on the 360 playing battlefield bad company i assumed terrain destruction and stuff would be the norm in the future and maps would be a lot bigger with more people, i was too stupid to realize that the most important part of gaming is that the graphics get un-noticeably, incrementally better over time without any fundamental changes to gameplay or possible art styles, everything must be bland and 'photorealistic' or else it must be Fortnite. I used to assume a good game would get a sequel in a year or two and have significance game improvements, now i wait a decade or more to get the exact same game but with higher resolution and frame rate and new microtransactions
this is conjecture, but i think the growth of the "indie" tier of games has bifurcated the market and made AAA titles larger and more conservative. makes no sense to pour hundreds of millions of dollars into a game concept that's even slightly different from something with proven mass-market appeal when a studio that's a hundredth the size with a thousandth of the budget might make something way weirder and still hit a tenth of your sales goal. it's just not maximizing your return.
The AAA style: open world, someone calling you to tell you to meet them at story quest marker. You can quick teleport right next to the marker. A bunch of markers for side quests. Crafting consumables and sometimes rare armor that needs 10 side quest tokens. The story quest is a gauntlet of killing a bunch of dudes before fighting a boss. Cutscene. New ability. Beat the game. Some kind of movement ability unlocked.
One of the reasons that died is that last gen went from the tech designed to be the most powerful thing available (on PS360) to CPUs that were bad even for 2013 mid-range laptops. Current gen is better but not that much better. Even on high end PCs GPU advancements are quickly outpacing CPUs.
Another reason is that open world has replaced linear as the norm, it's hard to do this shit when it has to be completely dynamic.
on the 360 playing battlefield bad company i assumed terrain destruction and stuff would be the norm in the future and maps would be a lot bigger with more people, i was too stupid to realize that the most important part of gaming is that the graphics get un-noticeably, incrementally better over time without any fundamental changes to gameplay or possible art styles, everything must be bland and 'photorealistic' or else it must be Fortnite. I used to assume a good game would get a sequel in a year or two and have significance game improvements, now i wait a decade or more to get the exact same game but with higher resolution and frame rate and new microtransactions
this is conjecture, but i think the growth of the "indie" tier of games has bifurcated the market and made AAA titles larger and more conservative. makes no sense to pour hundreds of millions of dollars into a game concept that's even slightly different from something with proven mass-market appeal when a studio that's a hundredth the size with a thousandth of the budget might make something way weirder and still hit a tenth of your sales goal. it's just not maximizing your return.
The AAA style: open world, someone calling you to tell you to meet them at story quest marker. You can quick teleport right next to the marker. A bunch of markers for side quests. Crafting consumables and sometimes rare armor that needs 10 side quest tokens. The story quest is a gauntlet of killing a bunch of dudes before fighting a boss. Cutscene. New ability. Beat the game. Some kind of movement ability unlocked.
This is why I hate every cookie cutter open world game.
But then they also do those things badly (thinking of the Suicide Squad GaaS here).
One of the reasons that died is that last gen went from the tech designed to be the most powerful thing available (on PS360) to CPUs that were bad even for 2013 mid-range laptops. Current gen is better but not that much better. Even on high end PCs GPU advancements are quickly outpacing CPUs.
Another reason is that open world has replaced linear as the norm, it's hard to do this shit when it has to be completely dynamic.