Star Citizen is in this picture. They added hunger and dehydration to a space exploration, cargo, and fighting game.
I really feel there would be a market for something like star citizen without all the realism stuff that gets in the way of the gameplay. I’m a backer, and when I can get to playing the game it’s fun, but finding my way to the launch pad after every two years break when I’m trying to checkup on progress sucks.
You’re talking about No Man’s Sky and Elite Dangerous. The whole point of Star Citizen is the realism.
Drag thinks hunger mechanics in a spaceship game are too much, though.
And development teams are too big. No game should realistically be having 500+ people working on it. That’s too many people, too big a ship to steer fast enough for the changes that happen in game development. Even the biggest games have done very well with teams of 250 or less, including all staff that work on the game, how about development studios pay attention to that?
People expect all games to be multiplayer with online live ops and events and a steady flow of new content.
That’s why you need to have a 500 person team. Someone needs to be designing and coding the valentine’s event for 2025 right now
I’ve heard this often, but most of the games I see people consume live updates for weren’t initially planned to get such constant updates.
Ex: Dead by Daylight. Released as dumb party horror game with low shelf life. Now on its 8th plus year. Fortnite: Epic’s base building game that pivoted to follow the battle royale trend, then ten other trends. DOTA 2: First released as a Warcraft map. GTA V: First released as a singleplayer game before tons of expansion went into online. Same with Minecraft.
It just doesn’t make sense to pour $500M into something before everyone agrees it’s a fun idea. There’s obviously nothing gained in planning out the “constant content cycle” before a game’s first public release.
Drag can think of one counterexample: Warframe. But Warframe is also 100% free to play and free to participate in every content update and event. And Warframe is developed by an indie team from Fake London who started the game with 120 employees.
Warframe feels just as riddled though with all of its different kinds of currencies and crafting mechanics. It may not have an egregious mtx model but the game loop around it still feels like it’s meant to. I much more enjoyed the game in beta when it was simpler. I go on it now and I haven’t got a fucking clue what to do, fumble around for an hour and just decide to play something else instead.
Warframe is much more fun with friends. Friends will tell you that you don’t have to bother with all the currencies. You can just do the story missions.
That’s the thing, had no idea there were specific story missions or where to do them
Oh, good news for you. They just released an update two days ago that separates the quests in the codex into story, side, and warframe quests. DE listened to player feedback and fixed the problem. Now you go to the codex terminal, you click on story quests, and it tells you what to do next.
Games got bigger to their own detriment. Halo and Gears of War are open world games now, and they’re worse off for it. Assassin’s Creed games used to be under 20 hours, and now they’re over 45. Not every game is worse for being longer, as two of my favorite games in the past couple of years are over 100 hours long, clocking in at three times the length of their predecessors, but it’s much easier to keep a game fun for 8-15 hours than it is for some multiple of that, and it makes the game more expensive to make, raising the threshold for success.
Unpopular opinion: open world ruined Zelda. I thought I’d love the concept. But actually give it to me? Ughhh… Spend forever doing side quests because you don’t know if the equipment will only be good now or if youll need it down the road… No real guidance so you can end up just meandering around…
I liked the more structured narrative. Don’t get me wrong - it’s cool to play Link and just do whatever you want. But for a story game, a more defined linear path is more engaging imo.
For me it took away the joy of the puzzles and building on a theme that the older Zeldas did.
I’ve not played TotK so maybe it brings back more of the dungeon feel from the older ones that I enjoyed, but I don’t have huge amounts of time for gaming these days.
Drag finished BOTW and now likes riding around Hyrule on a motorbike looking for koroks. Drag thinks the game is great if you use it as something to pick up and play a little bit of every now and then. Good game for bringing on airplanes and playing on the bus. Drag would have very much liked to have a game like that when drag was a child being dragged to boring dentist appointments and waiting to be picked up from school. Drag thinks maybe Nintendo is making games for children.
Single player games with a good story and fun replayability are what I’m after. Or co-op. Occasionally, a fun multiplayer with a risky, innovative design like Lethal Company.
If a game requires me to collect 100 goddamn feathers, or press X 20 times to “survive” a heavily scripted encounter, you are doing your game wrong. Look at Black Mesa, look at Subnatica. Look at the games that took risks like Lethal Company or Elite Dangerous. You don’t have to appeal to everyone. You have to tell a story well, and the gameplay should be unique and interesting. Larian understood that with Divinity 2, and made improvements to both story and gameplay in BG3.
Drag wonders what you think of the feather collecting in A Short Hike
