And even if it was, we’re long past the point of voting with your wallet anymore in this age of tech oligopolies.
Respectfully, the hell we are. Telling yourself there’s nothing we can do about it perpetuates the cycle. For one thing, you could probably stick to just the physical media that already exists and never run out of great video games to play, and besides that, depending on what’s important to you, there’s DRM-free games.
They’re quite different, but I think the more you try to adhere to classic Tomb Raider, the more visceral distaste you’ll get from people about how poorly those old games controlled. The puzzles in that reboot trilogy, though they often could have benefited from multiple additional steps to make them more interesting, were better than anything in Uncharted, since Uncharted loved to just give you the answer out of a magic notebook rather than let you solve things yourself. The second and third games in that TR trilogy were better about this than the 2013 game. The Legends era of Tomb Raider didn’t have much in the way of high highs, but there were definitely very low lows, and you end up with RPG skill trees in the reboot trilogy so that you can both A) decide how much optional content you want to do but also B) have a tangible incentive to do it, unlike what SkillUp pointed out in Wolverine’s progression elements in how those systems can be thoughtless.
As for chasing trends, they did a bit, but it became a real ouroboros when Uncharted 4 added a mechanic or two from the Tomb Raider reboot trilogy into its kit, and at least if TR was going to rip off some stuff from Uncharted, the combat in those three games was the best across either franchise.
I’d also recommend that recent Indiana Jones game, if you haven’t played it, speaking of ouroboros.
All of those things were in the reboot trilogy, and those games hardly played themselves.
It was a total loss on their books either way, so it sure looks like free to play would have failed exactly as hard.
Alternative theory: launching a free to play game in any genre these days may as well be buying an extremely expensive lottery ticket. The top 10 charts in player numbers, not just on Steam but on any platform, are entrenched games that have been out for 10+ years and perhaps Valorant. It takes a lot of players to financially sustain a free to play game, and without the price tag, they would have only burned through money faster. When the game was free pre-release, it had already proven that there was no interest in the game. 2XKO was one of the most popular fighting games out there by player numbers, but for what it needed to make that make financial sense, it was nowhere close. Highguard was free to play and had a tremendous amount of players at launch, but it barely lasted longer than Concord.
This used to be pretty standard! If it weren’t for all of Blizzard’s other nonsense, I might applaud this.
StarCraft II is one of my favorite games ever, but I have no faith in modern Blizzard to make a game that isn’t wrapped in trappings that would piss me off. Back in 2010, it was extremely annoying that the game required an internet connection and made us go through all sorts of wacky solutions just to have a LAN party. Nowadays, an online-only game is a non-starter for me. The story in SC2 jumped the shark after the Wings of Liberty campaign anyway.
It wasn’t damage control when the size of Concord’s loss was leaked to the press.
The weird one to me is that, if they’re going to cancel a Kojima game, they still haven’t cancelled Fairgames/Break-In/Project Espresso. One of those two is far more likely to break even.
Yeah, it’s not new, but it’s gotten more egregious, and everyone keeps pulling from the same bag of tricks regardless of how much sense it makes. Uncharted has a lot of climbing bits because it’s riffing on Indiana Jones, but why is James Bond doing the same climbing bits as Nathan Drake? And why are they so simple that my inputs hardly matter because the only path through the level is so telegraphed that it’s visible from space? Games need downtime between action sequences for pacing reasons, and while I could tolerate it in Gears of War because of their brevity, our answer to this problem needs to be more sophisticated than just holding up on the analog stick.
I ran into a lot of “AAA disease” when playing through 007 First Light recently, where the game has a lot of walk-and-talk and doesn’t respect your intelligence, but it’s a criticism that doesn’t permeate the entire runtime of the game. I didn’t realize how much worse it could be, but Ralph makes his case quite clearly in this video.
I’ve never heard of a Game Pass exclusive game. Care to name one?
Given your distaste for the genre, whichever one you might feel is “luxurious”, you probably haven’t played. Minecraft also has the benefit of working in precise squares/cubes.
Systems-driven games tend to have more bugs than ones where all of the solutions are finite and predetermined.
I’m not. It’s a statement of fact, and I don’t see the point in pretending it isn’t.
Seeing as Lemmy does nothing different than Reddit on a fundamental level, it’s no surprise we see the same problems. We’re just partially shielded from some of them by way of being a smaller community.
And posting genuine news about what is going to be one of the biggest gaming events of our lifetimes just gets downvoted here. Come on, people; it’s clearly relevant. You don’t have to upvote it, but then when people downvote anything they personally dislike, you end up with people who only get their gaming news here saying, “I’ve never heard of [one of the biggest games of the year].”
That was a different company.
Pretty thorough breakdown, and I’d agree with most of it. Some paraphrased bullet points though:
Perhaps stealth isn’t doing well right now because of all of those bad stealth sequences in non-stealth games that are otherwise great
Possible, but I doubt it. The late 90s and early 00s was full of those too, but that was also simultaneously the height of stealth games. I think it’s just that fads come in waves. Underground racing games were hot when The Fast and the Furious started. World War II shooters were popular after Saving Private Ryan, and modern military shooters followed when a lot of the target demographic either fought in the war on terror or knew someone who did. Dungeons & Dragons and a lot of Led Zeppelin’s catalogue only exist because The Lord of the Rings books made a huge impression on people. If something in the cultural zeitgeist comes along that would make a good stealth game, there will be more stealth games; at this point, the last James Bond movie was 5 years ago, and the next one won’t be for a while still.
A good compromise we landed on rather than perfect wallhack vision was to mark targets
Perhaps, but I’m even kind of sick of that, too. I played a good portion of MGSV without tagging and found it perfectly playable, largely because, as he acknowledges in the video, you can scope it out from any angle from far away before you make your approach. This is something the original Deus Ex and Ghost Recon: Wildlands do well too, even though the latter also does the trivialized target marking. I don’t mind some light wallhacks when you’re up close to simulate the character’s hearing, like in The Last of Us. If we found ourselves in that stealth situation in real life, we’d have pretty good three-dimensional awareness of enemy locations just by the way sound bounces off the walls, and I think it’s okay to represent that in some way. I think the marking target mechanic is so prevalent because Ubisoft made a large number of games featured in this video and inspired more still; and Ubisoft for the last decade and change has been a company that made an efficient machine for churning out games that used a lot of common mechanics between multiple franchises.
Playing through 007 First Light right now, a lot of my most common grievances are in predictability, but not of the enemies. There are a lot of context-sensitive actions, and while this game has a sort of tutorial that we’ll be talking about for years, it did a poor job of explaining those contexts to me. I had similar issues blackjacking guards in Thief, and there’s that guy-on-the-couch section in Splinter Cell that he highlights in the save scumming section that you could describe much the same.
I think they’re hoping to make a profit off of what they’re charging rather than loss leading.
I already outlined two things you could do instead. Casually overheard on the subway, I know the average Joe who just plays NBA 2K is becoming more and more aware of his other options as the one he liked grows to be worse in some way, whether his line in the sand is physical media or not.
Yes, Netflix got worse; buy some Blu Rays instead…you might find that they’re higher quality video than what Netflix has been sending you anyway, and you can get them pretty cheap on sale. PlayStation got worse; play your games somewhere else, even old or low spec ones that run on machines you already have or that you can afford. You won’t be the only one in this predicament, and game developers are going to have to start targeting a lower spec to survive. These companies get you used to a thing and either cut benefits or raise prices or both, but they’re not essential to your survival or happiness, and there are other things you can do in response.