It’s honestly kinda crazy how long some games spend in development. The Final Fantasy 7 Remake trilogy is a perfect example of something that should’ve been quick but ended up being so bloated and took forever to make.
FF7Remake was announced in 2015, got stuck in development hell for a bit, released 2020. The sequel released 2024. The third one still hasn’t been teased yet. How many people are attached to a franchise if it takes 10 years to get the full story? I loved the first remake but dropped the second one, I just didn’t care about the story as much as I did ~5 years ago.
I think back to early 2000’s, I was playing the Jak and daxter games all throughout elementary to highschool with a decent amount of replayability. Same with metal gear solid. And these were pretty fleshed out games worth the money back then.
Kingdom hearts was the first time I got fed up with development hell.
Ratchet & Clank had it’s first three games released in three years. Same graphics and no one cared.
A few years ago I was hit with the sack of bricks that is all Donkey Kong Country games being released one year apart. I have vivid memories of playing the second game for a very long time and then multiple times after while imagining what a third game would be like and you’re telling me that was only one year? There’s no way those games would mean so much to me if we had only had one per console generation.
Same for elder scrolls or gta. Kids today get 1, maybe 2 games of their favorite series before they have to do adult things. The only teams releasing on a quick schedule are the shit mobile games.
i mean with those games it feels like you get one every game third generation at this point.
elder scrolls 6 is going to become halflife 3 at this point.
Kids play kid’s games like Roblox or Fortnite. Also i feel kids don’t play single player games all that much.
It’s also interesting they spend their money on cosmetics over buying games. Meanwhile, I’ve bought no cosmetics for f2p games I play like The Finals, and instead spend that money on buying single player and coop games.
I want shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less and I’m not kidding.
Honestly, what I miss most are the low budget straight-to-handheld spinoffs that used to flourish in that space. Handhelds especially felt like a space where developers weren’t afraid to go wild with experiments, because development cycles were cheap and quick. But that attribute started to show cracks in the 3DS era, it was inevitable that this would no longer be sustainable when all of the budget had to go into bigger and bigger and bigger console games, while next generation handhelds also got more expensive to develop for too. There wasn’t room for these quick and dirty side projects anymore.
RPGs got worse for me as soon as they shifted to adding VAs for every line. FFX (1&2) were the last Final Fantasy games I played all the way through. (FFX-2: would not play again even though the combat system was better). I’m fine with voice acting, but I liked when I could read dialogue and advance it accordingly.
If you ever get the itch, I thought XII was better than X. But if you didn’t like X, you almost certainly won’t like any of the XII series or XV. I haven’t played XVI or VII remake yet
with worse graphics
Absolutely 100% I’ll take this trade every day of the week. Graphics got as good as they ever needed to get during the X360/PS3 era. Obviously better is better, but theres a limit to how much you can actually do. Putting the costs aside, we’re properly entering the uncanny valley with some games now, where they almost look realistic enough to be real but its not quite right. The slightest glitch and it scares me a little. When an eye starts rolling funny or something. Even that aside, theres diminishing returns. When youre running fast and looking in as many directions as possible to see if theres movement on a ledge, it really doesnt matter one little bit if the hair has full shadows and has realistic physics.
Agree, as long as we can leave the piss filter of that era in the past
A lot of that quick and dirty space is in indie dev hands now and they’re doing wonderful things. Things like Window Wars or Inscryption or the recent very successful tactical cat breeding game Mewgenics
I’d pirate Mewgenics if you’re interested in it. Dipshit edgelord author used Ethan Klein and Chris Chan for VO work in the game, then justified it with some lame centrist fence sitting. So fuck him.
Chris Chan the literal motherfucker? I might pirate the shit out of that just for curiosities sake.
They’re just doing meow sounds for the cats. It’s not even worth the controversy he caused by doing it. Could have literally recorded himself meowing as he suggested and no one would have known or cared.
Wow, what a jackass.
“I understand we live in a time where a meow from someone who has different beliefs as you is scary and frustrating, confusing and controversial…” McMillen said, “but it felt interesting so I decided to explore it. Also, I should probably point out that I don’t share the same opinions as, well, probably any of the people we included. If I only included people who share the same exact opinions as me, I’d be the only one meowing in the game.”
Being pro-murder isn’t a difference of opinion. What a fucking psychopath.
humor of a twelve year old with the morals of a south park character.
I just realized that that game was made by Edmund McMillan.
Honestly if you have played any of that devs games you would have known going in that that is basically exactly how you might describe most of them.
The only reason I even checked the game out was because it was Edmund. I put with his (literal) shit in Isaac because both it and this game are very well designed from a gameplay perspective. Not gonna reward putting murderers, rapists, and genocidal zionists in a game about doing cat eugenics though.
I’ve been playing Issac again lately because Northern Lion has been releasing videos again.
Still a great game.
Sorry, I had zero idea. I’m really getting tired of everything going to shit these days. It’s sparked several comments or I’d remove it.
You don’t need to apologize. It’s a good game worth recommending as long as you don’t pay that guy for it.
I feel this way too. I just want games with at least PS2 level graphics and I would be happy if it meant they came out sooner or were more fun to play. The obsession with realistic graphics is unrealistic especially with AI buying up all the ram and gpus.
SE’s obsession with making every mainline FF game a 100+ million dollar project with hours of cutscenes and a combat system ill suited to fight the skyscraper sized enemies is killing the series.
They’re obsessed with spectacle. Nobody really cares about spectacle anymore.
I mean, being the cutting edge turn based JRPG that’s on par with the most impressive AAA titles if not an industry leader itself was historically Final Fantasy’s place in the market, in contrast to Dragon Quest’s traditionalism.
Hell, I believe Expedition 33 is popular because it more or less filled the spot that Final Fantasy forfeited when it went action.
I still remember they put Deus Ex in the freezer, handed it over to Embracer, then they murdered it before the final chapter.
In fairness, spectacle has been a key part of the series’ identity ever since Summons were trying to show off as many particle effects as the SNES could handle. And then FF7 was designed around being a tech showcase for everything the Playstation could do, it looks quaint today but at the time that was cutting-edge eye candy and it’s how the game was marketed.
I’m seriously seeing the difference between reddit and lemmy in this post. Last time I saw somebody mention how franchises were pretty frequent releases they got jumped on hard for not knowing anything about how games are made and that it does take 15 years to make a decent product.
Also, and I’m just throwing this out there, maybe the circlejerk of nostalgia bait for Gen X/Millennials means fuck-all to younger people in general because it’s the nostalgia of their parents, not their own thing?
Like, aren’t we seeing this in so many different properties? As time marches on, interest wanes? Nobody cares about Marvel movies anymore. Nobody cares about Star Wars anymore. The most hardcore fanatics tend to be older and had the originals, which were literally original content, as things they grew up with. Part of the mystery and excitement of them was how much was left unexplained. Seriously, the Clone Wars was this mysterious fucking thing when it was just an offhand comment by Luke Skywalker in Star Wars: A New Hope. Now we have entire TV series dedicated to the background of the Clone Wars. Mystery gone. The first season of The Mandalorian brought back a sense of mystery to the series and then promptly dropped it to mix it in with every other piece of Star Wars memorabilia.
Young people want their own stuff that they’re growing up with, they don’t want rehashes of the shit their parents obsessed over.
Look at the continued interest in Adventure Time spinoffs, for example. Adventure Time first came out when I was just shy of 29. It would be fodder for the children of people just slightly older than me. It was also enjoyable for older folks who enjoyed silly fantasy, which gave it wider appeal. It persists more because it was an actual original thing that some people grew up with.
We live in an era where copyright that lasts 100 years after authorial death has broken corporations brains and they are scared to death of anything original in case it might not be a clear moneymaker. Letting interest in a new property grow over time is almost unheard of in the Netflix era of two seasons and then fuck you, it’s over. So even when new properties are explored, most aren’t given enough time to mature into something that becomes truly nostagliac for a younger generation.
If corporations want people to be as invested in long-lived series, they have to allow the option for new, interesting series to take the stage. Is it really a shocker that people are over games that started in the NES era? That young people want stories and ideas that reflect the world they live in, not the one their parents grew up in?
I’m in my forties, and I constantly talk about how the world our parents brought us up to live in was dead before we were born. It’s the same but at an accelerated pace for kids these days. The world we know and are trying to prepare them for no longer exists. Our stories and nostalgia become meaningless for our kids because it doesn’t speak to their experiences.
Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.
On the nostalgia front I just want to say I’ve never been into metroidvanias and never played any kind of metroid game before, I tried metroid zero mission an hour ago and I’m already hooked. These games are just genuinely good. Not dunking on newer games I play those a lot too, just saying not everything new is better and I’d love to see some kind of happy middle ground.
You aren’t wrong but I also think people tend to forget just how much of what we grew up on were remakes and rehashes of stuff even from the radio era. Especially the cartoons that we watched as kids, so much of that was just recycled jokes and such with some jokes for the adults of the day thrown in too. Even Star Wars was an homage to the serials of the 30s-50s like Flash Gordon, which itself got an 80s remake (with an excellent soundtrack by Queen). The remakes aren’t new they are just more obvious.
I mean, all you have to do is look at box office numbers to know you’re wrong about Marvel and Star wars.
Maybe the movies are garbage to hardcore fans, but the franchises still make a fuck ton of money.
Yeah and they largely all fucking suck ass for about the last 5 years.
There’s a difference between slop that appeals to an imagined ‘median consumer’ that will make a boatload of money, and ideas that are actually unique and new and captivating.
Regardless of what you or I think of quality, the median consumer is consuming them. Star Wars is still making a hell of a lot of money, it has not faded from cultural relevance in the slightest.
And yet the Disney effect is a very real thing. If your franchise hasn’t been milked to death, it’s only a matter of time.
Far easier to rehash a known moneymaker than to take a risk come up with something original. Some people might point at the multiple tens of thousands of games on Steam as evidence there are people making new games that are original, but if you compare the relaitive few that take off vs the popular franchises’ success it’s pretty obvious that rehashing works. Plenty of new games languish and never really get anywhere.
Young people want their own stuff that they’re growing up with, they don’t want rehashes of the shit their parents obsessed over.
If only children had the perspective to know alternative choices exist and they should hold out for something better. This assumes young people can control the media they are fed. It’s more likely that the generation making content for them confuses nostalgia for childhood and the audience doesn’t like the iterative/derivative product.
Nobody cares about Marvel movies anymore. Nobody cares about Star Wars anymore.
I want to agree with a lot of what you’re saying, but this is very much not true. Regardless of whether you or I like the new stuff, those franchises are still making tons of money, and that does include younger generations.
The article mentions asking kids which is more popular, Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest, and all the kids answered Pokemon. That’s a franchise that’s slightly younger than FF and DQ, but not by much, it’s still much older than all those kids playing it. So the real question that needs to be unpacked here is: why are some franchises able to continue appealing to new audiences, while others get reduced to nostalgiabait for those that grew up on them?
My parents once taught me how to use a payphone when I was a kid. I’m 40.
Your post is exactly correct.
Wtf is a payphone
There were many decades between the proliferation of home phones and cell phones. During that time many people may be away from home and need to contact someone over the phone. Payphones were installed in public places that anyone could use to meet that need. They took change in exchange for minutes using the phone.
When I was young, these were also basically the only two JRPGs that existed that I could get.
Now, there are countless thousands, and these are just two names amongst many. And FF really feels like they are just phoning it in recently for me personally.
Ill preface by saying I didnt read the article. But I also think that the state of gaming today is much worse than it was in the early 2000s for millennials.
When I was growing up, games had to come out complete so they were generally much more polished. However, when the Xbox360 came out, console makers gave the ability to devs to release patched versions via updates. Initially it was a great idea - devs could fix bugs they might have missed while testing. But then this quickly spiralled into studios forcing devs to release 1/2 baked games in a horribly broken state.
I also think how much you generally have to pay for games has gone way up with respect to the cost of living. Video gaming is much more of a luxury now, than a simple past time. Plus there are so many F2P mobile games out there, that there is even less of an incentive to get into a console / PC gaming.
- Diablo Immortal? F2P (i know theres probably micro transactions and bullshit)
- Diablo 4? PS5 ($500 - assuming you dont have the console already) + Diablo 4 ($67) + PS Plus ($14/month) = $581 + tax
I gotta argue against the games costing more compared to cola. A new Nintendo game in 1988 was $40 to $50. At that time hamburger was 99 cents, a value meal from a fast food place was $4, a house was $80,000, a new car was $10k to $18k, and you were pretty much a Middle class family if you made $45k\year. Some original NES games even hit $60 a piece.
So videogames are one of the few things that haven’t kept with inflation. In no small part due to more people purchasing games and less physical overhead, but that doesn’t take away from my stance. 40 years later and a game price has gone up by like $20.
But then this quickly spiralled into studios forcing devs to release 1/2 baked games in a horribly broken state.
And the other side of the coin, with the advent of DLC, being able to take a complete game and carve pieces off of it to sell separately for more profit.
For a long while, DLC has been just an excuse to foist unnecessary content on the consumer for sales. There are a few notable exceptions in this like Fallout 3 and New Vegas, earlier Borderlands, and, surprisingly, the recent Tainted Grail: Fall of Avalon.
For the most part, though, I have not bought DLC without thoroughly vetting it. I’m not talking about cosmetics. I’m talking about actual story/content additions being overpriced fetch quests which are, more often than not, just vehicles for more useless cosmetics.
As an example, Fallout 4 DLC (much like the basegame itself) was a mistake seated in brand loyalty/a hope of redeeming the title. The DLC featured cosmetic additions for their Sims style settlement minigame, a couple cutesy fetch quests for armor, and two unfinished story DLCs that played like the elevator pitch of what would have eventually been fleshed out of this we’re an earlier entry in the series.
With most story DLC, at best, you get a lackluster and entirely forgettable addition to the basegame. At worst, you get horse armor disguised as a new campaign or an unforgivably half assed hodge podge of storylines that cheapen the rest of your experience with the game.
Gaming was always expensive. Super Mario 3 was 50 dollars in 1990. That’s 120 dollars in today’s money.
Every era of video games was affected by its business model. Games used to be far more obtuse to sell guides and hint hotlines, and they used to be hard to the point that they were less fun so that it took longer to finish them. In the early 2000s, when the industry was largely between alternate revenue streams, you tended to get a lot of padding so that they could put a larger number of levels as a bullet point on the back of the box, so the first few levels would be great, but somewhere in the middle, they’d be pretty phoned in.
Release a non finished game, and finish it only if it’s a success ™
I’ve never played dragon quest, but as a long time final fantasy enjoyer, final fantasy 15 sucked so much I put it down and I never went out of my way to play 16 because of that.
FF7Remake was amazing. FF7Rebirth was good in many ways but also had way too much garbage and goofy shit so I have very mixed feelings about it. Also like the post said it’s a very long wait for a complete story. It also is not really an entry point because FF7 is a huge franchise in itself.
If you take those out of the equation, the last FF games were 13 lightning returns in 2013 which I think is probably good but very different (I didn’t end up finishing but not because I didn’t like it) and 13-2 which in my opinion is one of the best in the series but gets slept on because it’s gated by 13 (2009) which I like but I wouldn’t call amazing or transformative.
I think FF12 might would qualify as a worthy childhood formative game, which means (excluding 16 since I just don’t know) the last good FF that is also an entry point came out in 2006. 20 years ago.
Tldr; I don’t know if FF16 is a worthy childhood formative experience, but if it’s not, the last candidate is TWENTY years ago, so ofc young people aren’t getting attached to the franchise. They’re probably playing jrpgs that are actually good instead.
final fantasy 15 sucked so much
Why you gotta diss my boys like that?
I do think there was a lot to like in the bones but the execution was just so bad :(. The combination of 90% of the content of the game being doing ubisoft map slop and the story being broken up across media made it pretty miserable, but the moment to moment writing/character development for the party was top notch for sure. I really wanted to like it but actually playing it felt like a chore :(
As a non FF player who played 8 and 9 I thought 13 was kinda bad.
Lots of hallways when the previous games had more discovery to them.
Have not really played one since as I wasn’t into MMOs and figured I would try the 7 remake when they finished which it looks like they never will.
A lot of people have the hallway complaint, and honestly I think it mostly came down to visuals and sound design. So many games people love have exactly the same level design, including FFX, but there is normally enough to look at, and you don’t have the “high heels on tile” footsteps exacerbating it. I’m also pretty sure a large part of it was a YouTube video pointing it out and people jumping on the bandwagon.
I reckon it’s also because there are simply so many games available now, and countless devices to play them on. My generation had one console or computer max, and a handful of games. Now young gamers have half a dozen devices at home, and thousands of free or easily accessible titles on whatever platform is currently in reach. They don’t need to commit to a couple of titles, when an advert for the next one is a tap away.
I mentioned this before on another post, but I had 5 games on my PS1 as a kid. There are currently over 400 owned games available on the living room Xbox, there’s a Switch in the house, the kids have iPhones, iPads and laptops, there’s a Quest 2 gathering dust etc etc. That attachment we had to one or two of the few games we owned as kids has to be in part down to accessibility.
I agree this is a much more plausible reason. Not only was there less choice, there was less opportunity. Adjusting for inflation, I paid over $150 for Final Fantasy VI when it came out. Games were precious, and the good games were ones you replayed because–unless you were quite privileged–you didn’t have a big library to choose from.
That’s the kind of thing that endears players, and it takes truly exceptional products to get there now. There are also far more studios that have the game-making formulas to work with today, too. I don’t think that’s a bad thing in any way.
Steam library is at over 2000 games, yet it always Arc Raiders, Minecraft, and Peglin. Can’t get them to play a game with an actual story for the life of me.
I’m of the opinion that it really depends on the nature of the game.
For example, the children are super hyped for GTA VI, because even though GTA V came out before some of them had object permanence, they’ve been playing it for years. It’s remained in their consciousness this entire time.
Compare that to Skyrim, which came out only a year or so before GTA V, and we haven’t seen an Elder Scrolls game since… The young don’t give a toss. They weren’t playing it then, they aren’t playing it now, so there’s absolutely no attachment to Elder Scrolls as a series.
Games used to stay in the consumer’s consciousness before by having sequels made every few years, sometimes even every year! Now? It’s all live services, so it doesn’t feel like the game hasn’t had a new iteration for over a decade.
In other words: Kids aren’t attached to franchises anymore because the game industry is stagnating.
There’s not really a reason for games to be taking so long to make other than too many cooks in the corporate kitchen.
Back when studios were run by the developers, great games came out on almost a yearly basis. If they had 2 years? You’re almost guaranteed a classic.
Now that the business school people make all the decisions and there’s so much money being wasted on unnecessary positions in these companies, customers are left out to dry.
It’s much easier to build momentum around a franchise when you release 7 games in 10 years than 2 games in 7 years.
I had all 5 3D GTA games come out before I was 17. The first rated M game I bought myself on launch day was GTA V. I’m almost 30 now.
Of course, GTA isn’t necessarily a kid’s game, but we all know who’s playing it. Same deal there. There’s a whole generation of people out there who don’t even know we had 6 stars.
