It's why Elden Ring should be a lesson to every publisher in the industry that there is an intense desire for non-casual new IP. Everyone's trying to become the next Fortnite and that's just not gonna happen. It's also a reason I respect what Sony is doing with their stable of developers. For every TLoUP1 we get a Returnal.
Today it seems like every game has to be this massive open world game with RPG and/or FPS elements... I love the GTA series, but the popularity there has made pretty much every AAA game have to have many of those elements. It makes things way too expensive and nobody takes chances anymore.
Elden Ring selling a lot hopefully makes some of the developers rethink their approach. Ubisoft like open worlds full of map markers and handholding are awful.
I still break out NHL Hitz from time to time. Ragdoll physics in a hockey game is just stupid fun.
Frankly I don't think many studios can really make that sort of game (with maybe the exception of Team Ninja). From Software does one thing incredibly well and just keeps expanding that idea. Naughty Dog for all their talents hasn't shown they can make a game with that subtle of storytelling and that great of combat. I doubt anybody under the Bethesda umbrella can either. It is just a tricky sort of format.
Pokemon is absolutely a flagship franchise, but their insistence on hitching it to GameFreak hasn't exactly produced the results you'd expect from a AAA console Pokemon. I know a lot of people have liked them, but everyone can agree that they're incredibly buggy and look like they're two steps away from being 3DS games visually. Lots of that has to do with the Switch's limitations, but still. We saw what can be done with the likes of BotW. As for the others, I don't think anyone could reasonably argue a game like Splatoon is AAA on the level you'd expect from a God of War or Spider-Man. A great series, sure. But, like I said, lower on the totem pole.
The issue with the current open worlds is that they are massive areas full of dull busy work. Combine that with the developer treating the player like an idiot and showing everything.
Man I absolutely adored AC Odyssey, probably took over as my favorite AC game to date, but yeah their design philosophy is needlessly excessive to say the least. It's no wonder why Ubi is struggling the way it is right now.
My favorite player to watch , If he stays healthy we have another Superstar
Different consoles have different strengths and have different experiences... Switch and one of PS5/XSX makes the most sense to me. Having both PS5 and XSX without a Switch really doesn't (today anyways). Maybe when the exclusives start rolling out.
The treating the player like an idiot is really about maximizing TAM. These are typically huge (mostly publicly traded) corporations that have objectives to be met. Artificially limiting your TAM is typically a harmful thing to shareholders. For the same reasons many movie production companies push so hard for PG13 ratings, you get a large push to make games as accessible as possible. It is refreshing though when your hand isn't held.
According to exophase I've spent 54 hours on Hades and 21 hours on Arkham Asylum this month. Besides that I've been working through the challenges in Red Dead 2 and playing one or two other things a little bit at a time. How would I fit another console into that?
Take Hades on the go with you everywhere, including toilet time! Adds minutes per day! Minutes!
Black Flag and Brotherhood were my shit before Odyssey came out. I really wanted to like Valhalla. Love the setting and visually it was really impressive, but I'm just not a fan of the more heavy-handed RPG gameplay that was present in Origins and Valhalla. Having enemies become damage sponges purely for the sake of making it feel like an RPG robs it of the cool feeling you get playing as an assassin. I thought Odyssey did a phenomenal job of adding RPG elements while also keeping the gameplay quicker and more skill-based.
It looks awesome; way better than it should for a licensed HP game. It's really too bad that controversy is derailing the hype a bit.
It's tricky, I like that Microsoft has emphasized backwards compatibility and driven Sony to do the same (unlike certain other console manufacturers, cough, cough, Nintendo, who want you to repurchase the same game multiple times).
