Star Citizen is in this picture. They added hunger and dehydration to a space exploration, cargo, and fighting game.
I really feel there would be a market for something like star citizen without all the realism stuff that gets in the way of the gameplay. I’m a backer, and when I can get to playing the game it’s fun, but finding my way to the launch pad after every two years break when I’m trying to checkup on progress sucks.
Literally any other space game.
You’re talking about No Man’s Sky and Elite Dangerous. The whole point of Star Citizen is the realism.
Drag thinks hunger mechanics in a spaceship game are too much, though.
Same here, I loved the idea of a walk on space game I could play with friends. I loved the idea of ground side fights and boarding actions.
But now we’ve got some kind of super high fidelity survival game. If you can even run it it’s far more akin to an first person POV EVE.
Oh boy. Time for an 800 comment long flamewar about Star Citizen. I’m ready.
I’m proud to be the one to start the fire this time. To be clear I do really want a good game out of all this.
Personally, I think Star Citizen is shallow and pedantic.
It is, it’s also in alpha still. If they were claiming beta in this state I’d be more worried rather than just mad they keep adding stupid shit instead of going full optimization. They have a game, they just need to get it out the door and worry about content in future releases. It’s like the painter who can’t call a painting finished.
It’s like trying to trace an outline of a fractal.
After what feels like 20 years, it still being in alpha should worry you more than if this current state was called a beta.
Yes and no. On the other side they’ve essentially rebooted development something like 3 or 4 times. So there’s a chance it comes up roses.
For other games that would be described as development hell
Games got bigger to their own detriment. Halo and Gears of War are open world games now, and they’re worse off for it. Assassin’s Creed games used to be under 20 hours, and now they’re over 45. Not every game is worse for being longer, as two of my favorite games in the past couple of years are over 100 hours long, clocking in at three times the length of their predecessors, but it’s much easier to keep a game fun for 8-15 hours than it is for some multiple of that, and it makes the game more expensive to make, raising the threshold for success.
Halo as an open world is fucking awesome. I love Infinite.
The next step, in terms of budget and computing power required, which I eagerly await, is a massively multiplayer co-op Halo:
- open universe
- Humanity versus Covenant
- massively co-op
- 10,000+ humans in perpetual battle against endless Covenant invasion
That’s probably gonna require billion dollar budgets and quantum computers to pull off, but it’s coming. And I can’t fucking wait.
Planetside already exists. Just do that and scale up to more planets
Unpopular opinion: open world ruined Zelda. I thought I’d love the concept. But actually give it to me? Ughhh… Spend forever doing side quests because you don’t know if the equipment will only be good now or if youll need it down the road… No real guidance so you can end up just meandering around…
I liked the more structured narrative. Don’t get me wrong - it’s cool to play Link and just do whatever you want. But for a story game, a more defined linear path is more engaging imo.
Wasn’t Zelda always open world? LttP was about as open world as they come back in the day?
For me it took away the joy of the puzzles and building on a theme that the older Zeldas did.
I’ve not played TotK so maybe it brings back more of the dungeon feel from the older ones that I enjoyed, but I don’t have huge amounts of time for gaming these days.
Drag finished BOTW and now likes riding around Hyrule on a motorbike looking for koroks. Drag thinks the game is great if you use it as something to pick up and play a little bit of every now and then. Good game for bringing on airplanes and playing on the bus. Drag would have very much liked to have a game like that when drag was a child being dragged to boring dentist appointments and waiting to be picked up from school. Drag thinks maybe Nintendo is making games for children.
BotW and TotK are some of my favorite games of all time, but I really do hope we get another big dungeons focused game in the future.
To me, they would be perfect games if they weren’t Zelda. That is to say, they are great games, just not what I expect from a Zelda game. Something I’d expect from Bethesda moreso(style, not gameplay lmao).
I feel like Wind Waker was the right balance between freedom and linear story.
Just pretend it’s not a Zelda game then
“Of course it was cost-intensive to program an engine that will render every single eyelash at a resolution that will require the player to buy an additional graphics card for each eyelash concurrently on-screen, but now we only need twelve and a half billion people to buy, no, what am I saying, to pre-order and pre-pay the Ultra-Super-Deluxe-Collector’s Edition and we’ll start to turn a profit.”
- current AAA gaming
And development teams are too big. No game should realistically be having 500+ people working on it. That’s too many people, too big a ship to steer fast enough for the changes that happen in game development. Even the biggest games have done very well with teams of 250 or less, including all staff that work on the game, how about development studios pay attention to that?
People expect all games to be multiplayer with online live ops and events and a steady flow of new content.
That’s why you need to have a 500 person team. Someone needs to be designing and coding the valentine’s event for 2025 right now
To quote Bernard Black: “Well expect away!”
I’ve heard this often, but most of the games I see people consume live updates for weren’t initially planned to get such constant updates.
Ex: Dead by Daylight. Released as dumb party horror game with low shelf life. Now on its 8th plus year. Fortnite: Epic’s base building game that pivoted to follow the battle royale trend, then ten other trends. DOTA 2: First released as a Warcraft map. GTA V: First released as a singleplayer game before tons of expansion went into online. Same with Minecraft.
It just doesn’t make sense to pour $500M into something before everyone agrees it’s a fun idea. There’s obviously nothing gained in planning out the “constant content cycle” before a game’s first public release.
Drag can think of one counterexample: Warframe. But Warframe is also 100% free to play and free to participate in every content update and event. And Warframe is developed by an indie team from Fake London who started the game with 120 employees.
Warframe feels just as riddled though with all of its different kinds of currencies and crafting mechanics. It may not have an egregious mtx model but the game loop around it still feels like it’s meant to. I much more enjoyed the game in beta when it was simpler. I go on it now and I haven’t got a fucking clue what to do, fumble around for an hour and just decide to play something else instead.
Warframe is much more fun with friends. Friends will tell you that you don’t have to bother with all the currencies. You can just do the story missions.
That’s the thing, had no idea there were specific story missions or where to do them
Oh, good news for you. They just released an update two days ago that separates the quests in the codex into story, side, and warframe quests. DE listened to player feedback and fixed the problem. Now you go to the codex terminal, you click on story quests, and it tells you what to do next.
Who is these people that want this? And even if they do. Creating a good game does not need 500 people. And if you want to provide content after setup several small parallel teams to make cosmetics and stuff.
But the whole live service is something the companies want. So they can keep monetizing it and turn if off once a new iteration is done.
Check out the leaks from the Sony/Microsoft trial
There are literally tens of millions of people who ONLY use their PS5 for CoD - a live service multiplayer game.
A whole generation of people have literally never played a single player game and don’t know how to.
It’s like they exist in an alternate reality. But then I’m fine with that too. If there is a market for that… just a shame that the hunt for this audience eats up everything else.
Another way to look at it is that the multiplayer market is the only pool of money big enough to support games at that level.
Maybe if single player gamers would be accepting of feature scopes from 10-15 years ago, there’d be a stable niche for single player games.
I’m in my 40s and only get enjoyment from multiplayer games. Single player just dries up for me in terms of dopamine release.
When I was in my 20s I was unsocial, heavily autistic, couldn’t stand multiplayer because I didn’t control the variables.
Basically, my wallet and my brain followed a coupled pair of paths. The version of me with more money has more need for other people in my games.
I have more tolerance for other people. But also I’m more lonely in life. Used to be, games were a refuge from the other people I was constantly surrounded by in school, college, roommate situations. I could just go be alone and have fun, and I needed to be alone.
And that was when I was broke.
Now, I have more money, and I crave social contact. I live alone, don’t have constant social overwhelm any longer. Games aren’t my refuge of solitude any more. Now they’re a way to feel other people without having to go out my front door.
I’m not made of money, but I can afford games now.
Probably a connection there.
My main thesis though is just that maybe the world of multiplayer gaming just has more money in it period. Maybe it’s only the world of multiplayer gaming that can actually support AAA games’ budgets.
15 years ago, no game had a budget with the same orders of magnitude we see these days. Also, 15 years ago the oldest gamer demographics were 15 years younger.
Which brings me back to my original point: maybe it’s not that the multiplayer games are somehow nullifying the market for AAA single player games; maybe it’s just that no such market ever existed. That the multiplayer market is a new market that didn’t exist 15 years ago, not a transformation of an existing market.
For me at least the correlation is that me having this kind of gaming budget is correlated with me having overall social isolation more than overall social overwhelm like I did in my twenties.
Companies want all games to be multiplayer with online live ops and events and a steady flow of microtransactions money.
I once worked on a dance game that officially had a team of 400
How did that go
Space marine 2 seems like a good example of this.
Single player campaign: mediocre
CoOp missions: mediocre
Competitive multiplayer: poor
Seems like dropping one of those might have allowed the remaining two to earn a “pretty good”
It seems to be resonating pretty damn well for them. In fact, the competitive multiplayer has been praised for its simplicity and feeling a lot like the kind of multiplayer that we used to get so much of back in the 360 era.
Who praised them? But I don’t know what measure we’d use to determine the general reception of this particular feature. Particularly given that almost all video game journalism is mere marketing. So that’s probably not a fruitful point to argue over.
Instead I’ll offer the things that I think earn the competitive multiplayer a poor rating.
- No skill or even experience based match making. Too many games are blowouts because all of the level 1 players were put on one team.
- Teams are static once a match lobby has formed. If the teams are poorly balanced they will continue to be forever. Players can’t even switch voluntarily. The only remedy is to bail on the lobby and hop into a different random one.
- Classes and weapons are poorly balanced. The Bulwark is a key example of a too strong and not fun design. The Assault class, and melee in general is in a pretty poor state (unless you have an infinite defense shield that lets you walk up to people). Many of the weapon options for the classes are almost unusably weak, so class loadouts tend to be very samey. Grenades are spammy and the shock grenade blind duration is not fun.
- Players are randomly assigned Imperial or Chaos marines. But there is basically no character customization for the Chaos marines, while the Imperial marines have 5 or 6 different sets. Either the enemy team should always appear to be Chaos with their NPC style, or they should have included equivalent Chaos customization.
- Players have minimal control over which game modes they play. It’s either 100% random or selecting a single mode. A configurable selection is a common multiplayer feature.
- Map design is bland. This is perhaps a more personal preference, but I find the symmetrical, arcade arenas with no narrative character boring.
I watch and listen to a lot of Giant Bomb and SkillUp, and both had praise for the multiplayer modes, warts and all. I can’t agree with all games media just being marketing, otherwise you’d never see bad reviews for the likes of those publishers spending all that money on marketing. It may not have worked for you, but doing all of those modes has done very well for the game.
So you have valid points and I do think it needs to be better, I however love the damn game. I would disagree that the assault class is weak, I’ve play plenty of matches where a good assault player is very key to the teams success. Melee is really strong when used correctly. I also think only a few of the weapons are weak, but I’ve still found their place in a teams composition.
I do think they should of launched with more maps and modes, according to them though they are coming and I’m willing to be a bit patient. The first patch was good and another operation is coming this month. Which is good stuff.
back in the 360 era.
An era famous for its’ tacked-on multiplayer modes.
It was also famous for having multiplayer modes that were just fun and didn’t ask you to commit your life to them. Some of those multiplayer modes were really cool.
Reminds me of many “The reason why Call of Duty sucks” arguments I heard as a kid.
Like, my own tastes agree with you. But you don’t bring that argument into game industry discussion because fact is, the game is doing very well financially and obviously many players disagree with you. So you have to take that data, and work back to decide what the logical conclusion is.
If the argument is that SM2 is successful because it limited it’s scope to execute a smaller number of features well, I don’t think that holds up. It took on three different types of games and (imho) executed merely okay. What more could they have added? Open world? MMO?
I think the more plausible explanation for the sales is that it’s Warhammer, it’s pretty, and SM1 was good.
Single player games with a good story and fun replayability are what I’m after. Or co-op. Occasionally, a fun multiplayer with a risky, innovative design like Lethal Company.
If a game requires me to collect 100 goddamn feathers, or press X 20 times to “survive” a heavily scripted encounter, you are doing your game wrong. Look at Black Mesa, look at Subnatica. Look at the games that took risks like Lethal Company or Elite Dangerous. You don’t have to appeal to everyone. You have to tell a story well, and the gameplay should be unique and interesting. Larian understood that with Divinity 2, and made improvements to both story and gameplay in BG3.
Unfortunately the good taste of people who actively comment about games often has only slight overlap with what makes money.
Three of the top ten US game earners in 2024 were yearly sports game rehashes. One of the top ten games was Call Of Duty. One was Fortnite.
These are money making machines. We can argue and beg and plead all we want. There is a huge mass of gamers out there was simply don’t care, and who will continue to buy formulaic rehashes and microtransaction infested treadmills.
The AAA publishers are not in it for the art. Look at AA and indie if you want games that are willing to appeal to a niche. I’m talking to you and everyone else reading this because this might actually have an effect. Saying what AAA publishers and developers should do is pointless, not like they will ever read it.
“What makes money” is always relative to how much it costs to make though.
I would argue the market for every kind of game is expanding. There’s a bigger market for Tetris now than there was in 1987, in terms of actual economic resources that could go into making Tetris profitably.
The Tetris market is a smaller percentage share of the overall gaming market, but in absolute terms it’s more money than it was in 1987.
That’s my suspicion at least.
Then the challenge is connecting that market slice with the dev shop that wants to serve that market slice. Which isn’t trivial. But I think it’s worth keeping in mind.
Every market is getting bigger, based on at least these four factors:
- More cultural acceptance of gaming
- Higher percentage of humanity achieving economic status where leisure becomes relevant
- Proliferation of technology to greater portion of humanity
- Expansion of human population
All markets are growing.
Heck, the market for COBOL programmers is larger today than ever before. That’s really interesting if you think about it.
“What makes money” is always relative to how much it costs to make though.
Season passes, microtransactions, and DLCs. Additionally creating brand recognition among the masses along with flashy trailers. These are all reasons that AAA behemoths are still banked on to make huge net profits.
Sometimes these massive games fail and lose money in spectacular ways, but it happens a lot less than us enlightened good taste gamers would like to imagine. Money gets shoveled into creatively safe massive games because they usually make a huge profit. I love say, Wasteland 2, but that game probably has made less money in its entire life than the newest Fifa game made in a week.
Drag wonders what you think of the feather collecting in A Short Hike
Good story and fun replayability (to me that means branching story paths and discoverability) is tough to combine. I’m hopeful for generative AI’s ability to make good stories that are also unique. Real, in depth dialogue that stays in character, AI directors for new story paths, that kind of thing.
Lethal company is literally just old school d&d tho
You go into dungeons, try to avoid all the monsters because they can kill you in one hit, get the treasure they protect and gold is xp.
Pretty much what I’ve been saying for almost a decade, mostly in response to “game development is expensive, that’s why AAA games need *insert extra revenue streams*”. My response has always been that games are bloated with feature creep and if there was an actual issue with development costs the first thing you can cut are features that don’t really add to the game. Not only do you cut development costs but you arguably make a better product.
Nice to get some validation because it’s been a rather controversial opinion. People have argued nobody would buy AAA if it’s not an open world with XP, skills and crafting. Or a competitive hero based online shooter with XP, unlockables, season pass and 5 different game modes. I guess now people don’t buy those even if they are all those things
I think it’s cause of envy. Every once in a while, a game comes that just seems to do a lot of things and become very very successful (like red dead and gta).
Then these other studios get FOMO and turn to a go big or go home attitude.
So what you end up with is this inflation of features when only a few devs can land a big game like that.
