Games

31801 readers

1240 users here now

Welcome to the largest gaming community on Lemmy! Discussion for all kinds of games. Video games, tabletop games, card games etc.

Weekly Threads:

What Are You Playing?

The Weekly Discussion Topic

Rules:

Submissions have to be related to games
No bigotry or harassment, be civil
No excessive self-promotion
Stay on-topic; no memes, funny videos, giveaways, reposts, or low-effort posts
Mark Spoilers and NSFW
No linking to piracy

More information about the community rules can be found here.

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Where are the improvements in AAA games? (lemm.ee)

submitted 4 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

19 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Back in the day, Asscreed 1-4 and Far Cry 2-3, there were constant improvements and innovations in level design, mechanics, graphics, cool shit to do basically.

Recently the 2 "highly praised" Star Wars "open world" games essentially haven't moved the needle but are just Generic Game with a star wars skin

The new Open Worlds, firstly we have the Horizon Dawn killers, Breath of the Wild and Elden Ring. Exploration focused game design, unique mechanics include unrestricted interaction and massive dungeons hidden behind tiny doors. Honourable mention to Death Stranding where deep mechanics are overshadowed by top notch facial animation by famous actors
Hero shooters, not a fan, but probably huge improvements and gameplay mechanics in Apex, Overwatch, Fortnight, maybe someone could chime in
RPG, Baldurs Gate 3, an impressive step up from Witcher 3 where every choice is considered, voice acted, millions of lines of dialogue, every player thought predicted by the designers.

4 The indies - usually the place for innovation but recent indies are super polished for small teams, bug free, fully thought out, addictive game loop, Balatro, Tactical Breach Wizards, Animal Well,Thank you for Coming.

In summary i think the industry is just spread out across more budgets, team sizes and countries now, no longer are the days when western Devs come up with fun or innovative AAA games, the focus more is on casual appeal and form over function

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 days ago (1 children)

How much innovation can you get when you have to spend millions of dollars on large teams to develop games now, compared to even 10 years ago? It's not really all that surprising that companies want to play it safe. It's a large investment, and they don't know if there will be a return on it.

That doesn't even get into the fact that there's only so many combinations of things you can do in a video game.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago

This is a fair point, but these companies have enough money that they could set aside a small team that just tries new things. Whether the games succeed or fail shouldn't matter. It should be a testing ground for finding new things to base a new IP around or just add to existing series or something.

The team should be allowed to take their time and just make something they're passionate about and players should be able to get involved. Feedback should be taken seriously and used to improve what the team puts out.

I know this is an absolute pipe dream, but I wish companies would do this for the sake of keeping the business moving forward if not for the players.