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.