Netflix getting in on the streamed video games wasn’t all that crazy. I flirted with it initially, as they had a few good Steam titles on there that I was effectively getting handed for free.
But the marketing approach of jamming “Play this clickbait garbage game, you stupid idiot!” install button into my face every time I visited the site ultimately lead me to cancel my subscription. Like so much else in modern streaming, the website’s admins do not want you to have any control over your front page. The end result is utterly alienating.
I genuinely enjoyed the Kingdom Hearts action-adventure with a couple of celebrity minions supporting your Dark Souls-style main character and the occasional Big Summons to drop a global special effect. I don’t think its bad on its face.
But they’ve invested so much time and energy into making Live Action work as a system that everything from the story to the game mechanics have suffered. Like, if you want to make a FromSoft game, then go over to FromSoft and do a business partnership to make Eldin Fantasy: The Soulslike Crystal Saga. You don’t need to keep tinkering with this engine that clearly doesn’t work.
Also, the FF7Remakes seem to have found a sweet spot. Why can’t the mainline games deliver this level of quality?
Also, also, also why have you abandoned ChronoTrigger? Twelve different DragonQuest titles but you gave up on Chrono in the mid-90s? You monsters.
14 crashed and burned until they brought in the A-Team to reboot it.
I’d say that had a much bigger impact on Dev cycle than a successful release on the first try with 7Remake.
If nothing else, successful releases produce more talented Devs, while failures burn them. And that gets us back to 15, which was an outright dumpster fire.
I’ve had a great time with Remake and Rebirth. They put a lot more into it than some of the earlier spit-shines on 2D classics, which wouldn’t have worked for a game that was kinda in between generations of art and technique. But they’re really dragging this shit out. And I really don’t need a ChronoTrigger Integrade.
The franchise and the world have abundant potential. There’s no reason they couldn’t do something really creative and exciting with it. It just feels like the modders already did exactly that, only to have their work thrown in the trash.
As a rule of thumb, you’re looking at 25-50% of a AAA game’s budget going to advertising. So a $40 game becomes an $80 game in large part because the publisher is putting out $10Ms-$100Ms just to raise name recognition and build hype.
there are the likes of South of Midnight and Clair Obscur launching at $50.
Beautiful games, both. But again, they aren’t having the full court press of advertising like a new Call of Duty or Final Fantasy or Diablo would.
That’s the real cost savings. You don’t need to change $80+ for a game if you aren’t focused entirely on presale figures to justify your studio’s budget.
Incidentally, you also get to focus on a better game. Balatro didn’t need wall to wall subway ads in New York to end up on everyone’s phones.
Steam doesn’t advertise at the scale of Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo. It won’t have a ripple effect because it won’t change the degree to which artificial hype drives people towards the “Buy” button.
$80 on release day. $60 a month later. $40 a year later. $20 a year after that.
What you’re paying for isn’t the game, its the hype. An enormous component of a modern AAA game’s budget is just advertising. That’s what your $80 is going towards. You’re paying to have people tell you to buy it.
Even assuming you don’t feel like pirating… Just be patient, play something that came out a few years ago, wait for the next Steam Sale, and own the game for pennies on the dollar.
The joke of these games is that they aren’t notably more weird than titles Bethesda and Bioware were famous for turning out. Hard to get more weird than Fallout’s more esoteric vaults or Morrowind’s bizarre cults and exotic cultures.
BG3/KC:D have been, if anything, a direct successors to the old classics. They’re faithfully propagating the fundamental ideas these old titles represented in a way the new studios are unable to reproduce.
Also, honorable mention to the poor bastards who released Disco Elysium and then got their studio stripped out from underneath them by their financiers. Absolute gem of a game and you should feel free to pirate it without a twinge of guilt.
Idk. Breath of the Wild felt more like a tech demo than a full game. Tears of the Kingdom felt more fleshed out, but even then… the wideness of the world belied its shallowness in a lot of places. Ocarina of Time had a smaller overall map, but ever region had this very bespokely crafted setting and culture and strategy. By the time you got to Twilight Princess, you had this history to the setting and this weight to this iteration of the Zelda setting.
What could you really do in BotW that you couldn’t do in Twilight? The graphics got a tweak. The amount of running around you did went way up. But the game itself? Zelda really peaked with Majorem’s Mask. So much of this new stuff is more fluff than substance.
The dream of the '10s/20s game industry was VR. Hyper-realistic settings were supposed to supplant the real world. Ready Player One was what big development studios genuinely thought they were aiming for.
They lost sight of video games as an abstraction and drank too much of their own cyberpunk kool-aid. So we had this fixation on Ray Tracing and AI-driven NPC interactions that gradually lost sight of the gameplay loop and the broader iterative social dynamics of online play.
That hasn’t eliminated development in these spheres, but it has bifricated the space between game novelty and game immersion. If you want the next Starcraft or Earthbound or Counterstrike, you need to look towards the indie studios and their low-graphics / highly experimental dev studios (where games like Stardew Valley and Undertale and Balatro live). The AAA studios are just turning out 100 hour long movies with a few obnoxious gameplay elements sprinkled in.