Ramblings of a Madman

My guess is sometime within the next five years, primarily western publishers will finally abandon what they have been doing and start putting out what gamers want.

And the push, I believe, is going to come from the East. With games like Stellar Blade and Wuchang: Fallen Feathers, the West has to answer with something, well, stellar, if they want to remain relevant moving forward.

Initial impression of Battlefield 6 is promising. But we all know how initial impressions can be manipulated to get people to buy something and then later pulling the rug out.

There have also been numerous indie and AA projects that have rolled out in recent years that also give me hope. Clair Obscure is the big one that comes to mind. Not a single person involved in that phoned in their performance. Everyone poured their entire heart and soul into it, and that is something that has been severely lacking.

Love and Dedication

It shows when a team doesn’t care, or when there are too many cooks in the kitchen. That’s how you end up with games like Dragon Age: Veilguard and Assassin’s Creed Shadows. The former spent nearly ten years in development and the latter was handled so poorly that it’s a miracle it even released.

Devs and publishers need to get away from trying to make the line go up, and instead they need to focus on things that matter in a game: story and gameplay. Everything else will fall into place if they can nail those two things.

You can’t really have a decent game if you don’t have those two things. The First Descendent falls flat because it lacks a decent story, despite being Warframe with jiggle physics. And we all know how absolutely batshit Warframe’s story is.

Stellar Blade, while not being Shakespeare or Tolkien, at least has a coherent story to back up the gameplay and shiny posterior. Shift Up gave the people exactly what we wanted a year ago with the PS5 release, and then a month and a half ago with the PC release. It would be damn near perfect if it weren’t for the Denuvo.

Doom: The Dark Ages was another decent recent entry, in my opinion. Sure, it didn’t have Mick Gordon shredding a guitar while you Rip and Tear. That’s my only real complaint. The gunplay, the shield, the movement. It was all tight and to me felt as though there isn’t much more to refine. Is it perfect? By no means. It’s Doom; it’s a formula that is extremely hard to mess up.

I couldn’t believe the response to Baldur’s Gate 3. “You can’t expect this level of game from us.” Such an insane take. We don’t ask perfection, we simply ask that you care enough about your potential audience to put forth more than the less than bare minimum that you have been giving us.

Care about your story enough to accept criticism without resorting to insults. People are smart; we don’t like being lectured and talked at or down to.

Care about your characters enough to make them intriguing and beautiful and fit the setting. The women don’t have to all be curvy and busty and scantily clad, though I do enjoy a good femme fatale. The men don’t all have to be musclebound, just strong and fit enough to deal with the challenges presented.

If you aim for perfection, it shows, even if there do end up being issues with some part of your game. If you aim for perfection, the money will flow. If you give your audience what they want, well, I think you get the point.

And for the love of all things holy, get rid of the bloat. That will solve a couple of issues in a vastly reduced budget and not having as many ideas all vying for a position. Once you set your mind on something, go with it.