I mean, good creators don’t? There are still AA and indie devs pouring their heart into stories they want to tell?
This article is basically just bemoaning that AAA develops for the lowest common denominator, which I can understand as a gripe, but it’s a very old gripe. If you start really digging into AAA, you’ll get other similar ones like “Why are these gameplay loops made for people who don’t like gameplay” or “How come perfectly serviceable story focused games get mandatory crafting systems added onto them.” When you’re trying to make something to broadly appeal to as many people as possible, you stop making art, so I don’t know why people keep expecting AAA to produce artistic experiences.
I agree, AAA games are long dead. However there was a time where AAA games were amazing, maybe around the PS2/Gamecube/Xbox era. Back when devs were allowed creative freetom to make the games they actually wanted and try new things. I think a lot of people with these complaints miss that level of catered quality from back then
the industry has also be caught in the grips of budget gigantism by an influx of investor cash for the past decade.
Outside investors saw dollar signs with the rapid growth of the market, and also huge financial successes like fortnight. So they were willing to put up a lot of funding in hopes of outsized returns. Pressure from investors and management meant appealing to the largest audience possible, and also chasing the latest trends. Despite the huge budgets, the games were unfocused and bad, both from trying to appeal to too many audiences, and constantly changing direction during development to chase trends.
This article is basically just bemoaning that AAA develops for the lowest common denominator, which I can understand as a gripe, but it’s a very old gripe.
And an easy one to fix: Don’t fucking buy AAA games!
This concept of a second screen show is so unbelievably fucking moronic… It’s your own damn fault if you’re not paying attention!
I have a second monitor that I play things on, and it’s either a stream of someone playing something similar or the same game, or it’s a show I’ve already watched and know the story of.
If I’m watching something new, then I’m watching it. To have stories dumbed down, or just butchered to suit tictok brainrotted people completely devoid of attention spans is so freaking depressing and only exacerbates the issue. But in the end I guess I get it, you’re out for a profit and it hurts to have a plethora of idiots rate you poorly because they weren’t paying attention and didn’t understand the story… Ughh…
Devil’s Advocate: This is for the adult gamer set who only have a prescribed amount of time they can spend on gaming. They get a chance for a few hours every few weeks. Their lives are overwhelming with details and information they need to remember regarding every day life. They simply don’t have the mental capacity to remember all the details from a game they spend two to three hours on once every few weeks, not when their mental focus is given to you know, real fucking life.
While I understand the frustration with such writing, because it bothers me as well… I don’t have a job where I work 60 hours a week nor do I have children. I’m kind of the exception to the rule when it comes to being able to give a game my full attention. Further, I have always had an incredibly good memory and attention to detail. Most people I have met in my life simply… do not have incredibly good memories or attention to detail. That doesn’t make them bad people who are living life wrong, it just means their brains work differently or they’re putting that mental energy to different things.
If we want people to pay attention to these stories, well, we’ve got to change fucking society from the ground up so they have the free time to actually be able to do so. Whinging about it like this isn’t going to magically make people pay better attention when they have to split their time with taking care of their children, which obviously should take priority over a fucking video game.
People act like the Netflixication is because people are all busy staring at their phones… I posit that it’s actually people cooking meals, doing dishes, doing laundry, ironing clothes, and a thousand other tedious daily activities where they’re trying to squeeze in some entertainment while also paying attention to something else entirely.
Games with complicated or involved stories just need to go back to having a comprehensive log or journal. That used to be a staple of big games, to the point where it could take you days to read all the lore and journal entires. That might not be fully ideal for those adult gamers either but theres definitely a comfortable middle ground where your active missions page has a little brief for each objective telling you who gave the quest, what they wanted and why. Lots of games these days can have like 20 active quest markers and give you no information about any of them beyond some random npc you talked to once wants 10 of something for some reason.
I remember back in the day, when a lot of the time you had to keep your log/journal yourself with pen and paper. Getting back to Lands of Lore after a week without any notes? Might as well start over.
I like the way the new wave of CRPGs — Pillars of Eternity, Tyranny, etc. — deals with this problem. Of course you have a journal with a quest log and a lore encyclopedia. In addition to that, if you hover over highlighted words (names, lore things) during dialogue, it shows you a short explanation.
That’s a good point and, for lack of studies about it, it’s impossible to tell which is the most pervasive.
As a counterpoint, and this might be an "unpopular opinion"™: not all games are (should be) made for as broad an audience as possible and different attention (investment) levels should be expected depending on the game. That obviously won’t resonate with the business side of the gaming industry, but I think everyone needs to be aware of how much time they can dedicate to their hobbies and pick them accordingly.
I’m thankfully not in a position where I have to work 60hrs a week and I’m childless as well, but some weeks might leave me with less free time than others and I pick entertainment/media accordingly. That might not be what others do and I know my experience is likely purely anecdotal, but if I feel I don’t have enough time to properly enjoy a game or remember its premises as I play, I’ll simply do something else, even if gaming is my favourite hobby.
And to be clear, I fully agree that society needs to change dramatically either way. Everyone would benefit from better work-life balance.
not all games are (should be) made for as broad an audience as possible
The problem is that when a AAA game costs three hundred million dollars to make due to all the performance capture and famous actors and high fidelity graphics and whatnot, you have to reach as broad an audience as possible in order to make that money back.
I think this is what's killing the blockbuster movies, too. Everything needs to be lowest-common-denomenator to have a hope of turning a profit.
Sure, and that makes financial sense, but that’s only one specific subset of games.
Smaller productions/games still have ways to turn a profit with smaller intended audiences and can in turn offer more complex storylines.
It’s also very important to remember that AAA doesn’t refer to quality; it’s terminology borrowed from financial products to indicate how safe an investment it is to generate a return.
What’s even the point of playing story games then if the story is condensed and simplified to such a degree? If all explanations are spoon fed to you and the story if so primitive that the bar is on the floor it just becomes boring. At this point you are better off playing games that focus on gameplay instead, it will be a more fun experience.
It’s like reading a summary of a book of just watch a short clip about it on TikTok because books are “too long” and then calling yourself a reader.
I’m not sure where the Trails games fall when it comes to being dialogue or story heavy, but it has taken me a good 380 hours to get to the 7th game in the series (Trails of Cold Steel 2) playing over the last 3 years and it has been fantastic.
I’m in my early 40s and have a kindergartener so gaming is fairly limited. These games have become my “nightly TV” where I play about an hour before I go to bed.
This is not a good argument for unnecessary exposition though, this is just an argument for shorter, bite-sized narratives, or even what some games already do (like The Witcher 3) where they recap where you are in the loading screen. If anything, unnecessary exposition just wastes what little time you have to play, or forces you to skip the dialogue entirely.
The amount of time I’ve spent playing online games has fallen off a cliff after forced matchmaking, particularly SBMM. They’ve legitimately ruined my enjoyment of games.
I got into Overwatch for a bit, but the SBMM meant that at lower levels it was basically a coin flip if I would get a team that wanted to play as a team, or a bunch of kill whores who only cared about their K/D ratio. I don’t want to have to drop hundreds of hours int mastering the game just to have actual teamwork.
Oh, I love skill-based matchmaking. Without it, if you’re having a good time, it means your opponent is almost surely having a bad time, rather than keeping the matches close. At low ranks, often times a single piece of knowledge can escalate your play to a higher level, which can make those low ranks feel kind of swing-y, but I don’t know that that’s a problem that can really be solved unless you remove the asymmetry. That said, I no longer wish to substitute matchmaking for the likes of a server browser.
It’s very simple. If it doesn’t have a Server Browser, has MTX, has Gacha, has Rootkits, is Online Only/No LAN, or is made by any of the AAA studios, I don’t play it.
Server browsers and dedicated servers are subjects that make me want to start with the old man “back in myyy day” style comments.
I saw somebody mention CS, which is a good one, but for me the peak was in Quake 2 because of personal circumstances like getting into overclocking and then moving to a university network connection when modems were the norm at home.
Certain servers running certain mods were awesome late-night hangouts. I have a few really fun memories of all of us coordinating to do goofy stuff rather than play whatever the game at hand was. Then somebody new would join the server and start wrecking us until we caught their attention with the text chat and got them involved too, lol.
Vote with your wallet and don’t buy this. Many years ago we’ve got dedicated servers and free map builders. Nowadays we get matchmaking and 3 maps and additional 3 for 20 bucks.
I always liked going into older BF servers that weren’t so populated just to be able to get a lay of the land without being destroyed in three seconds.
Or to be able to use the vehicles and get used to them without as much threat.
Maybe I just want a mode that lets you free-roam maps…
I do! I enjoy camera modes in games a lot, too. I like to look at the architecture in games because I think it’s fascinating.
For BF, though, I do think a little playground would be great. Since they have that map builder tool, I may end up just having to make one myself.
Especially for adjusting piloting controls. If you try to do that while playing a normal match you may not ever even get to fly a chopper to see if you made a good change, for example. I played the beta all day on Saturday and didn’t get a chance to fly anything during that time.
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