or A games instead of relying so much on heavy-hitters.
I mean, sure, complaining and while doing the same thing and expecting a different result is one strategy. AAA games are purely capitalistic endeavours.
Crankenstein@lemmy.world
on 20 Jun 02:35
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Capitalism at its finest.
MidsizedSedan@lemmy.world
on 20 Jun 07:52
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I know im late to the party but… I just started playing Death Stranding. Lets just say its more than just a walking simulator…
Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.org
on 20 Jun 09:22
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I mean, it’s being a mail carrier in a world that is maximum Kojima.
By the time you finish the game, whatever you’ve seen so far will seem like the most normal thing in the world.
Definitely a lot of standard Kojima gameplay in there, among the apocalyptic Deliveroo simulator and bonkers 4th wall breaking.
clutchtwopointzero@lemmy.world
on 20 Jun 10:11
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Yoko Taro talking about weird shows a healthy deal of self awareness… +1 respect in my book
SoftestSapphic@lemmy.world
on 20 Jun 15:34
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Who knew kicking out every passionate person with artistic integrity and forcing the death of the artist would impact the creativity of the industry?
Jesus christ I hate game CEOs, they need to be locked in a room with games until they learn how to have fun.
commander@lemmy.world
on 20 Jun 15:48
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Dragon Age 1-3 all had their drawbacks but could always fall back on how beloved the lore was and how it was present. Dragon Age Veilguard has much of the lore the original creator laid out but presents the revelations in its game poorly and retcons lore from previous games in sterile ways. The original creator left after 3 and over the decade has dropped tidbits about the changing culture of the studio he left
What is he trying to say? How can something be weird and unique but also consumed by millions of people as a popular product?
If he thinks riding a dragon in modern Tokyo to fight a big naked statue is weird and unique, he’s probably sad that the world has moved on from holding up sporks and going “lol random XD!”
The markets can’t sell Weird™ to the masses. Now there’s no “weird” people making super high budget art. Terrible!
Montreal_Metro@lemmy.ca
on 20 Jun 19:21
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Called HR.
frenchfryenjoyer@lemmings.world
on 21 Jun 00:47
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I love it when I’m playing a game and I can feel the genuine love put into it. Old Nintendo games for example. now most games feel so bland and corporate
NigelFrobisher@aussie.zone
on 21 Jun 01:22
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threaded - newest
There’s definitely weird people making games on itch and sometimes in the depths of Steam.
By its very definition weird isn’t going to sell to mass market. That being said I do agree that we need more weird AAA or AA games.
Looking from another angle from Yoko Taro's point, I'd say that, in fear of failing due to being too big, companies would rather play it safe, but that causes creations to grow sterile.
And as consequence, people allegedly "weird", which I wouldn't think are necessarily people with curious antiques as Yoko Taro himself, but simply people whose game ideas are far from a safe ground, go for making indie titles instead as then they can be free to do whatever they want.
Oh yes. Ever heard of Beautycopter?
I have. Watched two beings play it. I sincerely hope the person(s) who made that game make more games.
Deity Driving was their first Steam release.
i am so glad that only costs 2 bucks because flying through rings is giving me serious n65 superman flashbacks. they’re so bad i can’t find the number 5 on my computer. the one next to that.
Weird still exists, true, but the combination of weird + budget is what's really missing.
The only recent example I can think of is Death Stranding.
It’s not quite as weird, but Alan Wake 2 as well qualifies I think.
I found a game on itch about a laundromat that washes women in the machines.
Hmm. On second thought, maybe games were a mistake.
The Alters just released, is AA, weird, and very good! Indies are definitely the home for weird experimental shit but I feel like there are going to be more strange, niche games being made for larger budgets as the AAA space splinters and devours itself.
Next you’ll tell me mainstream is not niche
The indie scene is so much fun.
Fewer weird people.
There’re fewer weird people.
Fair play!
I wasn’t saying you were wrong, just adding a further correction.
What if they meant there is the same number of weird people but they aren’t as weird
Touché!
Kojima is only getting weirder.
Lesser wierd pople
weird people the lesser
Thank you. For once I don’t have to be that person.
There ain’t no more weird folks makin’ no more games anymore.
Part of the issue is that AAA still hasn’t learned how to manage and produce passion projects, which most great games are. They keep wanting to use what’s working elsewhere with no regard for what makes sense in their own game.
Yeah really. They should be more like campuses funding a hundred small teams each trying to make something they’re individually passionate about. Hell, even give them the IPs to play with and see what they come up with.
Makes sense. AAA games are finance projects more than creative projects. Yeah there’s a lot of art and writing and stuff, but it’s all calibrated to make the most money and anything that threatens it is jettisoned. This makes them formulaic to a fault.
Indie games are passion projects, so you see a lot of weird stuff out there. Most of them are utter failures, financially, but the ones that survive are truly something special.
Not dissimilar to what happens with big studio films
20 years ago AAA games could still experiment, but that was because back then AAA games had about the same budget as big indie games now.
You just can’t gamble if you have 10k employees and hundreds of millions riding on it.
Being “safe” is also a gamble, if you aren’t bringing anything new or unique you’re gambling that the title or brand is sufficient for success.
Fear of failure becomes self fulfilling, yeah. You get so worried about making the wrong move and losing money that you can have your spotlight stolen by a challenger doing it fresher for 1/10th the budget.
Less so though.
Yes, being “safe” means you won’t make the next Minecraft, where a hobby budget turns into the best selling game of all time. But it also means that the people who buy every instalment of Fifa or Assassin’s Creed will also buy it.
These popular franchises almost always turn a calculable profit as long as they don’t experiment and do something new that bombs.
As sad as it is, it actually does work out.
That’s why we gamers shouldn’t trust on AAA titles bringing something great to the market. If you want to play a game like you watch linear TV (plonk down on the couch/in front of the PC and to whatever to relax and waste time), then AAA is great. If you want to play something new, something exciting, something that you haven’t played before, then go with lower-budget titles.
AAA is the McDonalds of games. You don’t go to McDonalds for the freaky hand-crafted vegan fusion kitchen bacon burger with crazy Korean curry mayo and caramelized lettuce.
20 years ago people were complaining about the same lack of creativity in the AAA scene, saying that gaming was better in the 90s. In fact I remember it was a common talking point that AAA gaming had gotten so bad that there would surely be another crash like the one in '83.
Here’s how I see it:
From a gameplay standpoint: My perception of the mid to late 2000s is that every AAA game was either a modern military shooter, a ‘superhero’ game (think prototype or infamous), or fell somewhere in the assassin’s creed, far cry, GTA triangle. Gameplay was also getting more and more trivial and braindead, with more and more QTE cuts scenes. The perception among both game devs and journalists was that this was a good direction for the industry to go, as it was getting away from the ‘coin sucking difficulty’ mentality of arcade games and moving towards games as art (i.e. cinematic experiences). There were of course a few games like Mirrors Edge, and games released by Valve, but they were definitely the exception rather than the rule (and Valve eventually stopped making games). Then Dark Souls came out and blew all their minds that a game could both have non-braindead gameplay and be artful at the same time.
Now I would say we’ve actually seen a partial reversal of this trend. Triple A games are still not likely to be pioneers when it comes to gameplay, we’ve actually seen a few mainstream franchises do things like using Souls-like combat or immersive-sim elements, which IMO would have been unthinkable 15 years ago.
From an aesthetic standpoint: My perception of the mid to late 2000s is that everything was brown with a yellow piss filter over it. If you were lucky it could be grey and desaturated instead. This was because Band of Brothers existed, and because it was the easiest way to make lighting look good with the way it worked at the time. As an aside, Dark Souls, a game where you crawl around in a sewer filled with poop and everyone is a zombie that’s also slowly dying of depression because the world is going to end soon and they’ve lost all hope, had more color than the average 2000s game where you’re some sort of hero or badass secret agent.
Things are absolutely better in the aesthetic department now. Triple A studios remembered what colors looked like.
From a conceptual / narrative standpoint: I don’t think AAA games were very creative in this department in the 2000s and I don’t think they’re very creative now. They mostly just competed to see who could fellate the player the hardest to make them feel like a badass. If you were lucky the player character was also self destructive and depressed in addition to being a badass.
Then and now your best bet for a creative premise in a high budget game is to look to Japanese developers.
From a consumer friendliness / monetization standpoint: In the 2000s people were already complaining about day one DLC, battlepasses and having to pay multiple times just to get a completed game.
Now its worse than its ever been IMO. Not only do AAA games come out completely broken and unfinished, really aggressive monetization strategies are completely normalized. Also companies are pretty reluctant to make singleplayer games now, since its easier to farm infinite gacha rolls from a multiplayer game (although this was kinda already the case in the 2000s).
Overall I think we’re now in a golden age for indie games, and things like Clair Obscura and Baldur’s Gate 3 give me a lot of hope for AA games.
I think your perception might be 10 years off.
Assassins Creed 1 came out in 2007, less than 20 years ago. It was mindbogglingly fresh and innovative back then. An open world where you can’t just run anywhere you want, but also climb anywhere? And your character dynamically climbed up walls, finding places to hold onto everywhere? That was amazing back then. It was the first game that even attempted anything like that, and it was really, really good. AC only became lame when they started doing the same over and over again with little change.
Similar story with Far Cry. FC1 came out in 2004, only FC2 was also released in that decade (2008). Both FC1 and FC2 were doing something new, fresh and genre-defining. Looking back from now, yes, these games look like everything else that followed it, but because these games defined it.
But in this decade we saw a lot of other genre-defining games, like Warcraft 3 (2002/2003), WoW (2004), KOTOR (2003), Bioshock (2007), Crysis (2007), Fable (2004), Batman: Arkham Asylum (2009), Portal (2007) and also a lot of AAA flops that happened due to too much experimentation and shooting for the stars, like Spore (2008).
And most of the games I listed above don’t have a piss filter.
You’re right, as is so often the case when people talk about a decade I’m thinking more of its latter half and the beginning half of the next one.
But in my defense I did say “the mid to late 2000s”.
I have a few more thoughts, but I’ll have to make another reply in a bit.
So, when I mention the Assassin’s Creed / Far Cry / GTA triangle I really mean to say the poor imitators of those games. They did do some very innovative things when they first came out, but just like modern military shooters took regenerating health and the two weapon limit from Halo while leaving behind all the other gameplay mechanics that made that work, so too did many games adopt the open world and the general way you interact with it, while removing anything interesting. By “the way you interact with it” I’m referring specifically to the map unlocking, the collectables, the village / territory faction control, and the “heat” system that spawns enemies depending on how much attention you are generating.
IMO those sorts of games were very much the other side of the coin from CoD-likes, and the problem was that while the extremely linear levels of CoD-likes were too restrictive, these open world games had no structure at all. In games like Blood, Quake, or what have you, encounters are designed to flow in a certain way, with each one having its own flavor and favoring certain approaches over others. In some games you can even think of enemy encounters as a puzzle you need to solve. Level design and enemy placement of course form the two halves of encounter design. In good games this sort of thing extends to the structure of the game as a whole, with the ebs and flows in the action, and different gameplay happening in different sections so the formula keeps getting changed up. But in games where the level design is an open world that let’s you approach from any angle, and where enemy placement is determined on the fly by a mindless algorithm, there is no encounter design. At the same time the way enemy spawning works is actually too orchestrated to have interesting emergent gameplay. For example, if an algorithm made an enemy patrol spawn an hour ago, and the player can see it from across the map, they can come up with their own plan on how to deal with this unique situation. If the player gets one bar of heat and the algorithm makes an enemy spawn around a corner they can’t anticipate that at all, its just mindless. This has implications for the gameplay itself (no enemy can be very tough or require very much thinking or planning if you’re just going to spawn them around a corner) but also, as previously stated, the entire structure of the game.
As for the other games you mention, I want to bring up Bioshock in particular. Its true, that game is a master class in presentation and aesthetics, and a game I would highly recommend, but its actually one of the games that I remember people complaining about when they said gaming was better in the 90s. Specifically the way Bioshock is very dumbed down compared to its predecessor System Shock, both from a general game and level design standpoint, but also because of the inclusion of vita chambers and the compass pointer that leads you around by the nose. (One place I will give Bioshock points though is that it has way more of an ecosystem than most imm-sims with the way enemies interact with each other; it even beats out imm-sim darling Prey 2017 in this regard).
This is admittedly a way more niche complaint than people complaining about QTEs or games being piss/brown, but it was definitely a smaller part of the much larger “games are getting dumbed down” discourse.
I could talk about Crysis and Spore too, but this comment is already really long. I haven’t played the rest of the games you list, so I can’t offer an opinion on them, though I have heard that KOTOR was very good.
That only happened in the 2010s. That’s when the Ubisoft formula really took off. Assassin’s Creed 1 was only released in 2007, Far Cry 2 in 2008 (FC1 was a quite different game). GTA also only started to get imitated in the 2010s.
Open World in that sense (non-scripted encounters that can be approached from many different angles, with a “living” world) only became a thing in the late 2000s, precisely because of games like Assassin’s Creed and Far Cry 2.
I remember reading a pre-release article about Far Cry 2 in a game magazine, where were all hyped about the many different ways a player could take out an enemy camp, e.g. go in guns blazing, or set a fire that would spread to the camp, or startle wild animals which then would stampede through the camp.
While I do get your point about hand-crafted deterministic enemy placement, it’s just two different kinds of approaches that work for different players.
When you say “dumbed-down”, I understand you mean that the difficulty was too low, is that correct? While some players love or even need punishing difficulty levels, others play for other reasons. (Maybe check out the Bartle taxonomy of player types. It’s a bit outdated, but it shows some of these different reasons quite well.) If you want to just kick back and relax after a hard day of work, punishing difficulty might not be the right thing. Some players want to have to learn (or even memorize) levels/bosses/encounters and repeat them repeatedly until they know exactly which button to press when, and that’s fine. For others that’s just tedious busywork, everyone’s different. I quite enjoyed Far Cry 2 and its random encounters and having to adapt to different scenarios all the time.
Forgive me for saying that, but it’s quite harsh to call a whole decade of games uncreative if you haven’t played a lot of the greatest and most creative games of that time.
To get back to the original point:
That was in the 2010s, not in the 2000s. In the 90s, game development was pretty much completely low-budget, with games rarely having more than 5 programmers on staff, and maybe 5-10 content creators. In the 2000s games started getting bigger, but the studios were still led by game developers, not by finance dudes. Budgets were still not nearly where they are today. Assassins Creed 1, for example, had a budget of $20mio. Compare that to e.g. the $175mio that AC Valhalla cost to make. And AC1 was comparatively expensive back then.
It was only in the 2010s when finance really got into gaming, budgets ballooned and risks were lowered to nothing.
So, that’s the thing, that’s interesting emergent gameplay.
Compare that to Just Cause (2006) or Just Cause 2 (2010). It has neat traversal mechanics (paragliding, and in the second one the grappling hook), but it has neither the emergent gameplay of Far Cry or the carefully crafted level design of a less open game.
Or compare Far Cry to Red Faction: Guerrilla. That has cool destructible buildings, but otherwise it just falls within the triangle. In my opinion they didn’t do enough with the building destruction (compare it to how destruction is used in a tactical way in the multiplayer game Rainbow Six Siege, or how its used as the basis for a puzzle game in the indie game Teardown), but the real ugliness of the game design rears its head in the driving missions. I remember being able to flick my mouse back and fourth and see vehicles appear in a space in the split second it was off screen. That wouldn’t be so bad if it wasn’t for the fact that these were timed missions, and a vehicle could literally spawn directly in front of you, or directly to your side off camera and plow right into you.
But beyond being really annoying and goofy looking, I have to ask if that sort of system even fit the concept they were going for. The GTA games were satire games, if the spawning system and the wild car chases were a little bit goofy that was part of the joke. And while Red Faction was not the most brutally serious game I’ve ever played, it was one of the most political, especially for the era that it came out. In the first Red Faction you are part of an armed labor uprising very reminiscent of the Battle of Blair Mountain (the workers are miners). In Guerilla you basically fight in a SciFi version of a middle eastern war, on the side of the middle east. So where is this goofiness coming from?
Sorry, that was a bit of a tangent, but I think game design and narrative/themes are intertwined, and IMO this is another instance of taking the open world formula and leaving elements behind while not doing anything to replace them or transform the things you took to make it work in the new context.
Not really, no. Certainly a lot of people complained about games getting easier and easier, but in regards to Bioshock in particular I mean that its level design and gameplay mechanics were literally more mindless for the player to interact with, conceptually simpler, and less intellectually interesting, than its predecessor System Shock 2. This doesn’t really have anything to do with how mechanically difficult it is to execute an action in either game (although SS2 was more difficult, in a bad way, it was enormously more clunky than Bioshock).
Its kinda hard to explain what I mean by this without writing a giant essay on the game’s designs and the philosophy of the immersive Sim design ethos. The most succinct way I could describe it would be to say that an immersive sim tries to merge an action game and an open ended puzzle game (as in a puzzle game where the player can come up with their own solution) into a seamless whole. Another way to describe is as a game that tries to maximize the potential for emergent gameplay while still having finely crafted encounter design (something that in most games is antithetical to one another). Another way to describe it would be a game that has those sorts of finely designed encounters, but with systems that are intentionally made to be exploitable in a way that many games do on accident. Or in other words the encounters are intentionally made to be cheesed and broken, and and the act of figuring out how to do this was made to be fun, and because of that the games were still usually fun even of you broke them in a way the developers didn’t anticipate.
So, to put it simply Bioshock just did these things much less than its predecessor (the places where it still did was the enemy ecosystem, and to some degree the way you had to plan to take down a Big Daddy). Unless I can dig up some really old YouTube videos you’ll have to take my word for it that there was a sentiment among certain circles, at least in the early 2010s, that was lamenting the death of games like System Shock 2, Thief, Arx Fatalis, and Deus Ex, and Bioshock was held up as an example of that.
At the same time there was a less niche complaint about the death of what we would call “boomer shooters” today. Specifically how they had keys, secrets, and nonlinear levels. The sentiment was
Imagine having 10k employees and not setting aside an indie dev team or two for passion projects.
The huge majority of indie games never make any money at all. This link is a little older, but it claims that 50% of indie games on steam never make more than $4000, only 25% ever make more than $26 000 and only 14% cross the $100k mark.
Considering the cost of developers, that’s about 1-2 man years for the $100k mark, and then there’s only a 14% chance of even recouping that.
Passion projects work out because the people making them don’t value their time as work time, don’t make a salary from it, and even then in the huge majority of cases, it doesn’t work out financially.
This statement holds true for pretty much every other corporation. Imagine owning a huge farm and not setting aside a few farm hands to grow old artisan vegetables. Imagine owning a supermarket chain and not setting aside a few shops for exotic sweets from Central Africa. Imagine owning a fast food chain and not setting aside a few restaurants for artisan burger variations.
Yes, every corporation could afford to do stuff like that, but they aren’t there to advance humanity by investing in arts and crafts, but for making every last drop of money they can. And yes, there’s much to criticise about this goal, but making little indie passion projects doesn’t work well with corporations.
Weird people were forced out of the industry over the past decade or more, for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with making games.
Happens with any industry that gets big, I think. More profits=more suits/vampires coming in and replacing artists/scientists or whoever is more qualified to make key decisions.
This won't stop unless infinite wealth hoarding is tackled by governments, if ever.
You’re not wrong. I still remember the day I picked up a newspaper and saw the headline “video games earn more than movies for the first time ever,” and I immediately knew where the industry was headed. In retrospect, I was 100% correct.
Happened even with Boeing. I think it should be illegal for anyone with an MBA to be CEO or CTO of any company. They can be CFO if they want to, but not any role with actual decision power over products.
Spicy, but I love that take
But then you get those people opening studios like Sandfall and creating masterpieces like Clair Obscura…
Can you blame them for not taking risks when these games get punished time and time again for doing so?
TLOU Part II had a mildly unlikeable character who gasp was a woman and it killed the entire franchise and sparked mass controversy so hard Naughty Dog now is making some bland and generic soulslike (but in space) GOTG ripoff slop with product placement in it.
False, Tlou part 2 was peak normie writing
Care to elaborate? You play as the person who killed a beloved iconic video game character and last game’s protagonist for 13 straight hours - I don’t know if it’s good but I’d hardly call it anything resembling “normie writing”.
To me - normie writing is something like those new switch Zelda games or Yakuza games or those Jedi Fallen Order/Survivor dark souls clone games or something like Watch_Dogs 1 or hell insert any ubisoft game apart from FC2, WD2 here
This. And none of these games with their totally predictable normie plots get any shit for that, let alone anything major.
And Watch dogs 1 was such a terrible game, it would deserve getting major shit.
It was certainly very pro-zionist.
TLOU2 controversy wasn’t because the unlikable character was a woman, it was because the writing was garbage. If the unlikable character was a man the reception would have been exactly the same.
Also, woman characters in games hasn’t been a risk since Metroid came out in 1986. It seems nowadays that the tables have turned and the vast majority of main characters in more than half of games from the past 5 years are women.
Whether the writing was garbage or not isn’t relevant to be honest - because controversy was spun by people who only knew the game’s story through hearsay of the leaks before the game even came out, and majorly it was to do with accusations of “wokeness” and other brainrot - so yes clearly it was an issue, of course it was an issue.
It wasn’t really the substance of the game that the usual outrage grifters latched onto so it’s not relevant to the discussion of the controversy.
As for more women being protagonists - sure, idk how you can say that so confidently, I suppose you have a convenient framing for what counts as “big games” to support your point, but I think the quantity was never really an issue.
Honestly more men being protags in games is okay, what I take issue with is that whenever something interesting happens, like oh I dunno, a game makes a woman kinda buff and mean looking, people bitch about it like no tomorrow.
So of course it’s an issue. It always has been.
In 2013-ish, Anita Sarkessian made some exceedingly light feminist critiques of video games in and it was an issue. In 2014-ish, A woman made an indie game that’s honestly really good even to this day (Depression Quest) and it was an issue. In 2020, a game came out where a fictional character (Abby) had muscles and it was an issue.
Nowadays I guess the most famous example would be the “FUCKING GENDER AMBIGUITY” screaming guy who didn’t like Starfield’s pronoun selection screen or some such.
Then people went truly psychotic in a deranged hate campaign against some random inclusivity consultancy Sweet Baby Inc. over games they were reportedly never involved with because there was women, or something, somewhere.
Hopefully you get the idea.
It was precisely the issue that a woman was the main character in a video game but was not in fact “Metroid from Metroid 1986” but a buff, angry, unattractive, hateful and morally grey character who does shitty things, sorta like Joel - in other words - she was something a lot more like a real person in a mature story, not a single digit frame twist from 40 years ago that amounts to an Easter egg turned geek culture cringe factoid parroted by the kinds of people who wouldn’t understand RLM’s “Nerd Crew” show is satire.
You can see some of the worst examples here, cherry-picked as they are, juxtaposed with what actual critique is: www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVQcZa4O01A
You can also visit the steam store page and look at the negative reviews, or peruse the cesspit subreddit /r/TheLastOfUs2 posts the time of the game’s leaks and release to see people bitching about everything from pride flags in Seattle(!) to Abby being made too likeable to accusations of this or that character being le ebil transgender or whatever else that sounds like it came out of a /pol/-themed magic 8 ball.
Hell, there are utterly deranged people in the steam reviews for this game now bitching about the show - about the actress that plays Ellie and one guy even implies she is “down syndrome representation”.
Like, what the actual fuck?
As for the game, the game is ok, I’m playing it right now, it’s less boring than the first so I like it a lot more, the AI actually lives up to the bullshit promised in the first game’s trailer, but it’s too long and yeah the writing is too on the nose sometimes, though I do like the characters and the atmosphere a lot. Idk if I “love” it, but I do find it way more fun as a game and far more interesting from a story perspective.
What it definitely is though is controversial as fuck and that’s just reality. People made a whole subreddit just to hate on the game that’s active to this day and most of their issues aren’t even to do with the game - they even pretend to hate the TV show they haven’t seen too.
This is spot on.
In 2013 I was much younger and believed ahit I read, so I was swept up in the “Sarkessian wants to destroy games” crap (as if she could and/or mattered enough to actually affect change in any way).
A few years ago I looked up her videos (cudos to her that she still kept them online) and I was honestly almost disappointed in how bland and obviously true her points were. Sure, her research wasn’t perfect and she could have presented them a bit better, but what these videos deserved would have been mostly bored acknowledgement. Similar to TLOU2. It wasn’t a super exciting game. The story wasn’t great but also not terrible. The characters were adequately interesting for the most part. The gameplay was again not great but ok, and certainly not worse than part 1.
Could it have been better? Sure, no question. But it also didn’t nearly deserve the hate it got.
Same with many other similar media, like e.g. the Ghostbusters remake or Twilight.
But what happened there was that people got seriously offended by these games/shows/movies and then made it their mission to destroy it. And that’s ridiculous and pathetic, but it happens all the time.
Killed the franchise so much that the original game has been remastered twice, the second game once, and a TV series has been made out of it…?
Killed so much that the game will never get a sequel it’s clearly meant to have, yes.
The remaster of the first game came out before Part 2. The subsequent remake of the first game is made using Part 2’s assets and mechanics as well as assets from the original and had much smaller production costs, it was clearly made to recoup the loss of IP value perceived by Sony, same with the relatively low budget HBO show, compared to making a game the caliber of TLOU it costs peanuts and if at all - that will be the only way the saga will see a conclusion sadly.
So yes absolutely TLOU was killed off by the controversy and they’re now working on a new IP that looks significantly more safe and uncontroversial in every way sans maybe featuring a black lady in it.
I imagine most game IPs wish they could be as killed off as TLOU.
Yeah, doesn’t change the fact though - it was Sony’s flagship from their oldest most well known first party studio and it effectively got cancelled and pawned off to HBO to be milked on a budget.
Most movie franchises wish they could be Star Wars but it doesn’t change the fact the sequel trilogy did immense and obvious damage to the brand due (primarily) to the controversy, though in that case those movies actually also sucked which I’m sure didn’t help things. TLOU Part 2 on the other hand was by no means as awful as any of the sequel trilogy SW flicks.
Nepotism is ruining entertainment.
The thing I miss most about handhelds is all the mid-budget experimental spinoffs made for them. That was where weird truly flourished, and I'm sad that there's not really a place for that in today's market. Hideo Kojima's Boktai trilogy is one of my favorite games of all time, and there will never ever ever be another game remotely as weird as that.
I suppose it happened because from a mainstream perspective handhelds like the DS and PSP were far behind dedicated systems in terms of graphics, and so the expectation was never there to have “triple A” visuals - neither from consumers nor industry.
Made for very fertile ground in terms of games that had budget, but still had a long leash to go and get wacky.
No worries. There is plenty of weird to find with indie games.
Yeah, but how survivable is making indie games? Unless you make it big, you aren’t paying rent that way.
That’s why you need public funding to support and nourish the industry. We’ve got that in our state where we can get grants to start up studios. This allowed for studios such as Massive Monster to be created.
VC funding isn’t great because they can pull out if the project or investment doesn’t suit them. See League of Geeks.
This take sucks. There's a clear cap on what indies can do because they have a limited budget. Whatever their output is, it's not comparable to big studios output.
What the market lacks is quirky games on a medium budget, which's not what indie scenes provide.
That’s why bg3 felt so special. For us by us at that scale
There are plenty of weird people making weird games if you know where to look. itch io and DLSite, for instance.
That was literally his point…that the weird people make indie games and not AAA games.
Read the article, you say? What a radical notion.
It’s pretty short too!
I didn’t even read the article that information is right in the title LOL
Sorry, I’m illiterate (this was written by my editor).
And it’s for the better, the AAA games industry devours talent and spits out mediocrity and burnouts. I would prefer that small indie studios keep control of their creative output rather than being devoured by the money machine.
There is a space between ‘itch.io freebie that runs in terminal’ and ‘TROUT: Sacred Band 8’ and the unprecedented level if sliders for dicks in character creation
"Do you think video games are silly little things?"
no.
That entire credit sequence is high water mark for games as a medium.
Every emotion.
Drunk ass man writing his characters, crying in a room alone. The thing we need more of lol. Will purchase any game his name is attached to.
I couldn't agree more
i mean if he just wants weird, i’m available for hire. got experience in storytelling and turning food into poop.
I don’t think you need to be weird to make weird games. I mean, it wouldn’t hurt but it’s not necessary. Just do what Fromsoft does: make the game first using the rule of cool, then write the story around it instead of the other way around.
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I stopped playing AAA games years ago. They are all trash.
Indie games are where it’s at
I’ve mainly been an Indie gamer since 2012 or so. My last gaming build is almost 7 years old, but I think the last AAA game I played was during lockdown and that was just because it was a way to hang with friends. At this point I just play indie ports on my phone.
Funny enough, after going through my Steam recently played, the last AAA game I enjoyed was Nier.
I dunno I like elden ring and rdr2. Some are still good, just not most, anymore
Yeah I’m playing cyberpunk for the first time and really enjoying it. i don’t know how much it innovates, but I’d say it was certainly a good game.
The good ones are solid tho and last a long time, I do prefer indie/smallteam for the most part now
vrs got some cool unique stuff, vtol vr is solid gaming still got some really cool stuff coming out, I wanna live in a world where vtol vr is as popular as cod
Some are quite good tho
Not all, but yeah. 75% of my wishlists are weird and interesting indie stuff from the constant Steam demo fests.
They’re polished, but nearly all of them are too safe.
The ones that subvert things a little are always best for me, and these always get mixed reactions from people who went in with a set idea of what they wanted from it.
Red Dead Redemption 2 being a slow paced wild west simulator rather than Grand Theft Horse is a prime example. It didn’t play by safety and doing popular things. It did what they wanted it to be, and it’s all the better for it.
Everyone should go check out The Alters, it is a pretty weird game but a lot of fun with a great story and atmosphere. It’s a space survival, resource/building, race against incoming death game.
After Spec Ops The line, everything went to shit, the bar was too high
Dunno why you’re being downvoted, that game was insanely good. Mediocre shooter, but the story was amazingly good.
Because there were still plenty of good games that came out after that?
Yeah, personally a huge fan of the game, but if you think spec ops the line is the last best game, then you really haven’t played that many good games since.
There’s also such a thing as subjective tastes and I believe that it’s more so significant in games because of how diverse they are.
That’s true. I was more commenting on how good a game it was though, but I do think it’s peak story for me. KCD series is second. There hasn’t been another game for me that had such a crazy twist in it than spec ops.
More than ‘story’, the way they made every part of the game about it.
It was mediocre/workmanlike when viewed entirely as a shooter. But most of the gameplay just used ‘shooter’ as framing.
That’s the entire tech industry. I got in at the tail end of it being full of nerds who were interested in computers. Then jocks and the like found out it pays really well and now it isn’t fun anymore.
Yeah man all those well known jocks like Spez and Zuckerberg sure did a number on tech.
hey mark does ju jitsu and he’s totally really good at it and all the other martial artist guys love hanging out with him
Is he actually good at it or are guys who want to hang out with a billionaire saying he’s good at it?
+1 to this, I feel like having a ton of money is what corrupts leadership, not necessarily their technical background.
Maybe Spez and Zuck haven’t changed much, but I feel like some others started out as relatively reasonable people who were also technically brilliant, but eventually their companies started doing shitty things and they are both aware and apparently unwilling to stop it.
Perhaps corruption in the Soviet Union is a good example of how even people from normal hard working backgrounds (i.e. not billionaires who have never worked a day in their life) can still be corrupted by power and a lack of accountability.
.
Jocks != Business c suite
Too many business majors joined game dev teams
What’s a jock if it isn’t the highschool quarterback?
Non usa-ish here
Yeah, it was nice as long as it lasted, now it’s all meetings and stupid “agility” (as agile as DPRK is democratic) and measurings of your percieved productivity.
I’m still looking, maybe some c/c++ old legacy system needs a geek somewhere?
The weird people are still there, but development teams are much larger now, so their input is not as prominent. Plus the budgets are so large that a flop can heavily damage a company or even ruin it, so they’re very risk-averse. We need more AA or A games instead of relying so much on heavy-hitters.
The weird people still make tons of indie games.
Indie games are great and all, but everybody I know is still waiting for great AAA games again that we can play together.
Well you need better friends
I mean, sure, complaining and while doing the same thing and expecting a different result is one strategy. AAA games are purely capitalistic endeavours.
Capitalism at its finest.
I know im late to the party but… I just started playing Death Stranding. Lets just say its more than just a walking simulator…
I mean, it’s being a mail carrier in a world that is maximum Kojima.
I mean it’s an Amazon delivery simulator so yeah
It is mental, but I also kind of wish he’d hire somebody else to write dialogue for him.
And maybe somebody to check all the women characters, and make sure he’s not coming across as being a little bit odd.
Not sure what you mean - “Mario and Princess Beach” is obviously peak cinema
Yeah…
And Death Stranding is better about its female characters than most of the MGS games…
I JUST started collecting chrysalis crystals. (so mabyt 4-5 delvilvery/walking sim missions in)
To quote an old meme, ‘I know nothing Jon Snow’ but one i saw the ::: spoiler Title Hand prints in the sand, :::
I knew this was more than a walking simulator
By the time you finish the game, whatever you’ve seen so far will seem like the most normal thing in the world.
Definitely a lot of standard Kojima gameplay in there, among the apocalyptic Deliveroo simulator and bonkers 4th wall breaking.
Yoko Taro talking about weird shows a healthy deal of self awareness… +1 respect in my book
Who knew kicking out every passionate person with artistic integrity and forcing the death of the artist would impact the creativity of the industry?
Jesus christ I hate game CEOs, they need to be locked in a room with games until they learn how to have fun.
Dragon Age 1-3 all had their drawbacks but could always fall back on how beloved the lore was and how it was present. Dragon Age Veilguard has much of the lore the original creator laid out but presents the revelations in its game poorly and retcons lore from previous games in sterile ways. The original creator left after 3 and over the decade has dropped tidbits about the changing culture of the studio he left
What is he trying to say? How can something be weird and unique but also consumed by millions of people as a popular product?
If he thinks riding a dragon in modern Tokyo to fight a big naked statue is weird and unique, he’s probably sad that the world has moved on from holding up sporks and going “lol random XD!”
The markets can’t sell Weird™ to the masses. Now there’s no “weird” people making super high budget art. Terrible!
Called HR.
I love it when I’m playing a game and I can feel the genuine love put into it. Old Nintendo games for example. now most games feel so bland and corporate
CreativityProduction