Red Dead 2 took 8 years to make. I bet my soul on that Concord was quickly thrown together in the last couple years by temp diversity hires and 3rd party contractors, or at least the version of Concord that we got now. I love that one of the devs said that “a lot of talented people worked on it”. If it really took them 8 years to make that is the oppsotite of talent. In 8 years I could probably get get a double masters in programming and game development and make a better game myself.
I disagree. The rule is “sex sells”, always has, always will be, period.
The people that complain about “wokeness” in games are a small but loud minority. The majority doesn’t care, hells seeing the steam achievements for some games the majority doesn’t even care to finish a game past the tutorial yet alone care about story or characters.
The problem is the approach to game design has changed. In the earlier stages of gaming, you would take a fun concept (finding perfect fits for boxes) and make it into a game (Tetris), that was all there was, Super Mario was literally called “Jump & Run Man” at one point. It was the essence of fun presented in a replayable form. Now games have to have a story, morals, relatable characters or some sort of overlaying message. This together with good gameplay can create a very good game no doubt. But each aspect has to be good on its own.
Take away the story from Last of Us and it’s essentially a 3rd person arena shooter, but it’s a good one at that. This alone would be a good selling point, add on top the story and you have an objectively good game.
But take Saint Row 5 as an example, take away the story and it’s a less than mediocre 3rd Person sandbox game, the fact that the story isn’t compelling either makes it objectively bad.
Rember the Hot/Crazy scale from His I Met Your Mother? Well there is also a Hot/Boring scale for games. If your game is boring it has to compensate by having hotter characters, if it’s fun it can get away with uglier ones. I can name countless examples where this is true.
Studios often overlook this connection. I’m all for diversification of the actual development environment but not the games themselves. It should always be fun first.
Never in my life have I heard anybody say “Are you going to get new game …? I’ve heard you can play as a black woman in this one. So cool.”
Studios then get upset because their model “Here diversity. Where money?” isn’t paying off.
It’s like not wanting to buy a cheaply made plastic valve for a boiler over a solid metal one and the company asks “Why are you not buying it? We made it blue.”
The fanbase is never going to change, because at some point we all realize that we want value for our money and often times studios spend so much time and effort making a game diverse, they forget to make it fun.
I don’t think you understand what chaos in terms of gameplay means. Chaos comes from unpredictability. On maps like shipment unpredictably goes out the window.
“What’s gonna happen if I round this corner?” “Prefiring” “What’s gonna happen if I stay in this spot?” “Grenades.” “What’s gonna happen if I rush?” “Spawnflip”
That’s it, there’s all there is to this map. That’s no chaos that’s pretty much as deterministic as it gets. What people mean by chaos is “If I 5 kills, I chain killstreak and big number on scoreboard.”
I can only speculate on why but speaking from over a decade of experience, leave it to the respective gaming communities to always pick the worst, most uninspired maps every time.
I think it has something to do with the saying in game development “Given enough time players will distill the fun out if every game.”.
If a map gets you kills fast it will be always picked above anything else. It doesn’t even have to be a guarantee, the prospect alone for getting a high kill count is enough. This results in either very small maps being favored (Nuketown, Shipment) or maps with critical chokepoints (Operation Locker (BF4), Metro (BF3,BF4)), Fort de Vaux (BF1)). Also maps that allow for cheap non-counterable tactics to get kills like Base Rape (Suez (BF1)), Vehicle Camping (Golmund (BF4)), Spawn Camping (Piccadilly, (MW2019)), etc…
Generally, every map that rewards unsportsmanlike behavior will be a community favorite.
If I ever were to release a video game I would never allow for map voting. As a player, I’d rather play maps that I dislike every once in a while instead the same 5 maps every time. And as a developer, why should I bother to invests tens of thousands of dollars to make a DLC with maps, if they are never going to be played anyway. The cherry on top is, the community still has the audacity to complain if a DLC has less maps than the last one, but then never play them anyway.
Capcom seems to pump out absolute bangers lately. They have multiple rock solid franchises (Resident Evil, Devil May Cry, Street Fighter, Monster Hunter) and their buisness model is still, make good game, sell good game, profit from sales. They don’t shove half-assed life service attempts down you throat and most importantly they don’t fuck fans over. It says a lot when your least acclaimed game over the past 5 years is RE3 Remake with “Very Positive” Steam reviews. I’m really looking forward to RE5 Remake and Monster Hunter Wilds.
But UE is the common denominator for all those problems. I actually don’t know any positive examples for UE. Satisfactory, maybe, but it still checks most of the issues. They are just less prevalent because the game itself is good.
There’s nothing wrong with it. It just doesn’t fit everywhere. There’s a thematic difference between Action platformers, Horror and Milsims, yet they all use the same font and UI. Imagine if most games would use Naughty Dogs “Yellow ledges”. It would get old very quickly.
I could write a whole essay on whats wrong with UE from a players perspective. But here’s the skinny.
Light Bloom, Distance Haze, TAA and Upscaling, no visual clarity, Roboto Font for 90% of all UIs, lower framerate for distant objects, no performance diffrence between highest and lowest graphical settings.
The only good looking and optimized UE games come from Epic themselves, so basically just Fortnite (RIP Paragon). Most of the games released by third parties are Primo Garbagio. They run like ass and look like ass.