Submitted 3 weeks ago by mintiefresh@lemmy.ca to games@lemmy.world
https://www.videogamer.com/news/nier-creator-yoko-taro-less-weird-people-making-games/
Makes sense. AAA games are finance projects more than creative projects. Yeah there’s a lot of art and writing and stuff, but it’s all calibrated to make the most money and anything that threatens it is jettisoned. This makes them formulaic to a fault.
Indie games are passion projects, so you see a lot of weird stuff out there. Most of them are utter failures, financially, but the ones that survive are truly something special.
Not dissimilar to what happens with big studio films
20 years ago AAA games could still experiment, but that was because back then AAA games had about the same budget as big indie games now.
You just can’t gamble if you have 10k employees and hundreds of millions riding on it.
Being “safe” is also a gamble, if you aren’t bringing anything new or unique you’re gambling that the title or brand is sufficient for success.
20 years ago people were complaining about the same lack of creativity in the AAA scene, saying that gaming was better in the 90s. In fact I remember it was a common talking point that AAA gaming had gotten so bad that there would surely be another crash like the one in '83.
Here’s how I see it: From a gameplay standpoint: My perception of the mid to late 2000s is that every AAA game was either a modern military shooter, a ‘superhero’ game (think prototype or infamous), or fell somewhere in the assassin’s creed, far cry, GTA triangle. Gameplay was also getting more and more trivial and braindead, with more and more QTE cuts scenes. The perception among both game devs and journalists was that this was a good direction for the industry to go, as it was getting away from the ‘coin sucking difficulty’ mentality of arcade games and moving towards games as art (i.e. cinematic experiences). There were of course a few games like Mirrors Edge, and games released by Valve, but they were definitely the exception rather than the rule (and Valve eventually stopped making games). Then Dark Souls came out and blew everyone’s minds that a game could be both have non-braindead gameplay and be artful at the same time.
Now I would say we’ve actually seen a partial reversal of this trend. Triple A games are still not likely to be pioneers when it comes to gameplay, we’ve actually seen a few mainstream franchises do things like using Souls-like combat or immersive-sim elements, which IMO would have been unthinkable 15 years ago.
From an aesthetic standpoint: My perception of the mid to late 2000s is that everything was brown with a yellow piss filter over it. If you were lucky it could be grey and desaturated instead. This was because Band of Brothers existed, and because it was the easiest way to make lighting look good with the way it worked at the time. As an aside, Dark Souls, a game where you crawl around in a sewer filled with poop and everyone is a zombie that’s also slowly dying of depression because the world is going to end soon and they’ve lost all hope, had more color than the average 2000s game where you’re some sort of hero or badass secret agent.
Things are absolutely better in the aesthetic department now. Triple A studios remembered what colors looked like.
From a conceptual / narrative standpoint: I don’t think AAA games were very creative in this department in the 2000s and I don’t think they’re very creative now. They mostly just competed to see who could fellate the player the hardest to make them feel like a badass. If you were lucky the player character was also self destructive and depressed in addition to being a badass.
Then and now your best bet for a creative premise in a high budget game is to look to Japanese developers.
From a consumer friendliness / monetization standpoint: In the 2000s people were already complaining about day one DLC, battlepasses and having to pay multiple times just to get a completed game.
Now its worse than its ever been IMO. Not only do AAA games come out completely broken and unfinished, really aggressive monetization strategies are completely normalized. Also companies are pretty reluctant to make singleplayer games now, since its easier to farm infinite gacha rolls from a multiplayer game (although this was kinda already the case in the 2000s).
Overall I think we’re now in a golden age for indie games, and things like Clair Obscura and Baldur’s Gate 3 give me a lot of hope for AA games.
Imagine having 10k employees and not setting aside an indie dev team for passion projects.
That’s the entire tech industry. I got in at the tail end of it being full of nerds who were interested in computers. Then jocks and the like found out it pays really well and now it isn’t fun anymore.
Yeah man all those well known jocks like Spez and Zuckerberg sure did a number on tech.
+1 to this, I feel like having a ton of money is what corrupts leadership, not necessarily their technical background.
Maybe Spez and Zuck haven’t changed much, but I feel like some others started out as relatively reasonable people who were also technically brilliant, but eventually their companies started doing shitty things and they are both aware and apparently unwilling to stop it.
Perhaps corruption in the Soviet Union is a good example of how even people from normal hard working backgrounds (i.e. not billionaires who have never worked a day in their life) can still be corrupted by power and a lack of accountability.
hey mark does ju jitsu and he’s totally really good at it and all the other martial artist guys love hanging out with him
Jocks != Business c suite
Too many business majors joined game dev teams
What’s a jock if it isn’t the highschool quarterback?
Non usa-ish here
Yeah, it was nice as long as it lasted, now it’s all meetings and stupid “agility” (as agile as DPRK is democratic) and measurings of your percieved productivity.
I’m still looking, maybe some c/c++ old legacy system needs a geek somewhere?
I stopped playing AAA games years ago. They are all trash.
Indie games are where it’s at
I dunno I like elden ring and rdr2. Some are still good, just not most, anymore
Yeah I’m playing cyberpunk for the first time and really enjoying it. i don’t know how much it innovates, but I’d say it was certainly a good game.
Not all, but yeah. 75% of my wishlists are weird and interesting indie stuff from the constant Steam demo fests.
They’re polished, but nearly all of them are too safe.
The ones that subvert things a little are always best for me, and these always get mixed reactions from people who went in with a set idea of what they wanted from it.
Red Dead Redemption 2 being a slow paced wild west simulator rather than Grand Theft Horse is a prime example. It didn’t play by safety and doing popular things. It did what they wanted it to be, and it’s all the better for it.
I’ve mainly been an Indie gamer since 2012 or so. My last gaming build is almost 7 years old, but I think the last AAA game I played was during lockdown and that was just because it was a way to hang with friends. At this point I just play indie ports on my phone.
Funny enough, after going through my Steam recently played, the last AAA game I enjoyed was Nier.
Some are quite good tho
The good ones are solid tho and last a long time, I do prefer indie/smallteam for the most part now
vrs got some cool unique stuff, vtol vr is solid gaming still got some really cool stuff coming out, I wanna live in a world where vtol vr is as popular as cod
The indie scene is so much fun.
The weird people are still there, but development teams are much larger now, so their input is not as prominent. Plus the budgets are so large that a flop can heavily damage a company or even ruin it, so they’re very risk-averse. We need more AA or A games instead of relying so much on heavy-hitters.
The weird people still make tons of indie games.
Indie games are great and all, but everybody I know is still waiting for great AAA games again that we can play together.
Weird people were forced out of the industry over the past decade or more.
Happens with any industry that gets big, I think. More profits=more suits/vampires coming in and replacing artists/scientists or whoever is more qualified to make key decisions.
This won't stop unless infinite wealth hoarding is tackled by governments, if ever.
You’re not wrong. I still remember the day I picked up a newspaper and saw the headline “video games earn more than movies for the first time ever,” and I immediately knew where the industry was headed. In retrospect, I was 100% correct.
Happened even with Boeing. I think it should be illegal for anyone with an MBA to be CEO or CTO of any company. They can be CFO if they want to, but not any role with actual decision power over products.
But then you get those people opening studios like Sandfall and creating masterpieces like Clair Obscura…
Part of the issue is that AAA still hasn’t learned how to manage and produce passion projects, which most great games are. They keep wanting to use what’s working elsewhere with no regard for what makes sense in their own game.
Yeah really. They should be more like campuses funding a hundred small teams each trying to make something they’re individually passionate about. Hell, even give them the IPs to play with and see what they come up with.
I know im late to the party but… I just started playing Death Stranding. Lets just say its more than just a walking simulator…
It is mental, but I also kind of wish he’d hire somebody else to write dialogue for him.
And maybe somebody to check all the women characters, and make sure he’s not coming across as being a little bit odd.
And maybe somebody to check all the women characters, and make sure he’s not coming across as being a little bit odd.
Yeah…
And Death Stranding is better about its female characters than most of the MGS games…
Not sure what you mean - “Mario and Princess Beach” is obviously peak cinema
I JUST started collecting chrysalis crystals. (so mabyt 4-5 delvilvery/walking sim missions in)
To quote an old meme, ‘I know nothing Jon Snow’ but one i saw the ::: spoiler Title Hand prints in the sand, :::
I knew this was more than a walking simulator
I mean, it’s being a mail carrier in a world that is maximum Kojima.
I mean it’s an Amazon delivery simulator so yeah
Yoko Taro talking about weird shows a healthy deal of self awareness… +1 respect in my book
That’s why bg3 felt so special. For us by us at that scale
No worries. There is plenty of weird to find with indie games.
Yeah, but how survivable is making indie games? Unless you make it big, you aren’t paying rent that way.
That’s why you need public funding to support and nourish the industry. We’ve got that in our state where we can get grants to start up studios. This allowed for studios such as Massive Monster to be created.
VC funding isn’t great because they can pull out if the project or investment doesn’t suit them. See League of Geeks.
This take sucks. There's a clear cap on what indies can do because they have a limited budget. Whatever their output is, it's not comparable to big studios output.
What the market lacks is quirky games on a medium budget, which's not what indie scenes provide.
Next you’ll tell me mainstream is not niche
After Spec Ops The line, everything went to shit, the bar was too high
Dunno why you’re being downvoted, that game was insanely good. Mediocre shooter, but the story was amazingly good.
More than ‘story’, the way they made every part of the game about it.
It was mediocre/workmanlike when viewed entirely as a shooter. But most of the gameplay just used ‘shooter’ as framing.
Because there were still plenty of good games that came out after that?
"Do you think video games are silly little things?"
no.
That entire credit sequence is high water mark for games as a medium.
Every emotion.
Drunk ass man writing his characters, crying in a room alone. The thing we need more of lol. Will purchase any game his name is attached to.
I couldn't agree more
There are plenty of weird people making weird games if you know where to look. itch io and DLSite, for instance.
That was literally his point…that the weird people make indie games and not AAA games.
Read the article, you say? What a radical notion.
And it’s for the better, the AAA games industry devours talent and spits out mediocrity and burnouts. I would prefer that small indie studios keep control of their creative output rather than being devoured by the money machine.
There is a space between ‘itch.io’ and ‘TROUT Sacred Band 8’ and the unprecedented level if sliders for dicks in character creation
Capitalism at its finest.
Fewer weird people.
What if they meant there is the same number of weird people but they aren’t as weird
Kojima is only getting weirder.
Touché!
There ain’t no more weird folks makin’ no more games anymore.
Thank you. For once I don’t have to be that person.
Nepotism is ruining entertainment.
Who knew kicking out every passionate person with artistic integrity and forcing the death of the artist would impact the creativity of the industry?
Jesus christ I hate game CEOs, they need to be locked in a room with games until they learn how to have fun.
Can you blame them for not taking risks when these games get punished time and time again for doing so?
TLOU Part II had a mildly unlikeable character who gasp was a woman and it killed the entire franchise and sparked mass controversy so hard Naughty Dog now is making some bland and generic soulslike (but in space) GOTG ripoff slop with product placement in it.
Killed the franchise so much that the original game has been remastered twice, the second game once, and a TV series has been made out of it…?
Killed so much that the video game franchise has been killed off and they had to make a remake of the original game using Part II’s assets and mechanics to recoup the financial damage to the brand and the saga will never see a conclusion outside of maybe the HBO show.
Dragon Age 1-3 all had their drawbacks but could always fall back on how beloved the lore was and how it was present. Dragon Age Veilguard has much of the lore the original creator laid out but presents the revelations in its game poorly and retcons lore from previous games in sterile ways. The original creator left after 3 and over the decade has dropped tidbits about the changing culture of the studio he left
I love it when I’m playing a game and I can feel the genuine love put into it. Old Nintendo games for example. now most games feel so bland and corporate
Called HR.
I don’t think you need to be weird to make weird games. I mean, it wouldn’t hurt but it’s not necessary. Just do what Fromsoft does: make the game first, then write the story around it instead of the other way around.
Creativity Production
What is he trying to say? How can something be weird and unique but also consumed by millions of people as a popular product?
If he thinks riding a dragon in modern Tokyo to fight a big naked statue is weird and unique, he’s probably sad that the world has moved on from holding up sporks and going “lol random XD!”
The markets can’t sell Weird™ to the masses. Now there’s no “weird” people making super high budget art. Terrible!
Everyone should go check out The Alters, it is a pretty weird game but a lot of fun with a great story and atmosphere. It’s a space survival, resource/building, race against incoming death game.
i mean if he just wants weird, i’m available for hire. got experience in storytelling and turning food into poop.
Justdaveisfine@midwest.social 3 weeks ago
There’s definitely weird people making games on itch and sometimes in the depths of Steam.
By its very definition weird isn’t going to sell to mass market. That being said I do agree that we need more weird AAA or AA games.
Coelacanth@feddit.nu 3 weeks ago
Oh yes. Ever heard of Beautycopter?
RebekahWSD@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I have. Watched two beings play it. I sincerely hope the person(s) who made that game make more games.
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
i am so glad that only costs 2 bucks because flying through rings is giving me serious n65 superman flashbacks. they’re so bad i can’t find the number 5 on my computer. the one next to that.
RickyRigatoni@retrolemmy.com 3 weeks ago
I found a game on itch about a laundromat that washes women in the machines.
Justdaveisfine@midwest.social 3 weeks ago
Hmm. On second thought, maybe games were a mistake.
Sylence@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
The Alters just released, is AA, weird, and very good! Indies are definitely the home for weird experimental shit but I feel like there are going to be more strange, niche games being made for larger budgets as the AAA space splinters and devours itself.