“These AAA publishers have, mostly, used this production scale to keep their top franchises in the top selling games each year.”
I never quite understood, why it’s not more popular among big publishers to create smaller games throughout the year. You can have risky AAA titles in development and compete in the AA market at the same time.
It’s just easier to advertise a single big game rather than several smaller ones. Even if you are interested in games it’s impossible to keep track of everything that’s being released. More casual players are aware of even fewer games. That’s why AAA games still sell so well because they are the only games a lot of people are even aware of.
If the companies have to split their marketing budget between multiple titles, they would reach a much smaller audience. And even if one of the smaller titles would be a hit, it probably sells fewer copies for a lower price.
Ding ding ding.
Half the cost of the game is marketing. And marketing is an effort that builds upon itself
The more smaller games you have, the more you have to market to niches from scratch. And niches are generally more inclined to be informed users. And it takes a developer with vision to make a satisfying niche hit. Well it always takes vision but…
Meanwhile one big bombastic game will get a bunch of mainstream folks hyped over qualifiers of scope instead of quality. Yes, I am saying hype culture is primarily an idiot’s hobby, but idiots still got cash.
Plus, plus, most studios don’t really see their junior devs as something worth fostering. Better off burning them out and replacing them.
It’s basically money well spent for them.
Eggs, meet basket.
He’s right
And they’re hoping that you and I aren’t paying attention
“He’s right y’know”
So make something new. Microsoft is in desperate need of defining series rather than Halo and Gears of War, both of which are the types of games he’s criticizing here.
Why take risks when I can dig up an old IP and jingle it’s corpse around for a quick buck?
I like both, especially halo, it’s very nostalgic for me, but the excitement for new games in the series’ are gone and they need new exciting IPs
Both have places existing sure. There’s nothing wrong with old series existing, just that new ideas should be tested and used.
Starfield advertised something like “Bethesdas first new universe in 25+ years” (paraphrasing)
That is not a good thing.
Hypothetically I don’t see a problem with things like a new entry in Elder Scrolls. The problem (to me) seems more like constantly remaking Skyrim into new editions and for each new console.
constantly remaking Skyrim into new editions
That’s pretty much Starfield in a nutshell, Skyrim in space. Don’t get me wrong it’s a fun game but it’s basically reskinned Skyrim with a few new systems bolted on. I’m also noticing some reused assets from Fallout, pretty sure the noise the scanner makes when opening is the same as opening the PipBoy.
I’m quite happy with starfield, but I did notice some reused noises definitely. I’m not sure that I particularly mind though
20 years ago.
Call if Duty is 20 years old. FIFA is 30 years old.
Diablo is 26
Tbf there are only 4 (plus expansion) of those, there has been a cod per year for like 15 years now and a fifa every year for 20+. Those are the egregious offenders, I’m fine with a game franchise getting a new game every 7 years or so as long as it’s clear the studio has actually put work into that game.
“Tbf”? The last 2 installments of Diablo have been shit right out of the gate. D3 improved after many years.
I like how both of you couldn’t even remember Immortal enough to criticize it.
It’s cause they don’t have phones
Immortal isn’t a Diablo game, it’s a shameless cash grab with a Diablo skin
Baldurs Gate was published in 1998
So many games to prove your point and the one you choose is FIFA?
Here’s me wishing that Splinter Cell & Deus Ex was part of this ride… It’s been so long!
Same. At least with Deus Ex I have some hope left. Iirc the studio (Eidos?) was sold by Square Enix and the new owner may have them work on a new Deus Ex.
If you like those kind of games it may also interest you that Dishonored 3 being planned was part of the leaks last week.
Not to mention a lot of them are still crappy at best: Fallout 4 is ridiculous, Fallout 76 is even more ridiculous, Assassin’s Creed turned into a conveyor joke, Cyberpunk 2077 was just insultingly bad at launch and remained that for a long time (haven’t played 2.0 yet, so I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt), Starfield is another sandwich full of lies, Redfall is not even worth talking about akin to Deathloop, Diablo 4 is a machine to vacuum money on a schedule, online FPS has been nothing but battle royale for what feels like almost a dozen years and now they’re testing the waters with “extraction shooters” looking at Escape From Tarkov (the extraction aspect alone won’t bring them the same fame), and all of that is coupled with ever-increasing system requirements and prices, making gaming the most expensive it’s ever been for really no good benefit.
The only AAA game that left me satisfied on launch in the recent years, like in the days of buying boxes, was DOOM: Eternal; to a lesser extent, Hogwarts Legacy was good, but the story felt lacking and really took away from the fun.
I personally blame the managers in the AAA gaming for not managing the scope creeps that obviously happen in many of these games, stretching the development resources, yet resulting in another “mile wide, inch deep” discourse time after time. Again, DOOM: Eternal is a great example: no crafting, no open world shenanigans, no multiple choices all leading to the same outcome (while not being a conceptual story-telling instrument) - just a focused game with multiple elements that make up the linear progression and gradually increase the possible complexity of one’s experience, finally culminating in a complete FPS sitting atop impressive optimization and great visuals.
AAA is just not worth it these days and hasn’t been for several years, neither in terms of hardware, nor software.
You make some true points, but it’s hard to take them seriously when you blanket dismiss entire games that are enjoyed by many as crappy or entire franchises as a joke.
That can’t be the sole metric. The POSTAL series is widely regarded as one of the worst franchises to ever happen in video games, and yet, I and many others are big fans of the entire series in general and are especially fond of some entries in particular; but it certainly doesn’t make these games less janky and subpar in many regards - at the very least, none of them was advertised as something “for the next gen” or “groundbreaking” or any of the big words the AAA industry likes to throw around when advertising.
entire franchises as a joke
Thanks for that, though, I didn’t meant to call the entire AC series a joke, only multiple of its entries after the first games.
I’m just particularly fond of Assassin’s Creed Odyssey due to it being the only open world game that is playable as a stealth game with stealth game specific mechanics and a world designed for stealth traversal, there has not yet been any other game designed that way that isn’t just light stealth elements that fall apart when you inevitably get caught in two minutes, until someone shows me another game like that, I honestly feel that game to be pushing the stealth genre, which is honestly not hard to do because of the dire state it’s in.
And I’m glad you expand on Postal particularly, it goes to show that even games that are despised by many have their own meaningful aspects to be gleaned with the right mindset and with their flaws in mind. I think that when it comes to games of this size it is very hard to be able to say they are crappy, full stop, especially ones like these, or even Deathloop, which I enjoyed. Not as much as Arkane’s Prey or Dishonored, of course, but it was still an enjoyable game with an excellent art style and soundtrack that heavily tapped into my love of the 70s, and featured a very nice multiplayer mode that simply doesnt exist in any other game.
Its not AC anymore though, they should have made a new IP instead of using an existing one on games that are completely different to the originals in the franchise.
I would agree with that, but then there’s a whole debate to be had about whether Odyssey would receive the same funding if it weren’t an AC game, and whether it wouldve been executed as well or has as much content in that alternate reality Odyssey.
I guess. I mean thats why they keep using the AC name though isnt it, they had no faith in their products to stand on their own.
I think all the recent AC games could have been a new franchise, they all are pretty much the same base game. I wouldnt even count AC4 as a AC game personally, I guess I just crave that beautiful AC2/Brotherhood experience again that we will never get.
I’m totally fine with you enjoying whatever games you enjoy, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. My opinion is that of the corporations and their practices only, not the consumers that happen to find something dear to them in the final product.
Granted, we, as consumers, have - or at least should have - certain ways to leverage the industry and let it know explicitly what we appreciate and like, and what we absolutely hate, but that’s much easier said than do on the scale of modern gaming in general, let alone the AAA gaming, the massive beast it is and the sizes of its many audiences. I do what I can to influence the industry, whenever I can, and that includes talking about it with my fellow gamers to maybe spark the same tendencies in them - but I certainly don’t want to discourage anyone from having fun.
Off the thread topic, yeah Prey and Dishonored are definitely one of the greatest games we’ve seen in 2010s, especially Prey.
I think you do bring up some good points about how a lot of the weakest AAA games now are either extremely over-iterative and lose appeal by virtue of sharing large parts of their design with their past iterations, diluting the novel good bits (Assassin’s Creed), and trend chasers (that most popular online FPS games chase battle Royale and extraction shooter genres, though battle Royale seems to be finally dying off.
It takes something like Doom, a game that bucks the trends, but doesn’t stumble on the execution of something fresh, but rooted in strong game direction and execution. Or something like Hogwarts Legacy, a rote-on-paper genre of game (open world) kept fresh and interesting because of its long-time-coming incredible choice of setting and the ways that it uses that setting to benefit the gameplay and immersion (the magic combat system, broom riding, and lots of sprinkled bits of lore that reward long time fans of the world)
But even then… imagine ten years down the line if there’s a Doom 6, and they let history repeat itself…
“leaked” email
Is it weird I read the title 4 times and every time I read Phil Spector and I kept wondering why we carried what a murderer thought about video games.
He’s not wrong.
Nearly all of Sony’s biggest AAA games started in the PS4 generation less than a decade ago
I’m sad they shuttered Japan studios
‘Most publishers are riding the success of franchises created 10+ years ago’
Keyword is “Most”.
Is it most? It’d at the very least be close
Its mixed, naughty dog tends to have new, while technically speaking, God of War and Spiderman is considered old IP in the case for Sony.
The statement is nostly true for Nintendo, as the only new IP for Nintendo that went anywhere was Splatoon, and Ring Fit to some extent. While ips like Arms, Boxboy, Astral Chain, Ever Oasis, Sushi Striker fell out of relevance.
Making a new IP tends to end up in failure.
That’s not damning. That’s how franchises work. Sequels come with an audience built-in, so they can pull a bigger budget on expected sales and spend less of it on marketing.
How recently was this not true?
Seriously. Ten-ish years ago, the big releases were Halo, Elder Scrolls, GTA, Bioshock, Deus Ex, Xcom, Zelda. If not all ten years old at that point - spiritual successors to much older games. Twenty years ago, the big releases were Tony Hawk, Mario Kart, Prince of Persia, Ninja Gaiden, Sonic… Elder Scrolls, GTA, Zelda. Thirty years ago, when home video games were just barely fifteen years old, half the big names were either direct sequels or media adaptations, and most would become long-running franchises. Shockingly, one title was already a decade-old franchise: Super Bomberman.
Now consider the games he’s talking about, today. Halo’s not on that list anymore. It’s there. But it’s not big. Deus Ex is dead again. The specific aforementioned Tony Hawk game killed Tony Hawk games. Prince of Persia and Ninja Gaiden came and went. GTA and the Elder Scrolls haven’t released a game since, technically speaking.
Meanwhile the last two Zelda games are a more radical departure than anything since that awkward NES sidescroller. FromSoft keeps doing FromSoft stuff, but that’s more of a genre than a franchise. Baldur’s Gate III is a sequel twenty-three years later, in a genre that was niche then and niche-er since. There’s big-budget remakes of stuff from the PS1 / PS2 era, but they’re practically brand-new games. Tony Hawk, ironically, less so.
Some of the big-ass games ten years from now will be surprise hits and slow-burn successes from the last few years. Some games will get a quality-bump sequel that takes off, and then if we’re being brutally honest, a publisher like Microsoft will squeeze the life out of the studio by forcing them to crank out more of that until they hate everything. And people in 2033 will complain on probably-not-Lemmy that Sea Of Stars V is such a tired rehash after the highs of IV, and why does nothing new ever come along?
I think they’re equally as bullshit but they’re right lol
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A thought I had yesterday playing Starfield, sighing with frustration as janky, broken system after janky, broken system sucked the fun out of my session…
All these different game devs, pouring all these funds & resources / hours into each creating their own special little bespoke game systems, mostly I assume to avoid paying licensing fees to Unity / Unreal. Imagine if they all pooled their resources and knowhow into making one stable, insanely-powerful, insanely-well-funded engine with limitless creative possibilities.
Starfield looks like a game from 10 years ago. Shitty character animations and weird-looking ‘people’. CDPR are, imo, making the smart decision moving over to Unreal for future games. It works, it looks fantastic, it’s very stable. More money and resources to put into the actual process of game dev rather than reinventing the wheel each time.
I don’t think you’d ever want an engine level monopoly to that degree, even Unreal isn’t by itself capable of the systems that allow Starfield to work the way it does, and would require serious modifications to do so, and not every studio would perform those modifications necessary to complete their game’s vision, and then just give all of that to everyone else to piggyback off of for free, there are a lot of reasons to not do that, specifically, what Unity is doing now.
It only seems cool to do that with Unreal because they haven’t pulled anything like Unity… yet. Not having done that yet doesn’t preclude them from doing it, that’s the scary thing about the Unity debacle, anyone engine could turn around and make a horrible change, we just have to trust that they won’t, and being given monopoly power makes it too tempting to trust forever.
Unreal isn’t by itself capable of the systems that allow Starfield to work the way it does, and would require serious modifications to do so
Can you back that up? Nothing I’ve seen of Starfield indicates it couldn’t be done in UE.
Please check out Angels Fall First and Renegade X, they’re made with Unreal Engine 3 and are not AAA titles, so they can give you a glimpse of what even older versions of UE can do.
I’m talking about the Creation/Gamebryo specific sets of mechanics like NPC schedules and the radiant AI or quest systems, those specific things that needed to be created that aren’t inherent in the engine. Not that Starfield is really the best show for those anymore, not by a long shot, it’s more of just an example of a limitation of OP’s idea of all devs using one engine.
Developers could all use Unreal, but if someone wanted to make Oblivion on Unreal they’d have to program and create those systems and mechanics because they don’t just “come with the engine”. If they made those, and all devs use Unreal, should they be folded into Unreal for future devs to use? Should Unreal program those mechanics or something similar for future devs to use? At what point does it become too complex to bolt on certain systems to an existing engine instead of make one explicitly for it, depending on the type of game?
I don’t have a great example for a game so novel in its execution that it would be truly limited by Unreal, because that engine is absolutely powerful, it’s more thinking about what would happen in a world with a single engine monopoly. Some studios would end up with their own proprietary offshoot modded engines like all the engines that spawned out of modified Quake engines back in the day, for instance, goldsrc.
What?
Nothing about Starfield is that amazing that you couldn’t replicate it in something like Unreal or even Unity.
Graphics are dead easy on either. Exploration is faked, it’s fast travel to a procedural terrain/level, with a few hand made destinations in between, nothing hard. Modular ship design? Simple. FPS RPG system, simple. Physics engines already exist, storing the location of player placed objects is trivial.
What exactly about Starfield makes you think an engine would need serious modifications for a SF-like game?
I’m happy they didn’t go for unity or unreal. Recent events showed just how unsafe it can be, and how having self reliance is a valuable asset.
