I love long complicated games, like breath of the wild, but I think the world also needs more concise games, those 20-40 hour masterpieces that keep you wrapped up without having to memorize 3600 pages of back story to remember where you left off.
What the studios (especially Nintendo) don’t understand is you can’t charge the same ~$60 for both games. People don’t hate shorter simpler games, they just hate paying the same price for less content.
Right now, Nintendo is selling the Switch version of Link’s Awakening for only $10 less than TOTK ($60 vs $70). That’s right, a remake of a 20+ year old game with a pretty limited story is selling for almost the same as the largest most complex and expansive game Nintendo has ever produced.
I don’t know why they’re so fixated on matching prices between games that took orders of magnitude different amounts of effort to produce.
the world also needs more concise games
Yeah!
those 20-40 hour masterpieces
…wait, concise?
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Oh definitely agreed, just picking on Nintendo because that’s what the post is about
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Yeah, bit they sell less and less these days. I think one FIFA was on PS+ about 18monyhs after release. The most recent one was less than a year. They can only milk so much.
“And games will be less fun of course”
Has Nintendo slipped in quality? Their practices aren’t the great, but when it comes down to it, they have some of the most consistently high quality games.
I thought BotW was pretty mediocre. They basically took the “bigger and better” strategy to one of their iconic games and made it “bigger and worse.”
It’s an unpopular opinion apparently, but that’s my take. Hopefully it’s notb the start of a trend of Nintendo following other AAA studio trends.
Mario wonder sucked
There’s one thing they did right that most other open world games do wrong: The map starts blank and it fills in as you explore. Others in the genre, you’ll Ubisoft that tower and then it fills in with all the icons of things to do here, so now follow the minimap to them all. In BotW, you Ubisoft the tower, you get the topology map, and now it’s up to you to find stuff in it, and when you do you get an icon on the map telling you you’ve done it.
I’m pretty sure the Rito quest wasn’t complete in time for launch so they had to rush to throw something together. The Hebra region is distinctly empty, I’m sure we were going to have to go on an arctic adventure to find Teba’s favorite cuttlefish bone or something, but they didn’t have time to finish it because the Switch was coming out so they said ‘Fuck it, build something that runs and ship it.’
There isn’t much variety in the enemy types, a lot of encounters are monotonous, a lot of the systems are so basic that they’re easy to break, and they were so afraid of telling a story out of order that the game doesn’t have a story of its own; “Link fucks around all over Hyrule for awhile then decides to defeat Ganon.” Meanwhile it tells you a different, somewhat related story.
Then there’s TotK, which they tried to make a sequel to BotW out of BotW’s bones, and it didn’t work as well.
They also have some of the longest tenured pros of game design and programming in the industry in its entirety… something sadly far more rare outside of Nintendo… but especially Japan.
Shigeru Miyamoto, for example, has been designing at Nintendo for literally 4+ decades at this point.
Turns out you can master a craft after doing it for a majority of your adult life.
But - in the US at least - the executives at publicly traded game companies would rather shut down literal smash hit dev studios like the guys who made Hi Fi Rush than cultivate a few master class devs of their own over a few decades…
Anyway…Have y’all tried Animal Well?
It’s on my list. Finishing inscryption first. Is it good?
I’m only an hour in, but I’m getting masterpiece vibes
That’s awesome to hear. I’ll have to check it out
What he’s saying is that major studios are locked playing chicken with each other, and that the industry is going to remember the 1983 crash fondly in comparison with what’s going to happen.
It has never been easier to make A Game. The only thing getting harder is meeting shallow expectations imposed by empty suits. What a small team can accomplish in a few months keeps expanding, and unless you chase some zillion-dollar trends, what they can do is plenty.
Shareholder puppets like Microsoft should figure this out - they demand instant turnaround. They own enough studios to have several of them try cranking out six games in two years. If you want it to happen faster, use fewer people. I dunno, build a friggin’ pipeline for indie devs to slap together a killer idea that gets fixed-up, art’d, and polished by different teams. Then you can sell more things to more people for more chances to trip into a brand new trend. You don’t have to perform ritual sacrifice when a decade-long project makes a shitload of money! You can still get angry when the actual profits are less than the number you made up in your head! Just-- put money behind cool things that cost $20, instead of constructing situations where people have to spend $140 each or you lose. It’s like a fuckin’ Mad TV skit. Spend less, sell more.
There are too many breakout indie hits developed by one person or a small team that prove this isn’t true across the industry.
AAA development may be that way because there are higher expectations, just like blockbuster movies invest heavily in special effects and A-list celebs. But at the end of the day gamers just want to be entertained.
I think that one could also say something similar about Hollywood, though there maybe I’d agree that scale is more important.
Terminator II was, for its time, pretty expensive. I’d be sad to not have Terminator II – it was a pretty good movie.
But Twelve Angry Men is a pretty good movie too. It has essentially no special effects. The costumes are mostly everyday business casual. Most of the movie takes place in a conference room, with a very small part in a courtroom and a bathroom. I don’t know what its budget is, but it has to be simply tiny in comparison.
Exactly! I especially like your point about T2. I don’t think it’s wrong to put a lot of money behind a AAA game, but there needs to always be a balance weighted toward the creative/entertainment value (whether it’s innovative game mechanics or story driven).
Once that balance shifts to the business side by focusing on recouping the investment is when a project is at risk for not being received well.
I think all gamers are ok with studios making a profit on their games, but don’t try to fleece us.
Among the games I’ve recently played and enjoyed:
- Nova Drift
- Rule the Waves 3
- Dominions 6
Those are all one- or two-man efforts.
I also like some games with much larger teams, but I’m not sure that things are simply getting bigger.
They’re definitely getting bigger, but not with anything meaningful. I’m playing through Cyberpunk 2077 and it definitely feels like a lot of the side missions are unnecessary filler to pad out an excuse for the major names they got involved. I’m guessing other AAA are the same, “we need to do more than last time” whether it’s impactful to the story and experience or not.
You look at the credits to a lot of games these days and notice that the vast majority of people are in the various art departments or management with, like, 3 people programming it all and the same or fewer people in QA. And it can take upwards of an HOUR to get through all the credits because there are THOUSANDS of people working on it.
Small teams deliver more concentrated quality, IMO.
I don’t know if I can reduce it to the programmers making the game, though. Like…yeah, the most-replayable games I’ve played rely heavily on the code, and less on the assets.
But there are also games where the art is pretty critical that I enjoy. Like, imagine games in the Myst series without the art and sound. Like, none of the code is particularly impressive. The puzzles are…okay, I guess. You play a game like that for the art and sound.
Or Lumines. I mean, yeah, they had to get the gameplay loop right, but technically, it’s a very simple game, just a falling-blocks game. But the audio and to a lesser degree, the appearance, is important.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bboWlUppp-s
Rez is maybe a little fancier codewise, but it’s just a rail shooter. It’s really about experiencing the art and music.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZLHB5e90pU
And I definitely did enjoy those. In the case of the latter two, those were not AAA games, didn’t have huge teams creating assets, but it was still really the assets that made the game.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=bboWlUppp-s
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=gZLHB5e90pU
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
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how about no?
Because they ban us from changing the source code: that’s what they won’t tell you.
What does one have to do with the other?
Just as long as they don’t hop onto the procedurally generated bandwagon. While I appreciate the attempts at making unique gameplay while focusing less on level generation, those types of games end up making me feel like a hamster on a wheel.
I think that many roguelikes or Minecraft wouldn’t really work without procedurally-generated worlds, and that they work fine there.
I think that it’s more that procedurally-generated world still isn’t a substitute for handcrafted world. You can’t just get infinite handcrafted world for free with procedural generation.
I agree on Minecraft. For that play style, it works.
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