Nier creator Yoko Taro reveals the sad reality of modern AAA game development, “there’s less weird people making games”

I have. Watched two beings play it. I sincerely hope the person(s) who made that game make more games.

i am so glad that only costs 2 bucks because flying through rings is giving me serious n65 superman flashbacks. they're so bad i can't find the number 5 on my computer. the one next to that.

The only recent example I can think of is Death Stranding.

Hmm. On second thought, maybe games were a mistake.

Being "safe" is also a gamble, if you aren't bringing anything new or unique you're gambling that the title or brand is sufficient for success.

20 years ago people were complaining about the same lack of creativity in the AAA scene, saying that gaming was better in the 90s. In fact I remember it was a common talking point that AAA gaming had gotten so bad that there would surely be another crash like the one in '83.

Here's how I see it:
From a gameplay standpoint: My perception of the mid to late 2000s is that every AAA game was either a modern military shooter, a 'superhero' game (think prototype or infamous), or fell somewhere in the assassin's creed, far cry, GTA triangle. Gameplay was also getting more and more trivial and braindead, with more and more QTE cuts scenes. The perception among both game devs and journalists was that this was a good direction for the industry to go, as it was getting away from the 'coin sucking difficulty' mentality of arcade games and moving towards games as art (i.e. cinematic experiences). There were of course a few games like Mirrors Edge, and games released by Valve, but they were definitely the exception rather than the rule (and Valve eventually stopped making games). Then Dark Souls came out and blew all their minds that a game could both have non-braindead gameplay and be artful at the same time.

Now I would say we've actually seen a partial reversal of this trend. Triple A games are still not likely to be pioneers when it comes to gameplay, we've actually seen a few mainstream franchises do things like using Souls-like combat or immersive-sim elements, which IMO would have been unthinkable 15 years ago.

From an aesthetic standpoint: My perception of the mid to late 2000s is that everything was brown with a yellow piss filter over it. If you were lucky it could be grey and desaturated instead. This was because Band of Brothers existed, and because it was the easiest way to make lighting look good with the way it worked at the time. As an aside, Dark Souls, a game where you crawl around in a sewer filled with poop and everyone is a zombie that's also slowly dying of depression because the world is going to end soon and they've lost all hope, had more color than the average 2000s game where you're some sort of hero or badass secret agent.

Things are absolutely better in the aesthetic department now. Triple A studios remembered what colors looked like.

From a conceptual / narrative standpoint: I don't think AAA games were very creative in this department in the 2000s and I don't think they're very creative now. They mostly just competed to see who could fellate the player the hardest to make them feel like a badass. If you were lucky the player character was also self destructive and depressed in addition to being a badass.

Then and now your best bet for a creative premise in a high budget game is to look to Japanese developers.

From a consumer friendliness / monetization standpoint: In the 2000s people were already complaining about day one DLC, battlepasses and having to pay multiple times just to get a completed game.

Now its worse than its ever been IMO. Not only do AAA games come out completely broken and unfinished, really aggressive monetization strategies are completely normalized. Also companies are pretty reluctant to make singleplayer games now, since its easier to farm infinite gacha rolls from a multiplayer game (although this was kinda already the case in the 2000s).

Overall I think we're now in a golden age for indie games, and things like Clair Obscura and Baldur's Gate 3 give me a lot of hope for AA games.

Imagine having 10k employees and not setting aside an indie dev team or two for passion projects.

Too many business majors joined game dev teams

What's a jock if it isn't the highschool quarterback?

Non usa-ish here

+1 to this, I feel like having a ton of money is what corrupts leadership, not necessarily their technical background.

Maybe Spez and Zuck haven’t changed much, but I feel like some others started out as relatively reasonable people who were also technically brilliant, but eventually their companies started doing shitty things and they are both aware and apparently unwilling to stop it.

Perhaps corruption in the Soviet Union is a good example of how even people from normal hard working backgrounds (i.e. not billionaires who have never worked a day in their life) can still be corrupted by power and a lack of accountability.

hey mark does ju jitsu and he's totally really good at it and all the other martial artist guys love hanging out with him

Yeah I'm playing cyberpunk for the first time and really enjoying it. i don't know how much it innovates, but I'd say it was certainly a good game.

vrs got some cool unique stuff, vtol vr is solid gaming still got some really cool stuff coming out, I wanna live in a world where vtol vr is as popular as cod

Indie games are great and all, but everybody I know is still waiting for great AAA games again that we can play together.

You're not wrong. I still remember the day I picked up a newspaper and saw the headline "video games earn more than movies for the first time ever," and I immediately knew where the industry was headed. In retrospect, I was 100% correct.

Happened even with Boeing. I think it should be illegal for anyone with an MBA to be CEO or CTO of any company. They can be CFO if they want to, but not any role with actual decision power over products.

And maybe somebody to check all the women characters, and make sure he’s not coming across as being a little bit odd.

Yeah....

And Death Stranding is better about its female characters than most of the MGS games...

Not sure what you mean - "Mario and Princess Beach" is obviously peak cinema

I JUST started collecting chrysalis crystals. (so mabyt 4-5 delvilvery/walking sim missions in)

To quote an old meme, 'I know nothing Jon Snow' but one i saw the ::: spoiler Title Hand prints in the sand, :::

I knew this was more than a walking simulator

I couldn't agree more

That's why you need public funding to support and nourish the industry. We've got that in our state where we can get grants to start up studios. This allowed for studios such as Massive Monster to be created.

VC funding isn't great because they can pull out if the project or investment doesn't suit them. See League of Geeks.

Kojima is only getting weirder.

Touché!

Fair play!

weird people the lesser

Read the article, you say? What a radical notion.

And it's for the better, the AAA games industry devours talent and spits out mediocrity and burnouts. I would prefer that small indie studios keep control of their creative output rather than being devoured by the money machine.

There is a space between 'itch.io freebie that runs in terminal' and 'TROUT: Sacred Band 8' and the unprecedented level if sliders for dicks in character creation

More than 'story', the way they made every part of the game about it.

It was mediocre/workmanlike when viewed entirely as a shooter. But most of the gameplay just used 'shooter' as framing.

Because there were still plenty of good games that came out after that?

Killed so much that the game will never get a sequel it's clearly meant to have, yes.

The remaster of the first game came out before Part 2. The subsequent remake of the first game is made using Part 2's assets and mechanics as well as assets from the original and had much smaller production costs, it was clearly made to recoup the loss of IP value perceived by Sony, same with the relatively low budget HBO show, compared to making a game the caliber of TLOU it costs peanuts and if at all - that will be the only way the saga will see a conclusion sadly.

So yes absolutely TLOU was killed off by the controversy and they're now working on a new IP that looks significantly more safe and uncontroversial in every way sans maybe featuring a black lady in it.

Whether the writing was garbage or not isn't relevant to be honest - because controversy was spun by people who only knew the game's story through hearsay of the leaks before the game even came out, and majorly it was to do with accusations of "wokeness" and other brainrot - so yes clearly it was an issue, of course it was an issue.

It wasn't really the substance of the game that the usual outrage grifters latched onto so it's not relevant to the discussion of the controversy.

As for more women being protagonists - sure, idk how you can say that so confidently, I suppose you have a convenient framing for what counts as "big games" to support your point, but I think the quantity was never really an issue.

Honestly more men being protags in games is okay, what I take issue with is that whenever something interesting happens, like oh I dunno, a game makes a woman kinda buff and mean looking, people bitch about it like no tomorrow.

So of course it's an issue. It always has been.

In 2013-ish, Anita Sarkessian made some exceedingly light feminist critiques of video games in and it was an issue. In 2014-ish, A woman made an indie game that's honestly really good even to this day (Depression Quest) and it was an issue. In 2020, a game came out where a fictional character (Abby) had muscles and it was an issue.

Nowadays I guess the most famous example would be the "FUCKING GENDER AMBIGUITY" screaming guy who didn't like Starfield's pronoun selection screen or some such.

Then people went truly psychotic in a deranged hate campaign against some random inclusivity consultancy Sweet Baby Inc. over games they were reportedly never involved with because there was women, or something, somewhere.

Hopefully you get the idea.

It was precisely the issue that a woman was the main character in a video game but was not in fact "Metroid from Metroid 1986" but a buff, angry, unattractive, hateful and morally grey character who does shitty things, sorta like Joel - in other words - she was something a lot more like a real person in a mature story, not a single digit frame twist from 40 years ago that amounts to an Easter egg turned geek culture cringe factoid parroted by the kinds of people who wouldn't understand RLM's "Nerd Crew" show is satire.

You can see some of the worst examples here, cherry-picked as they are, juxtaposed with what actual critique is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVQcZa4O01A

You can also visit the steam store page and look at the negative reviews, or peruse the cesspit subreddit /r/TheLastOfUs2 posts the time of the game's leaks and release to see people bitching about everything from pride flags in Seattle(!) to Abby being made too likeable to accusations of this or that character being le ebil transgender or whatever else that sounds like it came out of a /pol/-themed magic 8 ball.

Hell, there are utterly deranged people in the steam reviews for this game now bitching about the show - about the actress that plays Ellie and one guy even implies she is "down syndrome representation".

Like, what the actual fuck?

As for the game, the game is ok, I'm playing it right now, it's less boring than the first so I like it a lot more, the AI actually lives up to the bullshit promised in the first game's trailer, but it's too long and yeah the writing is too on the nose sometimes, though I do like the characters and the atmosphere a lot. Idk if I "love" it, but I do find it way more fun as a game and far more interesting from a story perspective.

What it definitely is though is controversial as fuck and that's just reality. People made a whole subreddit just to hate on the game that's active to this day and most of their issues aren't even to do with the game - they even pretend to hate the TV show they haven't seen too.

Care to elaborate? You play as the person who killed a beloved iconic video game character and last game's protagonist for 13 straight hours - I don't know if it's good but I'd hardly call it anything resembling "normie writing".

To me - normie writing is something like those new switch Zelda games or Yakuza games or those Jedi Fallen Order/Survivor dark souls clone games or something like Watch_Dogs 1 or hell insert any ubisoft game apart from FC2, WD2 here

It was certainly very pro-zionist.