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2 years late to the party but I've started playing Elden Ring.
Long story short, I mostly agree with the majority sentiment, that it feels like how games used to feel like. It's not exactly controversial to assert that modern triple A games are terrible. Much has been said and written about why modern triple A games have regressed in quality and how Elden Ring was a breath of fresh air because it didn't make those same mistakes.
But here's my shower thought. And it might be dead obvious but I'll share nonetheless. It doesn't have to be that way!
Elden Ring feels more like the games from the 90s than games from the 90s. And that's obviously because we have better tooling and hardware in just about every aspect. It's infinitely easier to make good games now than it was in the 90s, we just don't make them.
It's also infinitely easier to write good software now. We have gpt, forums with decades of content, ides, YouTube, etc. Why do we keep on writing bloated shit? We don't have to.
Macdonald's fries would still be good if they used beef tallow.
Just about every way In which the quality of things regressed, it's easier now than ever to make an even higher quality version.
Something is wrong with us, that we don't. And I don't believe it's an eternal September the masses want slop situation, that's a copout. Elden Ring is one of the best selling games of 2022. It's a culture thing.
Because hardware is good enough that we can get away with it, kind of.
I work at a large company with a couple thousand software engineers and fairly selective interviews, and it's unbelievable how much waste there is in terms of easy optimizations left undone. There are $10,000 bills just lying around all over the place, and people often drag their feet on fixing them even when I point it out and spell out the solution.
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I think what you identify as "feeling like games from the 90s" is the lack of shame of letting you feel the designer's hand. Western designers seem obsessed with making games that feel like systems piled on top of systems. Levels that feel like they they were designed by following rules rather than just "being how they are" because a designer wanted it so. To create difficulty, a western developper create a class of boss or miniboss enemy with tweaked numbers to make it more difficult. To create difficulty, a From Software level designer puts a normal trash mob like a dog around a corner so you don't see him and he blindsides you, then makes another dog fall from above on you because haha funny! Western games barely ever do this anymore, they don't want you to think about (curse) the level designer.
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I think AAA vidya simply mirror the gradual enshittification that has already set in their siblings in other creative media like blockbuster movies or popular comics, e.g. Modern Warfare 2 was the last Call of Duty game I ever played and I'm okay with letting it stay that way. The increasing penetration of DEI/political bullshit didn't help too although in my opinion it's not the main driver, the real culprit seems to be either filthy casuals settling into the hobby or people legitimately becoming allergic to difficulty - at some point challenge in vidya became something you seek out in specific niches (insert dank souls meme here) instead of being the default waterline of competence videogames expect from the player.
Lest I be too cranky, there are definitely some "casual" quality of life features I really can't imagine games without nowadays (I'm too used to autosaves/automaps and really don't miss undocumented features/mechanics, I try not be a google gamer) so the influence is not entirely negative, but it's a thin line to walk, one man's welcome challenge is another man's carpal tunnel syndrome. The winning move imo is to present a wide "range" of challenge within a single game to cast as wide a net as possible, but that's understandably a pretty big ask and few games pull that off - mainly rogueli[k|t]es which often have a flexible difficulty system, or sprawling autism simulators like Path of Exile that are huge enough to accommodate many different playstyles (make goofy ahh builds and shit items actually work, renounce sleep and push uber pinnacles within 2 days of league start, literally just sit in your hideout and trade all day until you can steamroll the game through sheer economic power, etc.)
Personally I
hopethink AAA gaming is a lost cause, take the indiepill or go full weeb, you won't regret it either way. You might have to do basic research with indies though, since those seem to be either absolutely neutral without a whiff of idpol or entirely woke and wearing it proudly on its sleeve, there's like no in-between.I largely agree with you here. I'd add that not only are games worse, but there are actually too many of them. This is more specific to online games. Since the golden age of WoW passed, there have been a number of well made and engaging games that failed financially b/c there are more of these games than there is a player base to support all of them at once. I think an online game with 1/3 the total number of games, but with triple the players, would be better for everyone. A current example of this are the games Mordhau and Chivalry 2. These are both "medieval slasher" type games, similar to FPS like Counterstrike, but with medieval, mostly melee weapons. They are fun. These two games are direct competitors, very similar to each other, but with a number of small but impactful differences. The matchmaking for these game are super local to your area to keep the pings as low as possible. There are not enough people playing either of the games to have a health matchmaking ecosystem, I often launch one of them and fail to actually join a match for 15+ minutes before giving up and playing something else. If only one of these games existed that would not be the case, everyone would be in a single player pool.
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I mean, the one begat the other. Once you accept the premise that "games are for everyone", it's not far from removing all hard skill gates, sanding off all the rough edges, turning the game into an effortless amusement park ride from point A to point B, and then also going full clown world on having it star some ugly lesbian with Ron Pearlman's jawline.
The western game industry is probably more people who think "games are for everyone" in the worst possible sense than not. They don't even like games in any sense you would have grown up with from the 70's through the 00's. They want everything to be some combination of slot machine and safe-horny visual novel.
Depending on how you define a VN and how you define difficulty, you can have a difficult VN. I've never managed to find the true ending of Kara no Shoujo, for instance. It's even somewhat possible to have difficulty on replay or with a walkthrough, although that requires a PRNG somewhere and it can be tricky to cross over from "memorisation" to "understanding required" (Miyuki's security questions in Totono are randomised, for instance, and thus immune to walkthroughs, but I wouldn't call that difficult since it's a pure rote recall task), particularly with strict definitions of what counts as "VN" vs. e.g. "raising sim" or "turn-based strategy".
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People who played Elden Ring on release were already 11 years late to the party. I like it, but it's de-facto Dark Souls IV. Not just mechanically, even many specific weapons and specific characters (welcome back, dear old friend Patches).
Triple A sucks because they ironically make too much money, so they can afford to hire way too many people. Add modern culture with its low hierarchies & trigger-happy hypersensitivity and you have a recipe for disaster. It's way too many cooks, and each cook is especially confident about the stuff they don't like, so everything ends up extremely bland, bloated or both.
Japanese culture doesn't really have these particularities. I strongly recommend Kojima's games as well.
Other good news is that the indie scene is also stronger than ever. The modding scene, likewise. So it's quite easy to avoid the triple A slob, though some issues extend beyond it (for example, even indie devs lean significantly more woke than average).
I think a major issue is the over focus on monetisation in the west. Almost all newer major studios are engaging in the most degenerate design possible, with little care actual game design and writing and handing that over to the DEI people or only pay perfunctory attention to it.
The few companies not doing this are legacy developers. Once one goes bad, which is almost inevitable over time, it's just gone and nothing replaces it.
Like with movies there is a mid budget gap in the market. Tons of great Indies but major productions that have to sell unreasonable amounts or use predatory monetisation strategies to make money.
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The people interested in making games, aren't interested in making games. The pay is shit, the hours are bad, and the chance for breakout success on your own to avoid those issues is vanishingly small. You can make more money doing just about anything else in the same field but outside the AAA game industry.
It isn't actually that easy to make a good game, the netcode alone is a nightmare for most multiplayer games (except for CS!). It seems like it should be easy, it ain't, and you'll make a more as a quant (even rhymes!) if you like that sort of thing.
It is a culture thing, but probably not in the way you imagined when typing up this "enshitification" post. More like we get Zuckerberg's instead of John von Neumann's because that is what we incentivise. I think you already know this, because you're a programmer? Maybe? I can't recall and your account is private.
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