GigaBowser
The bear of bad news
Where are the games with deep physics, interactive environments, incredible AI? It's a sad state when it's certain indie developers that are going the furthest to push this aspect of gaming. It's a sad state that Fear, nearly a 20 year old game has AI that puts nearly all modern games to shame. It's a sad state when Guerrilla: Red Faction still has better destructibility than anything on the market 12 years later. It's a sad state that a Nintendo game (BOTW) released in 2017 on inferior hardware probably has the best use of physics and environmental interactivity of any game ever released. It's not that these games were incredibly expensive to make, the developers just allocated more time into trying to make them.... you know? FUN.
We traded all of that in because the DF console war crowd just couldn't let go of "teh graphics, framerates, and resolutions" to besmirch each others consoles which has very much shaped our current predicament.
And yes it made a huge difference, companies in the PS4/Xbone/Wii U generation were absolutely crippled if their games fell short in head to head comparisons and didn't tick the right boxes with resolution and frame-rate.
What we're left with are graphics focused games with massively bloated budgets that have become GaaS nightmares just to make a return in investment. There's a lot fewer of them and there is a lot less risk in terms of genre (so generic as well). To make matters worse, I don't even feel the games look substantially better. There are exceptions here and there, but I can count them on one hand.
Maybe the industry was headed in this direction anyway, but I can't help but think we played ourselves.
We traded all of that in because the DF console war crowd just couldn't let go of "teh graphics, framerates, and resolutions" to besmirch each others consoles which has very much shaped our current predicament.
And yes it made a huge difference, companies in the PS4/Xbone/Wii U generation were absolutely crippled if their games fell short in head to head comparisons and didn't tick the right boxes with resolution and frame-rate.
What we're left with are graphics focused games with massively bloated budgets that have become GaaS nightmares just to make a return in investment. There's a lot fewer of them and there is a lot less risk in terms of genre (so generic as well). To make matters worse, I don't even feel the games look substantially better. There are exceptions here and there, but I can count them on one hand.
Maybe the industry was headed in this direction anyway, but I can't help but think we played ourselves.