The quality of games did not improve, in fact game quality and diversity has deteriorated. The quantity of content has dropped off as well. Graphics fidelity and production costs have skyrocketed though.
Graphics are so superficial when it comes to games anyhow, why would anyone pay more for a pretty waste of time?
Edit: i am talking about AAA games here, obv there has been an extreme proliferation of indie titles
Diversity and quality are both going to be difficult to measure objectively, and I’d argue both are still in better supply today. Quantity is far easier to prove objectively. Not only are there just far more games out there, but try some like for like comparisons of some of your favorite long-running franchises on How Long to Beat. Assassin’s Creed II was 20-25 hours; Assassin’s Creed: Shadows is 35-64. Halo 2 was 9-12; Halo Infinite is 11-20. Baldur’s Gate 3 is close to as long as its two predecessors combined. Call of Duty is three games in one now.
The value of a game’s Quantity is directly proportionate to its Quality though, starfield and its 1000s of repetitive planets are the perfect example of this. Would any halo fan rather play 20 hours of infinite or 20 hours of halo 2…?
Yes there have been outliers of increased quality and quantity over the last decade, but in the full priced AAA space nowadays, that is the exception not the rule.
Quantity is directly proportionate to quality though
I’d disagree with that premise. It’s not like they’re making just as much game in the same amount of time. Games are taking way longer to make these days than they used to. As I’m 70+ hours into Kingdom Come: Deliverance II and nowhere near done, they could have made about 2/3 as much game as they made, and it still would have been phenomenal and worth the price. The same goes for Baldur’s Gate 3, not to say that I’m unhappy about how much of it I have.
I don’t think the high quality games are outliers. We just have so many more games coming out these days that it becomes more and more likely that we get some bangers in that volume. EA or Ubisoft may be putting out fewer games because of how long they take to make, but they’ve got more competition than they did 20 years ago.
As the end user why should i pay sympathetically for the extended dev time of a product that hasnt tangibly improved for my uses?
Yes the price ceiling of $70 does not do justice to games like KCD 2, but all that matters for the end user is perceived value. If the perceived value of any game isnt going up, then it is difficult to charge consumers an increased amount.
KCD 2 and Elden Ring are great examples of RPGs with content that fans perceive as a great value, but only AFTER playing.
Maybe KCD 3 or Elden Ring 2 can push their perceived value beyond $70, but the simple fact is that the majority of AAA games DO NOT offer an amount or quality of content that gamers would consider to be worth $70, especially with the tiering off of content with various editions, passes and DLC.
It is just subjective that you and i disagree about the amount of games that cross the value threshold of $70, but the evidence of a $0 cost increase for full priced games over the past decade or so definitely seems like evidence towards my perspective.
I wish i could pay more money for higher quality games with more content, but the advertising for these products happens within a competitive and reciprocal market, and that market has a mean perceived product value of $70.
KCD 2 and Elden Ring have essentially wasted dev time/cost creating bonus content, although the perceived value towards their brands it has created, plus the positive IP mind share, will pay off for them down the road with units sold i am sure.
As the end user why should i pay sympathetically for the extended dev time of a product that hasnt tangibly improved for my uses?
That’s not the point I was making. The price you’re paying is the same, but they’re delivering more for the same price, which you argued they were not. Then you said that quality dipped when they made more, which I argued it did not, and the reason for that is because they’re spending more time making it, so they don’t have to sacrifice quality to build more game, because they can give it as much attention as they’ve always given it but for longer.
Yes both very subjective. Accessibility and streamlining gameplay has seemed to be the focus. Developing unique, novel but also enjoyable new gameplay experiences? (the reason i believe most people game) That more or less ended with the Wii, Ps3 and 360 era of consoles.
I will, respectfully, still disagree with that assertion. Just because Assassin’s Creed, Call of Duty, and the like are on their umpteenth entry, does not mean that no more unique and novel games are being made.
I would argue that AAA full priced gaming space is not where that innovation has been happening in recent years, it has mostly been with lower priced indies.
There were more sports cars in the parking lot in the PS1 era than there were in the PS4 era
What a struggle. Should we then have tripled the prices so the poor publishers could afford 2 sports cars instead? Or, hear me out, just play indie games that’s higher quality and doesn’t have a useless middle man.
Definitely. I reckon on my first console I bought games for (2000 or so.), you could get a game roughly fifteen quid, within a few years (2005) it was 40 quid, and not long after that (Around 2010-2015.), £60. My wages didn’t increase like that.
It’s not even a “remaster” conversation anymore, a simple port to modern consoles to rejuvenate the game’s soul should be more than enough. Too bad we’ll probably never see that happen neither :/ .
Can you elaborate? Would jacking up the graphics, animations, and sound mess with the atmosphere? It‘s been a hot minute since I‘ve played it so I‘m not sure what the issue would be.
Is a form of magic portrait as evil and in the best cases morally grey. Is also one of the most fun builds in DAO.
The more modern Dragon Age games don’t let you create truly evil characters; you’re mostly just a douche and morally grey options are scarce. I don’t think they would remove it in a remake, but they certainly won’t let you use blood magic in a new Dragon Age.
EA have one of the worst records for re-releases of any of the major publishers/IP Holders. Whether that is a pro or a con depends on you and I really don’t care.
That said… Look, I still think DA Origins is one of the greatest CRPGs ever made… gameplay wise (I could do without “What if Game of Thrones but even MORE rapey!!”) and wish basically anything else had continued on that mix of isometric-ish strategy and simple conditional based AI. DA2… DA2 had a REALLY good story and atrocious gameplay and level design. And I hated Inquisition so much that I never even did the DLC about the most boring fascist ever who then became a hero in the decade or so between games.
And considering all three (?) of those are different engines? It would have been a LOT of money for a re-release. And… most of these discussions would have been happening around the time Larian/Obsidian/inXile/Owlcat were fighting for kickstarter scraps against frigging Spiders.
In a post BG3 world… it would still be a stretch. But at the time when “We should re-release thse games to build hype for DAVe”? Frigging nobody would expect anything close to a CRPG to be worth that kind of investment. Hence why the DAs have been ARPGs in the vein of Divinity 2 for the past 15 or however many years since DA2.
And I say all of this as someone who loves CRPGs and who actually backed most of the Larian/Obsidian/inXile/Owlcat kickstarters.
And just as an aside because I have seen it come up a lot.
No, Wizards of the Coast were not genius visionaries for thinking BG3 could work. By all accounts, they were looking to shop around one of their old IPs (Baldurs Gate) and lucked out in that Larian got involved. And Larian largely forced what would have been the same mobile slop WotC had been funding for years into being one of the all time great CRPGs. And that is why Swen et al want absolutely nothing to do with WotC for a sequel.
Paizo (Pathfinder) have been a bit better but it is similarly telling that Pathfinder Kingmaker cannot be updated because of how shitty the publisher to that game is and that Owlcat, after Wrath of the Righteous (arguably THE greatest CRPG ever made), mostly are focusing on one off contract work with IPs that care less about the actual RPG side of things.
True, but that works for books and writers too, not just for games. The story might not be one of the bests, however they managed to make a great game if you consider it in its all. I can say I definitely enjoyed DAO more than Dungeon Siege 1&2, even though I liked them a lot. And I prefer isometric to any other angle any time.
Here is an unrelated anecdote: The first Witcher game was going to be isometric initially but they decided to go with third-person view. Looking at Witcher 3, it was a good call. Though can’t help myself imagining how would it like with isometric view.
At this point, I doubt this will happen, because they’ve purposefully sunk Dreadwolf/Veilguard into the abyss, and probably wrote the entire DA series off, as a loss, all together
I was probably just unlucky with it. Had a drifting controller replaced also within my short time with it.
Yeah PC is much better, we bought this for Demon’s Souls and the other exclusives we figured would release. Just became my partner’s go-to Genshin machine until it started making blinking rainbow artifacts very much justifying the epilepsy warning.
not too suprised, given the game runs fairly poorly on the base PS4, and I believe with Natlan, they made the decision to increase the quality of certain elements of the game, and its not going to get any lighter.
Unfortunate, but sometimes you need to cut support for 12 year old hardware in order to do more with your game. I come from MMOs, and this sort of thing would regularly happen when a new expansion would be announced. Minimum specs rise, and support for old stuff gets cut.
yeahhhh it makes sense, just kind of wild because live service games THRIVE on old hardware. Stuff like Fortnite and Overwatch has kept the PS4 platform pretty damn lively, and i’m sure it accounts for a significant chunk of sales, so seeing a live service game cut off that revenue stream is interesting. The hardware may be 12 years old, but the new hardware has sat in a pretty steep price point for its entire history so far, so somehow this still feels premature.
Yeah, I’m sure they ran the numbers and a decision like this didn’t come lightly. Also, since this is a multiplatform game, there’s a good chance the displaced ps4 users already have another device they can play the game on. Ultimately though, if the devs want to grow the game, then these decisions have to be made. Back when I played, after every major patch, you were guaranteed to see people lamenting that they could no longer play the game because their device no longer had enough storage.
While I understand it’s not a 1:1 comparison, Final Fantasy 14 dropped support for PS3 in 2017, and the console was only 11 years old at the time.
While I understand it’s not a 1:1 comparison, Final Fantasy 14 dropped support for PS3 in 2017, and the console was only 11 years old at the time.
I don’t want to say too much bc you acknowledged the apples to oranges comparison, but I’ll say the quiet part out loud for others: technology advanced way more in those 11 years than it has in the last 12 since the PS4 launch. The only conceivable limiting factor at this phase is storage speed, and as others have pointed out, Genshin on PS4 is currently MISERABLE with load times. So like, it makes sense, but still feels wrong.
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