All the likes of Zelda, Mario, Halo, Pokemon, etc. are going to get forgotten
I disagree. The reason being that video games and gaming of this caliber are completely unheard of in all of human history. We’ve come further in gaming tech over the last couple decades than the grand majority of all humans that have ever existed could even dream.
That being said, as long as emulation exists, there will be fans of big ips. The problem with saying “it’ll get forgotten as soon as the last person stops playing” is that the specific circumstance of modern gaming is unprecedented. People are still out there emulating games that came out in the 80’s. There’s really no rule saying this kind of technology won’t last hundreds or thousands of years like more classical games do.
If you haven’t already, give divinity original sin 2 a try. BG3 was built on the back of a game just as complex and satisfying, with a ton of the same exact mechanics, that went under appreciated because Larian wasn’t a big studio with a well known ip.
You can catch it on sale pretty regularly for like $5. I bought it on release back in the day and I still play through that game like once a year.
I’m not really commenting on how the actual game was, just the hype building up to it. Nintendo consistently teaches a masterclass on hyping their IPs. Whether or not the game was good, or worth the money, is an opinion beside the point.
In the same vein, people call starfield “fallout but in space” and “fast travel simulator 2023”. There are plenty of things to criticize there too. But I honestly think the reason those criticisms weren’t taken in stride like totk was is because of all of bad hype surrounding the release. People expected a lot more.
That’s what hype does. Hype can be good if the end product lives up to it, or the hype isn’t so potent. Tears of the Kingdom comes to my mind for this. The hype was more like “it’s coming, we think it’s going to be cool” and a couple of gameplay vids. Then their reputation combined with the understatement of how good the game actually was created a wildfire of good hype.
Starfield was like “PREPARE YOURSELVES FOR THE BEST GAME EVER MADE, IN THE WORKS FOR HALF A DECADE, YOU’LL NEVER PUT IT DOWN, GAME OF THE YEAR GUARANTEED” and created a ton of bad hype. Bad hype is good for sales, but creates unrealistic expectations and makes a lot more people go “meh” once they find out what it is.
Let me tell you a secret: bad hype is intentional. All that matters to a studio is how much they sell, not that players continue playing.
Bad hype makes players stop talking about a game pretty quickly.
Any more manipulative than a ceo making the decision to axe a functioning and profitable licensing structure to implement a new one with more dollar signs?
If you told me the same exact ceo made the layoff decision, I wouldn’t be surprised.
The very first time a game tells me I have to pay for something with real currency in game that isn’t purely cosmetic, it gets dropped. It’ll be a cold day in hell before I let a game tell me that the blue triangles are mtx only.
I seriously considered getting one for my wife about 6 months ago. She’s a casual controller gamer on her laptop, so I thought I’d spring for something with a little quality for her.
I had an official Xbox controller in my hand ready to check out and decided against it because when I looked, there were so many accounts of the controller just falling apart on people. It’s not worth paying a premium $80 for a controller that doesn’t last a year.
She still plays on a 10 year old black 360 controller with a wireless adapter and has zero problems.
When has Bethesda ever released patches to fix anything short of game breaking bugs? And even then more often than not they don’t fix those.
I mean, some of the most popular mods for fallout 4 and skyrim were community patches. I’m not saying I agree with that practice, just that this is par for the (shitty) course for Bethesda. Starfield probably won’t be an actually good game until there are thousands of mods for it.
My roommate was one of those “completed a run but didn’t finish enough to see the ending” people.
He said that completing the run alone felt like the end of the game to him and he couldn’t bare the thought of struggling for what he barely managed to achieve once.