It might be a good time to revisit some other long-running series that have managed a very good “reset” after running dry. Some examples that come to mind are Resident Evil 7, God of War, The Legend of Zelda, maybe some others.
At least for RE7 and God of War, it does feel like their overall goal was to reduce the action-packed scope, and focus more closely on something character-focused. RE7 doesn’t have crashing helicopters, and God of War doesn’t have you killing gods in the first 30 minutes. It definitely felt like an overall goal for FF16 was epic, bombastic scope and throwing around their budget, which obviously drove sales…but not as much lingering popularity as they hoped.
(Oh yeah, and plan a Steam release already. The world is not as console-obsessed as Japan)
The specific game that gave me the idea for this post was Freedom Planet 2. I remember getting the original as part of one of the early Humble Bundles, and enjoyed it, but never felt compelled to try the sequel.
Something I’ve been missing is having more game stories with fully “melodramatic” character acting - where character A is gasping in tears over the injuries to character B, and won’t ever forgive ruthless villain Y. That was something I remembered FP1 for, for better or worse, and apparently from reviews they improved their craft a bit for the sequel.
I remember when I had to use my Steam Deck connected with USBC as a “desktop” for a while. It couldn’t remember to put my taskbar on my preferred monitor no matter what I tried doing.
I’m torn, because on the one hand, the logistics of constantly recording new lines for minor stuff is really annoying. Imagine you’re playing a live-service game that really needs a certain balance patch, but that balance patch is reliant on a very slight change to a voice line (for instance, reducing the time it takes for a character to perform a special attack. To take an Overwatch example, maybe a certain archer is voicing his ultimate ability too quietly). Having to call someone in just for that is costly and unproductive.
But, we’re talking about delivering the source of someone’s work and livelihood (as well as all their creative influence, exaggerative tones, and delivery) into an algorithm. The line where it would go beyond convenience into worker-reduction efforts is going to be hard to draw.
I would rather that the voice actor retains the rights to their voice, even if it’s put into an AI algorithm. Thus, if the developers want to make a small change to a voice line, they still need to get approval for some AI-generated correction - and the actor would have the right to say “No, that one sounds terrible. I’m only going to agree to re-delivering this one myself.” Similarly, actors could approve limited sets of explicitly-defined live AI usage, for instance pronouncing the player’s name. Granted, some companies would become annoyed at actors being too inflexible, just like they have disagreements with actors today.
I’m definitely worried about too much signing-over of voice identity. I think it’s very easy to cut humans out of the equation that way, which not only damages the health of the industry, but also reduces creative output.
I just finished Tyrion Cuthbert: Attorney of the Arcane yesterday. Definitely the kind of game that sits on your mind a long time after you’ve finished. It’s almost criminal to refer to it as an “Ace Attorney fan-game”, seeing how many things they get so right so uniquely. They absolutely nail the kind of cathartic, heart-twisting drama of all of these characters that gets you cheering for the ending.
There’s a lot in the soundtrack that I adore, especially the way they build multiple character leitmotifs and a particular track right at the finale of the game, but obviously, their equivalent of the “Pursuit” theme is always going to be a standout.
Alisa is a great horror game that uses pre-rendered backgrounds and plays very much like an old Resident Evil game. It even opens up with a pretty nice FMV intro.
One big difficulty of it is that there’s one finite currency used for buying upgrades, weapons, health, and ammo; and you’ll likely be strained if you avoid buying the latter.
Same, it’s hard to build expectations, but I also felt a little bit of that with Endwalker’s impending release. “Oh, so we go to the moon now?” when the moon was barely before the halfway point.
One thing that can help is if they can invent methods of moving beyond power scaling. The Endsinger’s potential was mostly dictated by “despair for the future”, which is such a vague concept they could likely invent new such challenges without explicitly saying “This thing is stronger than the last thing you fought”. It’s already hard to claim that the cattle at the far edge of Thavnair are stronger than Hades.
I know a lot of people point to resale as a big advantage of physical media, but I really prefer just having a digital environment that encourages frequent sales and price reductions.
If you think about memorable singleplayer games for instance (AAA or indie), they’re really victimized by that mentality of “Well, I guess I’m done with this now”. Even shitty online games, or big open-world games with 80 hours of boring content, usually won’t be re-sold in that way; and each used sale will be a lost New sale for the developer. Never forget that You are the product of GameStop’s used games business.
The funny thing is, I don’t think even this is a right way of looking at it. I think variety in the characters you view makes them more interesting; adult characters can definitely come across as heroic even to kids. It’s not necessarily excluding them as an audience.
Besides the difficulties for players, there’s also the fact that key reselling is an excellent method for credit card pickpockets to launder money quickly.
Someone’s credit card is swiped in the streets, and in the time before it’s reported stolen, the thief buys many copies of expensive games, to be resold on a place like this. The key resellers themselves claim they’re purchased directly, but…I personally have almost no faith in them or their claims.
The judicial decision seemed to be based more around the fact that he was a danger to others, regardless of his own mental limitations. He re-hacked the company using a cell phone and a Fire TV stick when cut off from other devices. What else can they feasibly do? I sympathize with people who have special needs, but that doesn’t mean people should just live in fear of the ones that are a danger.
When the “victim” is lost money and leaked footage, I’m sure there’s limited sympathy, but I feel like these hackers are not so long from deciding to SWAT someone and very possibly getting people killed.
“I was able to get into your admin’s crypto wallet and steal $400,000”
“Holy crap! Good find. Can you document how you did that, and put the money back?”
“Lol, you think you can order Lapsus around? Money’s mine, life lesson: Secure it better. I’m going to leak your home address now.”
It’s not a trend they abandoned - Counter Strike is still a huge source of deceptive digital item trade. It also spread to Team Fortress 2 in the meantime.
I guess with such a terrible track record around games based on larger media properties, it might not be surprising if that new (reportedly decent, if by the numbers) Avatar game isn’t selling gangbusters.
It didn’t have a way to function in the event of system failure.
Steam sometimes goes down. When that happens, people can often still play their singleplayer games. If Steam had totally failed business-wise, it either would have been sold to another publisher who would maintain access, or the games would’ve been unlocked for permanent offline play.
Take a look at Stadia’s failure resolution strategy; they had to fully refund every person who bought a game there, because all purchases became completely unusable. Imagine if they’d gone a decade selling games to people and building off of their revenue, before encountering failure.