Honestly, I think the bar for games these days is totally warped. People expect these cinematic masterpieces with ultra-realistic graphics in gigantic 3d landscapes with massive autonomy, extensive character creation options, full voice acting, juiced up complex mechanics, and zero bugs, and they want it yesterday. If it costs more than a full tank of gas they’ll say it’s too expensive, and if it isn’t fully patched on day 1 they’ll call it unfinished.
It seems almost obvious that simpler 2D games are a better and more satisfying alternative in this landscape. No wonder AAA studios seem like they’re racing to the bottom.
How are you supposed to get all that and also have a decent story or a sense of cohesion? We need to simplify.
Paradox's games don't really do storytelling in a traditional sense. They're strategy and managememt games. Some of them are pretty damn good at creating stories dynamically through gameplay, or providing a frame upon which you can create your own stories, but they were never intended to be narrative experiences
What’s that meme? Hold on… I can dust it off since it’s still applicable. Oh, right! “I want shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less, and I mean it!”
I don’t need it to be super epic in scope and graphically mind blowing. I just want a tight, focused, well thought out game that isn’t buggy af. And it doesn’t have to be flawless day 1, but there should be some pretty good communication and patches in the first month.
“We need to simplify” indie games are doing just fine. It’s almost like super massive studios take much more money to make games with less replay value.
And who expects cinematic masterpieces? Most gamers skip the cutscenes and all dialog lol
Studios make the games pretty for pre sale hype. Getting people interested without game play.
Agree. The thing with realistic graphics is that it brings in soooo much complexity on a systems level that it becomes the center point everything else revolves around.
Imaging a 2d game vs a 3d game. Alone trough that you have a complete third dimension wich you have to account for.
A whole book full of new bugs are possible now.
And with realistic graphics the brain now expects the rules of the world to be realistic too.
My character looks photorealistic so, of course, the environment needs to look photorealistic too otherwise we go into uncanny valley territory.
So next thing the interaction needs to look realistic too. Think walking trough a forrest and the player character pushing leaves out of his way.
That is just to fucking much you need to test and invest time in to be flexible anymore.
The simple answer here is better art direction. Photorealism is neat but not needed.
With simpler graphics it becomes cheaper to change stuff in development so it becomes more viable to experiment with creative ideas.
You can have more diverse assets because they are, potentially, cheaper/less time consuming to make and they don’t take as much space.
Like 1 photorealistic tree needs as much discspace as 2 trees with half the polygons.
In the and gaming has become a business and people got involved that don’t play games.
For them it is just an investment and no different to a car or a garden hose. And for those people the only viable way to solve a problem is to trow money at it.
Which worked but only for making things grander not making it more interesting. For that you need people that solve problems with creativity.
And you get people who solve problems with creativity when there is less money because you have no other choice but to solve it like that.
That is clearly not the whole picture but a part of it IMHO.
I think at this point, if you are a gaming enthusiasts and are informed about the “scene” there is just no reason to buy AAA(AAAAAAA) games anymore.
And also no need to be angry about it. Just ignore them and talk about the indies that made a change. It is more productive to have that dominate the conversation than what sucks.
Because talking about shit is still advertisement for shit.
the recent avatar game is a great example of actually hitting the mark visually and superficially (probably one of the better looking games I’ve ever played) and the physics and gameplay in the world are pretty damn good. but people complain the story is boring. and yeah it’s not amazing. I don’t think it’s terrible, and it’s a game really built to explore the environment rather than complete missions.
it’s near impossible to get that perfect game that hits every single button possible. I truly think we gamers need to settle down a bit as a whole. Sure buggy messes that are unplayable are not something we should tolerate, but I think we need to stop treating everything that isn’t perfect as a pile of shit
They are part of the studios… point was “the bar” is “fun/interesting”. The vast majority of people that purchase games don’t have a bar as defined by the content I originally replied to.
I completely agree that business ghouls doing business ghoul things make studios make worse games… doesn’t really affect my point though… studios are not making games based on a “bar” set by the consumers as described in the original post…
I’m also interested to know whether you think Paradox should make another Sims-style life sim, after nuking Life By You
I’d personally like a “The Sims”-like game.
But while I like the sandbox aspect of that series, I was never that into the actual gameplay.
Being able to make your own structures and interact with them is neat. I like games like that a lot. Dwarf Fortress. Rimworld. Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead.
But the actual gameplay in The Sims in that sandbox world doesn’t really excite me all that much. There’s not a lot of strategy or planning or mechanics to explore the interactions of. Watching your Sims do their thing is neat, and I’d enjoy having that go on while I play a game.
I can imagine a world where I have a lot of control over structures, with NPCs that are sophisticated to an unprecedented degree.
But I don’t have specific ideas as to how to gamify it well. I just know that The Sims hasn’t gotten there.
If what one wants is Sim Dollhouse, I guess it’s okay. I know one woman who really liked one entry in the series, bought a computer just to play it. I guess it’s a neat tool for letting people sorta role-play a life. There may be a solid market for that. But for myself, I’d like to have more mechanics to analyze and play around with. Think Kerbal Space Program or something.
If only steam had a way to mark games as “hey, this game is in beta, expect issues”. I don’t know, making it clear that we were accessing it early or something…
I can’t speak for everyone, but I know I’d be willing to tolerate games being a bit buggy if they up front said “we know this game has issues. You can try it now or you can wait until we fix them”.
Realistically early access launches are just launches. Some games get a boost and surge when they go 1.0, but the vast majority don’t. Using the ea tag may put more people off than the buggyness, and people forget about the game 3 years later when it hits 1.0. I think paradox knew about it and just decided it would reduce sales more then the bug reports would.
Don’t get me wrong I don’t think games with major bugs should be released as a 1.0 product if they are asking a high price. There are great games that started ea and became great, but it was a risk for them when they did that.
I wish the tagging system was expanded to include more details.
While I think it’s helpful to know if a game is “souls like”, i also want to know if the game has a ending, or will be in continual development, or if it’s good as a pick up and put down game…
Problem is when things like Kerbal Space Program 2 happen, and they release a buggy mess and charge full price for it and then abandon the project.
I feel like established publishers (Take 2, Codemasters come to mind) should be specifically excluded from the Early Access program, or perhaps price limits should be imposed on games in the program…
QA is part of the game development process and its supposed to happen before it reaches end users. They’ve made some good games but they can’t act all surprised that selling a game and letting users be free QA doesn’t cut it.
I was looking forward to cities 2. When I heard it had crippling performance issues, I decided to wait. Still haven’t gotten back around to it. There are just too many other games that already work for me to put up with broken new releases.
It was the sheer quantity of dlc stuff along with the second one having potential performance issues that kept me way and away from it for now. I’ll check back in at a 50-90% off sale.
See, in a lot of games generas I could look past performance issues, but with city builders? Yah, nah, good performance is kind of core. It’s basically impossible to make cities of much more than 40,000 unless you have a monstrosity of a CPU, and even then your game will be chugging. Scale of city is fundamentally limited by the performance, you can just make a larger, more interesting city in cities skylines at the moment. There are some interesting game play changes from from the first, but not interesting enough to make up for the limitations to scale.
Victoria 3 also has some big performance issues. Like paradox games have always been known to slow down in the late game, but you basically can’t get through the end game in Victoria 3 unless you’re willing to run the game in the background. Again, this is even on good, modern, mid range CPUs.
I got into the millions with a mid-to-high end CPU and was... fine. I mean, fine at 40-ish fps, not fine at 240 fps.
To me the bigger issues were with balance and broken features that were hard to diagnose because city builders are so opaque by design. I can play a strategy game at 30 fps, been doing that for decades, but I need to have some way to figure out how the game is supposed to work.
In any case, it's less that I'm not "accepting" of games being broken, it's that I think I and everybody else are starting to wise up to the fact that you can just... wait. Why play CS2 at launch if you can give it a year while you do something else and play a better version of it that costs half as much?
I recently played the Little Nightmares DLC. It came out in 2017, and there were game breaking bugs still left in. I think people have just been burned so many times by unfinished products at this point
I’m tired of broken games and at this point I’m not even mad at the publishers/devs anymore. I’m mad at the gamers. Like it’s really not Bethesda’s fault they keep releasing unfinished garbage. Why actually spend time making a decent game when the brain dead consumers will buy it anyways.
We’re not going to do a bump every year. There’s no reason to do that. And, honestly, from our perspective, that’s kind of not really fair to your customers to come out with something so soon that’s only incrementally better. So we really do want to wait for a generational leap in compute without sacrificing battery life before we ship the real second generation of Steam Deck. But it is something that we’re excited about and we’re working on.
It’s refreshing to see someone that understands their customers. I often experience buyer’s remorse with even products I like and have thoroughly researched and use often. Never once have I felt like I wasted money on the SD, and it just feels like it constantly gets better.
Agreed. Even though the SD OLED addresses all the customer feedback from the LCD version, both devices are still on equal footing when it comes to SteamOS. They didn’t abandon the previous generation, they improved on it by making it a more capable device. When someone asks me which one to buy, I always tell them to decide based on the money they’re willing to spend on it. Yes, the OLED is better in terms of specs, but that doesn’t make the LCD a bad console.
The battery life is already not great when running anything intensive. Can’t imagine being able to make anymore sacrifices there without making the thing useless.
Hollis-Leick and narrative director Craig Sherman pushed back on some of the “do’s and don’ts” they received from Games Workshop about Space Marine vocabulary. They deviated from the suggested phraseology to make Titus and his comrades sound less “strange and antiquated”, less like the Spanish Inquisition, and more like soldiers from real-world present-day militaries. “Space Marines don’t necessarily say things like ‘dismissed’,” Hollis-Leick observed. “There’s a line in the game where Acheran says ‘company dismissed’ and they really wanted me to change that to ‘brothers, attend your duties’, or something. But it’s three words instead of one, and if that model was applied to all of the language in the game, I really strongly felt that people wouldn’t get it.”
Gonna be a whole lotta really peeved 40k ultra fans…
I mean, I’m not an ultra fan, only a casual one and I dislike that. The whole over the top style of WH40k is exactly what was fascinating about it. If I want to play something with modern soldiers, I have Battlefield or Call Of Duty. I play 40k games for the absurdity of it. That’s exactly the kind of “I know better what the fans want” that most bad adaptations are born out of. Luckily it seems they didn’t feel the need to change too much.
But admittedly, I can understand that you don’t want to create something where you are pretty sure enough media illiterate idiots will not get that the fascists are NOT supposed to be the good guys.
But admittedly, I can understand that you don’t want to create something where you are pretty sure enough media illiterate idiots will not get that the fascists are NOT supposed to be the good guys.
Just look at Helldiver 1/2, couldn’t be more in your face about it, and yet there’s still people not getting it.
I formed a barometer for measuring comedy and it’s perceived ripple effect on society. Look at the comedy piece, the joke, the theme as a whole, whichever element, and then ask - does it highlight the issue, or does it perpetuate it? It may be the case that the intention of the piece to be a commentary denigrating fascism, but if it does a poor job conveying that message it might just look like an over-the-top approval of it.
An example of this that hit me close to was for It’s Always Sunny during 2016, the insane “I can do whatever I want” antics that some Americans were replicating was seemingly getting higher and the crossover between people quoting the show in the wrong ways just made me realize that maybe the show hadn’t done a good enough job presenting itself to less observant viewers. Well they also felt the same way because they really ramped up the highlighting of the issues after season 12, in a way that is presented in a different fashion.
This of course, was disliked by that specific crowd - there’s a few people who aren’t hateful who just don’t like the new presentation and that’s fine (they’re wrong of course! lol). It wasn’t uncommon for a few years to see people rage about how the show went woke, and still happens but less often now because they all got angry and dropped the show (Newsflash asshole, they were talking about you the whole goddamn time!).
Anyway, as mentioned with Starship Troopers, this happens with a lot of popular media in the conservative sphere, as can be seen with Idiocracy. There’s a ton of other examples too, but we’re all aware of how often this occurs.
The Boys comes to mind, even though this show is hardly subtle. One has to wonder if at least some far-right demagogues are fully aware of this and are actually doing it as a form of cultural appropriation.
The Boys is a good one, and an interesting one specifically because it plays to the StarWars-Imperialist / DC-Marvel-Authoritarian types. Garth Ennis, who wrote for The Punisher comics and of course, The Boys, is vehemently anti-everything that these types of authoritarians stand for.
Yet despite his hatred of them, he writes them exceptionally well in a way that is lost on the less observant viewers (man I just love that phrase lol). The people who love the Punisher for the wrong reasons are the very same people who love The Boys for the wrong reasons, it’s actually crazy how much crossover there is between the two pieces.
I think The Boys (show) also played up this aspect as a way to vilify power seeking behavior to the Conservative crowd by mocking Homelander outright, and subtly by showing the effects on The Boys (the group themselves and their struggles with power and how they use it). Very similarly to Sunny, there is a shift in the way The Boys is perceived by the conservative crowd around Season 3, as the writers were amping up their highlighting of the issues specifically because idiots were perpetuating Storm-lander’s sexualization of weaponized dehumanization (i.e. getting off on Nazi romance) - in the show so much so that even Homelander was like dude that’s fucked up.
The issue of course is that Homelander is justified to these idiots, so making him look silly and dumb comes to be one of the only ways that a specific demographic will understand that his actions are bad – which of course, they get offended by and do not like, because they’ve wanted to emulate Homelander the whole time. Characters like the right-wing Stepdad and the Podcaster Listener at the convenience store show how an individual can fall into the cycle of hatred perpetuated by the media and the entire point is completely lost on them because Homelander lasering those liberals was exactly what he should have done.
Part of it is scary, because I don’t believe it’s Marvel and cartoons that are breeding this mindset. These people are conservative christians who listen to talk radio and watch the news, and they are not being inspired by characters like Homelander, they were already like this. Characters like Homelander or the Punisher are just placeholders, scapegoats, a way for these hateful individuals to self-insert themselves into media. This does not mean that the answer is culling these characters existence, but rather continuing to highlight their faults and flaws in order to re-engage people to show them what it is like to actually be a good person.
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