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
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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
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Hero shooters, not a fan, but probably huge improvements and gameplay mechanics in Apex, Overwatch, Fortnight, maybe someone could chime in
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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
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I’m legitimately having difficulty following the flow of this question. The formatting vacillates between question and statement, and I am sincerely having trouble fully discerning the connection between points.
I think this post comes from disappointment with Star Wars Outlaws, which by all reports largely follows the Ubisoft formula for open world games. For this, yes Ubisoft has struck upon a formula that is applied to seemingly all of their open world games, which is indeed overly predictable. For that, I do agree that the rote steps of a collectation heavy game where the player secures territory of the game in order to advance the story is overplayed.
Otherwise, I am stuck trying to tease out the rest of the post’s intention.
Recently the 2 “highly praised” Star Wars “open world” games
I don’t know what the other Star Wars game referred to is supposed to be. Is this referring to Jedi Survivor? That game did have a number of technical problems, but it wasn’t ever intended or marketed as an open world game. Putting even that aside, why are two Star Wars games used as the pillars of western AAA games? What is the point or critique here?
Ubi actually has 2 kinds of open world games… Assassin’s Creed Style and Far Cry Style. I prefer the former, I was disappointed to see the Avatar game was the latter
I have’t heard how Outlaws breaks out yet.
Outlaws doesn’t really feel like either.
It has elements like both, but it doesn’t do exploration towers that unlock areas. It feels more like a third option between the two, which makes most sense because it comes from the devs that did both The Division and Avatar.
I enjoyed Outlaws open world gameplay, even though it doesn’t bring anything new to the table. It was still an enjoyable experience that felt like discovering the worlds on your own, instead of being guided and follow a checklist of stuff to do, despite having a list to get upgrades and do story and missions. It felt a bit more like Rockstar style open-world, where you just go about your business and run into encounters, instead of going from A to B all the time.
I just want to say I was really disappointed when Far Cry 3 basically became the template for Far Cry games.
The main thing I hate is the “observe this outpost from a distance then permatag all the enemies so they’re visible through walls, then take them out” mechanic.
To add to your point, Jedi Survivor was a huge improvement over Fallen Survivor. I’m not sure how you could look at that game and say that there hasn’t been any improvement at all.
*fallen order (you spelled survivor twice)
Honestly I’ve I did jot know how survivor improved upon the first part since the pc version was so overshadowed by it’s technical problems. Tho I’ve heard the patch yesterday improved the performance massively
I suspect a big part of the process has shifted focus from making an enjoyable experience to how we can milk this for every dollar it’s worth and then some.
It’s risky trying to explore new avenues as a large company you’re expected to deliver unimaginable returns on your investment. So copying the games that did well will hopefully perform better that quarter. As opposed to spending resources on expanding the engine or trying out a novel idea.
On top of that I suspect the executives are envious of the addictive cash burning cycle that gacha games provide.
I feel like too many games have and continue to copy the formula established by Minecraft and Far Cry 3. I find the experience of exploring a new zone, climbing a tower, unlocking material xyz then rinse and repeat. To be boring and unimaginative. But it seems like I’m the weird one here and people seemingly adore it.
I thought the inventory management of BoTW was awful. It’s not fun to complete a cool quest line get a cool item and for it to break forever after two fights. Wtf
Crafting games such as Valheim have nothing to do aside from grinding for the sake of grinding. Sure building a cool house had some appeal but it’s overall just intentionally tedious.
Baldur’s Gate III was a breath of fresh air. I actually have been thinking for a while that maybe I just didn’t like games anymore until it came out.
I’m also about to start my first Elden Ring run with a group of friends for the first time soon. Excited for that.
The Dark Pictures Anthology has some fantastic stories if anyone is interested.
100% agreed with everything you’ve said here.
If the intent here is to discuss games that are actually doing something new and different, Space Marine 2 really needs to be in this conversation.
At first glance it’s just a very, very polished third person action game, but the more you pay attention the more you’ll notice the excellent mechanical design of the combat. There are some very smart, very subtle choices that have been made in the gameplay mechanics that affect the dramatic flow and tension of combat in surprising ways. Someone designing this game actually thought about the pacing of fights, and that’s something you just don’t see in games all that often.
Also on a purely technical level there’s the extremely smart bit of coding that allows them to render ungodly numbers of enemies in screen at once, behaving as coherent swarms that move and flow together, and dear God is it incredible to watch.
The first game was a great Warhammer game (for the time). This one is just a great game, no qualification needed.
As I see it, the difference is that we now have capable game engines freely available. Indie studios can, for the most part, offer the same quality of gameplay. AAA studios can only really differentiate themselves by how much content they shove into a game.
In particular, this also somewhat limits creativity of AAA games. In order to shove tons of content into there, the player character has to be a human, the gameplay has to involve an open world, there has to be a quest system etc…
It’s great. I don’t have time for AAA games anymore anyway.
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.
I feel like the problem right now is that we have too many open worlds as if every game needed to be one.
As much as the ps3-xbox 360 era was the FPS Era, the PS5-Xbox X is the open world era.
I hope that soon we will go back to more variety.
Right now I’ve adopted a rythm where I force myself to play a linear game between every open world.
Companies aren’t innovative. Once they land on a formula they just keep using it. Eventually it gets stale and the company crashes or buys another company that had a good idea and runs it into the ground. Innovative games happen when a AAA company happens to acquire an indie studio at the right time to give them runway to properly polish their game.
