Modern Gaming Sucks!!! Or Does It?

[sXeth]

Aren't all those shooters though? I generally don't play those so I'm not all that aware but basically how I see it is one shooter is always the big one, back in the day it was the halo series, then CoD, now fortnite. You always had some other stuff like medal of honor and battlefield and titanfall and overwatch and so on too, so I guess if you're saying those are the ones being done in I get what you mean, but I don't really think that is the case. It's just the stuff Epic would be making, other devs like bungie with Destiny 2 and whoever makes Overwatch 2 still make shooters don't they.

PAragon was a MOBA, so like League of Legends or DoTA. While some characters did have guns it would hardly be called a shooter and mechanically breaks down more like a team of Diablo characters fighting another team and trying to take their home base down.


Unreal Tournament is of course, a first person shooter. But its not by any means going to be confused with Fortnite BR, and has a very different approach to things then Destiny or CoD. Overwatch more specifically cribs (steals) everything it has gameplay wise from the main alternative to UT back in the day whcih was Team Fortress. I can comfortably say there's no Deathmatch/Arena based shooter that has anything resembling Unreal in the modern landscape other then if Quakes alive still in whatever niche hole it vanished into in Bethesda)


Fortnite, the original is a class based, team tower defense game vs hordes of NPC enemies. There is another sort of popular game called Orcs must Die that covers the tower defense but no so much the rest (or the more expansive building of your fort/tower. I don't know you can find anything in the AAA space even close to it. Warframe (very distantly) has some elements in some specific game modes)

 

[wings012]

I think what you suggest is definitely possible, but my view is that anyone who would be influenced in this manner wasn't worth anything in the long run anyways so nothing of value was lost. If you don't have enough passion for what you're making and can be swayed by fads to this degree (assuming you weren't itching to make a game in a genre like that but couldn't up to that point, which can also happen) then you likely weren't gonna make anything worth playing had the fad not occurred either way.

Nice words and all, but a lot of pretty big companies and a lot of money gets swayed by these fads and I think it can have a pretty big effect on the game industry at large. The passion of the developers matter not when the big money chasing corpo overlords get the final say. EA has done plenty of whacky things in pursuit of trends. Like Dead Space getting led down a silly path with sequels. I remember there was some sort of cancelled single player Star Wars game at EA as well.

I mean sure you can just say EA isn't worth shit, but damn that's a lot of money and talent going into stupid places.

The pursuit of live services has fucked more than a few beloved brands and companies in the past decade.

Aren't all those shooters though? I generally don't play those so I'm not all that aware but basically how I see it is one shooter is always the big one, back in the day it was the halo series, then CoD, now fortnite. You always had some other stuff like medal of honor and battlefield and titanfall and overwatch and so on too, so I guess if you're saying those are the ones being done in I get what you mean, but I don't really think that is the case. It's just the stuff Epic would be making, other devs like bungie with Destiny 2 and whoever makes Overwatch 2 still make shooters don't they.

Grouping all shooters together would be simplifying things a bit. And just like you said earlier on how something like Fortnite is pulling in a totally different crowd, it's not really appealing to the players that would play something like Unreal Tournament.

I personally think nothing of value was lost with Paragon, I tried it and it was a janky ass mess from art direction to gameplay. But it was mostly a weird experimental MOBA. But well, it did have a fanbase of sorts and maybe something could've been done with it.

The original Fortnite was some sort of coop zombie survival crafting thing. I guess there are other games that fit the mold these days(though nothing on the AAA scale that I know). But there was an early access buy in, and there was definitely a fanbase looking forward to the original Fortnite.

Unreal Tournament was meant to harken back to the days of arena shooters(90s/2000s) and mods. The way it was advertised anyway was that it the developers were going to work closely with modders and whatnot. Community dedicated servers rather than matchmaking. A game that could be played however you wanted to play it. In a world where all multiplayer games are under the yoke of the developers/publishers who decide how the players should play their game, this could've been a nice return to form. But alas.

But maybe not all is lost. Halo Infinite managed to launch its Forge mode as cursed as the game is, and it has led to an influx of crazy custom modes and fan maps. The whole arena shooter genre has been on shaky ground anyway I suppose, so it's hard to say if it would've worked out even if they didn't have the success of Fortnite. But I think I'd like to have seen it taken far enough that enough of a community could've formed and then just kept it going or something even if Epic themselves decided to neglect it later on.

And going back to how you referred to how one big shooter replaces the previous one - like how there was Halo, then CoD, then Fortnite etc. In a way fans of Halo were totally left out to dry with the coming of CoD. I think this is a case of CoD actually getting a whole new market, but Halo was then helmed by a new studio which attempted to chase CoD's tail about the place. Which led to Halo fans having suffered over a decade, and are still suffering. The existence of the big new things these days can affect market diversity, so I can't really blame people for having some kind of resentment towards new trends even if it ain't the most productive thing to do.

 

[Dreiko]

Nice words and all, but a lot of pretty big companies and a lot of money gets swayed by these fads and I think it can have a pretty big effect on the game industry at large. The passion of the developers matter not when the big money chasing corpo overlords get the final say. EA has done plenty of whacky things in pursuit of trends. Like Dead Space getting led down a silly path with sequels. I remember there was some sort of cancelled single player Star Wars game at EA as well.

I mean sure you can just say EA isn't worth shit, but damn that's a lot of money and talent going into stupid places.

The pursuit of live services has fucked more than a few beloved brands and companies in the past decade.

No I totally agree with all that, I just don't think you really have to play games made by big companies that are AAA and so on. There's so much cool stuff made from smaller studios out there. I dunno, it may be due to genre, you seldom see a AAA fighting game or Jrpg so I'm just used to lower production values and don't really care for the attention to graphics or detail that something like for example red dead redemption 2 has. I appreciate and enjoy it, of course, but I can take it or leave it.

Grouping all shooters together would be simplifying things a bit. And just like you said earlier on how something like Fortnite is pulling in a totally different crowd, it's not really appealing to the players that would play something like Unreal Tournament.

I personally think nothing of value was lost with Paragon, I tried it and it was a janky ass mess from art direction to gameplay. But it was mostly a weird experimental MOBA. But well, it did have a fanbase of sorts and maybe something could've been done with it.

The original Fortnite was some sort of coop zombie survival crafting thing. I guess there are other games that fit the mold these days(though nothing on the AAA scale that I know). But there was an early access buy in, and there was definitely a fanbase looking forward to the original Fortnite.

Unreal Tournament was meant to harken back to the days of arena shooters(90s/2000s) and mods. The way it was advertised anyway was that it the developers were going to work closely with modders and whatnot. Community dedicated servers rather than matchmaking. A game that could be played however you wanted to play it. In a world where all multiplayer games are under the yoke of the developers/publishers who decide how the players should play their game, this could've been a nice return to form. But alas.

But maybe not all is lost. Halo Infinite managed to launch its Forge mode as cursed as the game is, and it has led to an influx of crazy custom modes and fan maps. The whole arena shooter genre has been on shaky ground anyway I suppose, so it's hard to say if it would've worked out even if they didn't have the success of Fortnite. But I think I'd like to have seen it taken far enough that enough of a community could've formed and then just kept it going or something even if Epic themselves decided to neglect it later on.

And going back to how you referred to how one big shooter replaces the previous one - like how there was Halo, then CoD, then Fortnite etc. In a way fans of Halo were totally left out to dry with the coming of CoD. I think this is a case of CoD actually getting a whole new market, but Halo was then helmed by a new studio which attempted to chase CoD's tail about the place. Which led to Halo fans having suffered over a decade, and are still suffering. The existence of the big new things these days can affect market diversity, so I can't really blame people for having some kind of resentment towards new trends even if it ain't the most productive thing to do.

Oh definitely, I didn't mean to group all shooters. In my mind there's like...4ish large categories. There's the old school quake doom UT style "fun shooter", the story driven single player focused stuff like Bioshock and Vanquish, and I would actually put Halo in there cause the first two games which I played back in the day had a pretty great single player mode, but they're more like a cross between this group and the next one, which is the super hyper competitive ones like CoD, titanfall, csgo and Overwatch that are mainly out there for multiplayer, I guess you could add UT here too, and then finally you have the battle royales like apex and fortnite and a ton of others that I'm not even aware of that are likely trying to ape fortnite.


I mainly gravitate towards the first two groups, only really played the recent Doom games as far as FPSs go, but Bioshock is def my fav from the bunch. I haven't followed Halo much but since bungie abandoned it I expected it to be shit, hell if anything I'd think people would just play Destiny since it's made by them, instead of following the soulless husk of halo.

 

[Phoenixmgs]

Save it for the hot takes, and I don't particularly care. Plenty of FPS better than that.

I meant similar style multiplayers released SINCE Warfighter was released. I think only Siege can be argued as being better.

 

[BrawlMan]

I meant similar style multiplayers released SINCE Warfighter was released. I think only Siege can be argued as being better.

Yeah, I already stopped caring for this conversation.

 

[CriticalGaming]

I dunno, it may be due to genre, you seldom see a AAA fighting game or Jrpg

What? These are almost exclusively AAA. What do you mean? Is Final Fantasy not AAA? Street Fighter? MK? Tekken? Those are huge games.

 

[Dreiko]

What? These are almost exclusively AAA. What do you mean? Is Final Fantasy not AAA? Street Fighter? MK? Tekken? Those are huge games.

Nah, you just listed the exceptions. Also SF is hardly AAA, 6 may be trying to get to that level but 4 and 5 definitely weren't. 4 was an arcade game ported to the consoles and 5 was an early access game that eventually became halfway decent like 5 years after it came out.

And hell, even if I were to grant you SF, do you know how many other fighters are out there? I currently play like 8 other ones and none of them are SF or MK or Tekken. And with Jrpgs the disparity is even greater.


Suffice it to say, an easy 90% of the worthwhile offerings in both genres are AA or lower.

 

[BrawlMan]

Nah, you just listed the exceptions. Also SF is hardly AAA, 6 may be trying to get to that level but 4 and 5 definitely weren't. 4 was an arcade game ported to the consoles and 5 was an early access game that eventually became halfway decent like 5 years after it came out.

This is a big disagreement there. SF was always AAA. I know Capcom had their fuck ups with SFV, but it does count. It started as a $60 AAA beta, yet it was the only thing saving them (well that and Monster Hunter World) from going broke when they made that console exclusive deal with Sony. While SFIV was a port of an arcade game, it was charged at $60 at the time for the vanilla release and was not on older console hardware in mind. Capcom did their usual thing, and released later editions at discounted price and added extra modes, characters, costumes, etc. The Marvel vs. Capcom games are AAA, even Infinite for as much as I dislike it.

Suffice it to say, an easy 90% of the worthwhile offerings in both genres are AA or lower.

This I agree. Doesn't help that with all of Capcom's screw ups, they were no longer top dog, and left a huge void for other fighters to fill. Killer Instinct (2013) being one of them. KI2013 is basically an XBLA game modified to run on XONE and PC. Made a killing in the fighting game market, and even lead to Capcom copying some of KI's mechanics into SFV. V-Trigger is basically V's version of the Instinct Bar from KI2013.

 

[Dreiko]

This is a big disagreement there. SF was always AAA. I know Capcom had their fuck ups with SFV, but it does count. It started as a $60 AAA beta, yet it was the only thing saving them (well that and Monster Hunter World) from going broke when they made that console exclusive deal with Sony. While SFIV was a port of an arcade game, it was charged at $60 at the time for the vanilla release and was not on older console hardware in mind. Capcom did their usual thing, and released later editions at discounted price and added extra modes, characters, costumes, etc. The Marvel vs. Capcom games are AAA, even Infinite for as much as I dislike it.


This I agree. Doesn't help that with all of Capcom's screw ups, they were no longer top dog, and left a huge void for other fighters to fill. Killer Instinct (2013) being one of them. KI2013 is basically an XBLA game modified to run on XONE and PC. Made a killing in the fighting game market, and even lead to Capcom copying some of KI's mechanics into SFV. V-Trigger is basically V's version of the Instinct Bar from KI2013.

AAA is more about how much a game costs to develop than how much it is sold for. Tons of games sell for 60 bucks new but they're not AAA or anything close to that, and they sell maybe 100k copies yet manage to remain sustainable. They're not indies either so they don't get discounted but they're in a middle ground of production values. Think of something like the Ys series, super responsive and hype action gameplay, epic story with awesome voice actors, but the production values are clearly nowhere near something like an AC game or something like that and the dev team is like 50 people too. Or hell, the recent Melty Blood is another great example, that also released at 60 bucks, but the dev studio is like 11 or 14 people total lol.

 

[BrawlMan]

AAA is more about how much a game costs to develop than how much it is sold for. Tons of games sell for 60 bucks new but they're not AAA or anything close to that, and they sell maybe 100k copies yet manage to remain sustainable.

I know that. Every AAA game has her own types of budgets and quotas, but if you're going to charge $60 or the standard price, then that's AAA in my opinion. Every Street Fighter game that came out was charged at a high price. Even on the Sega Saturn and PS1, any Street Fighter that came out usually was charged $50. Same thing on PS2. Capcom vs. SNK2 was released at $50 at launch.

Think of something like the Ys series, super responsive and hype action gameplay, epic story with awesome voice actors, but the production values are clearly nowhere near something like an AC game or something like that and the dev team is like 50 people too.

You don't have to tell me. I already know that. There are AAA products out there that deliver to a niche audience that are made on a lower budget, but still charge the standard pricing as if it has much funding as the next Sony exclusive. Grasshopper are a niche company, but they've always charged a standard $50 to $60 with one or two exception. Plus, they're what I consider a small AAA company at this point. Especially with games like Let It Die selling above well, and getting a sequel/spinoff. Platinum is definitely AAA, even though they're a more niche company as well. Their games got budget. Usually.

 

[Gordon_4]

AAA is more about how much a game costs to develop than how much it is sold for. Tons of games sell for 60 bucks new but they're not AAA or anything close to that, and they sell maybe 100k copies yet manage to remain sustainable. They're not indies either so they don't get discounted but they're in a middle ground of production values. Think of something like the Ys series, super responsive and hype action gameplay, epic story with awesome voice actors, but the production values are clearly nowhere near something like an AC game or something like that and the dev team is like 50 people too. Or hell, the recent Melty Blood is another great example, that also released at 60 bucks, but the dev studio is like 11 or 14 people total lol.

Street Fighter and Tekken qualify as AAA by virtue of prestige and lineage alone, my dude.

 

[sXeth]

I feel like the Street Fighter/Capcom argument is really just more related to Japanese companies and culture having a more conservative bent in general.


Almost all the Japanese AAA companies (Capcom, Nintendo, Bandai, et al) tend to mostly run in more budgeted and focused experiences. The exception is Sony (who are more internationally flavored, the heads of their big studios aren't even Japanese) and Square (even then, other then FF a lot of their properties have the same approach, and its their more Westernized projects (like Tomb Raider) that get the treatment.


Resident Evil's been Capcoms only really big western-AAA spectacle high budget thing, and even that didn't really creep into the series until it started gaining a bit less of a cult niche with the success of the movies.

 

[Dreiko]

I feel like the Street Fighter/Capcom argument is really just more related to Japanese companies and culture having a more conservative bent in general.


Almost all the Japanese AAA companies (Capcom, Nintendo, Bandai, et al) tend to mostly run in more budgeted and focused experiences. The exception is Sony (who are more internationally flavored, the heads of their big studios aren't even Japanese) and Square (even then, other then FF a lot of their properties have the same approach, and its their more Westernized projects (like Tomb Raider) that get the treatment.


Resident Evil's been Capcoms only really big western-AAA spectacle high budget thing, and even that didn't really creep into the series until it started gaining a bit less of a cult niche with the success of the movies.

I would count DMC and the recent Monhun games as AAA cause they are basically the pinnacles of those genres. But AAA officially just means stuff with insane budgets like GTA and the like.


I think it is more useful to have the nuance of counting things like, I dunno, Disgaea or something as AA, despite being the main franchise that put nipponichi on the map, cause that way you judge them more fairly and do so while being mindful of the lower budget they had to rely on to put out what they managed to.

 

[sXeth]

I would count DMC and the recent Monhun games as AAA cause they are basically the pinnacles of those genres. But AAA officially just means stuff with insane budgets like GTA and the like.


I think it is more useful to have the nuance of counting things like, I dunno, Disgaea or something as AA, despite being the main franchise that put nipponichi on the map, cause that way you judge them more fairly and do so while being mindful of the lower budget they had to rely on to put out what they managed to.

Monster Hunter World vs Rise is a pretty good example really. You can tell right out that RIse is not the Western AAA sensibilities that went into World, and not just because it was on Switch first. Cinematics are way scaled back, theres not nearly the amount of voice acting. The campaign (such as it is) even just kind of randomly switches into the multiplayer mode halfway through. Even the maps (which are upcycled old MH maps with the loading screens taken out) are less broadly spannning mini open world setups. Cinematic turf wars are few and far between with the mechanics focused (and using all the standard monster attacks and animation assets) wyvern riding replacing it.

 

[Dreiko]

Monster Hunter World vs Rise is a pretty good example really. You can tell right out that RIse is not the Western AAA sensibilities that went into World, and not just because it was on Switch first. Cinematics are way scaled back, theres not nearly the amount of voice acting. The campaign (such as it is) even just kind of randomly switches into the multiplayer mode halfway through. Even the maps (which are upcycled old MH maps with the loading screens taken out) are less broadly spannning mini open world setups. Cinematic turf wars are few and far between with the mechanics focused (and using all the standard monster attacks and animation assets) wyvern riding replacing it.

Yeah I mainly put in time in World to be fair so that's more what I had in mind. I think the Switch really is to blame here but either way you have the right idea. Rise is closer to the pre-World monhun games, ones that mainly came out on handhelds and the Wii, which were not quite AAA.

 

[BrawlMan]

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[BrawlMan]

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[BrawlMan]

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[BrawlMan]

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[BrawlMan]

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