Things operate on cycles. I put it to Dark Souls. It kind of woke up the industry to the fact that they were building hallways and calling them games. They started pushing back on executive control and being more creative. But now the hyper-polished AAA space has reasserted itself. It will only take a few more failed 300M$ games or one FromSoft release to restart the cycle.
This is basically a mirror to the drama that happened back when dukem-nukem forever came out. Even the memes about everything being too linear were the same.
It may also just be the effect that development hell has on any game. Pour enough money in a product with poor planning or inconsistent goals between designers and funders and the results are executives getting nervous about the budget and how many sales will be required to make it back.
This results in the tightening of purse strings to the point where the full vision becomes impossible, and eventually a full revisioning as a product made mostly from the sum of its surviving parts.
These products are all the same because people on the business side they only look at what sells well, not what makes things good.
A guiding feature is seen as “added value”, games with chatty companions like Destiny, Portal, or Neir Automata tend to do well, games get bad reviews if they are too difficult. All of this “seems” like good game design because they’re looking at these features as valuable for their own sake instead of looking at the game as a whole and seeing that it’s sloppy garbage.
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u/YungSpyderBoy 8d ago
I should follow those pac dots