No matter how much hobbyists liked selling their games back to GameStop so the store can mark them up 500%, I have always hated that the industry of used games punished releasing fantastic short singleplayer games much much more than perpetual 2000-hour microtransaction live service games.
That crowd of gamers absolutely contributed to the fall. The general distrust of digital is acknowledged, but if people were just paying low/moderate sale prices for each SP game and keeping them, instead of paying used prices, we’d probably have fewer publishers moving this way.
One ethics quandary is AI child porn. It at least provides a non-harmful outlet for an otherwise harmful act, but it could also feed addictions and feel insufficient.
Worse, it might depend on licensed infrastructure. Maybe a company can stand giving away their proprietary server, but they can’t legally give away a library toolkit they purchased a $300,000 non-transferable license for. That kind of middleware is extremely common in the industry.
Since you mention FPS and open world, you could try some of the Far Cry games. AAA but often fall out of public eye fast. They’re all the same but do what they do pretty well.
Another interesting AA is In Sound Mind. Shooter-puzzler about a psychiatrist trapped in the minds of his patients.
There are some very good games out there that have survived this; including most of Valve’s greatest games - Half Life 1, 2, and Team Fortress 2. Remains to see if the same can happen with this team.
Haven’t played either remakes, but I feel like the brevity (and, at its time, novelty) of the story/scenes in the original made them a bit stronger. Some of the dramatically lengthened scenes have kind of undershot their impact.
Plus, with text speech and tiny gestures from 3D models, your mind was filling in the details your own way, which could actually work well sometimes.
I think my first was Majora’s Mask (I joined the N64 age late) and I’m the same. I wasn’t even committed to buying “new Zelda” until I saw they were upping the difficulty and having players be more self-reliant, and I loved it. I still can’t categorize the exact mode of fun people associate to “dungeons” compared to wide-open exploration.
It’s been a challenge for devs to find ways to make each weapon pickup rewarding without constantly having ATK number go up.
Division 2: Every spare weapon can be dumped into the Specialization research for that weapon type. If not, it probably has unique weapon mechanics that are interesting if nothing else
Zelda TOTK: All weapons break, so even a duplicate of an old weapon will let you keep swinging that weapon type
People pretty often completely understate the Vita’s popularity/lifespan. Less than the 3DS for sure, but early metrics were stupidly counting hardware sales when it was moving early to digital.
In Japan it stayed popular long after the USA stopped talking about it.