I'll keep this (relatively, for me) short.
My kids and I have been playing Mario Kart World on the Switch 2. It's really well done, free roam is fun (but limited), and the controls, smoothness, graphics, etc. are REALLY well done. It's lacking in many features (ghosts racing, competitive free roam trials, tracks, items, etc.) and I hope many of the gaps will be filled in over the coming years. It's feeling a bit played out already.
BUT... I've also recently introduced Double Dash (Gamecube) and Mario Kart Wii to the kids. They got a kick out of wii motion controls and double dash's gimmicks, but even with a retrotink, playing it on a big flatscreen TV is just not ideal.
So I sailed the high seas for some ROMs (to games I already own), installed the Dolphin emulator, and installed some 4K texture packs. My PC is ok... i7-4790 processor (10+ years old) and a 3080.
Double Dash, a game from 23 years ago now looks almost as good as Mario Kart World (you can easily find Youtube videos). It's staggeringly good. The controls and speed -- better than World, imho. The performance is fantastic.
If you took the base Double Dash or Wii game and compared to World, you would say we've come incredibly far. But, with a little upscaling, some new textures, etc., it's clear that we really haven't.
I get that Nintendo games are not known for pushing the envelope, but I think this is just one good example of how ... empty ... modern AAA gaming is.
Most of corporate products have stagnated because it’s more profitable. Innovation is expensive and risky, it’s way easier and cheaper to let 50 companies do startups and then buy out the innovation after 45 of them fail. You let others take the risk, buyout the finished product and lump it in with whatever other slop there is, rinse repeat. Thats AAA gaming in a nutshell as well, innovative games get bought, bastardized and then the studio is gutted after the bastardized product stops selling. The few that survive all eventually turn into whale fishing pay to win slopfests.
Nintendo is the most innovative triple AAA company out there, the switch is still easily the most innovative game console of the past decade and the 3ds is definitely a strong contender as well for the decade before, but Nintendo will also never change their golden geese. This is both good and bad, the good is Nintendo is the most conservative on micro transactions and most games have little to no DLC, they also will have the most consistently “good” quality games because continuing the IP is their priority, the bad is that games will almost always be 90% the same and three iterations down the road you will not notice much innovation and very rarely any actual big changes.
Nintendo is loathe to change its existing IP, but every once in a while the company tries a moonshot by creating a new IP. Splatoon was a success, but ARMS was not.
That's honestly how it should be done, but suits want the baked-in audience of an existing IP while "broadening the audience" by sloppifying it.
Just look at Firaxis & Civ7's release last year after almost a decade since their last IP.
They tried to change up the formula from their classic Sid Meier franchise dating back to the early 90s (decoupling historic leaders from their ethnic civs, forcing civ switching at the end of eras stealing ideas from the failed competitor Humankind, dumbing down gameplay to make it easier for casuals - getting rid of classic gameplay mechanics like workers, assigning citizens to work city tiles, etc).
While I think their experimental changes were crass and shortsighted, it's also a good example why most AAA devs and studios are cowardly & lazy.
The response to the expensive & undercooked release last Feb may have destroyed one of the most successful remaining PC IPs dating back generations.
Civ 7 was such a massive fuck up that only women could have made that change. No grand strategy fans were going to”you know what, fuck one long continuous game that takes hours or micromanagement and planning. We need separate games where everything just kinda resets and becomes redundant if you play a full game”
Seriously, not finishing a long game didn't need to be fixed, it's fine if I can just play until I'm satisfied that the end is set and then start a new game.
It doubly didn't need to get fixed by chopping the game into four parts, then packing the fourth part up to sell me as part of the first expansion pack.
It was a mind numbingly stupid decision
Their dev staff is all pretty soy dating back to the promo vids for the DLC releases for Civ6 over the pandemic.
Hard to tell how many of the Civ6 team is still around though. They took so long between the release of Civ6 & Civ7 that there seemed to be tons of layoffs & natural attrition.
The problem was that they made a Civilization game where you can pick Ada Lovelace or Harriet Tubman but not Queen Elizabeth (either of them) or George Washington.
The wokeness was definitely a dog whistle, but Civ7's structural problems go way deeper than that.
There's a lot of shitlibs who have been assmad since Day 1 that Firaxis chose to fuck with the classic formula of the 4X mechanics.
There's also some sweet poetic justice that Firaxis' ultimate downfall was copypasta-ing the failed experimental model of Sega/Amplitude's Humankind which had failed hard itself 5 years earlier despite being promoted as the latest "Civ Killer". Where Amplitude's dev team was similarly infiltrated with public-facing trannies too.
It was a civ killer, just not in the way they hoped
Now that Metroid has underperformed, we'll probably not see a new entry in that series for another decade.
This is something that bothers me about Nintendo - they're not the least bit shy about packing Smash Bros full of affectionate callbacks going back to the early 80s and franchises nobody under 50 would recognize, but they still consider these franchises not worth a mention otherwise. Ice Climbers, Kid Icarus, Punch Out, Starfox... All of these could be great again if they'd put off another Kirby game to revisit them.
I think honesty the opposite will happen. I would expect a non linear Metroid in the next 5-6 years. I agree on the lack of diversity in their IPs, part of me thinks they are being too risk adverse to their detriment, and part of me wonders if it’s because there’s not enough good talent available to make consistent good games like the golden age, everything has expanded to the point where a lot of good talent are working on minor games that can sell well and we don’t have a lot of AAA companies willing to juggle that much premium talent across multiple IPs.
The only way they are going to make another good Metroid is if they listen to any of the criticism the last one got.
I get that, but look what they did with a few other IPs to reinvigorate them when they were lackluster, I have faith they care enough about the IPs to cater to the fan base still. They completely reformatted DK and did two distinctively different releases within a few years to regain trust in the community. Same with Mario too. If Nintendo doesn’t listen to fans I’ll be worried, but they have at least a decent track record compared to most AAA titles.
Nintendo deserves a lot of praise for avoiding (mostly) the microtransaction nightmare.
I do pay for a monthly Nintendo family subscription though...
Meh, I pay 20 bucks a year for the family online expansion pack with a few friends.
Competency Crisis in Action. A generation or two of talented programmers and game designers have retired by now, and they took their expertise with them. The game dev mills aren't producing legitimate talent, and DEI is flooding every industry with unproductive retards. Anyone with real chops is swinging for the fences in indie development because success there sets you up for life. Outside of a few Asian and eastern European studios, AAA game dev is turbo cooked.
Yep that's what happens when you only hire people who are "qualified" but otherwise not passionate, intelligent, etc. It's just been a downward slide since the mid 2010's and getting worse each year. That's why the only great upcoming games are smaller and not by multinational corporations.
I wouldn't even say "it sets you up for life". I think the issue is entirely Occupational VS Aspirational. The OG game creators, and even to a good extent the next two generations, did not have money in the business. Even the burgeoning AAA industries were scrappy. Look at Pokemon Red's code: It's held together with duct tape and prayers. They had to make do. And had to work around a number of hard limitations.
Now, there's soft limitations. You can't have a woman be too attractive, or a man be too unattractive, or the harpies at IGN will throw a hissy fit. That's no longer a developmental limitation, it's a social one. And people follow that social limitation, not because they want to make a good product and they think it to be sound advice, but because they don't want to get fired. Because being a game dev in a bloated industry IS being set up for life. The indies fail, people are forced out, it's cutthroat for a few hundred to a few thousand sales. But get in the comfy EA-Sports or Blizzard houses, and unlike those indie devs, you ARE set for life... As long as you never cross the harpies, startle the tengu, or offend the shades.
And people know that. It's "a good job". And so they take no risks, because they want their guaranteed good paycheck. A-tier and above devs are occupational. They're just there for the reliable money. The indies are aspirational. They hope. They dream. VERY FEW are deluded enough to think they're the next Notch and going to be a billionaire. Most of them just want to make a game that they, themselves, would like to play.
And now they have the tech to do so! But the soft limitations still blockade them, too. A few break through, power through SBI and IGN's slander and libel and threats. But many are cowed, and choose not to make the game they want to make, BECAUSE there's so much money in the industry, occupational, dedicated to putting down innovation and ideas and creativity and making what the developer would want to develop.
I wouldn't mind the lack of innovation so much if games didn't take eight years to develop now. In the same amount of time between Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, we had everything from Ocarina of Time to Skyward Sword.
I don't want games to change so drastically that they're not what I fell in love with in the first place, but it does feel like we're not even getting the bare minimum these days.
I saw an article where Japanese Zoomers don't care about Dragon Quest or Final Fantasy anymore. The former is especially bad, as DQ releases were unofficial holidays over there. Games are taking so long to make that kids are already adults by the time the next installment comes in. By then, there's no emotional attachment.
The one exception is Pokemon, and that's because Game Freak shits out a game every three years.
That raises some huge alarm bells. It used to be that the release of a new Dragon Quest was basically an unofficial national holiday in Japan because everyone would knock off to go play it.
This information is new to me, and actually hurts me deeply. I have been a DQ fan for my entire life. Played and finished every single mainline game except 6. I am currently playing it through it, with the intention to finish it.
As Margarine said, this information definitely has me worried about the future of DQ. If even the Japanese children aren't interested. How long before it's fucked up entirely like Final Fantasy and its "chasing the larger audience" garbage?
It's sad, but it's natural for things to fall off, though. There's no reason why something should go on forever just because it happened to be one of the first iconic JRPGs.
That's definitely true. I still really enjoy the mainline series. Will definitely be sad when it does end, or change direction dramatically.
They do all this dumb stuff when developing their games, yet refuse to utilize interesting tools to do really neat things that will help make better games. An easy one is sports games, using AI text generators to write "articles" and headlines about how the weeks games went, using the already generated team and player stats, vs a bank of generic templates just with names and teams changeable.
I find it hilarious that they keep saying "We need more UE 5 because it helps make games faster" "We need more AI" "We need more [...]", when in reality, games have never taken longer to make, even when games had to be made in Assembly, and artists had to draw literally pixel by pixel.
At the same time they do the most barebone gameplay possible, but on the other side, they will spend 2 years on a single map because they need to add every prop in existence.
Having baseline materials DOES help. But they're still just baseline materials. Give a great sculptor a highly impure and faulted block of marble, and give me the alchemically perfect block of marble, and they will still make a better statue out of their waste rock than I could with the ideal one. No amount of good materials will help me in that contest.
But give either of us the opposite, and our results clearly would change. They'd make a masterpiece, and I'd likely not be able to make anything except a pile of smaller rocks.
In the SC2 modding community, you have people making complete overhaul mods that fundamentally change how the game plays, in a handful of months, solo. The source material is very good to work with, AND these people are independently motivated and talented. Their incentive to make a good product... Is making the good product.
In corporate development? There is no incentive to make a good product, your pay is the same. In fact, there's no incentive to make ANY product, your pay is the same. And you're there for the paycheck, not love of the game, so why strain yourself when no one else is? It's an industry bloated and infested with leeches, karens, HR, focus groups, investor and marketeer management... The moment you make an actual effort, you're "rewarded" with no additional pay, but the obligation to do two leeches work on top of your own, forever, until you quit, while they coast. And the work you do isn't determined by what you think will be good or fun, but by what capital investors think will turn profit.
Games are aimed as quantity of players, not quality any more. They don't need to improve things when they are fielding low quality bloat to the lowest denominator, and in some respects they possibly can't improve things lest their normies fail to win.
WoW went from hardcore raiding to absurdly casual play by opening up their target consumers, but basically at the cost of the soul of their game.
Hardcore raiding wasn't even peak WoW. Classic was so successful because it took everyone back to a time when the leveling journey was everything. BC gave us the cancer of dailies and weeklies, and Wrath cemented their laser-focus on the painfully sweaty endgame. None of these were good developments.
Modern WoW is bad because it's incredibly feminized and gay.
That makes me wonder if an MMO that created an insanely long, complex leveling process would be successful.
Don't even bring up WoW. That one hurts.
Double Dash is the GOAT Mario Kart for me. My brother and father and I would always play it together, and if we get together occasionally still do. I would agree that there has been virtually zero improvement in anything other than graphics in those games since that time, over 20 years ago. More courses and characters too, which isn't nothing I suppose. But the base things that are the most important core portions of the game havent really improved much.
Double Dash is great. My sister and I played it (and we never did anything else together!). Good memories.
Most of the World courses are retreads of old courses from the SNES on. Not that I'm objecting, some of them were and are great tracks, but still.
One thing that I hated in later games was the tracks felt so damn wide. And (probably related) it felt like you had a lot less control over the car. Been a while since Ive been to an anime convention but I used to love creaming people at Double Dash if they had a GameCube setup.
You can go back to 3DS games, even PS1 ones, upscale them on emulator and they look good to great on a larger screen.
Personally I find alot of charm in SNES and GBA graphics and music for a good chunk of the catalog. The PC remasters often make the sprites look ugly trying to ''improve'' them ( FFVI comes to mind ).
The catalog of great games that just aged like fine wine, or only need some graphic polishing and an update to User Interface is already huge.
Add to that smaller studios still producing very fun games and you can simply ignore modern AAA DEI-infested mega-projects.
Absolutely! Until I tried Dolphin I would have said my favorite era of gaming for retro was NES and SNES. I play quite a few DOS games with regularity. The early to mid 3D games have turned me off, but I'm rethinking that now..
It's been 3 years since the last main line mario game (Wonder iirc)
Also been 3 years since the last Warioware.
It's been more than 30 years since the last Starfox (unless Starfox 2 on the mini counts, then it's only been 9 years)
It's been since 2004 for the last F-Zero title. (Yeah maybe F-Zero 99 counts, but that was a satella release ages ago they recycled.)
It's been since 2009 since the last Pilotwings.
It's been since 2005 for Wave Race.
It's been since 1985 for Excitebike, or 2006 for Excitetruck as it was.
Nintendo has long stopped caring about their own franchises and fun. They'll happily recycle them into other franchises to remind you they exist, but not do anything new with them. Unless they think it'll make them the safe and easy money.
But the creativity is gone, and the games now reflect that.
Excitebike 64 came out in 2000.
And to really drive in the point, the F-Zero minigame in Nintendo Land on the Wii U was the most F-Zero related content fans had got in years, and even that was over a decade ago now.
Meanwhile F-Zero GX in dolphin is still touted as one of the best VR showcases.
Oh that's right, so it's only been 26 years. I had completely forgotten about Excitebike 64.
It's like this for 95% of video game IP. Look at Playstation. Warhawk, Twisted Metal, Colony Wars, Wipeout, Infamous, Resistance, Killzone, Ridge Racer, Bloodborne, the list goes on.
Meanwhile, we're about to get our third Horizon spinoff.
What the hell are you smoking? The last big starfox came out in 2016 on the wii U.
Oh yeah, that's right. StarFox Zero. My memory isn't what it used to be.
I played Burnout Revenge not too long ago. Upscaled, it looked amazing, and if you only improve the car models, it would look just fine nowadays.
On top of being more artistic, older games are also much easier to read. Most modern games are just throwing so many VFXs and polygons everywhere, it's impossible to see what's actually important, hence why they rely on yellow paint so much, for instance. Even when kids were playing games (sometimes they couldn't even really speak or read), they were still able to get around and find what to do.
Lack of improvements is one thing, but if you look at the overall picture, we've lost many things.
New PVP games don't come with bots anymore, when it was the case for the vast majority in the 90s / 2000s.
Community servers are gone. Now it's all matchmaking. No more bonding with the same people every night, statistically, you'll never find the same player twice in your life.
Basic features like Quick save / load are almost non-existent anymore.
Remember couch co-op? Barely any game has a splitscreen feature anymore, even though almost any game ever created is better in multiplayer than singleplayer. Even a terrible game is better, cause you at least make fun of the game with your friend and try to break it as much as you can.
Remember stuff that you unlocked simply by playing? As if, it's the devs giving you a gift because they're happy you enjoy the game and keep playing?
Play a few more games from the golden era, and you'll realise how much we've actually fallen.
The leading cause of poor readability in modern games is terrible image quality thanks to TAA. They've smeared Vaseline all over our videogames. Of course we can't see wtf is happening.
Low quality gambling scams make more money than quality games so the market has adjusted to that. You're better off at putting money toward marketing and selling a bad game than putting no money to marketing and selling a good game. The market adjusts to this.
Gamers are their own worst enemy in a lot of ways. People keep spending money on trash so they're going to keep getting trash.
Gaming will never produce quality until it stops being profitable to produce trash.
It's not gamers, really. People are just addicts. The explosion in the market was just a mirage. The real explosion was in gambling masked as gaming.
Just enjoy it and pretend that you're a games journalist.
That's a low blow, and yet, totally earned (for the journos).
I think this a fairly common experience for people into sport franchisees. You look back at an earlier year Madden and it's pretty noticeable it's the same game, the newer ones look prettier but it's almost a clone in every other way.
It's even worse for the EA sports installments like Madden.
They stripped out the single player Franchise modes in modern versions, instead focusing all their yearly efforts on Ultimate Team pay-to-win lootbox BS.
Some of the YouTubers lament and play the College Football titles with a lot more single player Franchise depth from X360 titles from 20 years back.
That's why I enjoy Retroachievements despite their recent failings (caved to trannies telling them to drop tracking for an edgy 4chan pokemon ROM hack)
You can deride the goal of accumulating meaningless internet points, but I enjoy the fact that it tracks what I've played, whether I beat it, and offers challenges to see new content in games I've already played a lot.
That combined with suggestions for games I haven't played yet (but already downloaded in a 32GB no-intro collection that includes basically everything released on a cartridge before the 3DS and Switch) has made it well worth my time.
They peaked with Double Dash. They really did. Hell I'd say that the GameCube was basically the peak of Nintendo.
I thought you wrote Mortal Kombat World and that it was giant open world. That would be fun. My favorite game the last few years was Breath of the Wild and I have wondered why we haven't had more.
Nintendo Good is a major thing. They take the console and make it amazing. I disliked the Zelda released for Wii, but the graphics were amazing and dreamlike. Too many designers even then applied graphics and "cinematic storytelling" and that was it. Nintendo has been doing this since the original Nintendo.
All video games require you to pres butan when a flash or ding ding happens. In this way all video gamez are clonez
Are you lost?
Gonna be that guy, but is there a lot of room for innovation in kart racing games? I think the genre has peaked, is the problem, so there's nothing left.
Adding free roam was certainly a symptom of "yeah, uh, we got nothing."
That's certainly a fair point. I guess the single biggest thing for me was that the graphics really haven't improved that much in 25 years. A few more polygons, that's it. Throw on some higher res textures and an upscaler, and I was shocked by how good a gamecube looked at 4k.
My kids love roam. They've just about 100%ed it. It has a lot of untapped potential. There are time trials, trick trials, etc., and it's just begging for competitive multiplayer. Then again, it's also almost identical to Tony Hawk 4's open world skating, just different in orders of magntitude.