My Thoughts On... Developer Complacency 

I have asked this question elsewhere and received very few examples: can anyone list game mechanics that were introduced in the past 10 years and really shifted the paradigm of gaming? Stuff like regenerating health, snapping to cover, aiming down sights, dedicated grenade button, bullet time, surface climbing, etc. If you're having trouble coming up with a list of them, Try doing the same with the 2000-2010 decade, and see if you have better luck.

I always find it hilarious that I finally have a decent pc and yet 90 percent of my game library is from the 90s and early 2000s. There was a huge variety of genres back in the day. Like, what happened to space shooters, or games like the rainbow six franchise?

I haven’t watched the whole video but I didn’t want to lose this thought. Not really here to make a point, but sharing my thoughts on this topic as a whole. I have a theory that game development companies don’t give a rats dick about what they are making at all. Call of Duty will forever remain soulless to me because it feels like I’m playing a product designed to suck all of my money without earning any of it. I think video games are actually worthless. They don’t maintain their value at all. Games constantly go on sale and a video game will always drop in price (Activision, Nintendo and Rockstar are egregious exceptions, and are thankfully not the norm). So what is the value of a video game? I feel like that’s trying to put a price on art. I played Fallout 4 for a little over 2k hours, (~1200 on Xbox and ~900 on PC) and I paid 60 dollars on release. Now I didn’t know Fallout 4 would be my most played, and favorite game ever, but it only became that way because the game I played had a soul. It wasn’t for everyone, definitely isn’t even for every Fallout fan, but it was for someone. It was for Bethesda. I believe them when they say they make games they want to play. I love playing Fallout 4 so much, I make my own content for the game just so I can keep playing it more because I loved what I got. I paid 60 dollars, and I got not a video game, what I got instead was a rekindling of a childhood dream. This piece of art did the one thing it was designed to do, it made me feel something. That something was clearly very powerful because it inspired me to pursue my dreams of becoming a director. I want to make something that makes people feel the same way I do when I play Fallout 4. It’s a shame what this industry favors. It cares more about dollar signs, review scores, sales and public opinion. This industry keeps making it clear that it doesn’t care about you, and their games aren’t made to be enjoyed, but are instead expertly crafted to exploit you with manipulative tactics and paint this picture of a game that doesn’t exist just to get you worked up so you can spend spend spend that money and devs will keep supporting your favorite games with shallow content, and jpg for your weapons. So much time is spent crafting a game that doesn’t exist, and it’s constantly being marketed in the process. The entire video game industry is built on greed, it thrives off greed and it will continue to take and take until every game ever is either a shallow multiplayer fps, a shallow open world game, or a shallow mmorpg. Hopefully Art wins this war with Greed.

Most game publishers (in contrast to developers) are extremely conservative and don't feel comfortable trying something new. For instance, lots of people would pay $40 for a story rich RPG with a card-based combat system like Magic: The Gathering, but it's safer to make a clone of Slay the Spire and sell it for $20. Similarly, it's hard to find an isometric CRPG that doesn't have a setting that's very similar to Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, or Fallout (Pillars of Eternity 2 tried pirates and didn't sell as well as expected, so we're definitely not getting an Eberron game). The tabletop and board game industry is crashing but will likely get replaced mainly by shallow mobile games that use predatory addiction-based microtransactions. Paradox Interactive could probably pick up some of the demand but they're only interested in publishing games that they expect will make money. The outlook for actual tactical action games like the Rainbow Six or SWAT series is probably even worse than for RPGs or strategy games. As for anything that's interesting but unpopular (like developers who want to experiment with nonviolent educational/philosophical games for adults) the situation is even worse.

To be honest, id rather have no new games released than all this underdeveloped sheit that is coming from the Triple Shame industry! Yet, indie devs release to much trash as well, that i can always ask the same questions. Did they even bother to look at older games who did all that right 20 years ago? Whats with the crappy UI? Whats with the crappy controls? Why can't i rebind keys? Why is "Exclusive Fullscreen Mode" still Borderless Fullscreen? Why no mouse support? Why no Gamepad Support? Why are gamepad controls backwardsass stupid by design? Why is the game so badly designed? Who thought this $h!t was a good idea? And the list goes on... So many things that should be bare bones standard in this industry. And barely anything i just mentioned is correctly implemented, if even existent in the first place!

Many game genres have died in general like remember back in the day we use get alot of RTS games now we barely get any except from the indie scene.

I haven't bought a game in ten months. My last purchase was the Nier Replicant remaster in late April of 2021. I used to at least buy one game every single month prior to getting my new PC. I've just been emulating older PS2, PS1, PSP, and even Sega games I never got to play. Despite some of their rough and clearly aged mechanics in many cases, some of them even being outright bad games, I still appreciate what many of them tried to do from a design perspective. For example, Drakengard might have awful gameplay, but it at least tried to buck many of the trends of the JRPG genre and stand out as this weird, warped and twisted game. It might not be fun to play, but it's still oddly remarkable. The industry has been on a downward spiral for, I want to say, a little over a decade. It started getting really noticeable in the past 5 or so years, which is why I almost never bought a game full price in that time. The industry needs a reset similar to the gaming crash of 1983, which encourages developers to work with the resources they have and find creative solutions to problems, rather than relying on the advancement of technology to do the work for them.

Your comment about not feeling excited about any release for the past ten years resonated with me. Having gamed since the early 80s I have seen the ups and downs of the industry. I used to get very excited about game releases. It’s probably been about ten years for me too. That was about the time that games started releasing in and unfinished state full of bugs that would often take years to fix. Adding iinto the equation in game transactions with said buggy games (see Battlefield franchise and it’s long decline for reference) and you have a recipe for a complete disaster. There is not one game publisher I trust anymore, I feel that ultimately it’s about the bottom line for all of them.

Raven Software and Monolith Productions are my most painful downfalls.

This video reminds me of those "Why are video games no longer fun?" videos I've been seeing on RU-vid. Do you feel like that sometimes? Like the spark you once had for the games is just not the same and you can't really get into games as you could before... I assume one factor is because you are younger, you have more time for these games, and as you get older you only play a select few from time to time. But if your job revolves around gaming does that still happen? That you are sometimes just playing a game and think "Why am I even playing this? I don't feel joy at all. I just feel dread." (Bonus points if you cry after that)

i dont believe from soft to be an instance of developer complacency. dark souls was lightning in a bottle and there really wasnt anything else like it -- heck it made a whole subgenre of video games. of course they are going to make more. i might see what you were saying if all the souls series (+bloodborne, sekiro, eldenring) were all the same, but other than maybe dark souls 2 and 3, each game brought something new and it has its place in the lineup of souls games.

If someone told me Elden Ring is Dark Souls 4 i would believe them. It looks the same as the previous Dark Souls.

Anyone gamer that is 30+ year old will be able to relate. However, I don’t think we can ever expect the rapid amount of innovation to ever return within this media format. The era of discovery is over, refinement is where we are. We will experience genre defining breakouts occasionally but that’s about it. A new frontier is needed, perhaps VR/AR. Something beyond higher graphics fidelity. Look at any tech based industry, eventually it plateaus until something different comes along and changes the industry, leading to new avenues of discovery and many failures along the way. We cannot recapture the magic of ‘login into Everquest for the first time’ using the same tech. We can only hope to live long enough to experience it.

I think it says alot I get mostly excited for when I find an obscure game and look forwards to tracking it down than almost every modern title. A large chunk of my steam library are games that had very small physical releases but are easily accessible now. (Such as Stalingrad,7.62mm High Caliber and Marauder) I honestly get more excited when I found out about obscure games like Paradise Cracked/Cops 2170, Syrian Warfare and the original Warfare and other older forgotten titles that actually seem interesting while barely any games that come out now actually interest me. Doesn't help "Modern Design" (that people will use to claim older games are outdated, which is nonsense usually) is not that good, even as a COD Fan, I liked COD when every FPS wasn't like it, I'd love a Timesplitters-style or even simple a Medal of Honor style game, since it seems the "middle ground arcade-y" FPS genre is mostly dead nowadays, your game is either super arcadey or wacky or going for outright realism.

Other than the independent scene, risk taking is increasingly becoming scant because of how long and expensive video games are to develope. Very well done video.

Honestly I think this is why I've been getting into a lot of eastern games like jrpgs and fighting games recently for example Arcsys are basically known for just fighting games but basically try something new in each game or mixing various system mechanics from past games and creating something new.

Big business priorities are incompatible with the priorities of science (game theory and CS are a branches of science after all) and art, much less fun in general. I've been saying this for three plus decades and at this point I expect most people to give me a blank stare in person or the equivalent online.

fromsoft also made lost kingdom. i wish they made a new one.

LEGO Games are like this. They usually play the same.

great video, though I'm not sure I entirely agree about boomer shooters. I mean its true that there is a glut of them, and players might not be as excited for all the new ones, but I wouldn't necessarily call it complacency when its a new dev just making what they want to make. I mean yeah they might not sell as well, and if the dev expects to make big money they might be delusional, but I for one, am making a boomer shooter just because I enjoy playing them and want to make one. (though I do think I have a unique hook with the competitive horde mode angle) Sometimes a dev just wants to make an homage to something they like, and if there isn't quite the market for it, well... so be it.

I agree with some of the points int his video. I don't like how game developers follow some bad practices like adding pay to win mechanics and microtransactions.

There's some good points here, but it it's also filled with points where you go 'Company X don't do this anymore. Except when they do. But I won't count that for some reason'. And the pining for 80s/90s development totally ignores the fact that games made then were done on small budgets with incredibly small teams in most cases. The indie space today is the 'AAA' space of that era. There's tonnes of experimentation if you look outside the big releases. Maybe not from Rockstar, sure, but the video feels a little blinkered for you.

Give Rebellion some credit, Zombie Army 4 changed a lot from Zombie army Trilogy

Here’s a discussion! Skill Based Matchmaking in the current CoD games, and I believe it’s also in Halo as well.

It's not just games, most mainstream media is having this problem.

I found some Indies that you might be fancy to look at : 1.Cantata (Isometric Turn Based game..gives me Alpha Centauri vibes) 2.STATIS (Sci-fi Adventure with semi horror? It has that dead space theme to it) 3.CRUSH (Heavily inspired by SMASH TV) 4.BROK The Investigator (A weird point & click with detective & beat em up mix) 5.Signal Ops (A bit like Full Spectrum Hammer but in fps view and you are looking at your team from a monitor view) 6.It Stares Back & Dap (1st one is this dark virtual astral plane rts with light RPG elements where as Dap is more of a horror themed Pikmin) 7.Iron Meat & Bio-Gun (Contra & Metroid clone) 8.The Drifter & Rosewater (One adventure is pulp thriller while the other is an alternate 19th century western) 9.SIGNALIS (Classic Survival Horror with Alien vibes) 10.Whisker Squadron & Dead Containment (A starfox & house of the dead inspired games) Then there's new Indies that may have interesting aesthetic or has some dead genre element such as flash game : -Read Only Memories Neurodiver -Command & Control 3 -Warpips & Legacy Of Sin The Father Sacrifice -Winter Falling Battle Tactics -Lost In Play & Beat The Clock -Legend Bowl -ANNO MUTAIONEM -Motor Town Behind The Wheel -Broken Roads & Brutal Fate -Kapital Sparks Of Revolution & Mech Engineer Are they the best? Not really but it's nice to see how some of these subgenres aren't forgotten

In unrelated news, Sniper Elite 5 was just announced...

Speaking of Kings Field, there’s an upcoming game in the style of those games called Monomyth, it has a demo at the moment and it’s the closest thing to a new Kings field/Arx Fatalis. Definitely check it out

I loveeee King's Field

I think you gotta yo rewatch Razorfist video on cureent video-game industry crush. From - like - five years ago.

So if someone makes a wolfenstein 3d like game? Or maybe like maze war, phantom slayer, or Total eclipse???

Can we expect a "Red Dead Redemption 2" review? If not, what are your thoughts on it?

There’s never looted dungeon if you looking for another first person dungeon crawler

Fallen Aces looked like Action Doom!

King's field looks interesting.

I've heard Rockstar has begun development on Grand Theft Auto VI since February of this year (2022), but fanboys of the GTA series are acting as if it has been active development since 2013, which to be honest, was never true to begin with and they have zero proof to back that claim up.

My understanding is that in capitalism you vote with your money People would argue that capitalism is exploitative in nature, but that is not true. Certain humans are exploitative by nature. That is where explaitation comes from. Do not vote for that.

you want a market crash and thousands of people in this industry to lose their jobs/career because the product you consume isn't up to your personal taste?

13:31 speaking of Shooters trying something cool in the vein of F.e.a.r. Did you give Severed Steel a try yet? It looked cool as hell. It was supposedly also short and kinda overpriced, which is why i haven't bought it yet. But i much rather have Shooters focussing on Movement mechanics than just another retro shooter rehash. Imo those peaked when NewBollod did Dusk and Amid Evil very close to each other. Thanks for making me aware of Selaco, that looks pretty damn great!

Well, i dont see why releasing a great number of games, all with different styles and of different genres, in a short period of time would be necessarily a good thing. I mean, From Software may not have released that many games in the last 10 years, but some of the games they have released are considered some of the best of all time. Doesnt that count for something? And going with your Bethesda example, yes, they have produced more games, but most of them are garbage. So, whats the point? To put out a lot of garbage nobody really likes just for the sake of variety? Im seeing a lot of holes in your arguments here, bro. Just saying.

I agree, capitalism has ruined art and now everything is centered around either get rich quick schemes of low effort high return or mountains of money consuming everything to grow ever larger.

It literally is dark souls 4. Are you regarded?

I am all for good critique but this is just bs, like seriously bullshlt