I mean we’ve talked about this before but I definitely think the vultures are circling when it comes to indie/innovative games. There’s a broad awareness in most commercial pursuits that there’s just not a lot more to get—we’ve picked the low hanging fruit—and in terms of new companies entering the market, individual artistry and all that stuff, everyone’s hopping on the current gold rush, which is finding ways to socialize work while privatizing profit (i.e., platform capitalism).
As for how much of any of this technical wizardry we still need, or really ever needed? I don’t know. The problem now is you have the platforms on one hand and on the other AAA with increasing budget scales that have become a monoculture that can’t possibly serve every customer. We could probably talk a lot about how Elden Ring does open world right by specifically not doing a bunch of Assassin’s Creed shit from 15 years ago and instead just making a big playground full of surprises, but that doesn’t mean any other company is going to follow that lead (the takeaway from BotW was, after all, “gliders are cool.”)
So what’s left to do when you can’t grow? Discipline labour, basically. Hooray
i’ve been thinking about this a lot actually. nobody learned anything from BotW and honestly? hardly anyone learned anything useful from Dark Souls anyway. Just “what if combat was too hard and also you could retrieve your money after you died”, that was about it.
the one thing that other developers refuse to learn from dark souls is that you can justify making your game hard if you make your character a pathetic little worm who succeeds basically by accident in spite of hilarious odds. the power fantasies when I play other AAA stuff are so gross and jarring.
(this is part of why RE7/8 were so good, they got it)
I think you have to be inside AAA for a bit to kind of get that it’s incredibly industrial, inflexible, and run by people who aren’t trying to do much but shake hands and made brands. The industrial approach simply doesn’t mesh with the idea of making an artistic product that people are going to enjoy and, since the target markets for the products are too huge and diverse, mostly revolve around maximizing “time on device” (hence on removing barriers to continuous play). So development has ossified to revolve mostly around removing problems instead of creating things people want, which can mostly be replaced with expensive set pieces and gambling mechanics (numbies go up).
So when it comes to every AAA developer I know playing and enjoying BotW, and DS, and so on and so forth, the machine just can’t do that regardless. They can’t do an Elden Ring because there’s no non-stop VO telling you what to do and where to go next. Players might just not find the weird cave that has that important vendor in it. They might go the wrong way, think it’s too hard and quit. These are problems to be solved and if solving the problem crushes the tiny fragile thing that is actually like… making a good game, well fine whatever. I’m just a cog and my job is to make the playtest metrics better for my boss.
And I do think that’s where the next crash is coming from. People are just going to get habituated to having to spend 64 hours farming materials to upgrade all of their 30,000 samey weapons and the big publishers aren’t going to realize it until all their major titles hit at the same time and flop and the industry collectively loses trillions in a single year. Then nobody can afford to pivot their thousand-person teams to a completely new development approach, etc.
Edit: what gives me this feeling is I’m naturally suspicious when everything starts moving in the same direction since price signalling tends to lag and hence to produce irrational exuberance around anything people just kind of like. Not only every big publisher, but every engine developer, service studio and middleware developer is acting like we’ve “figured out games” and they all look like AC, Horizon, etc. We’re starting to get bespoke solutions—some of which are generally useful but most of which are at least heavily marketed towards making the One Kind Of Game That There Is Now. Pubs have like 30 year plans a la Disney that we’re just going to keep doing this forever. And it just smells bad to me. I don’t have any numbers evidence—these games are doing very well, but if you just stand back and look at the shape of it it looks like Atari immediately pre-ET or the dot com bubble or anything else of the sort. It just has that general shape
I really don’t see a big need for a PS5 myself… but I do really want to play Elden Ring and I don’t trust the last gen version (and my PC is unupgraded from 2010) so I think they’ve got me :\
if variable frame rates bug you (they really bug me) i found the ps5 version of Elden Ring tough to play as it was fairly consistently varying between 30-50fps (I almost never felt like I was getting the 60 fps “performance mode” promised).
OTOH I’ve heard PS4 runs it at a pretty smooth 30 and even older PCs can run it similarly.
I run everything over Moonlight to my TV and except for streaming load stuttering (which I have confirmed is happening just on the PC too), it’s smooth as butter. However I do have a 10th gen i7 a 3080 and insane mesh wifi, so
Unfortunately my PC is wired to a mesh point via ethernet so I don’t get wifi speed via windows system properties. It’s a covr mesh made for basically a big house though. I just got it because trying to work on specifically Homeworld 3 using our ancient modem’s terrible wifi from home was making me insane
According to Digital Foundry, the trick to get Elden Ring to run at 60fps on PS5 is to run the PS4 version using the PS5’s back-compat mode, lol. Then you get a version optimized to run at consistent 30fps on PS4 Pro on twice as fast hardware.
If you don’t like the tradeoff after all, you can convert your PS4 savedata to PS5 later (the reverse is not possible though, and as I didn’t do this kind of research before starting Elden Ring, I’m stuck with the variable framerate at this point)
Also note that to use the ps4 version on ps5 you have to buy elden ring ps4 version on disc. If you buy the ps5 version either on disc or through the store there is no way to boot the ps4 version afaik (I bought the ps5 version and ended up having to eat the loss from a trade in because I made that mistake…. Don’t be like me)
its only been a few days since I read this but can NOT stop thinking about the alternative breast-based directional movement universe that could have been
wasn’t this the controller idea for atari’s “gotcha”, the most ineptly sexual game aside from those apple ii programmes that just roll a dice and if the number is greater than 3 print “why not have sex ?”
