-Half LIfe 2 and Halo killed FPS for a decade at least (going from frenetic wide-open maps to linear piss-easy corridor shooters), only just now recovering with "boomer shooters" and indies.
-WoW and the MMO gold rush killed single player RPGs for a decade, and even now with successes like BG3 the industry kicks and screams at making any type of RPG other than a linear cutscenefest and/or brainless casualized button masher.
-Ten+ years after Skyrim there's still no better Skyrim. While most people I know consider Skirym to be a severely flawed dumbed down disappointment, the rest of the industry views it as impossibly complex and out of reach, to the point attempts to copy it fail miserably (e.g. Avowed).
The world will never see a proper sequel to Arcanum, Thief 2, Deus Ex, the real Fallout 3, or another game with the design of Wizardry 8 from a major studio ever again, and it's not because those games don't sell. It's because making them is TOO HARD and the industry doesn't want to even try. Pajeets can only make cargo-cult "gameplay loops" that superficially mimic a real game and SJW programmers only view gaming as a vehicle for their sick festishes. It's pathetic.
Half life 2 is an example of a good game that ruined the industry by focusing on the wrong things.
Turning FPS into a storyline is shortsighted and requires constant diverting development assets away from gameplay and into narrative. The story people eventually take over the game design and ruin it in favor of pushing messaging. Developers mistake the appeal of a story in a videogame. Half life was cooked the moment it became Mulatto girl crying drama and not creepy alien sci fi horror.
Consider Diablo 2, one of the best games of all time, the leads had so little interest in story they left it up to the cinematic department to make up whatever they wanted.
The difference in story focus in Diablo II and Diablo III was annoying as fuck. Shoving the story into the forefront and making it trash hurt that game so much.
But also, the company couldn't finish the story. They could not move forward because so much had happened and they didn't know how to continue. They had an ending for the episodes, but that just twisted things more. Level design became so important they were hiring actual architects and people with knowledge to design areas to actually feel like the area.
There is a feeling that it needs to be better than the previous game, so they have scrapped more version than we have any clue about. They scrapped stuff or changed ideas for Half Life 2, and that was fine, so it felt right to keep seeking a greater form of perfection. Because of that, nothing was released.
The creators of the game have slowly left the company. Apparently the older members still demand it be this great vaunted thing. Tons of ideas have been scrapped. Heck, I'm fairly certain there have been several versions of Source Engine that had various Gordon Freeman ready to not talk. Newer members are going in a new direction, but that is still rare and feels kind of weird.
Half Life 2 was so good, no one knows how to continue it. It defeated itself.
we have a lot of clever indie games coming out now. imagine those but with a higher budget and competent staffing.
that said, I think the bloated budgets might actually be one of the things that cause gaming to shoot itself in the head in the first place. blood budgets mean high investment, which means everything has to be safe. "Call of Duty sold 50 million copies last year? make that game again!"
I was talking with my buddy about this the other night, but I think that as we see bloated budgets start killing off studios we're going to see a shift in the industry. Games will become consumed more in the way books are consumed. That is to say, gamers will no longer give as much of a shit about playing whatever the latest release is in favor of whatever is actually good. PCs can emulate just about every console for the handful of titles that are still foolishly platform locked, and as the 3D rendering arms race dies more and more stuff will run on whatever average potato people own, so you'll get to a point where people don't have to limit their selection when choosing what to play. You'll have an endless stream of garbage that gets released every year and immediately forgotten, just like how most books published in the last 20 years aren't worth the paper they're printed on, but you'll have a handful of titles that will survive through the ages like how The Lord of the Rings or The Art of War do. I'm excited to see that freedom to choose good games exert market pressures on developers to refocus their efforts on producing a good product again.
I'd just love to see the loving craftsmanship of the old days come back. You only get that from passionate, hyperfixated nerd programmers. Back when most devs custom built or at least heavily customized their own game engine so it could meet their requirements exactly and each game would have its own real, unique character.
I'm so sick of trawling through hundreds of UE games with the bare minimum of superficial visual crap loosely stuck on the same built in functionality of the stock engine.
I mean full on isekai anime, but in AAA flagship game form. A Japanese teen meets Truck-kun and dies
How about flipping that around, making it kinda like Valkyrie Profile, except you drive a truck? Scout out potential isekai targets, run them down, then guide them to the other world, set them up with powers, and send them off after the demon king or whatever.
I just wish DK64 wasn't the pinnacle of collectathon platformers, and they continued to make them after it came out.
Because its nowhere near as bad as people make it seem, usually its revealing themselves to just be bad at the game and blaming the game for it (sans a few things like the bonus games near the end being quite terrible), and we could have so much more interesting things happening with now decades of technological improvement towards physics engines and environmental effects.
Instead its mostly relegated to indie games (where gimmicks or padding are used to disguise the short run times) and very rare Nintendo first party games that aren't saddled with retarded gimmicks (so basically Odyssey and seemingly the new DK game).
Also we need a timeline where Midway Games doesn't go bankrupt and continues to make arcadey fun games even into the era where things are all brown and serious. Sumner Redstone is my personal Jewish nemesis for what he did to that company, and I hope he is rotting in hell in the worst way possible.
Personally I've always thought Banjo Tooie was the pinnacle, but I've never really played DK64. There is a hack which allows you swap between the kongs anywhere which is supposed to make it a lot better.
Tooie is a lot of busy work with not a lot to show for it. Like multiple steps for a Jiggie that would have been singular in the original, with almost no fanfare for even getting it beyond throwaway (those little jingle celebrations when you get the big plot token go a long way to making them feel worth something). It was great at showing how interconnected they could make the worlds, but by the second half it just felt like a slog.
I enjoy the first half a lot, until you get to "oh you need to come back here through a shortcut unlocked 3 levels later to do 1/3 parts of this Jiggie's quest!" and then it spirals down. Anytime I feel the desire to play it again, I just do Kazooie and enjoy it more.
The Tag Anywhere mod for DK64 actively ruins any challenge or thought the game has in the name of QoL ease. Most bananas (colored or golden) are deliberately placed to be challenging for X Kong to reach, and not so for Y Kong, so half the goal is "how do I get fucking Chunky here." When you can swap on the fly you just negate most of that, and you just as soon not even have multiple characters.
There are certainly spots where its meaningless busywork to run back to swap for something, not a perfect system. But even they knew that, its why the colored bananas (the big complaint people always have about it) only require 75/100 to be considered "complete." And only the final level needs a hair more than that to unlock the boss.
I don't fault people for playing with the mod, but for a first time playthrough its absolutely ruining.
One thing I really want to see is RPGs where the world acts and moves as a genuine setting rather than just being a sandbox that pauses once Captain Protagonist leaves the immediate area. Things like:
Time limits which actually matter! No more of this "oh, I know Alduin is going to destroy the world imminently but I'm off to spend the next month doing odd jobs for the Thieves' Guild!" And, frankly, also have something cool that you can only get if you devote yourself to the Thieves' Guild too.
Factions who actually impact the world if you help/hurt them, beyond flags and guard uniforms changing. Take the Legion from New Vegas. If you help them, they should take over places like Novac mid-game, and then actually enslave and/or execute people who opposed them (like Boone and the other sniper). Alternatively, if you oppose the Legion, then have something where you raid a slave camp and NPCs you get out actually have story and quests you can access if you safely get them home.
Going back to point 1, have factions and groups actually pursue their own agendas and missions outside of player input. Sticking with New Vegas, have the NCR and Legion actually throwing armies at each other (ideally with some level of randomness to it so NCR might win one game, Legion another, etc) instead of Forlorn Hope and Nelson will just keep staring at each other forever unless you get involved.
Groups that have standards. No Todd, a dumb brute barbarian should not be able to join the Mage's Guild. If you are head of the mage's guild, then the fighter's guild should at least reject you from becoming their leader, if not bar you outright. And solving two problems should not lead to the supposedly prestigious ancient chivalric order of knights suddenly declaring me their commander and the best leader they've ever had.
Don't always have a "best" ending to conflicts. I say this as someone who loves playing high Charisma/talky characters, but why can you almost always speech check things into an ideal outcome. It's a bit better when you actually have to do work beyond just the speech check, like with the Geth and Quarian in ME3, but as cool as that is in the moment it seems like speech checks are borderline mind control and almost always give the optimal outcome in most games. But I shouldn't be able to erase centuries of conflict with one rousing speech.
I think a lot of this comes down to two main things:
Achievement culture means that lots of players insist on "completing" games, and often quickly, so the average gamer will not want to go through a 100+ hour RPG multiple times to see everything
and
Devs worried about players "missing" content. I don't know really if this is a publisher-induced concern (fear of money being spent on content only a small amount of players would see), a writer-induced concern (see Emil Pagliarulo's ridiculous paper airplane argument about game story and dialogue), reacting to achievement culture, or something else, but devs seem to want players to be able to see most stuff in one playthrough too.
I am a fan of turn-based dungeon crawlers. Etrian Odyssey 1 was my jam, and while the series got "better" over time, it also got worse simultaneously. The first one bragged about its limitations, making demerits into positives. The box cheerfully alerted you to its lack of story, by-hand map-making, and obtrusive level-up system. They turned negatives into positives.
And that's something the modern industry just can't do. You can't have "negatives" in the modern development cycle. Everything needs to be a wash of grey and sameness.
There’s a space somewhere between Factorio and Supreme Commander, but SupCom 2 consoleified itself, and RTS grand scale/physics based games didn’t progress where they could in the intervening years. BAR seems to be developing nicely but I don’t care as much for the TA style, I dislike hero-ish units and prefer hordes, but not in the Total War style…
There’s a VR game called Jet Island. It has movement mechanics like Tribes(frictionless downhill momentum like the bird flight game Tiny Wings for iPhone), but combined that with both webslingers and hand-jets. It came out near 7 years ago with the Valve Index wave. I’ve never seen anything quite so magical since.
I will always shill zero-k, if BAR's not quite scratching the itch. It's another spring engine TA successor, so it's not going to be far off BAR, but it has its own soul too and the UI and unit AI work they did to facilitate intelligent mega-scale battling without impossible micro is beautiful.
Zero K, Falling Frontier are games I’m slightly keeping tabs on, but development is glacial and I worry that they’ll produce something middling(like the 3 faction Grey Goo game that evaporated) or worse, fraudulent(Planetary Annihilation).
-Half LIfe 2 and Halo killed FPS for a decade at least (going from frenetic wide-open maps to linear piss-easy corridor shooters), only just now recovering with "boomer shooters" and indies.
-WoW and the MMO gold rush killed single player RPGs for a decade, and even now with successes like BG3 the industry kicks and screams at making any type of RPG other than a linear cutscenefest and/or brainless casualized button masher.
-Ten+ years after Skyrim there's still no better Skyrim. While most people I know consider Skirym to be a severely flawed dumbed down disappointment, the rest of the industry views it as impossibly complex and out of reach, to the point attempts to copy it fail miserably (e.g. Avowed).
The world will never see a proper sequel to Arcanum, Thief 2, Deus Ex, the real Fallout 3, or another game with the design of Wizardry 8 from a major studio ever again, and it's not because those games don't sell. It's because making them is TOO HARD and the industry doesn't want to even try. Pajeets can only make cargo-cult "gameplay loops" that superficially mimic a real game and SJW programmers only view gaming as a vehicle for their sick festishes. It's pathetic.
It's amazing how Half Life 2 defeated itself.
Go on
Half life 2 is an example of a good game that ruined the industry by focusing on the wrong things.
Turning FPS into a storyline is shortsighted and requires constant diverting development assets away from gameplay and into narrative. The story people eventually take over the game design and ruin it in favor of pushing messaging. Developers mistake the appeal of a story in a videogame. Half life was cooked the moment it became Mulatto girl crying drama and not creepy alien sci fi horror.
Consider Diablo 2, one of the best games of all time, the leads had so little interest in story they left it up to the cinematic department to make up whatever they wanted.
The difference in story focus in Diablo II and Diablo III was annoying as fuck. Shoving the story into the forefront and making it trash hurt that game so much.
Well, to start, what Guy said.
But also, the company couldn't finish the story. They could not move forward because so much had happened and they didn't know how to continue. They had an ending for the episodes, but that just twisted things more. Level design became so important they were hiring actual architects and people with knowledge to design areas to actually feel like the area.
There is a feeling that it needs to be better than the previous game, so they have scrapped more version than we have any clue about. They scrapped stuff or changed ideas for Half Life 2, and that was fine, so it felt right to keep seeking a greater form of perfection. Because of that, nothing was released.
The creators of the game have slowly left the company. Apparently the older members still demand it be this great vaunted thing. Tons of ideas have been scrapped. Heck, I'm fairly certain there have been several versions of Source Engine that had various Gordon Freeman ready to not talk. Newer members are going in a new direction, but that is still rare and feels kind of weird.
Half Life 2 was so good, no one knows how to continue it. It defeated itself.
Did you pick up the can?
we have a lot of clever indie games coming out now. imagine those but with a higher budget and competent staffing.
that said, I think the bloated budgets might actually be one of the things that cause gaming to shoot itself in the head in the first place. blood budgets mean high investment, which means everything has to be safe. "Call of Duty sold 50 million copies last year? make that game again!"
I was talking with my buddy about this the other night, but I think that as we see bloated budgets start killing off studios we're going to see a shift in the industry. Games will become consumed more in the way books are consumed. That is to say, gamers will no longer give as much of a shit about playing whatever the latest release is in favor of whatever is actually good. PCs can emulate just about every console for the handful of titles that are still foolishly platform locked, and as the 3D rendering arms race dies more and more stuff will run on whatever average potato people own, so you'll get to a point where people don't have to limit their selection when choosing what to play. You'll have an endless stream of garbage that gets released every year and immediately forgotten, just like how most books published in the last 20 years aren't worth the paper they're printed on, but you'll have a handful of titles that will survive through the ages like how The Lord of the Rings or The Art of War do. I'm excited to see that freedom to choose good games exert market pressures on developers to refocus their efforts on producing a good product again.
Ultima is sort of Isekai if you think about it. So, a really nice Ultima.
I'd just love to see the loving craftsmanship of the old days come back. You only get that from passionate, hyperfixated nerd programmers. Back when most devs custom built or at least heavily customized their own game engine so it could meet their requirements exactly and each game would have its own real, unique character.
I'm so sick of trawling through hundreds of UE games with the bare minimum of superficial visual crap loosely stuck on the same built in functionality of the stock engine.
How about flipping that around, making it kinda like Valkyrie Profile, except you drive a truck? Scout out potential isekai targets, run them down, then guide them to the other world, set them up with powers, and send them off after the demon king or whatever.
A good mech game
I know we're talking what-if fantasies here, but you gotta keep some levels of "possible" in mind! That's ridiculous!
You chose the words that'll hurt me the most didnt you?
I just wish DK64 wasn't the pinnacle of collectathon platformers, and they continued to make them after it came out.
Because its nowhere near as bad as people make it seem, usually its revealing themselves to just be bad at the game and blaming the game for it (sans a few things like the bonus games near the end being quite terrible), and we could have so much more interesting things happening with now decades of technological improvement towards physics engines and environmental effects.
Instead its mostly relegated to indie games (where gimmicks or padding are used to disguise the short run times) and very rare Nintendo first party games that aren't saddled with retarded gimmicks (so basically Odyssey and seemingly the new DK game).
Also we need a timeline where Midway Games doesn't go bankrupt and continues to make arcadey fun games even into the era where things are all brown and serious. Sumner Redstone is my personal Jewish nemesis for what he did to that company, and I hope he is rotting in hell in the worst way possible.
Personally I've always thought Banjo Tooie was the pinnacle, but I've never really played DK64. There is a hack which allows you swap between the kongs anywhere which is supposed to make it a lot better.
Tooie is a lot of busy work with not a lot to show for it. Like multiple steps for a Jiggie that would have been singular in the original, with almost no fanfare for even getting it beyond throwaway (those little jingle celebrations when you get the big plot token go a long way to making them feel worth something). It was great at showing how interconnected they could make the worlds, but by the second half it just felt like a slog.
I enjoy the first half a lot, until you get to "oh you need to come back here through a shortcut unlocked 3 levels later to do 1/3 parts of this Jiggie's quest!" and then it spirals down. Anytime I feel the desire to play it again, I just do Kazooie and enjoy it more.
The Tag Anywhere mod for DK64 actively ruins any challenge or thought the game has in the name of QoL ease. Most bananas (colored or golden) are deliberately placed to be challenging for X Kong to reach, and not so for Y Kong, so half the goal is "how do I get fucking Chunky here." When you can swap on the fly you just negate most of that, and you just as soon not even have multiple characters.
There are certainly spots where its meaningless busywork to run back to swap for something, not a perfect system. But even they knew that, its why the colored bananas (the big complaint people always have about it) only require 75/100 to be considered "complete." And only the final level needs a hair more than that to unlock the boss.
I don't fault people for playing with the mod, but for a first time playthrough its absolutely ruining.
This post will get deleted in the near future. I'm surprised anyone bothered reading it.
Haha, looks like you read him like a book. Didn't know he his bitchfit deletions were quite so frequent.
Actual interesting discussion, then OP decides to be a fag and nuke it? Weird.
One thing I really want to see is RPGs where the world acts and moves as a genuine setting rather than just being a sandbox that pauses once Captain Protagonist leaves the immediate area. Things like:
Time limits which actually matter! No more of this "oh, I know Alduin is going to destroy the world imminently but I'm off to spend the next month doing odd jobs for the Thieves' Guild!" And, frankly, also have something cool that you can only get if you devote yourself to the Thieves' Guild too.
Factions who actually impact the world if you help/hurt them, beyond flags and guard uniforms changing. Take the Legion from New Vegas. If you help them, they should take over places like Novac mid-game, and then actually enslave and/or execute people who opposed them (like Boone and the other sniper). Alternatively, if you oppose the Legion, then have something where you raid a slave camp and NPCs you get out actually have story and quests you can access if you safely get them home.
Going back to point 1, have factions and groups actually pursue their own agendas and missions outside of player input. Sticking with New Vegas, have the NCR and Legion actually throwing armies at each other (ideally with some level of randomness to it so NCR might win one game, Legion another, etc) instead of Forlorn Hope and Nelson will just keep staring at each other forever unless you get involved.
Groups that have standards. No Todd, a dumb brute barbarian should not be able to join the Mage's Guild. If you are head of the mage's guild, then the fighter's guild should at least reject you from becoming their leader, if not bar you outright. And solving two problems should not lead to the supposedly prestigious ancient chivalric order of knights suddenly declaring me their commander and the best leader they've ever had.
Don't always have a "best" ending to conflicts. I say this as someone who loves playing high Charisma/talky characters, but why can you almost always speech check things into an ideal outcome. It's a bit better when you actually have to do work beyond just the speech check, like with the Geth and Quarian in ME3, but as cool as that is in the moment it seems like speech checks are borderline mind control and almost always give the optimal outcome in most games. But I shouldn't be able to erase centuries of conflict with one rousing speech.
I think a lot of this comes down to two main things:
and
True living conspiracy games. Ones with fully developed charters that reacted to the progression. Essentially what Dues Ex tried to be.
Essentially, a game that was advanced enough to make the trigger tree truly invisible.
I am a fan of turn-based dungeon crawlers. Etrian Odyssey 1 was my jam, and while the series got "better" over time, it also got worse simultaneously. The first one bragged about its limitations, making demerits into positives. The box cheerfully alerted you to its lack of story, by-hand map-making, and obtrusive level-up system. They turned negatives into positives.
And that's something the modern industry just can't do. You can't have "negatives" in the modern development cycle. Everything needs to be a wash of grey and sameness.
I've always liked those too, shame it's basically a dead genre.
There’s a space somewhere between Factorio and Supreme Commander, but SupCom 2 consoleified itself, and RTS grand scale/physics based games didn’t progress where they could in the intervening years. BAR seems to be developing nicely but I don’t care as much for the TA style, I dislike hero-ish units and prefer hordes, but not in the Total War style…
There’s a VR game called Jet Island. It has movement mechanics like Tribes(frictionless downhill momentum like the bird flight game Tiny Wings for iPhone), but combined that with both webslingers and hand-jets. It came out near 7 years ago with the Valve Index wave. I’ve never seen anything quite so magical since.
I will always shill zero-k, if BAR's not quite scratching the itch. It's another spring engine TA successor, so it's not going to be far off BAR, but it has its own soul too and the UI and unit AI work they did to facilitate intelligent mega-scale battling without impossible micro is beautiful.
Zero K, Falling Frontier are games I’m slightly keeping tabs on, but development is glacial and I worry that they’ll produce something middling(like the 3 faction Grey Goo game that evaporated) or worse, fraudulent(Planetary Annihilation).