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.
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.