There certainly was a “golden age of gaming,” where the cost for a studio to exist and make a game was pretty low and they were more willing to experiment. The thing people forget is that there was so, so, so much trash and shovelware made during that era as well. We remember the incredible game that innovated and drove the medium forward, and we forget the movie tie-ins and genre knockoffs.
These days, AAA has forgotten how to innovate, and nearly all of it is being driven by indie titles. This is because, once again, the cost to develop is now so low that literally anyone can do it. The amount of trash and shovelware we’re getting is almost ludicrous though, so it’s a lot harder to find the great titles that are overlooked, but extremely high quality has a remarkable way of cutting through the noise.
It got one? The HD collection came out in 2012 and is honestly still pretty good, plus you get DMC3 with it.
I’m generally against remaking games that are currently perfectly playable. I’d vastly prefer getting DMC6 before they re-release the original for a second time.
I think that’s looking at the deal in hindsight. Palworld had just as good a chance at flopping completely as hitting #1 worldwide, I imagine they were grateful for the opportunity to have some guaranteed income at the time.
There seems to have been a major righting of the ship with Dragonflight. The live retail game is in a very strong place right now, and players are now actually anticipating an upcoming expansion rather than dreading it. Season of Discovery was also an especially inspired idea, injecting a lot of new life into vanilla. Assuming there isn’t too large a shake-up with the team after the Microsoft acquisition, this might be a new golden era for World of Warcraft.
That’s almost too harsh. The one positive thing you can say on the matter is that Capcom isn’t running around shuttering development of games to lay-off developers in order to manufacture like 3 points of profit. The Western AAA games industry is fucking disgusting in their greed, the Eastern AAA industry is just kinda confusing.
Travel is fun, Capcom are just a dumb company. You’ll get plenty of access to fast travel tokens throughout the game, but the act is still limited to only a handful of fast travel points. Cart travel has been my preferred method of going long distances, which does come with the risk of a griffon ambush, but griffon ambushes mean you get more combat.
I mean, the RE4make let you buy weapon upgrades with cash, DMC 5 let you just buy all the currencies in game directly, I don’t even know where to begin with Monster Hunter World’s microtransactions. It’s shitty, but Capcom does this in literally all of their games now, so absolutely you’ll see dumb mtx in RE9 and Monster Hunter Rise.
Only thing actually rare are the fast travel items. Everything else on the list you can get within the first four hours of playing the game. The real dumb shit is the new game decision, the character creator demo gave you five save slots so why does the game only have one?!
Didn’t Epic just win an anticompetitive lawsuit against Google, off the back of losing a similar anticompetitive lawsuit against Apple?
Methinks they’ll be coming back for round 2, and this will be the provocation that will give Epic a win. Regardless of your thoughts and feelings on Epic, I think we can agree that Apple is a shitty company and they could do with an L.
Look I love Dark Souls; it is an incredibly flawed game, and Demon’s Souls is even moreso. Dark Souls was so far ahead of it’s time that it still needed time to bake in the oven. Then with how claustrophobic DS2 and DS3’s worlds were by comparison, I don’t think FromSoft really surpassed Skyrim until Elden Ring.
Both games are some of the greatest of all time though, so a lot of it will just come to preference. I think a lotta Dark Souls players have been spoiled by the remaster though, the original release struggled hard under the weight of Miyazaki’s ambition.
People in the future will realize that Skyrim was made in a perfect sweet spot at Bethesda. It was made recently enough that the controls make sense and it feels good to play, but Skyrim was still so, so ahead of it’s time when it came to an open world RPG. Back then, Bethesda’s writers really had a knack for making incredibly interesting settings, and just seeing an entire digital world so wonderfully realized was considered ground-breaking.
A decade later, and the same model has become stale. The gameplay is still there, but the soul is not. Idk if most of those old writers have just left Bethesda or retired after so many years in the industry, but the magic has left the studio. I’m not even really looking forward to ES6 as much as I am the upcoming Avowed from Obsidian, because their games still have plenty of soul.
It’s going to mean smaller selections of games, more gambling/gacha bullshit, and “you’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy” will dominate the industry. When licensing runs out for music, they’ll just pull a game instead of trying to “fix” it, if it’s not profitable enough. We’re entering an era where there will be a dead-zone of lost media and history because so much of it is increasingly locked up behind corporate barriers.
I have some bad news about the past few years for you…
Rollercoaster Tycoon was 1999, so I’ll choose to believe that the “then” era was after the big gaming crash of the 80s. There was still shovelware, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as during the 80s when you’d see mountains and mountains of terrible, non-functioning games. I don’t think anyone really has nostalgia for that period of gaming, but the late 90s to early 2000s really were as close to a golden age as we ever got.
They tried for like a decade before finally giving up. Microsoft has learned a lot of lessons while trying to work on their gaming arm, and some of them have actually stuck. I would expect titles to be sold on Steam until Phil Spencer retires.