The trailer for Fallout 4, the Steam Summer Sale, the announcement of a fourth installment in the venerable Doom series. Lessons from the past like The Elder Scrolls Online, Sim City 5, Duke Nukem Forever... All overseen by a hype-filled industry that is fueled and supported by an uncritical following eager to accept anything resembling a game as long as there's something new around each corner. It's almost like the industry has grown too big, too cynical – too content to simply make money and purely technical advances.
There will never be another 'Alpha Centauri Moment' in gaming. There will never again be a genuinely intelligent, original, and compelling game from a major studio. If it happens it will be purely by chance. Formula-tweaking will not allow it to happen. Meantime you get to enjoy your bloated, lifeless, stagnant franchises. Billion dollar abortions litter the new scene.
Fallout 4 looks like Fallout 3 with 'next-gen' wankery like modular building, a deeper crafting system, a voiced protagonist, and all the other embellishments that make a person excited for a Bethesda game until they remember the previous four Bethesda games and also that distractions are great for padding a game that may include: a terrible story, a pissy and clunky engine, dialogue from hell's anus, formulaic combat, a big world full of the mostly identical things, annoyance.
I can't believe they're going for the interactive introduction again, after it pissed off just about everyone who played Fo3 more than once. Spending months programming a cool way to customize the PC's face is kind of a hint about the pathology of modern game design. There's a weird kind of narcissism where the way your character looks becomes more important than doing cool things, a fatal passivity for a pastime that used to promise ridiculous, cool, and/or interesting situations of greater and greater complexity over time.
Doom 4. Oh cool, another lame shotgun. Demons drop bullets? Where's the zombie troopers? Looks like it could be more or less mediocre than Doom 3 but I will gladly bet one conciliatory blog post that Doom 4 will miss the point just as badly. Larger teams and more money only diluted everything and added dozens of useless features, but at least Doom 4 won't have crafting bolted onto it, so the team isn't completely incompetent. The idea of context sensitive executions is kind of cool but it's So Not What Doom Was Ever About and Reduces Player Agency so I'm not excited and in fact disappointed already.
You can't exploit nostalgia forever. Let some of these franchises die. They deserve rest.
Remakes and re-releases of old games are big news, but they're only important because they reveal an industry that's nearly flatlined in terms of creativity. Every new piece of shit game is celebrated and overhyped by a toothless, uncritical, and quite frankly spoiled consumer base. You get a new installment in your franchise every year and some people have been patiently waiting for something interesting to play for a decade, while secretly understanding that it'll never happen, that there will only be hollow and pretty experiences from now on, that getting interested in a game and playing it for years is something of the past. Player agency is in decline. Everything's a mile wide and an inch deep. At this point I'd pay more for a closed-world, non-emergent, non-feature-cluttered game with tight gameplay and focused mechanics. I've seen two decades of failed promises and I don't get the culture anymore, I really don't like its self-regarding nature or its identity crises, and I'm extremely skeptical of its offerings.
The Steam Summer Sale. No prominent, relatively recent
game under $5. I saw System Shock 2 for a dollar. I first finished that
game over 10 years ago, and I'm ready to let go, even though my suspicions
about nostalgia are repeatedly proven wrong when I return to a clunky,
ugly, kind of pain-in-the-ass game and it's immediately more compelling
than Borderlands 2. Currently I don't know if I'll ever need to upgrade
since apparently the majority of good games already exist and were made
what seems like eons ago.
At least let me try a modern game for
cheap, Steam. That's what the deal used to be, remember? Let it be an
indie game, I don't care, but one really good deal a day would be great.
I guess now that steam money is basically free you will never allow a
great deal to happen again, which is a pity because I've been saving
card money for months in hopes I can spend it on something cool, but I
just play an old game and complain to my small handful of friends who still game.
I got Just Cause 2 for something like $1.75 three
years ago and there hasn't been an equivalent deal since – the game is
probably more expensive right now. I realize the business model Steam
adopted doesn't work like I think it should, but even non-perishable
products should get cheaper after they've been on sale a dozen times –
even if it's only the sale price. Steam has realized that savvy gamers
are becoming hardened towards hype and ready to wait months if not years
to buy new games, because the price will drop so much more than when we
traveled to physical locations to buy our interactive videogaming
products. We are extremely spoiled, but if the general quality and inventiveness of these products doesn't increase we will probably stop caring about them entirely, and it will spare us a lot of disappointment.
On the plus side: I'm saving money and spending it in more interesting and dynamic ways and I have a lot of freed-up time to spend on actual life. Turns out life is actually very interactive, with: numerous challenges, emergent situations, and high stakes. Still I'd like a cool game, please. Doesn't have to be super complex, doesn't need the best A.I. in the business, it just needs to be fun to play. Gameplay first; dorky kid shit like graphics and hype last.
