By Tadej Kupčič, Project Director, Programmer
A couple of days ago, I was getting so hyped up and excited for this year's E3, I couldn't even sleep. It's the first E3 after all three major consoles were released and I was hoping for some new IPs (intellectual properties) since now is the best time to announce those. New consoles are more powerful, meaning you can implement mechanics you weren't able to before, and new IPs are perfect for that.
After the shows were over, I was feeling a bit... disappointed. Yes, sure, they showed a couple of great looking sequels and we did get a few new IP announcements, like Bloodborne (which is technically a spiritual sequel to Demon's Souls) that got me pretty excited, even though they didn't show any gameplay. But nothing spectacular, nothing I would go and say damn, I must play this right now! It seems like the whole industry is playing it safe, creating the same old cinematic cover shooters and MOBA clones. Am I just getting old or was it always like that? Am I growing out of gaming, becoming like all the other grown ups who say that everything is going down the toilet?
So I took a look back and saw what games were released one or two years after the launch of last generation of consoles. There were games like Bioshock, Crysis, Stalker, Dead Space, Crackdown, Overlord, Lair, Stranglehold, Witcher, Assassin's Creed, Mass Effect and more. All of those are more or less decent games, but they promised something new or exciting. Destroyable environments, being an evil overlord, travelling through space as a space ship commander, becoming a medieval assassin and so on - it was fresh and exciting. Developers were promising new features that would either improve the current gameplay mechanics, create imaginative, amazing new worlds or just try something that hasn't been done before. And even if the game wasn't anything new, it was still made with love and attention to detail, which gave it a special atmosphere.
It seems that I was right. Developers are just playing it safe and sticking to the same dull mechanics and turning game making into nothing more than a straight forward, soulless business. Even worse, each sequel is usually dumbed down and simplistic to cater to lowest common determinator, abandoning the fans in hope of gaining the players of whatever game is the most popular at that moment. And finally, if the game is successful, they shower us with season passes and expensive DLC that should've been in the main game. If the game isn't successful, they blame piracy. I'm unhappy with what AAA games are turning into and every time I mention this to someone, I get spat on and called a hater, an elitist. People just accept this, without thinking what it will do to consumers in the long run.
Now to get to my point - this is why indie games matter. They create games with love, worrying more about the quality of the final product rather than profit. Also, big publishers used to ignore smaller genres that were once popular, like the survival horror genre for example, but now we've proven that those games can indeed make a profit. Not the same kind of profit like Call of Duty, but still enough. It seems like they noticed and now we're receiving quite a handful of AAA horror titles again, like The Evil Within and Alien: Isolation. I'm sure indie game developers are going to continue with innovating gaming - hopefully enough for the mainstream publishers to follow our lead and once again lovingly create amazing, fresh experiences like they once did.
Day 12 | Cowardly Creations
We were expecting problems with mod support, but there are a lot of other issues.
This is why you get the GOG version on gog you can select the version of the game to download.
On pc fallout 4 fallout new vegas and skyrim are all broken on steam because they all got the same "next gen" update.
Skyrim dec 2023
https://www.pcgamer.com/sky...
Can not find new vegas but anyone that modded it knows the script extender there was also broken
Not accidental, they want modders to stop modding their older games to force them to mod Shitfield.
There doing the same on starfield with a mods store and blocking mods
There goal is like blizzard and what they did with fallout 76 you make mods they can sell and you become a slave.
On skyrim they have "trusted" mod devs now basically a badge that lets your mod on the store you get a crumb of the sale when someone buys it.
lol to the disagrees, the last Skyrim update broke mods too. They've been trying to kill mods to monetize them in creation club for years, it's not a stretch that they purposely put out patches just to break free mods.
The disagrees are from people who have common sense. They aren't trying to kill mods. Most mods for any game will break with a new update because they rely on files/code that have been changed. This isn't new. Even with Bethesda this would happen way before the creation club. Mod support is literally one of the things that got Bethesda to where they are, and they're one of the only devs that releases comprehensive mod tools for each of their games.
Over 14 GBs and doesn't change much at all? What? Taking up that much drive space for a pathetic 'remastering' is shameful.
Par for Bethesda.
LOL people are actually expecting massive improvements or something? From Bethesda?? the same people who released Skyrim multiple times and the all look like shit? THAT Bethesda? are people for real?
The ps5 version doesn't change a ton but from my small playtime it's enough to make me want to replay it just to have it running at 60.
A side note to this my PS4 version no longer boots after it's "update" so I guess that's what it feels like to own a Bethesda game on PC
As of right now, there are no monopolies in the games industry, and for the sake of the medium as a whole, they never should either.
And yet the biggest tech companies in America are essentially that. They buy up all the small comps only to kill them off and steal what they have, and if they can't buy em they bleed them to death.
Eventually they’ll realize the value is with the employee not the company. Buying an IP means nothing if the people who contributed are let go. They’ll get it one day.
tech is different because they buy threats and then kill them. Twitter bought Vine and did nothing with it. Despite people seemingly liking it. Could've had tiktok a decade before bytedance. go figure.
They buy IPs not talent. That's why these buyouts never work and the IPs die. Right now it's too expensive to develop games - but I expect that to shift maybe as AI tools can make it easier. The best games have been indie games for awhile as big developers fuck their ips to death with "games as a service" -
A voice actor from The Coalition's third-person shooter series, Gears of War, has hinted at a new game announcement coming in June.
Hopefully Microsoft will go back to the original story line and get away from that woke nonsense from the last Gears game Gears of Woke! But were talking about Microsoft so all the betting money is on more of the same woke nonsense.
The Locust trilogy concluded with Gears of War 3. I don’t get how Gears 4 and 5 are “woke” .
"They create games with love"
and that what the Gamers want !!
i love indie and i support the Dev !!!
and there are a lot of indie that are better than AAA !
I have to admit recently all or most innovation is seen in indie games imo
You forgot to mentioned that some indie games got published by gamers aka kickstarter projects like Among The Sleep, FTL, Chivalry, etc. You also forgot about modders turning their mods into commercial games like Dear Esther, Natural Selection and of course Dota which started as a map mode for starcraft two. Yup indie game developers are leading the way into new genres like the survival genre the forest, rust, day z, the unproven lands all in bloody alpha at the moment aaaaargh!!!!!😭 crossing fingers for these games to release next year. Oh yeah the return of space sims Star Citizen, No Man's Sky yay , Elite Dangerous and such games. All of these games mentioned coming from indy game developers that got their game published by gamers, going from modder to indy game developer, etc. Go indie, Go Ubisoft what Ubisoft invited me to their E3 party . I don't know mainstream game developers like you said and I highly agree are playing it safe......
Good read. Thank god for Indies and Devs that are willing to revive/reattempt genre's that were deemed "Dead". I thought i would never see another horror, space-sim, or adventure titles in the midst of game releases saturated with cover-Shooters & Sequels.
All you need is love :-)