It wouldn’t have gotten so much hate at release if it was a remaster, but it was a remake that looked like a remaster, which is not acceptable when you’re talking about a 20-year gap. They made the right move, which is what’s so surprising to me.
You know, I'm not surprised about that, and not in a good way. CR is part of RPG culture I'm not good with, and I'm totally unsurprised that people who were part of 5e are joining them.
All I can hope is that seeing Hasbro lose people will draw attention to other systems - or for Hasbro to make a marketing push on the Essence20 system in addition to (or instead of) d20.
The commodification and the desire for mass appeal are the top-level issues I have. I feel uncomfortable when I see the modern D&D branding on stuff in "normal" stores. It takes away the community and puts Hasbro in the central role, rather than the network of GMs who should be the majority influence. If I wanted a hobby with a company in charge, I would play Warhammer.
Now, on the community side, my biggest issue is with things I see as derived from CR. The lack of respect for simple theatre of the mind is a direct issue with the way I've always run and played since I left D&D. The tolerance and even acceptance of paid DMing also pisses me off in ways that make it very hard for me to remain civil.
Those are the big ones. There's also the fact that D&D doesn't seem to have the offramps it had since AD&D1 (and which admittedly went downhill when the Forge went out of the spotlight).
The commodification and the desire for mass appeal are the top-level issues I have. I feel uncomfortable when I see the modern D&D branding on stuff in "normal" stores. It takes away the community and puts Hasbro in the central role, rather than the network of GMs who should be the majority influence. If I wanted a hobby with a company in charge, I would play Warhammer.
Now, on the community side, my biggest issue is with things I see as derived from CR. The lack of respect for simple theatre of the mind is a direct issue with the way I've always run and played since I left D&D. The tolerance and even acceptance of paid DMing also pisses me off in ways that make it very hard for me to remain civil.
Those are the big ones. There's also the fact that D&D doesn't seem to have the offramps it had since AD&D1 (and which admittedly went downhill when the Forge went out of the spotlight).
The lack of respect for simple theatre of the mind is a direct issue with the way I’ve always run and played since I left D&D.
What do you mean by this?
The tolerance and even acceptance of paid DMing also pisses me off in ways that make it very hard for me to remain civil.
Why? Running a game is work, and not every group that wants to play has a good GM. How is it any different than commissioning art of your character or buying an adventure module? Don’t get me wrong, I prefer unpaid friends, but I’m blessed with multiple potential GMs in my group. Not everyone is so lucky, do they just not get to play? Or are they forced to nominate a GM who won’t enjoy it and won’t run an enjoyable game?
I mean that every time I've tried to run a game, either on tabletop (exceedingly rare now) or online, the demands from players are ridiculous compared to my expectations and what I set out as my intentions. I am not a voice actor. I'm decent at improv, but sometimes do need a moment to contemplate. I do not use images, music, battlemaps, miniatures, or any other equipment. Just dice, words, and imagination. This has gone from being the standard mode of play in the communities I'm accustomed to into a very niche thing that no one seems interested in anymore.
[Defense of Paid DMs]
At best, we'll have to agree to disagree. I'm going to address the points I think I can without overcoming apoplexy first.
There are hundreds if not thousands of GM guides available. If you cannot or will not put in that level of investment, then run something GM-less, or work together to GM the game. Gary called DMs 'referees', and I think that model still holds up - no ref in a game is responsible for the whole field at every moment. Real referees switch up and have things like VAR or other systems. If one guy in the group is good at designing traps, let him design the traps and run them. If one person is good at storytelling, let them present the story. The person who knows combat best should adjudicate it. This is a game of cooperative fun. So, cooperate. Either that, or try something like Fiasco, Shadowrun Anarchy, Microscope, Space Bounty Blues, or something like that, and then move into refereeing a rules-light system like The Black Hack or a PbtA. Don't be hemmed in by modern D&D (note that this ties into the 'D&D has fewer offramps' point above).
As far as the paid DM part, it's very simple: This is a creative hobby. This is the time we have free together as friends, and RPGs have been some of the very few things in my life that has been an escape from the soul-crushing burden of working and money changing hands for every damn thing. Paid DMs turn it into a business, not a fun experience, and I consider their existence toxic to the community. Because after all, if some other schlub is making money doing a thing, why shouldn't I charge money to do that thing? Why should I be the one doing free labor? And that's the problem. It turns what should be creative, cooperative, storytelling with guard rails into a discussion of labor and capital and investment and all the crap that I want to avoid in the world via the escapism of RPGs. That paid person isn't my friend anymore, he's a paid service provider. But what KPIs is he measured by? 'Fun' isn't quantifiable (much to Friend Computer's chagrin), so, what? XP per session? Loot? Some other valueless measure which inevitably means nothing?
In short - no. I will reiterate, I believe that paid DMing is toxic to the community as a whole. It turns what should be an exercise in building and developing friendships into building and developing a business. It takes the party away from being a group of friends or fellow-travelers into a group of customers receiving shared service from a provider. It's no different from the people you meet at the big table of a hibachi restaurant.
That's before we get into how incredibly elitist it is by definition. Paid DMing takes away from the grassroots elements of the game. It puts a paywall between the player and the game. Any of the paid DMs I've seen have their players basically sign non-compete agreements, so they can't just turn into a normal group without that DM - which means those players don't join the larger community. So in every way I can oppose it, in every way I can hate it, I do.
I don’t despise paid DMing as much as you do, but I agree that it’s negatively shifting the expectations of hobbyist/enthusiast DMs and commodifying what was originally a personal investment into a social group.
In addition, a paid DM is more inclined to make conditions favorable for the players… as they do not want to get fired from that role.
It’s true that DMing can be hard work and that the DM will spend many more hours on DnD than anyone else in the group, but last time I DM’ed, my friends ran a food rotation (usually big macs or taco bell) and I always ate for free :)
Burgers won’t make me fudge dice to keep the party happy, but a paycheck sure would.
I mean, this just seems really gatekeepy. You’re obviously allowed to play however you like, but I don’t see how the way others play affects you.
the demands from players are ridiculous compared to my expectations and what I set out as my intentions
That sounds like a communication issue. I’ve played fully tactical with battle mats and set pieces, and I’ve played fully theater of the mind, and I’ve never had an issue with player expectations as long as I communicate my intentions pre-session zero.
As far as the paid DM part, it’s very simple: This is a creative hobby.
So is art, so is adventure design. I still don’t see how it’s different from commissioning art of your character or buying a module.
Why stop at DM? Every group should invent their own system, carve their own dice, design their own adventures. It’s not very grassroots to use a system designed by an elitist corporation.
I’m into 3d printing. When the hobby started, there were not commercial printers, you had to build one from scratch. Are we supposed to hate manufactured printers to preserve the creative integrity of the hobby?
I just don’t see the rationale of your preferences for how you like to play metastasizing into hatred. You’re allowed to play how you want, so is everyone else.
You’re absolutely right. D&D past AD&D1 should never have been the center of our hobby.
Oh I switched to GURPS years ago. I don’t think D&D is a particularly good system for anyone with any real TTRPG experience, but 5e is actually pretty accessible as an introduction to the hobby. Plenty of canon content to work from, or just buy modules from, and it’s fairly simple to play. Plus D&D is the OG, so it’s the default TTRPG in media.
And I’m fine with media. I like media, temporarily. It introduces the hobby to people who might otherwise remain at a perpetual distance, and while a lot of them aren’t really right for TTRPGs, some of them are, and I’m happy they were introduced to it.
The reason I don’t mind paid DMs is because the people that want them are new to the hobby, probably a whole group worth. The alternative is that they elect one of their own; personally I’m down with sharing the GM’s chair, but I don’t think it’s practical for most newbies without an experienced GM present.
Now someone totally new has to figure out how to run a game, and odds are they’re going to suck a bunch, and that’s going to lead to a game that sucks a bunch, and everyone’s going to think D&D actually sucks, and all TTRPGs as well by extension. Players who might, under an experienced GM, see what it can be, will see it instead as a trainwreck.
The market for paid GMs is newbies, and I don’t mind it. This isn’t the 80s, there’s other stuff to do if their first campaign sucks. I don’t mind paid GMs as the starter to get a group moving. Once they get a little wind in their sails one of them will step up and adopt the mantle.
Especially since I assume a decent GM is probably in the neighborhood of $100/session, so about $25/person for a party of four. I think that the instant one of them feels confident to give it a go, they will have that conversation.
Sure, there might be a bit of an expectation adjustment, as you said, but that actually seems easier to accommodate. It would be obviously unreasonable for the party to expect, for free, the same experience they were previously paying $25/person/session for.
And even if they don’t, and they keep the paid GM, it’s not like WOTC has a DM Uber app. Those aren’t corporate stooges, they’re experienced enthusiasts like yourself getting a little kickback for the years of development they’ve dedicated to their craft. I’d reckon a fair segment of the people who would take the job are veteran GMs with no parties to play with. They benefit doubly.
I just think new players in the modern age benefit more from a good first impression of the hobby, and the cost provides a natural incentive for the unpaid alternative to evolve.
Depends on who you talk to. I always thought the atmo was pretty chill. When I was there around 2010 as a contractor for a couple years they had a strange work schedule: 9-hr days Mon-Thurs and half day Friday - which was almost universally regarded as a screw-around day, along with at least half of Thursday.
From my understanding, they used to basically be the same as Games Workshop is today: If you talk to people who work there “off the record” (or they are pushing the equivalent of a youtube channel… shout out to Rogue Hobbies) you’ll either get outright condemnation or LOTS of vague posting of a culture of theft and abuse.
But recent years have seen people get annoyed enough at the products that they now care about labor and we start to see a LOT more complaints.
The problem for Hasbro is that, right now, the company doesn’t have that much in non WotC moneymakers and hasn’t had it for years. There have been attempts by activist investors to push for having WotC demerged from Hasbro so WotC isn’t subsidizing the rest of Hasbro. The across-the-board cuts were Hasbro leadership trying to placate investors, but they cut muscle and bone from WotC for some reason instead.
People have been complaining about WotC’s executive meddling in D&D and MTG for as long as I can remember, since before the 1999 Hasbro purchase. D&D 3e, mostly written after WotC acquired TSR but published shortly after Hasbro acquired WotC, was panned so badly that they dropped 3.5 just a couple years later. And 4e (including the first OGL fiasco) happened when Hasbro didn’t care about WotC because they were all-in on the Michael Bay Transformers movie. In fact, up until Stranger Things and Critical Role, Hasbro seems to have considered WotC the “Magic: The Gathering Money Printer” and done most of their meddling on that side of the house.
And Crawford is an incompetent smartass. I honestly don’t know what any TTRPG would have to gain from including him in the team.
If they hope to chase 5e’s success by following in its footsteps - piss poor adventure modules, nonexistent DM support, unbalanced player options, and a game designer that contradicts himself on Twitter every other post while attempting to explain why he isn’t wrong - then good luck to them, I guess.
I very much doubt that 5e became the juggernaut that it’s now because of Crawford. If anything, it’s despite of him - mostly because of the free publicity granted by things like Critical Role and Stranger Things, and DnD being the default option for anyone who develops an interest in roleplaying for the first time.
How much do we actually know about what Crawford is like outside of the WotC machine? He might be perfectly competent but held back by executive mismanagement.
I would put money on the downfall of WotC being exclusively due to being owned by Hasbro and their executives forcing their greedy practices onto the team.
Internally, yea, but I was speaking more towards the decline of their products, not the treatment of staff, that was being discussed in the top comment.
Ok, I’m not familiar enough with any of those to know what that means in this context. But in any case, weren’t his contributions to those games all ages ago? M&M in particular came out almost 30 years ago, right?
Everybody who was passionate about games have left and been replaced by money-grabbing opportunists who only want to inflate the stock value, bail out and get their severance pay.
I don’t have links to it at the moment (I’m prepping dinner… so excuse the laziness 😅) but if you search “D&D controversy” or “OGL” you’ll find plenty of discussions and analysis.
In short: they tried (but are still attempting to) bring micro-transactions and loot box mechanics to tabletop games.
I don’t need to remember it. I’m in the middle of replaying Baldur’s Gate 1. But that was more of a complicated math formula to derive something that we can do much more simply. The hope and fear thing not only reminds me of that scam curriculum in Donnie Darko, it also doesn’t feel like an interesting tactical layer; it does the opposite by interfering with initiative in a way that I’m not a fan of.
It’s rooted in the light/dark side of the force from Star Wars tabletop, and kind of inherent to Star Wars is making out everything in the world to be light or dark as though it’s that simple, but hardly anything in life is.
I don’t think any designer has ever said it is from Star Wars, and it most definitely does not use them as Light Side/Dark Side or imposed morality. It’s inspired by the Genesys rpg system of degrees of success/failure and has narrative effects like “Yes, but” and “No, however”.
I’d seen it written up in other articles as coming from Star Wars, so perhaps it was that writer that was mistaken. I’ve watched them play, heard the rules explanations and such, and “yes, but” and “no, however” to skill checks aren’t solving some problem I’ve had in other systems.
Sure, it’s not solving anything, but IMO it’s fun giving the GM a tokenified response currency even though you pull off a success. I’ve seen a fair amount of backlash, but just feel portraying the dice mechanic as Star Wars is miles off base, when it adds a narrative prompt for success/failure (D&D does this with nat20/nat1).
I’ll grant you I’m not typically the GM. From your perspective, do you see it making things more interesting as a GM? Because as a player, it’s less up my alley, and the GM’s response currency without that system is whatever they want it to be, because they’re the GM.
It does, I think. It powers “lair actions”, gives powers like interrupting turn sequence, making multiple moves in sequence. When the GM has a pool of currency players can see, there’s an unsaid acknowledgement things are going wrong/badly, which helps fuel collaboration in the storytelling aspect. I can say that someone fails an attack, but on a fail with fear they miss the attack AND leave themselves open to a harsh counterattack, or perhaps lose their weapon. I can do all of this off the cuff in D&D because ‘GM said so’, but then the players can feel an adversarial relationship instead of collaborative, which is so much more encouraged in Daggerheart.
All entirely subjective, and at its core it’s still heroic fantasy same as hundreds of other systems and if you are put off by rolling two dice for metacurrency, it’s likely not for you.
That interrupting turn sequence part is the one that upsets me the most, and I’m not fond of the extra drag on pacing that the "yes, but"s and "no, however"s can have over time. If they are putting their weight behind it, I hope it’s resonating with others, but if they intend to ever replace their D&D with Daggerheart, I wouldn’t be thrilled with the substitution.
It comes from the FFG Star wars RPG system and its method of creating multiple success/failure conditions. It’s an entirely independent system to the light/dark side force mechanics.
That’s fair if it’s not solving a problem for you, but it does add something new that resonates with a lot of people (at least it did for me). I’m speaking from the Genesys side so I don’t know how daggerheart handles it, but I absolutely loved it. I found it made skill checks more collaborative, my table would suggest ideas for how to interpret the roll, and having more to ‘explain’ got people more descriptive in how they talk about their actions. We went from ‘I take a swing. Nope, that’s a miss’ to ‘failure with advantage, ok I go in with my axe but I can’t get through this guy’s defenses. For my advantage, I want to hook this guys shield with my axe so the next attacker gets a boost die to hit’.
It does make checks more involved, but I prefer fewer, more impactful checks as a general rule anyway.
I can see why the comparison to Genysis would exist now but I don’t think it’s a very worthwhile comparison to make in how they play out and are used in each system.
It’s interesting and it seems like a good change for people that have done a lot of d&d but it’s probably not going to be a complete replacement for 5e. It seems good for short campaigns but it only has one book out for now.
For the demo, I really liked it. I thought the writing was good as it set the atmosphere. Not to spoil anything, but the first guy you meet… it tells you a lot about things lol. HE BROKE SO MANY RULES! (iykyk) The dialog options seem like they could lead to something interesting down the road. Understanding the various characters and what they do seems like it could be an engaging loop while you level and modify their stats. After playing the demo, which is pretty short, I fully plan to pick this up when it’s released.
If you haven’t played the demo, or couldn’t tell from the trailer, this game is almost exactly the same loop as This is the Police. I liked This is the Police, but it could certainly drag after a handful of hours. That’s probably more of a problem with the execution than the idea; already, Dispatch dresses up the day at the desk job by having very ever-present banter, and not annoying quips but dialogue that feels like it’s building characters or moving the story forward. I liked what I played of this game, but I wonder what they have to spruce up the gameplay after a few iterations through its loop that This is the Police couldn’t come up with.
I played the demo and really liked it at first, as it started out like a Telltalle-style narrative game.
The actual dispatching gameplay loop though, I did not enjoy all that much. It becomes quickly way too frantic for me to enjoy the banter. Plus the actual thing you are looking at and interacting with is a map with glowing icons, i.e. not what I enjoy in video games.
One of the things I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is media literacy as it relates to gaming - specifically about the design conversations developers are often having amongst each other that players only vaguely feel. Let me elaborate:
A good example is the Castlevania series. From early on, Castlevania was always both refining and reinventing itself. Vampire Killer and Castlevania feel to me like a kind of A/B testing to see what hits. When Castlevania prevailed, they immediately began iterating on the formula with both Simon’s Quest and Dracula’s Curse figuring out different modes of gameplay through nonlinear level design and changing characters. Super Castlevania IV was already a remaster of sorts starring Simon Belmont. Of course followed by the all time greats Rondo of Blood and Symphony of the Night. It had trouble jumping to 3D with the N64 entry which was just called Castlevania again and eschewed the burgeoning Metroidvania/RPG elements of its predecessors.
This eventually leads us to Lords of Shadow which I can certainly respect as a good game with a dedicated following, but it never appealed to me and I had a hard time putting my finger on why. It’s because it’s not just a reboot, but one that kind of wholesale grabs the QTE/cinematic/rage mode game mechanics of the 2010’s and stuffs them into a Castlevania package. It’s difficult to say anything isn’t a “true” Castlevania game in a series that was already very loosely defined as “gothic action probably with Dracula somewhere?” but it had very firmly stepped away from the conversation of its own series.
Even if you’re new to the Castlevania series today, I think you can find great satisfaction in trawling through the depths of the franchise, playing them in chronological release order, and appreciating the various thematic and gameplay elements that each entry contributed to the series. I think gamedevs could learn a lot by looking at this evolution, too. Take look at the Release timeline and note the space in between early entries.
Nowadays, a big game will spend multiple years in development. Inspirations it may have taken from the gaming landscape are years in the past, assuming it even picked up on them when they were peak. When that theoretical game exists, someone may then take inspiration from it and push it into their years long development. The needle moves sooooo … slowly …
And because of that, as we all know, they’re willing to take less of a risk on creating innovative games. There’s this prevailing notion that there are only “good” and “bad” game design concepts and if you mash enough of the good concepts together in a package, you’ll have a good game. They’re all homogenizing because they’re no long trying to deliver on a product to entice you to play it, they’re trying to force a platform/market on you. Take a look at Concord or Marathon or MindsEye or any of the other monumental flops. Kind of like the DCU in my mind; you know the proper thing to do is take the time to build out the world and characters by giving satisfying entries that serve people the things they’re craving. But they keep jumping the gun. If you really wanted Marathon to succeed as a GaaS, why not create a single player game first and allow players to get accustomed to the world and give them something to value to pull them away? The eagerness with which they keep sacrificing projects to snap the trap shut early and make their money back should be a big clue.
Anyways, speaking of MindsEye, I was watching this video earlier which speculates the game was supposed to be another metaverse platform called Everywhere, akin to Epic’s Fortnite. Nobody wants an everything game. Nobody wants an everything app. I don’t want ONE game that I play for the rest of forever, that’s not a thing I ever wanted. They’re trying to forcefully dictate the market at us and everyone is just gagging. As consumers I don’t think we can put effective boycotts together anymore but the market is so utterly saturated and overwhelmed that you literally cannot get people to care. It stands at the complete opposite end of what the article discusses and I think that’s worth meditating on.
It’s not speculation with MindsEye. Everywhere was shown off first, and it’s still happening. That studio was funded with VC money, and VCs want “the next big thing”. That thing at the time was “metaverse”. MindsEye seems to be the smaller project they can get out in the meantime and, charitably, is one of a number of things they’ll churn out that all comes from a similar process flow and builds on each other (they hope).
As to boycotts, your individual purchases always matter; not just with what you don’t buy but also what you do buy.
As to boycotts, your individual purchases always matter; not just with what you don’t buy but also what you do buy.
Agreed. I’m having a bit of a hard time articulating my ideas properly.
I think my overall point is just that it’s really hard to organize purposeful and effective boycotts these days, especially since no matter what the issue, there’s usually a counter movement dampening it. Whatever market forces are causing these companies to register the lack of interest and disdain the consumer market has, I’d like to identify it and capitalize on it because when the market adapts, it most likely won’t be to the consumer’s benefit.
You could live quite happily off indies these days, but it’s hard to ignore the thrashing leviathans. I’m not sure how much I really care about them anymore, but they do take up a lot of the oxygen in the room. And they seem to control a lot of platforms/storefronts as well …
That oxygen is in a different room. The person who only plays Fortnite probably never heard of MindsEye or Concord. At some point, I wonder why games media even covers certain companies anymore. Sure, EA and Ubisoft made games we all liked 20-25 years ago, but they don’t really make games for those same customers anymore, largely.
I absolutely recommend it! Slope’s Game Room has an excellent, 2 hour retrospective you can put on while you work if you want a pretty good deep dive. Other than that, I recommend getting yourself set with some emulators so you can kind of dig through the series. A lot of the early games are difficult and I think it’s perfectly fine to kind of just pick through them a bit, get a taste, move on, return to the ones you like, etc.
You can absolutely feel the arc of design elements through the early series up to the pinnacle, Rondo of Blood. That’s because it was all being done by Konami teams, often who knew eachother or were handing the projects off. Rondo hits this sweet spot where you can feel the inspiration of old vampire novels combined with dramatic stage plays (the stages have dynamic names like Feast of Flames instead of just area descriptors), told with 80’s anime cutscenes, wrapped into a videogame package. It’s truly a work of art that both wears its influences on its sleeve and also that couldn’t really exist the way that it does in any other medium. So where do you even go from there? Symphony of the Night! It takes everything that works about Rondo and kicks it to 11 while flipping the franchise on its head with an absolutely rocking soundtrack and sprawling castle. You can enjoy these games in a vacuum, sure. But playing the series up to that point gives you a real appreciation for what they were going for and how they accomplished it. I don’t even think you really need to play them in order because going back and returning to previous entries almost feels like fitting in missing pieces of a puzzle.
The series flounders a bit when it hits 3D, but it will always have a special place in my heart. Koji Igarashi takes the Symphony of the Night formula and basically owns the handheld world, especially from Aria of Sorrow into the DS trilogy, A++. Ultimately I think he developed that formula enough on his own that breaking it off into the Bloodstained series feels right and good, I think he’s better off this way not weighed down by Konami and the Castlevania franchise, but in this way, we still feel that arc of development. Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night actually took a bit to grow on me, but once it did, I saw it as the most Igavania game that ever existed, he has refined the formula.
All this to say that we just don’t get experiences like this anymore, where series have the proper time to cook and develop. Instead we get Concord where they pour millions into something and try and ram it down your throat, “You WILL enjoy this new franchise. You WILL pick one of these characters as your favorite to get invested in, even though we’ve given you no reason. You WILL make this your ONE game you play because … reasons?” Ditto Marathon. Ditto MindsEye (likely). Ditto all the other rubbish they keep pushing out.
EDIT: OH MY GOD! And the Castlevania DLC for Vampire Survivors, how could I even forget. It’s been a Castlevania wasteland for years and that DLC is some of the best I ever played. Completely the Richter scenario and getting to the end of it legit made me cry, it was such a love letter to fans and felt like a huge emotional, respectful sendoff for the series that Konami will never give us 😭 It’s so good, if you’re a Castlevania fan you should absolutely play it and if not, save it til the end because it’s incredible and bittersweet.
It's quite funny that Strange Scaffolding seems to embrace uncertainty with er...uncertainty. As in, they keep things explicitly contract based in order to keep people from expending too much time and energy into a singular project. I've always thought of contract work as something rockier due to taxes, benefits, etc. I think though, they're just ahead of the curb and if they're successful enough more power to them. Clearly something is a bit amiss though, if the head of the place can't afford a ticket to GDC. I do like however, that they showed up to socialize regardless. Which is pretty much the main reason to show up to one of these anyways.
There was a podcast that Irrational did before putting out BioShock Infinite that would interview game developers and other creatives, and they had one that interviewed the BioWare doctors. BioWare was always set up to be a multi project studio, and Irrational was a single project studio. At that time in the industry, lots of companies were pivoting from the former to the latter, due to how many more hands on deck a 7th gen console AAA game took to make. BioWare was set up the way it was so that one underperforming game could easily be carried by another reasonably successful one. By the end of that interview, I thought you’d have to be nuts to employ that many people and only work on one game at a time. Sure enough, Irrational buckled under that weight right after shipping BioShock Infinite’s DLC, and modern, single-project BioWare is looking worse for wear.
I also remember when people would constantly say that games were too short. I didn't play them at the time, but there was a period when everyone was complaining about waiting for a long time for games - paying a lot for a game, and then finishing it in 5-7 hours and never playing it again.
That led into the used market, I suppose (a boogeyman for the games industry that birthed lots of the worst monetization today). I never really had that problem, outside of outliers like Pokemon Snap that were unusually short. In the 00s, it was pretty common to get 8-15 hours for an action game that you paid $50-$60 for, often times with multiplayer modes alongside the single player modes, and that felt like great value to me at the time.
I've never had that problem myself either. I took a break there for quite some time with my gaming but I did grow up with it, and I have returned to it. I can't think of a time when I have played a game - even a story based one, and liked it and haven't returned to it at least once more. I think I've noticed though, I am kind of a gaming minority. I think the funniest thing I can say about games is that back when I played with a big rowdy group of guys a game would last however long it lasted because the guys would fight and swap for whoever was controlling the character and we'd play that shit into the ground regardless of how long a game was. The last system I had was a PS2, so idk but I knew a lot of complaints started coming out PS3 era. Snap even was a game that we played like crazy. I had a friend who had a N64, and Pokemon was so hot! And we'd all just sit there and see if we could do "perfect" runs even though it was pretty much the same game over and over again.
Speaking of trends, I mean I guess these things have always existed but I think the PS3 began the genre my girlfriend lovingly describes as "penis games" which have hyper-masculine protagonist smashing the shit out of everything with dynamic lighting. I don't mean to offend anyone with this, but the trend is still here (I am just guessing it's Unreal graphics). I know it existed before the PS3, but it really took off then and was part of what actually turned me off of gaming as a whole.
polygon.com
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