I think the last AAA I tried was Baldur’s Gate 3.

Pretty good tbh.

Like a gambling addiction if you think about it. “No no no, THIS will be THE game that will make us Fortnite money!!!”

Even then, turn your brain off and chill only fits a certain market segment. Sure, it’s a large market segment, just look at how popular the Marvel films are, but it’s not the entire market, and just like with gaming when something truly compelling comes along it tends to shake things up a bit.

Suppose this is why Marvel films just don’t work for me. Like, I can appreciate the artistic talent that went into things, I can appreciate that they’ve got impressive budgets and teams working on it, but narratively they kind of suck.

Sat down and watched Antman with a friend recently. I liked the moments the main character had with his kid. I liked it when the step-dad showed equal care for the kid as the father, and them sort of resolving some of their differences in that moment. That was nice.

I’m still bothered by the whole “when you shrink you retain your mass, so you’re essentially like a bullet” part, and how that concept got completely shit-canned for the rest of the film. You can’t just punt an ant-sized object weighing 90 kg, yet I think there was a moment where he literally got flicked away. Why even bother with some scientific-sounding BS if you’re not going to adhere to it?

Guess you’re just not supposed to think about it. But then, what is the point? I don’t read books to not think, I read books to experience something new, and have something to think about. Film works the same way for me.

It’s interesting because the live-service formula is kind of antithetical to what they want. They essentially want a low-effort low-cost perpetual money-printing machine. They really should just invest in actual money printing machines and churn out fake money, because that’d be a more successful endeavour.

The live-service games that live on do so because of a constant investment and commitment to the game and the community it harbours. The moment people think the writing’s on the walls, they jump ship.

It’s just so bizarre to me that they want people to invest time and more importantly, money into the game, when they themselves aren’t willing to do so.

Yeah it’s always funny to see these quotes about games being bad, from people who make games of questionable quality

Meanwhile I’m still very happily playing Neverwinter Nights & Civilization 4.

It’s weird to think of a top-down historically-isometric RPG as “AAA”. We’ve come a long way, baby.

BG3 is technically an indie game if you go by the literal definition of the term!

Have they considered not spending half a billion dollars giving hair strands shadow effects, and instead developing interesting stories?

Losing the hardware constraints made devs less innovative too. The Crash Bandicoot devs had to hack the PlayStation’s system memory allocation to squeeze a bit more out of the machine so their game could be better.

The live-service games that live on do so because of a constant investment and commitment to the game and the community it harbours. The moment people think the writing’s on the walls, they jump ship.

This especially. Just as an example, I sunk way too much time into Destiny 2, and recently picked up Warframe after putting D2 away last year, and the difference between the studios behind them both is night and day. The former feels like an abusive relationship, built on constant FOMO, removing content, and constantly skirting around the community’s numerous issues with the game’s systems and sandbox (and that’s all on top of Bungie/Sony execs treating the actual devs like garbage).

The latter feels like a game where the players are genuinely treated as the game’s lifeblood and rather than nickel and dime them for every last thing, the devs give them what they want, and the devs get to make what they want to make. Not to mention literally everything in the game minus community-created cosmetics can be earned without spending anything at all.

These sorts of comparisons are all over the place. PoE2 compared to Diablo 4 or post-Krafton Last Epoch for example. You can’t just pump out a live service game and hope shit sticks, you need to foster a community around it.

If they really try to outprice the common user in an attempt to drive people to subscription based services, I will simply not go with that - I’d rather just keep playing what I have. And I think I have already enough games until the end of my life - damn, even my PS2 collection can keep me entertained for a decade.

Thats why I love the ps1 and og consoles in general. For one. Yes, they had to work their asses off. For two, THE GAMES WERE (usually) FINISHED BY THE TIME YOU PLAYED IT.

The model of make game-test game-release game-DONE was tried and true, and something rarely experienced today.

There are amazing games today of course. But still, we have definitely shifted and I dont prefer it for the most part.

Im still waiting for them to make something TRULY original again, like Majestic.

But that takes creativity and hard work, something massive corporations and capitalism will shove down so far you forget they ever existed.

I don’t think the industry has the willpower to spend less money. They’re always going to chase the highest graphical quality.

I think Digital Extremes, at least currently, is still very aware of what made them successful.

John Bain for example spoke out about the games potential very early, earning them a big influx of players, and they’ve previously stated that Warframe wouldn’t have been a thing if not for him. I guess it can be particularly contrasted with the fact that Warframe was kind of a Hail Mary project for the studio. They’d pitched it around for a while but no publisher responded positively. When they were running out of money they just said “fuck it” and went to work on it, publisher be damned.

I’ve been playing on and off for years now, since around the release of The Second Dream. It makes me really happy to see that they’re doing well. I hope they’ll continue to do well, and do well by the community.

I don’t know if this is the best applicatioon of their genius tbh. If you’re not spending time fighting with tools, you spend it making stuff you want to make.

Sometimes you get both. And then it’s really special (especially 8 years later when you can turn the settings up), see RDR2.

Can’t think of a game that really needed more than like 10GB of RAM. It’s all VRAM for textures and even then 8GB is enough