This was due to something that happened between (roughly, very roughly) 2005 and 2015. Games went from being made by a bunch of nerds who really wanted to make games, to a more corporate setting, to a marketing setting.
Fifteen years ago QA would declare Alpha, Beta, etc, in that the build fit the criteria for each state. Then, marketing would set a date, and on that date, Alpha, Beta, etc would be ‘ready.’
This lead to huge problems. There was a time where Alpha meant Feature Complete, and that there were only a few major crashes. Beta meant you had no, or virtually no, reproable crashes, game ending bugs, etc. Once marketing took over, it didn’t matter. Instead of Beta being a checklist, it was just ‘March 10th.’
In addition to this, innovative and cool game design ideas are harder to sell visually than ‘we doubled the poly’s!’ So more and more focus was put on visuals to the point where marketing would assign things to the design team, IE. “It has to have
battlefieldCODtarkovCSGOTF2Popular Game-like mechanics, gameplay, etc.”So now you get games shipped with incredible graphics and garbage stability. I’ve been on projects where crashes later in the campaign were changed from P1 to P2 because reviewers likely wouldn’t make it to the point where those would come up. (This is called ‘punting’.) In addition, having arbitrary dates decide major milestones means that builds are constantly broken, all through the process of creating them. You know how people get that ‘beta’ build of a game and ask why it’s so crash happy, why it runs like shit, etc? It’s because the game has literally never been stable. It’s been assigned Alpha and Beta based on a calendar, and time is never allowed to delay to fix issues. Add to that that the owners of game companies will give publishers absolutely asinine claims about how long a game will take. Most franchise games, ‘AAA’-wise, are made in 18 months. However, they often also had six months of pre-production before that. Marketing took that out, and focused on a game every 12 months. They used a secondary studio for the ‘B-Team’ and thus every second game in the series was made by said ‘B-Team’. B-Teams were given even less time, and often no pre-production, so the entire game would effectively be made in 12 months.
Then they lay off 50-70% of the staff, and start all over.
So if I may end this way, do not go into games. If you like them make them in your free time. You will be treated like an animal and be unemployed about 1/4 of the time if you choose the inudstry. Of all the people who I worked with in my first company, maybe six are still in games.
Stay away.
Maybe the most fucking disgusting part of all of this is that it doesn’t even lead to more money. The shitty western companies are all fucking floundering right now because they have no institutional knowledge, there’s no way to become a veteran game dev at a company that churns through their workforce every 12 months, and suddenly you have out of touch execs at Ubisoft and EA wondering why people don’t play their games. All the innovation that comes from pouring your soul into a project for the long-term comes from indie developers now, and it’s left AAA games feeling as soulless to play as they are to make.
Meanwhile in the east you have companies like FromSoftware and Capcom who are just laughing all the way to the bank, because their competition is all run by idiots.
Counterpoint, you also gave Nintendo in the East pouring kerosene over their accumulated goodwill and lighting it on fire.
Oh don’t get me wrong, the execs in the east aren’t immune to doing batshit insane things. Capcom is on some wild shit with their microtransactions. Konami really feels like they’re just taking a shovel to Kojima’s legacy and pulling out whatever they can. Nintendo is trying to find out if they can legally punch developers in the face.
But they aren’t putting out multi-million dollar flops. They’re not decimating their workforce to increase CEO compensation packages. They’re not getting swallowed up by the handful of fish who are too big for the pond. They’re just being kinda weird, which is a fine change of pace.
If you allow for some cultural differences Nintendo is not really acting all that weird. It’s a conservative (in the original meaning) company in a very conservative country. They play it close to the vest and are very careful about protecting what they feel is theirs to protect.
Don’t get me wrong though, I dislike what they’ve been doing as well and I’m not defending them. From their perspective they probably don’t look at it like that though. For them it’s mostly what they feel like is defensive measures to protect their stuff. I’m certain they won’t stop until they’ve done their best to utterly destroy the emulator market at large. For me at least that’s the only reason I need to completely boycott them.
It fucking sucks, but this is what capitalism comes down to. Hopefully they get some sense slapped into them at some point soon by a judge somewhere.
Konami on the other hand, that shit just boggles my mind. I don’t understand any of the choices they’ve made for a while now.
Nintendo hates their fans, not their developers. They’re actually one of the better game companies to work for.
Even Nintendo games have recently been dropping in Quality. Especially Gamefreak.
Meanwhile in the east you have companies like FromSoftware and Capcom who are just laughing all the way to the bank, because their competition is all run by idiots.
The worst part is the CEO’s/whatever of each company know each other, too. You’ll get C-suites come into game companies who not only have never played a game before, but don’t even remotely understand how software development works. I worked for a company where the owner made himself Project Manager and ran that project straight into the ground. Tens of millions on worthless overtime while we sat around waiting for another build that would fail, on a weekend, for months.
Larian sounds like some sort of a bizarro-world company. They even have awful investors but managed to keep creative/overall control.
If you like games, work on a crowd-sourced game like Endless Sky.
Or FOSS games like Xonotic
Thank you for putting all these pieces together.
No worries. I see a lot of posts about what’s happening that are close, but don’t quite understand this is a managerial issue. The devs themselves are (mostly) good people who want to make games. The owners of smaller companies don’t get called out enough though, in my opinion. Every time you see ‘EA just bought and closed another…’ keep in mind the vast majority of the time the company didn’t need to be sold. Some guy who inherited a bunch of money created a company of people who do the actual work, then waited till the worth of the company was high enough for them to sell. It happens constantly and it’s easily the most disheartening part of game development.
Imagine spending 80 hour weeks and 30-90 days without a single day off, making a breakout game that is beloved… and realising you’re not going to make it to 5 years at a company, because they’re selling it to Activision.
Then do that every 2 years.
Lol
This is a great opportunity to recommended indie games on Newgrouds or itch.io
deleted by creator
This is great opportunity to recommend FOSS FPS game Xonotic
doom source code + freedoom ftw
It’s a great game !
You know that’s fake cause they wouldn’t add physically interactible objects to modern games
Unless it’s for a quest or achievement. 40 years later you log onto steam, and unlock the hidden achievement “degrade a bag full of nail clippings”
Pretty sure The Stanley Parable has some achievements like that. Like don’t play the game for 5 years then open it again or something.
Yep that one exists. I’m currently working on the 10 year achievement in Stanley Parable Deluxe. It’s good to have long-term concrete goals.
Also 90% of the development time went into making this feature, so a few cuts had to be made in less important areas like gameplay and story.
Sure, programmers that make systemic features like these also write the story
I feel like this happened with Sparking Zero, they actually had to skip parts of the story because
“Whoops, we didn’t have stages ready for the Universe 6/7 Tournament, King Kai Training, or Inside Buu segments, gotta skip it!”
The lack of stages in general pisses me off
I remember before the first Fable came out, in an interview or preview of the game in one of the magazines I subscribed to mentioned that you would be able to carve your name into a tree and then see it scar the tree as it aged over time, and even then as a teenager, I was like “bull fucking shit.”
They didn’t even have that as, like, a cutscene. Let alone a mechanic.
And people STILL take peter’s word at face value today.
that sounds unlikely considering he hasn’t released a game since like 2017
Graphical improvements have been minimal at best for probably ten years, now. They have to do something. I mean, at least they think they have to do something to justify charging $70 or whatever for a new, AAA game these days.
I feel like games have gotten less realistic in recent years. Like we had destructible terrain on the PS2 with red faction and games today still don’t really do it.
The issue with something like destructible terrain is that if your one and only goal is graphical fidelity, the only thing the AAA companies care about, then it actually becomes a massive resource hog. You’ll need to have artists render each photorealistic way that a piece of a scene could turn to debris. It’s the kinda thing that sounds simple, but could take a team of artists months or even years to accomplish.
If you look at an incredible game like Teardown which really delivers on full destructibility, you can see that they’re using voxels and the game looks a little blocky. It’s the kinda thing you can easily ignore with good art direction though, which Teardown has. The problem is that you need talented directors to conceptualize that, and most of the talent in the Western games industry is being wasted by corps that want to treat developers like single-use plastics and trash them once the current project is out.
I agree. I wish that everything wasn’t just decoration, aside from some designated destructible boxes or barrels.
It feels like old cartoons(Tom & Jerry/Looney Toons era) where they drew the background as a muted static cell and only freshly animated things that moved. Objects in games are either entirely real, or just a painting on a texture. We’re still at “if I can touch it, it’s probably important. Otherwise ignore it”.
Unfortunately if you have walls today that get destroyed like Red Faction, you would get people complaining that it’s lazy and looks weird. But to get a wall to break with the standards we have now takes an exponential amount more processing power because not only do you need the walls to break “realistically” but it also has to render the super nice graphics on each little piece of that wall break.
The relative success of Teardown refutes this, I think.
That’s actually exactly what I was going to add on to my post but decided against it. I assumed OP was talking about AAA games since those are the topic of this post. There’s plenty of indie games that have less worse graphics with breakable walls.
Battlebit: Remastered before the devs bailed on it, too
I disagree and counter with Minecraft. Art styles don’t need to be hyper realistic to accomplish immersion.
I counter with all the realism hype about Arma 3. Players were literally talking about the grass and moon cycles. Meanwhile the actual combat simulation part was worse than a game cooked up by the US Army Recruiting command.
I swear if a wall didn’t break exactly right they would have written a 20 page dissertation on it and mailed it directly to the lead graphics artist.
Their existence doesn’t negate the people who enjoyed Minecraft. You basically said “the people who bought a hyper realistic sim expected hyper realism”. Yes, a tautology is a tautology.
Again, plenty of people find non hyper realistic graphics satisfying. An entire Indie catalogue proves this. Games like Lethal Company or Among Us or Terraria or Stardew Valley are huge hits with pixel graphics or graphics from 1995.
Your argument is boiling down to “well someone will complain, so might as well not even try”. It’s very cynical and defeatist. Acting like hype against Arma means no one else enjoyed anything. You take too much from other people’s opinions. Enjoy what you enjoy. Stop basing your opinions on what others on the Internet say.
That’s not it at all. You were talking about immersion and I’m just pointing out that some people see the environment as more important than the core gameplay mechanics. That doesn’t invalidate people who enjoy Minecraft. And yeah the problem is big game companies are listening to those gamers who are basically the squeaky wheel.
I still blame the advent of graphics. Look at final fantasy: up until 10, everything was simple graphics for the most part and storytelling was key. Then graphics began to explode and everything became about the visuals. The same thing happened with other games around that time(roughly when the ps2 launched). Now everything is raytracing this, lighting that, dynamic shadows this.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s all very cool. But it feels like the AAA focus went towards graphics and it’s taken the Indie scene (and Nintendo, love them or hate them), to keep pumping out creative and "just fun to play’ games.
Meanwhile I still play Mount & Blade: Warband. The graphics hold up today, but it’s not like they’re good. But the game is just so damn good they mean absolutely nothing.
Edit: I should also mention I’m young, I’m sure somebody would point out that Warband isn’t old compared to a lot of games, but in my eyes 2010 (which was 14 years ago, that makes my young ass feel old too) is an old game, although I’m going to be honest, I totally thought it was from like 2006
but in my eyes 2010 (which was 14 years ago, that makes my young ass feel old too) is an old game, …
I’m dead. I died of old age reading that. I played Wolfenstein 3D and Doom.
I think your point stands well. You’re playing an older game despite less fancy graphics because the gameplay itself is engaging. 2010 counts as “old” in my book. Anything previous generation and beyond definitely isn’t “modern”.
I agree. FF is an interesting example though. It was always very much about the visuals, even when isometric. But it wasn’t just about the visuals as it seems to be now. The story has gotten less and less coherent over time.
I actually really enjoyed 13, but this new stuff is awful. If I wanted an action RPG, there are better places for that.
Final fantasy changed some core gameplay elements that, unfortunately for me, took them away from games I wanted to play.
I like turn based combat. I liked relatively straight forward leveling and character/weapon progressions. I liked essentially a single gimmicky system like materia. Or the card games in 8.
I hate the full action battles all the time now. It feels like the game is much more intense and twitchy. It ruins the pace of the story for me. It used to be something I would read my way through, explore at my own pace, take a journey. Stories aren’t always fast action, and that’s what I feel like the more modern battle system make the game feel like.
Same. I understand the combat in the earlier games wasn’t great, and it’s was difficult to do something with it. But this direction wasn’t it.
It 100% needed to remain turn/menu based for one.
This perfectly describes Star Citizen.
Getting loaded up on water bottles in my inventory. To then have a game crash after finally getting to my ship and leaving the planet. Trying to login again and spawning in prison.
Fuck Star Citizen.
Yup. We’ve gone beyond realism and any sane level of graphical fidelity. In a game about fighting, exploring, and trading in space. I still think when they release the game they’re going to be in for a surprise when reviewers rake them over the coals for having survival game mechanics. That’s fine on a multiplayer survival game, but if the new extraction shooter is anything to go by, reviewers are done with that stuff getting added to other games. (It has a mechanic where if you run out of water you lose everything. You can only realistically have a couple days of water. So F to that Disney vacation, Daddy has to login to farm water.)
Fable 5?
Oi it’s chicken chaser!
Then someone will introduce a “Disable toenail growth” mod which eats even more ram.
I like playing minecraft to relax a lot of the time.
One game mod I was always interested in was a game character with a life span.
Normally, you can play a game like minecraft in hard core mode … basically one life and when you die the game is lost completely. I see many hard core mode players who can make their game last months or years and in some instances, they’ve carefully crafted everything to the point where they are more or less protected from everything. They could play it indefinitely, at least within an actual human lifetime.
One Mod I’d like to see is to have a hardcore mode … but with a built in lifespan and an aging character. Give the character a lifespan of about 80 human years … a day in minecraft is 10 minutes I think … so here is my calculation …
Roughly 82 years can be broken down to 300,000 days … so if a minecraft day cycle is ten minutes of day and ten minutes of night - we multiply 20 with 300,000 and you get 6 million minutes, which adds up to a maximum of about 11.4 years of real human years of active game playing.
So an entire hard core mode game cycle would be programmed for a maximum lifespan of 6 million minutes or 11.4 years of playing time … but there is a catch.
Of course you could die by the usual ways of accidental death. But your player is spawned as a weak child character for the first 750,000 minutes (37,500 minecraft day/night cycles) - (which corresponds to the first ten years of human life) … don’t worry, you are born into a village that protects you, or at least tries to and you have to figure out how to survive by not being able to hold tools, weapons or use basically anything other than to eat whatever you can find and shelter in place.
A teenaged period could be programmed in for the next ten year cycle but we’ll just skip to full adult for now.
So starting at 37,500 minecraft day/night cycles … you automatically become an adult and now the game can start as usual. However a clock starts working in the background. For the next 3,000,000 minutes (150,000 minecraft day / night cycles) - this corresponds to the human ages from 10 to 50 - you are more or less a healthy normal adult.
After this point, your character requires more food and food doesn’t last as long in your system. You are also 30% slower, 30% weaker and you incur 30% more damage when hit (regardless of what equipment you carry)
The next stage is started after this period ends (this corresponds to human ages 50 to 70) … now for the next 1,500,000 minutes (75,000 minecraft day / night cycles) … your character ages again … you are now 30% more slower, 30% more weaker and you incur 30% more damage with every hit (regardless of what equipment you carry) … at this point your character is moving around 60% slower and can’t do much any more.
The last segment is the last ten years of life (from age 70 to 80) … 750,000 minutes (37,500 minecraft day/night cycles) … if you survived this long, you can now barely move and everything is dangerous to you again … like the first ten years of life. At this point, no matter what you do, if you achieve everything and stay safe to the end of the clock, your player just dies and the game is over without any choice.
I don’t know if anyone would enjoy that game or not … I’m not sure if I would either … but I would probably by excited about it at the same time.
Hey let me show you my 11ish year long hardcore world. Isn’t that cool check this out and this….
Times up. You Died. World Deleted.
11 years of your real like literally wiped away with no choice in the matter. I can’t say there’d be none that try. But I can’t imagine that sitting well with many.
Same here … but I was imagining a gamer youtuber building an entire community around the life of a minecraft character … documenting everything they’re doing … near misses, near deaths, mine adventures … but mostly watching the character grow old … and the holding a funeral of sorts for the life and death of a minecraft character that a bunch of people would have followed for 11 years.
It would be like watching your favourite TV character or actor and the following their work over a few years and then realizing that they have to die and life moves on.
It’s not the typical idea of an ever lasting game with no end … it’s more an admission that these things come and go and we all have a finite lifespan.
I played a MUD once that had characters age. When you got older, it affected some of your stats. You wanted your cleric to be older because that benefitted wisdom and mana, but fighter types wanted to be young for the health bonuses.
There were equipment that modified effective age, and you could remort at max level to reset it. It was kind of cool, aside from the first time I was like “why is my HP Regen so low? Ooh my cleric is like 120 years old”
Sid Myers Pirates! Has the character age which affects stats too. I can’t remember if you can die of old age but I think at some point it forces retirement.
there was a game made by sega a LONG time ago that had a realistic time progression. No one has ever beaten it and I think finding copies of that game is extremely difficult
as you can expect, making a hyper-realistic game didn’t work out so well. But now there’s lots of games with way too many “chores” RedDeadRedemption 2 has way too much stuff you need maintain.
One of the things that pisses me off about the elder scrolls games is the limit on how much loot you can carry.
Or in zelda breath of the wild and tears of the kingdom, there’s almost nothing but insanely fragile weapons that literally shatter into nothing when you hit something with it more than 4 times.
I loathed the shattering weapons in the first hour of botw, but the next 80-100 hours, I learned to love it, and when totk came with the merge or whatever it’s called oh boy was I having fun.
I made fun of BotW when I first played it, but once I got into it I realized how great it is. You can’t kill all enemies you come across right away. Much like Elden Ring you make a mark on the map and come back when you’re stronger and you have better gear.
I got bored early on and traversed the whole map climbing each tower. In doing so I really fell in love with the style. I recommend everyone struggling with the game do the same. Open the map completely and explore. Later on it’s super easy to raid the castle for infinite end game gear.
Yeah, the durability on every single weapon in BOTW/TOTK could have been quintupled and the game would have been better for it.
It was so bad that you couldn’t even kill a Lynel with their own weapon before the weapon broke. You had to abuse glitches just to make it through the fight with the same weapon they were using against you.
