got to watching the henry stickmin franchise again, I realised how true this still holds. think about your favorite game franchises of all time; Mario, Mortal Kombat, Doom, even plot-heavy franchises like metal gear or COD started relatively simple. simple mechanics, simple stories, a simple gameloop.
This lowers the cost of development and in turn the cost to the player to try something new. If players see something they like, they'll be more likely to spend more on the sequel, and in the meantime, word of mouth advertising can get the game going.
rather than spending literal billions trying to get a new ip off the ground, studios can spend significantly less money trying new concepts and introduce more complexity as time goes on, rather than trying to hit the ground running.
You can do that with indie titles, but big corporations seem permanently stuck in 'it must make a billion dollars or it's not worth trying' mentality.
The old complaint goes "why does Hollywood make one $10M film, when they could make ten $1M films?"
And there's actually an answer: you can't embezzle $1M from a $1M film.
That's genius.
Wish I could take credit. It's a paraphrase from a figure from the Golden Age of Hollywood that I can't for the life of me find.
Corporate Brainrot all the way down.
No, but you can embezzle 1m from 100 1m dollar projects, lol. And it's harder to track that way
And yet they barely make numbers that would be embarrassing a generation ago
I have several games in my Steam library that are years long labors of love by one, count 'em, one developer.
It doesn't take a team to make a game worth playing (and buying), it just takes effort and determination.
This has been similar problem with Need for Speed and other racing games, where they try to shoehorn in a story where it doesn’t matter/fit. Most Wanted ‘05 did it right and Rivals did a solid job at it too, but a lot of modern racing games put in a story that doesn’t matter. I want to race fast cars and battle cops, not deal with NPCs that only talk. The best classic and modern NFS games, Hot Pursuit 2 and Hot Pursuit 2010 both have zero story, focus on tracks and driving experience, and are far better for it.
Racing games, please stop with the plots. 90% of the time it’s not going to work.
I miss Most Wanted, partially because it looks like Yakima Washington where I was living at the time.
It’s a great map. Good city, industrial, suburban and rural environments. Fun to drive around.
It was probably the best version, though the videos were terrible.
I had this epiphany during my current lap through the Star wars movies. everything needs to be incredibly complex in nuance. it's gotten to the point we're a simple story of a white knight saving a damsel from an evil wizard is kryptonite to storytellers now.
Because everything is work shopped to death to appeal to everyone. There is no more "this is cool." It becomes well "this is good but..." and everyone is nitpicking things to appeal to just one more demographic. So you can't just make a movie about soldiers in the trench trying to survive you need to shoehorn in a romance plot. But you can't just have one woman, you need two to pass the bechdal test. Then there is something else that needs to be changed because someone found it icky. Before you know it appeals to no one.
I'd realized when my family and I saw the 7th Star Wars movie. They hate it, but they still borrow from that age of story telling. For example, Girl Luke Skywalker and Storm Trooper guy go to blow up the Death Star 3. Which the Empire decided to build a 3rd time, but bigger.
Rogue Squadron would be awesome. Too bad Level 5 is gone after trying to fit the AAA market.
I completely agree. Problem comes from a very bloated system. Companies have resources and they need to use those resources, the resources cost money so the end product must be some bloated, soulless, appeal to everyone slop that justifies having hundreds of people working on it.
Before you had a small team with passion. Bethesda went from a 34 Devs for Morrowind to 1.3k devs for Starfield.
Worse part is that once it gets bloated there is no scaling back. If you want to fire people it makes them look bad, investors get scared so management just leech off it and then move away.
Like... Clair Obscur- Expedition 33?
TBH I wouldn't consider a game that cost ~30 million to make to be an indie title or getting back to basics at all.
Considering it was made by like 30 people, yet is on par quality wise with most AAA games with 100s of employees, its absolutely getting back to basics.
30 people - not including all voice and mocap, 8 korean animators, entire dozens-strong QA team, 7 in a porting team, another french QA team, more french voice, all the localizers, a 3-man sound studio, all of Musiversal and the orchestra they hired for the OST, the entirety of the Kepler Interactive publishing team...
even AAA boils down to 30 crucial directors and programmers if you strip it down that much.
Clair Obscur: https://youtu.be/04wAYTaqNkI?si=cMRSL5shScOZw5gI
Assassin's Creed Shadows: https://youtu.be/4Cm4tQOBPxA?si=fMdi0YeifSz6JqDf
TBF AAA gaming doesn't go that low when you strip it down. It's always absurd amounts in every department
And they got all of those people for just 30 million?
So instead of them being a very small team, they are now a massively efficient team who maximized their budget to carry them to heights well above their punching level and still felt comfortable selling it below market price.
So, still back to basics because that's how the game industry worked before it went mainstream.
oh, yeah, they're far from as inefficient as AAA. still, it's not quite 30 nerds in an office building like the olden days.
In the grand scheme of things for the quality that expedition 33 it is a dirt cheap budget.
The closest I've seen that would fit was Pathfinder games made by OwlCat. They did Kingmaker first and then WOTR. Kingmaker didn't do it for me because it was a rough implementation but I liked WOTR. I still had to mod the wokeness away and it made me realize there is no going back to a time where a medieval society is not going to look like modern day London or Paris and where we don't have more then half to 90% of all leaders being women.
I wonder if game jams ran by larger developers would work out in that sense... it probably would filter out a fair amount of design by committee devs from good ones.
Sadly, the committee will get a hold of it afterwards.
Pikmin was based on figuring out the limits in the GameCube, and then creating characters for it. Nintendo is kind of known for doing that, though they obfuscate it a bit.