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KoboldCoterie, do games w Oblivion Horse Armour dev looks back on hated DLC – “We had no idea what we were doing”
@KoboldCoterie@pawb.social avatar

“[Horse Armor] must have been [sold] in the millions, it had to be millions,” Nesmith said. “I don’t know the actual number, I probably did at one point, I just no longer remember that. And that was kind of a head shaker for us: you’re all making fun of it and yet you buy it.”

And that right there is the reason why the industry is absolutely saturated with this shit now. If people had just chilled the fuck out when this shit was first introduced, made sure it was an absolute flop from a sales perspective (not only for this one, but for others that were released back then, too), we might be in a better place now.

RadicalEagle,

We must live in the world we create.

Katana314,

I’d argue that part of the problem is, gamer culture has approached everything in the industry from a vein of negativity. “Don’t buy this”, “Pirate this”, “XPublisher is damn evil”. Certainly many of those accusations and rejections are valid, but there is now far, far more attention on what sucks than what’s good. A developer puts out an awesome singleplayer game they spent 7 years making, and we’ll give them $60 but…not much more than that. We’ll probably even complain if, due to high budgets, it comes out at $70. Meanwhile, the rest of the world that’s curious about entertainment doesn’t care much about 30 “Don’t” rules and just buys whatever seems interesting when they’re bored - because they got their paycheck and want something.

It’s reasonable a developer is always finding new ways they can pay their staff. I’d even say many singleplayer games we love were NOT the money-makers we wish they were. Granted, quite often now those $60 are going into paying into shareholders and executive bonuses, and I think that’s another valid thing to be negative towards, but once again: If this was an important point to gamers, we could champion studios that grant paid time off and lower their CEO bonuses.

And I’ll even go one further: If a common thread is “Studios ask too much of our money for the full game”…we could even turn our attention to minimum wage laws. We certainly should be.

acosmichippo,
@acosmichippo@lemmy.world avatar

I think the takeaway here is that these things are not important to gamers. a few of us complain about it online, but clearly we are outnumbered in the market.

diegooooooo,
@diegooooooo@lemmy.world avatar

BG3 received a lot of possitivity for releasing a massive game for half the price of starfield. But it seems apparent that negative reactions are stronger than possitive ones for most of us.

BigBananaDealer,
@BigBananaDealer@lemm.ee avatar

bg3? baldurs gate 3? that was 70 bucks and not on game pass on release so it was way more expensive than starfield

diegooooooo,
@diegooooooo@lemmy.world avatar

Dude where I live BG3 is $40 and starfield 75 ($100 with the ‘expansion’)(steam). At least on pc. What’s your situation?

BigBananaDealer,
@BigBananaDealer@lemm.ee avatar

BG3 has been 70 dollars since release, unless i missed a sale. meanwhile starfield was on game pass on release which is like 20 bucks a month, so if you play starfield for 1 month then cancel you had essentially paid just 20 dollars for it. im on xbox though, not steam, so that may be why ours are so different

diegooooooo,
@diegooooooo@lemmy.world avatar

Damn that’s quite the difference, those where the standard prices on pc, not sale. $70 is a lot.

BigBananaDealer,
@BigBananaDealer@lemm.ee avatar

yep its why i havent played it yet waiting for a sale 😂

WraithGear,
@WraithGear@lemmy.world avatar

The only reason i have it was because it came with the goty edition. I wonder how many that accounts for

celsiustimeline,

There will always be some fucking rich kid that will buy every skin no matter how many other people criticize the practice.

p03locke,
@p03locke@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

The sad part is that most of the whales aren’t actually that rich…

CrayonRosary,

If people had just chilled the fuck out… we might be in a better place now.

Gamers aren’t a bloc, and each person has their own individual game tastes, opinions, and willingness to spend money on trivial junk.

Most gamers are tween Fortnight players or ones who play exclusively mobile games full of ads. They are not people like us. This was inevitable, and nothing would have or will ever change it. Most people just want a pleasant distraction from the horrors of life and don’t have any particular principles when it comes to how they spend their money on games.

chunkystyles,

I will admit to being one of the people who bought this DLC when it came out. I was very engrossed in the game at that time and felt like $2.50 was trivial enough that I just went for it.

Now, I was uninformed about what the armor did and was disappointed that it was only cosmetic. But I don’t remember regretting buying it.

In hindsight, I wish I hadn’t bought it. And it’s something I wouldn’t buy now.

tobogganablaze, do games w Age of Empires designer believes RTS games need to finally evolve after decades of stagnation

Yeah usually “innovation” comes with pandering to mobile users and microtransactions. So we’re good, thanks.

ampersandrew,
@ampersandrew@lemmy.world avatar

I’d be happy if they pandered more to controller players without removing the decision making in base building, like Halo Wars did. I always look to Cannon Brawl as an indication of what RTS can still be (by which I mean, not exactly like Cannon Brawl).

ICastFist,
@ICastFist@programming.dev avatar

Have you checked Tooth and Tail? I don’t think it has base building, but is a very controller friendly RTS

ampersandrew,
@ampersandrew@lemmy.world avatar

I have. It does have base building, but it doesn’t really have choke points the way that StarCraft does. That doesn’t make it a deal-breaker, as I do enjoy that game. In fact, the way it has a controllable character that puts a controller-friendly speed limit on APM is something it has in common with Cannon Brawl.

CosmoNova,

And the AoE franchise tried that at least twice and failed.

Justdaveisfine, do games w Nier creator Yoko Taro reveals the sad reality of modern AAA game development, “there’s less weird people making games”

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,

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.

Coelacanth,
@Coelacanth@feddit.nu avatar

There’s definitely weird people making games on itch and sometimes in the depths of Steam.

Oh yes. Ever heard of Beautycopter?

RebekahWSD,
@RebekahWSD@lemmy.world avatar

I have. Watched two beings play it. I sincerely hope the person(s) who made that game make more games.

RizzRustbolt,

Deity Driving was their first Steam release.

HeyThisIsntTheYMCA,
@HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world avatar

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.

missingno,
@missingno@fedia.io avatar

Weird still exists, true, but the combination of weird + budget is what's really missing.

Justdaveisfine,

The only recent example I can think of is Death Stranding.

Coelacanth,
@Coelacanth@feddit.nu avatar

It’s not quite as weird, but Alan Wake 2 as well qualifies I think.

RickyRigatoni,
@RickyRigatoni@retrolemmy.com avatar

I found a game on itch about a laundromat that washes women in the machines.

Justdaveisfine,

Hmm. On second thought, maybe games were a mistake.

Sylence,
@Sylence@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

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.

hal_5700X, do games w Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered confirmed by ESRB rating

Things are getting stupid now. Remaster a game from 2017. 🤦‍♂️

Coelacanth, (edited )
@Coelacanth@feddit.nu avatar

With each lazy and unnecessary cash grab remaster we move closer to the day a remaster announcement is made at the end of a game’s release trailer.

callouscomic,

As a massive fan of Age of Empires since the first one, I still cannot believe they re-released them as “Definitive” editions, and then have proceeded to add new DLC to them.

I love the support and attention they’re getting, and the new content they never had before. But I cannot get over adding paid DLC’s to a DEFINITIVE EDITION OF SOMETHING!!!

Riven,
@Riven@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

Normally I would take this as a joke but they shut off concord after 10 days and that was worth 200mil. I’m surprised they didn’t give it 2 weeks at least.

echodot,

The first time I heard about concord was when they shut it off. I don’t know how they expect a game to do well when they did absolutely zero advertising.

Riven,
@Riven@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

Yea same lul. Not sure who thought it would be a hit. It’s just overwatch but with guardian of the galaxy visuals.

paultimate14,

That’s over 7 years old. Roughly the length of a generation. I think re-mastering console games from 2017 is reasonable in general.

Not for HZD though. It was already one of the best-looking games on the PS4, and then they added a free upgrade for the PS4 Pro to get checkerboard 4k. Like… What’s left to improve?

Maybe upgrade from checkerboard to full 4k? The FPS seemed fine for me playing on a base PS4, but perhaps there’s room for improvement there. The initial load time to open the game is pretty bad, but if you don’t switch between games often that’s not really a problem. I haven’t tried the PC version yet, but perhaps there were some UI improvements there they could apply to consoles?

My main complaints with the game that I’d like to see fixed would probably be beyond the scope of the term “remaster”. The facial animations during dialogue were pretty uncanny in the base game, but they’re good in the DLC and sequel. Also the itemization system was clunky and felt like it was trying to be similar to an online multiplayer experience for some reason.

scrubbles,
!deleted6348 avatar

Nah, 2 generations minimum. Rereleasing the game so the next generation can still play it is one thing, but this is weird.

Coelacanth,
@Coelacanth@feddit.nu avatar

My main complaints with the game that I’d like to see fixed would probably be beyond the scope of the term “remaster”. The facial animations during dialogue were pretty uncanny in the base game, but they’re good in the DLC and sequel.

To me this feels like perfectly within the scope of what should be the realm of “remaster”, it’s just that history teaches us to expect less.

paultimate14,

Redoing animations? To me, that’s definitely more than a re-master. The musical equivalent would probably be something in the mixing phase- adding or adjusting effects, changing pan, level, EQ, automation, etc.

celsiustimeline,

The templated auto face animations during dialogue along with the low enthusiasm VO from half of the cast is really the only factor that keeps OG horizon from being perfect.

Pacmanlives,

But PS5 pro support!!! /s

pennomi, do games w Nier creator Yoko Taro reveals the sad reality of modern AAA game development, “there’s less weird people making games”

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,

Not dissimilar to what happens with big studio films

squaresinger,

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.

phdepressed,

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.

grrgyle,

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.

squaresinger,

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.

drosophila, (edited )

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.

squaresinger,

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.

drosophila, (edited )

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, (edited )

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.

squaresinger,

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,

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 that without these elements the player was much less likely to explore of their own volition (not just because its the opposite direction of a waypoint) and think about the level design. Speaking of waypoints I remember the first group of people really complaining that the arrow in Bioshock is even more egregious than waypoints, though IMO the way it encourages you to unthinkingly follow it is actually quite thematic.

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.

I have actually played Portal. I had a section where I mentioned that Valve games were an exception to this sentiment, then I deleted it and forgot when I wrote the last part of my previous comment.

But anyway, I’ll admit that I was really thinking more about the time period from 2005 to 2015.

ghosthacked,

Imagine having 10k employees and not setting aside an indie dev team or two for passion projects.

squaresinger,

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.

mojofrododojo, do games w Bethesda is allegedly working on ‘multiple Fallout games’, including Fallout 3 Remastered, teases report
@mojofrododojo@lemmy.world avatar

spin up 5 projects. hire devs from all over the world, make them work on site in person. people upend their entire lives for a chance at a stock option.

cancel 2 after 10 months.

cut the teams on two of the others.

cut the teams again.

and again.

oh wait hire like crazy and overcorrect so we can

cut the teams again.

Then cancel 1d3 of remaining projects, announce <OLD IP>REMASTERED

All devs cut never neared their stock vestment, all shares returned to the mothership, start to consider spinning up 5 more new projects.

the_q,

Wow they should hire you as CEO!

mojofrododojo,
@mojofrododojo@lemmy.world avatar

I couldn’t stomach it.

illi, do games w Sniper Elite Resistance dev defends asset reuse - “if they’re there to use, why not use them?”

Agreed. Idk how they reuse specifically, but it is fine for sure - to a point. As long as your game doesn’t have 3 enemy types that are recollored across it or all environments are the same everywhere (hello, Dragon Age 2)… use what you have effectively.

ladicius,

I was gonna say.

For a game like Fortnite for example reuse of assets is vital to make the constant updates possible - without that steady flow of changes the user base pretty sure would dwindle fast (as already regularly is the case at the end of their “chapters” and “seasons”). They have to balance old and new parameters a lot to not alienate any/or bore their customers - not the easiest thing to do according to their fan forums… :D

ShaggySnacks,

The reused map designs in Dragon Age 2 was so annoying. It’s up with there with Mass Effect 1’s planet exploration.

scrubbles,
!deleted6348 avatar

The saving grace now is that you can burn through DA2 in a couple of days if you’re really dedicated to move into inquisition. It’s too bad with the gameplay since there are some hugely key plot points revealed in it

Black616Angel,

The criticism in this case is completely bonkers. They reuse assets from previous games, even adding more while developing.

This only means that they have an ever increasing repertoire of assets from all their games, from which the designers can freely choose. And then of course they match the asset to the new game (adding a grunge pass for a zombie game is the example given)
This is the optimal way of doing it. They save time and money and have lots of different assets to choose from.

SlothMama, do games w Oblivion Horse Armour dev looks back on hated DLC – “We had no idea what we were doing”

I was working in the industry at the time and people absolutely talked about the implications of microtransactions and how it would result in more expensive games and being nickel and dimed.

Like, I distinctly remember conversations with actual human beings from exactly the horse armor DLC and maybe we didn’t think it was going to result in, say the online shooter battle pass formula exactly, but we without ambiguity understood that meaningful in game items, and things like levels / experience would be monetized.

The biggest shocks to me were how patches would be used to reduce the game testing cycles, enabling companies to print incomplete or broken versions of games, requiring day one patches.

It’s a disgusting practice now, and it was then too.

Thrashy, do games w Sniper Elite Resistance dev defends asset reuse - “if they’re there to use, why not use them?”
@Thrashy@lemmy.world avatar

This feels like complaints over asset flips bleeding over into first-party asset reuse, because the people complaining don’t understand why the former is objectionable. It’s not that seeing existing art get repurposed is inherently bad (especially environmental art… nobody needs to be remaking every rock and bush for every game) but asset flips tend to be low effort, lightly-reskinned game templates with no original content. Gamers just started taking the term at face value and assumed the use of asset packs was the problem, rather than just a symptom of a complete lack of effort or care on the developers’ part

ampersandrew,
@ampersandrew@lemmy.world avatar

Do asset flips even happen anymore? I feel like they were a problem that Stephanie Sterling brought to light a decade ago when Steam opened its floodgates to anyone who wanted to sell a game, but it seems to me as though standard market forces made them nonviable in just a few years’ time.

Takumidesh,

They are all over the place, they just don’t get promoted much and get buried in steam releases.

frezik,

Right. I feel like they were a self correcting problem all along. They get buried in Sturgeon’s Law and that’s the end of it.

Except for that one guy who tried to copyright claim Steph’s channel. That guy needs something more. Like any kind of consequences at all for false copyright claims.

ryathal, do games w Age of Empires designer believes RTS games need to finally evolve after decades of stagnation

Even as an RTS fan, I’m starting to think the genre is dead. AOE 3 actually had some nice updates to the genre, they abandoned most of it though. Sc2 improved on the DoW2 campaign, but it’s been nothing since.

Part of the problem is the focus on competitive formats. Pretty much everyone admits it’s the least popular format, but it also gets the most attention. Campaign, comp stomps, and co-op are by far the most popular formats, but they get little or no support. Part of it is the pressure to release so early, and competitive is just easier to focus on while fleshing out mechanics and factions. Another problem is listening to pro players of other games, they don’t know shit about making a good game, they know what they like about an existing game and want that as much as possible.

Another big problem is focusing on players of well established games. The people still playing ladder on SC2 or AOE2 aren’t moving anywhere, there’s probably 20x players that have stopped with those games that would love something new. Instead all that gets released are shallow copies trying to get players to move off a game they’ve played for a decade.

IndiBrony,
@IndiBrony@lemmy.world avatar

Slightly different, but I stopped playing Rocket League not long after they abandoned all the cool weird arenas because it got boring playing exactly the same map with a different skin.

They standardised the arenas after listening to what the pro players wanted.

AceFuzzLord,

I swear, standardization kills fun and creativity.

ICastFist,
@ICastFist@programming.dev avatar

Which kinda proves that Nintendo is right with how to balance Smash Bros: it’s a game to be played for fun, not for pro player tournaments (no items final destination fox only).

BrowseMan,

I’m still extremely salty over Homeworld 2, that I waited like the messiah, for this…

sith, (edited )

It must be playable for casual and single player gamers for sure.

I’ve never seen a casual friendly multiplayer RTS I believe. The FPS genre manage to do this, so I think it should be possible. Hmm… Nothguard, Dune: Spice Wars, Line Wars and maybe Total War. These could maybe be considered casual friendly multiplayer RTS.

Though I must admit I want a good e-sport RTS I can watch and maybe dip my toes in, now when SC2 and AOE both feel quite dead. It’s the only e-sport that really entertains me. (we’ll maybe chess is an e-sport as well nowadays)

ryathal,

The ultimate casual RTS is a moba.

communist,
@communist@lemmy.frozeninferno.xyz avatar

sunspeargames.com/skill-ceiling/ immortal has this figured out, after playing in both playtests and seeing how the devs handle new ideas I’m set

MudMan, do games w Baldur’s Gate 3’s biggest mod team now has hundreds of devs working on its huge custom campaign in an impressively professional production

I don't get ballooning mod teams. I mean, at that point why not ship a standalone game? Last time this happened it was called The Witcher and I hear that did alright.

jjjalljs,

A friend of mine had a similar thought. He was sitting down to do some work on an open source game, and then was like “Wait. What am I doing?” and he made his own game from scratch. ( This one: store.steampowered.com/app/1271280/Rift_Wizard/ - It’s good, but kind of too hard for my brain )

It helped that he a had a lot of xp in game development. I imagine some of the boring, difficult, stuff doesn’t have as many people readily available. There’s a lot of “Why does the game crash if I push the up arrow key when I’m in my inventory, sometimes?” stuff you have to worry about when you’re doing the whole thing.

Elevator7009,

Rift Wizard!

Part of me is so pulled by games with customizable characters and good magic systems, but roguelike… oof. But it calls to my childhood self. Maybe I’ll watch a playthrough to try to see if it’s for me.

Props to your friend for making and finishing a game at all, let alone the reviews said one lots of people enjoy!

simple,

Modding something that already exists is way easier than making a game, and when it comes to huge mod teams most people contribute in small ways in their free time. People also come and go to the modding scene whenever they feel like it as opposed to actually requiring to work in a timely manner.

MudMan,

Yeah, well, that's why game engines are a thing. I didn't pick The Witcher at random, that was built on top of Neverwinter Nights tech.

Maybe I'm too stuck in the 90s, but I never quite got the point of doing all those total conversions for Quake games when you could just as well use the exact same tools by licensing the engine and just ship the thing as a game.

Well, no, I'm lying. The point of those total conversions was very often that people wanted to use a bunch of licensed characters they didn't own, which I guess is the point here as well, so maybe I've answered my own question.

Paradachshund,

As far as I know you also can’t just buy the Larian engine. It’s proprietary.

onoki,

Pre-existing models/art is something that is a huge work effort. Not to be undervalued. If one can get those for free, it can be the reason some game exists.

Take Auto Chess for example. I can imagine programming that DOTA 2 mod was an effort one or few programmers did as a hobby at first. If they would have had to either pay or network with artists to create the art and other people to do marketing, it would have been a lot more than a hobby.

MudMan,

"One or few programmers" is the key part of that, though. I'm not saying every modder should get into game development out of the gate. Modding is a great way to dip your toes into gamedev without having to do all the teambuilding and groundwork of putting together every piece of a game.

But some mods get so big they do have a full-on dev team. Nothing wrong with spending some time getting proof of concept that the team can do the job, but if you're spending years with a full team completely overhauling a game... I mean, get paid, man. You're doing a whole ass job at that point.

zaph,

why not ship a standalone game?

Hasbro owns the ip and it’s way cheaper to use someone else’s license and make changes than to get your own license.

naticus,

I’ve never heard that this started as a mod. Last I knew, even Witcher 1 was a licensed product even at the initial development. It’s been a couple years since I watched the CDProjekt documentary though.

MudMan,

It didn't, technically, but it WAS originally build on the Neverwinter Nights toolset/engine. A licenced version, then modified. Which is sort of my point. Why mod if you have a big group of devs and you're working at speed? Just pay to license the toolset you're using and ship a game.

metaldream,

Because Larian wouldn’t let them do that. It’s extremely rare for companies to legitimize and officially adopt a fanmade mod as a real product. Larian isn’t licensing the BG3 engine as a game toolkit so there’s no legal avenue for fans to do this.

They would need to make it a new IP with different tech and new assets, which is much much harder than what they’re doing now.

MudMan,

Well, I don't know that Larian is the problem. They don't own the D&D or the BG license and they´re moving on from both, apparently. That said, I don't know how willing they are to license their engine. I'm guessing not particularly, since they haven't done it so far, to my knowledge.

naticus,

Yeah, definitely not Larian, they’ve always been pretty open to players and other devs alike. And if they really do end up moving on, I cannot wait to see what they do next. Maybe a new Divinity game that’s as in-depth as BG3?

sirico,
@sirico@feddit.uk avatar

They do eventually that’s how we got most of our legendary studios and genres, but modding is low risk and cuts a lot faff. It also gives you a massive boost in publicity without spending on marketing.

MudMan,

Sure.

Again, people seem to be reading this as saying "don't mod, develop full games". Not what it says. I'm saying "if your mod is bloating so much you have a full team of developers working at speed it may be worth considering making a standalone game instead".

In some cases you only get there a long while into working on a mod and it's worth releasing that, getting some visibility and then moving on to standalone stuff instead, but mods that could have been a full-on release are relatively frequent, and I don't like it when artists get paid in exposure by speculatively making games for someone else.

sirico,
@sirico@feddit.uk avatar

Yeah I agree sorry if it came across as comtrarian I just live the idea that game dev is going back to the 80s90s with non published games outpacing AAA. Be great to see a proper studio come out of this. Hopefully there’s some dedicated full timers in those numbers.

Coelacanth,
@Coelacanth@feddit.nu avatar

Last time a ballooning mod team released a mod was Fallout: London and that also did alright…

some_guy, do games w Nier creator Yoko Taro reveals the sad reality of modern AAA game development, “there’s less weird people making games”

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,

Yeah man all those well known jocks like Spez and Zuckerberg sure did a number on tech.

burgerpocalyse,

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,

Is he actually good at it or are guys who want to hang out with a billionaire saying he’s good at it?

axby,

+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.

Baguette,

Jocks != Business c suite

bystander,

Too many business majors joined game dev teams

Valmond,

What’s a jock if it isn’t the highschool quarterback?

Non usa-ish here

Valmond,

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?

Pyr_Pressure, (edited ) do games w Nintendo Switch 2 US price won’t increase after tariffs, but accessories will cost more
@Pyr_Pressure@lemmy.ca avatar

Tune in on Monday to find out new tarriffs make this announcement no longer valid

Wahots,
@Wahots@pawb.social avatar

Monday? I’ll see you in two hours! xD

bluegreenwookie,

No worries the tariffs will get another 90 day pause after the stock market crashes again

Poopfeast420, do games w Age of Empires designer believes RTS games need to finally evolve after decades of stagnation
@Poopfeast420@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

I watched the trailer and the evolution they’re going with is apparently not making an RTS anymore, but an Action Roguelike. If that’s the kind of evolution we’re talking about, I feel we’ve already stuff in a similar vein (dunno specifically about roguelike though).

Varyag,

And that, too, isn’t new. It’s been done since at least the Spellforce series, or Dawn of War 2.

If you want to see what an “innovated” RTS looks like, check out Beyond All Reason. The base formula is Total Annihilation, but with nearly 30 years of player driven improvements and QoL. That game’s UX is extremely smart, and you can keybind or automate so many things on the fly, freeing you up to make strategic and tactical level decisions , instead of spamclicking for micro. Which, you can also do if you want to.

GriffinClaw,

Ooh, now this I gotta try out.

Thanks for the recommendation!

reksas,

zero-k is also like that, less emphasis on the graphics though but more on the gameplay

solarvector,

Thank you, zero k interface is amazing, and their “cold takes” show a design philosophy I constantly find myself wishing I’d find pretty much everywhere else.

IncogCyberspaceUser,

Can you elaborate what you mean by cold takes and why that’s something you wish more of?

solarvector,

They have quite a few posts that are primarily about design philosophy. It’s clear they put a lot of time and effort into it. One of my favorites that has driven a lot of innovation in you can interact with the game is

zero-k.info/…/3_-_Fight_your_opponent,_not_the_UI

One that I find myself coming to a sort of grudging agreement with is (veterancy for units isn’t good):

zero-k.info/…/15_-_Experiences_With_Veterancy

april, do games w The new Flappy Bird game has a hidden secret: crypto

The original author made an incredible hit and everyone got so jealous that they bullied him off the internet. Really sad story.

Now this crappy wannabe group buys the trademark years later and thinks they can fool people?

Toribor,
@Toribor@corndog.social avatar

In their defense many people are exceptionally dumb.

SomeGuy69,
@SomeGuy69@lemmy.world avatar

It’s totally going to work.

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