The Absolute State of Modern Gaming
This blog is outdated, please take as a grain of salt
1
Why there's is so many games that were completely broken at launch? Cyberpunk 2077? Back4Blood? New Pokémon? New Grand Theft Auto Trilogy? It's kinda becoming a trend to create a half-baked game, then patch it later with god knows how many gigabytes worth of patches and updates.
Back in the day, there was no such thing as updating a game, Compact Discs and Game Cartridge almost 100% contained the full game that was extensively playtested to be nearly perfect at launch. Of course, the ones who couldn't be polished due to some disturbance, got forgotten, and that's is completely fair, specially nowadays with the accessibility of game development.
The very revolutionary idea of updating a game and evolving itself became one of the very weapon of destruction of this industry, which is baffling. Now, I'm too young. I didn't have the pleasure to play the Nintendo64 as a kid, even if I did, my family would still be unable to afford it. However, I did have the pleasure to play Super Nintendo, PlayStation 2 and a little bit of PlayStation 1 and Mega Drive. The joy I felt and still feel playing such games, is unmatched to any new form of modern gaming. My favorites games from Super Nintendo since then is The Mask and Donkey Kong Country 3.
While this can be the nostalgia factor, I still sometimes pick a game from PlayStation 2 I've never played before and still got some joy out of it.
indie games
2
Oh yeah, Indie gaming. Indie game development is notably better than AAA with gaming development by the simple fact that everything is made with more love ❤️ and much more with the gamer in mind rather than the soulless 'do-as-I-say' kinda of workspace found in AAA corporations. The recent Stray: the game that you play as cat is kinda cool, not outstandingly awesome in the writing but still has some fun puzzles and gameplay as far as I can tell. I really like when games detaches you from reality, mesmerizes you in the screen for what is happening in the game which Stray does pretty nicely, I think this is ✨ immersion. ✨
- Quick Fun Fact about Stray: There is many posters in the walls in-game which apparently are in a alien-looking language. I tried to decipher them, expecting extra development of the world because I was very into the game atmosphere and I wanted to learn more about this world. Instead, I was greeted with "Lorem Ipsum". This kinda broke my heart .... how ... disappointing ... that's okay the game still cool 🥲
However, of course, sometimes not even indie developers get away with the "lazy" factor. Game development was never so easy, there is plenty resources and tutorials to get started, plenty of free development tools like the beast that is Unreal Engine 5. It was never been so easy to make games and still you can find indie games poorly made, but that's okay!!
There is nothing wrong in getting something wrong because that's essentially what learning is about; but it's another thing when this supposedly "learning developer" introduces monetization in their game, either by micro-transactions or by selling the game for half-price or more. Even more problematic when the developer fail to acknowledge that their game won't be the last intellectual propriety they'll ever make, there is plenty of space to get this system done, and for getting things wrong, so you don't have to make mistakes in the future. You can argue that, well ... this is indeed a mistake that is being committed by the developer, fair enough, yeah makes sense.
Of course I'm not generalizing here, there is good modern games like the recent Wi-Fi Rush released few weeks ago. I wish I could know more though. Still, it baffles me that those some of those bad games makes a ton of money out of pure incompetence and laziness. The music being the only consistent part of the game that actually slaps most of the time.
online-only games
3
Worst than those games, it's the games that are only has a online component. I'm talking about Valorant, Overwatch, Dota. Things can get greedy here, considering that many of those intellectual proprieties uses many techniques from mobile games.
Let's use Genshin Impact for example: This game is visually super pleasant to look at, the UI and animations, with giant world to explore and the world-building it's pretty good as well, it quite literally is a 'BOTW neuron activation' to me. I'm actually sexually aroused by these kind of open-world survival-ish games being sarcastic, could be true However, the game crumbles on itself when we dig a little deeper, having one of the worst game design I've experienced in a game.
4
Now that's a gorgeous landscape screenshot. When you're playing Genshin Impact, you're first aroused by the ⭐handsome looking guys⭐, of course. More importantly, the way you progress in the game is the purest form of Gacha. It's all about wasting all your time grinding to get characters/artifacts that a paying-player can get in absolutely no-time. Even if you pay for the game, it eventually the game will become boring because you still have to go in domains to do the the exact. same. thing. It's not that the writing of the story holds up well anyway, with most of it being simplistic and sometimes generic with the narrative. It's super repetitive and a ginormous waste of potential. The music of this game though, is actually so well-made and amazing that it outstands the actual quality of the game design.
the ability to update games is controversial
I have a bold suggestion to game updating that — at least in my perspective — would smooth this out a little, of course that may be hit or miss, it's an idea.
- After reaching the proposed release date of the game in a given platform (PlayStation, Xbox, Steam, etc.) the game will be out to the public to play;
- After release, the game will be in a judging state UNLESS the game is early-access or its main component is online_mode;
- When a game is in it's judging state, the developer cannot update, nor hot-fix the game and it should remain locked for at least 21 days. Players and Critics are able to make reviews of the game during this time, giving their impressions and their verdicts about it;
- After the 21 days, the developer can finally patch their game as normal. Only this time, all the reviews of the game will already be out, revealing the absolute state of the game. It could be only a masterpiece, or a disaster.
What is the idea here? The idea is to create artificial limitation. With the developer being unable to fix the problems immediately, this would make more pressure into lead developers and a shift of attention towards play-testing, with more fear being thrown into the release date. Gone the days of day-one patch.
Now I know, I know. Artificial limitation is always a pain for everybody and in this case it wouldn't be different. Imagine if the developer ship their game with a game-breaking bug, with their players being unable to proceed or continue playing the game. It would be embarrassing for the developer, for the publisher, for the platform where the game sits, and for the player. No one can do anything, besides of waiting, and making memes. That's exactly the point! Creating actual consequences and big losses for developers who rushed their games. While you may say that is a bit extreme, remember that the way it is now. Developers can get away with their blunders by simply releasing an anime (!!!) of their game (cof cof Cyberpunk), getting the world distracted from their disastrous decisions.
The first problem with this approach is that there is ways to get around it. Game developers can just use their own game client like good ol' times and ditch major platforms all together (that's pretty hard, but not impossible). For example, you can't play Grand Theft Auto V without the Rockstar Games Launcher even if you fire it up with Steam or Epic Games. It's a client and intermediate-client that can be used to bypass this limitation. The second problem is that it may encourage developers to release more online-only games out to get around this system, even more true when is more probable to profit out with a game that is skin-focused with Battle Pass with quick dopamine hits rather than a single-player game you spent 15+ hours playing to see a story and interaction between fictional characters.
conclusion
At the end of the day, gamers — at least currently, don't get me wrong, I really want this to change — always suppress bad developer behavior and continue giving money to them. I don't think the mans' in suit care about us. You — the consumer — perhaps might be only a statistic for those at the top and this applies to many other unrelated industries as well.
An old thought is ... why do everything that is older is better for some reason, even though we have the cutting-edge technology to produce newer ones? Well, you could say that things just become a little bit harder to get up to the people's standards but — at least for entertainment — I guess all can be explained with the rising of the business and money-oriented goals. The goal is not to make it fun, entertaining, dedicated to a friend, to a lover or anything anymore. The goal to apply the most effective tactile to get more money out of you, the consumer. That is apparently not changing anytime soon.
Stray, image from GameInformer↩
Overwatch 2, image from GamingBolt↩