if it makes you feel better theres plenty of longplays with more views!
the boss run with her legs as the thumbnail has a million though hahahah oh well
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the lovely fellow who runs the shop in the original PC-98 version of Master of Monsters Final:
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Hello i havenāt read the forum in a few days which is unusual for me but i just wanted to say that this is an excellent post thanks
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I think the steady crystallization around a game type has always been cyclical, and always proven wrong after a few years. Iām quite confident that the move towards Witcher 3-style āquest-basedā open worlds will flame out in a few years, too.
The (shamefully-satisfying) failures of Anthem, The Division 2, and Ghost Recon Wildlands 2 killed the 'everything is Destiny trend, just as the under-performance of the Tomb Raider reboot and the cancellation of EAās Star Wars game killed the earlier 'everything is Uncharted trend.
But regardless of game type, thereās absolutely a convergence towards long-term play and tying players into a lifestyle game, and that hasnāt slowed at all in a decade, and itās not just the pathologies of big studio production pushing it there.
I think publishers look at traditional premium games and clearly see how small they are compared to free-to-play games. And more than anything, expensive single-player games are the most out-of-touch with what people spend time on, and thatās whatās killing single-player, or mutating it to look like MMOs or lifestyle games or what have you. So yeah, this drive towards progression in place of content, hooks in place of interest will absolutely keep happening as AAA single-player burrows into its Megatherium niche. Even as the underlying design of AAA single-player keeps changing itāll still always be moving towards long-term play, something that begs to eat months of time. These single-player games will keep changing but always towards a lifestyle model.
Iām not expecting a crisis point for AAA studios but a continued winnowing because they really are getting more expensive for a smaller and smaller proportion of the total audience. We shouldnāt overplay this, because theyāre still enormously influential and important. I think the real inflection will come from Game Pass and Microsoft consolidating risk inside their subscription engagement risks and, like with Netflix, using money as a differentiator in somewhat different ways. The risk for games this expensive will be too much outside of a platform or subscription strategy that can absorb it.
When thinking about potential collapses, the funny thing is that the great mass of small games and studios, who are not bound by big-studio politics, rely on all these progression and content inflation tricks even more. Player fatigue in mobile seems like it would be much more of a problem but itās just kept trucking along even as the companies bid up the user acquisition costs (advertising budget). If players became tired of these progression systems Iād expect to see it happening in phone games first, which are more naked about it and have smaller project budgets allowing quicker adaptation.
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I want to do a longer reply but itās Friday evening and Iām cooking dal. I 99% agree! I will clarify later
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Yeah, based on what youāve been saying recently I think we have similar perspectives on the AAA mines but just slightly different perspectives on the failings of senior leadership. I spent enough time in those closed design meetings and then being the one to tell everyone that the ground had shifted underneath them that I have sympathy for why it happens.
Iāve come to believe that thereās a ceiling on what can be achieved above a certain scale. That the work and the deep pleasure of real artistic partnerships need a more intimate environment, and that itās worth limiting scope and reach and stability to get there.
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Thinking about how Nintendo was able to leverage its cultural cachet to generate something like half-a-billion dollars per year in gross revenue from Mario Kart 8 Deluxe without any DLC.
Meanwhile, small-time publisher āSquare-Enixā determined that their mascot kart racer needs a season-pass-type DLC model in order to be an economically viable project.
(Itās strange how in this age of infinite content that the absolute Most Popular things are more popular than ever, while everybody else feels like they have to survive on rapidly sub-dividing scraps.)
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One of the scariest changes in the last five years has been the ossifying of sales charts. Nintendo figured out how to make their staples sell throughout a console a few cycles ago (you just make one of them and time it near launch and never cut the price and make sure the brand has twenty years of goodwill), but watching GTA V and Call of Duty never stop while the free to play and mobile charts stagnate is scary.
I donāt believe that weāve figured out how to turn games into perennial sports (certainly a lot of energy is being invested in adding novelty to these older games) but we seem to be clearly past the point where tech and platform changes necessarily deprecate older games.
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I do want to push back a little on this and say: while obviously I understand the differences between these microgenres and understand that the AAA space is determined by setting and following these trends with high granularity, in the broad view these are all the same game and thatās exactly the problem.
As in, Destiny is roughly the same game as Uncharted?
I mean you picked the games most on the ends of the spectrum to dunk on me, but, yeah. Those games have more in common with each other than either of them do with like, I dunno, any one of a zillion things in the wide world of games. FF7. Papers Please. Wizardry. Smash TV.
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Ah, I meant that big publishers go through cycles of only wanting games like [recent hit] (the very good tools they have for analysis can only look backwards), but since people donāt want that, it inevitably fails after the first wave of followers compete against the initiatorās followup. Uncharted kicked off one wave, Destiny kicked off another, and theyāve both subsided from their peak. But right now we lack clear obvious directions that these are heading in besides āterrified rush to superhero IPā.
But if you mean, it feels like character games are converging towards a small set of actions, well, maybe. Itās hard for me to say that character controls are more similar now than the heyday of 2D platformers. āBe a character and have adventurersā remains one of the core genres and theyāve always controlled relatively similarly. Iād have to think about it but Iām not sure our main shooter and platformer implementations are in a smaller space than theyāve been historically.
But with fewer and fewer big single-player games being released, the retail and ad market collapses down to everything is a form of character adventure, while a lot of genres no longer exist at the big publisher boxed level.
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that ea published the x68000 port of mahou daisakusen
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The ending of Code Veronica sounding like pleasant sitcom music
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Way late to the party but no one should buy a PS5, literally the only reason to get it over an xbox is PSVR2 which is obviously an unknown quantity at this point. The exclusives are AAA drivel that are on PS4 anyway and the extra $10 per title gets you nothing. PS+ is an insult at this point.
If you got a fancy TV and want something to make pretty the series x is better in every single way and if not the series s at least gets you the better UI, controller, and gamepass.
I am thinking a lot about how just having a ālocal co-opā filter in the store puts the xbox far past any software Sony has made since you could buy games on the internet
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Like is this supposed to be a bonus? Having to read through all this shit to figure out what is actually on offer for your $60/year feels like a punishment
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yeah theyāre on one
I couldnāt get over how bad the PS5 controller and the UI were when I used a friendās briefly like a year ago
japanese studios are all on PC now too so it seems like thereās finally actually nothing to prop Sony up through another several lean years of prestige stew
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and a Series S is the only console thatās like, simple and price competitive with a PC the way that consoles are supposed to be
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I think Demonās Souls remake and Ratchet and Clank are the only things piquing my ps5 interest but I cant reliably play shit with a 3rd party peripheral on a PS5 cos Sony says fuck me I guess.
I wish I could cure my Ratchet and Clank fan condition.
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