grand theft auto vi and the AAA spiral
we've went from 'insert quarter to play' to 'insert $70 and bottomless time investment' when all i wanted was 'insert cheesy bread'
now playing: a warm place (instrumental) - nine inch nails (the downward spiral)
(please excuse the thumbnail. i had no idea how to depict this topic with one image so here's a cute mouse to contrast against the several thousand words of bitter rambling!)
i found myself ranting quite listlessly the night prior to this current post's writing, and i thought that what i had went off about warranted being archived, reduxed, and just generally brought up to snuff in some capacity with the other offerings available here. i feel like whilst it may not exactly be a host of original statements, per se, it is certainly a list of grievances, ones that i feel are partly responsible for how i view games.
that said, it all stemmed from me having come into contact with two pcgamer articles, both in regards to the upcoming grand theft auto vi. one was on how the bank of america thinks that gta vi should be a high-premium price,. let's start with this one, as it is by far the less in-depth of my two arguments, just by virtue of the fact that, well, it explains itself. of course this is absolutely fucking inane to be saying. let's just set aside that rockstar north are famously edinburgh-based, so if anything it should be the exchequer secretary of the treasury trying to peddle this bullshit - that's a whole other can of worms that has a host of implications of how their publisher may be dicking them over about it. no, what i predominantly want to focus on is the fact that this is going to set some degree of expectation and precedent; i point to the popularity of the GaaS dogshit that is gta online and how basically everybody in the fucking world tried to copy that exact model of microtransaction when they hit it big. likewise, if take-two go ahead and start charging even $90, let alone the constantly proposed $100, then everyone is going to start doing it. in theory it's nice to claim that you're "look[ing] at delivering something amazing and how do we make sure that what people pays for it feels very reasonable" (itself, already a complete fucking misnomer because i somehow feel as though what constitutes as a "reasonable price" to a ceo of a corporation pretty much exclusively known for trying to nickel and dime with mtx and generally scummy business practices at all times may be misaligned with my own, and i would pray to god other people's), but what that means in effect is that you're charging more for the same game with bells and whistles on. a sentiment which is going to perk up a lot of ears and turn a lot of heads, seeing as that's already what the whole fucking AAA sector has been doing in the long absence since rockstar let their feature creep settle for a moment to actually release something.
but what i also wish to highlight with this is thus: your own lack of control should not affect us as consumers. imagine how utterly fucking dumb it would be if because i was going to see some marvel flick, because it had a high-ass budget, i got charged more to buy a ticket for it. already, every movie has been scrambling, tripping over themselves to get a piece of the pie in terms of the tropes and spot-the-chungus appeal of the mcu, so why wouldn't they ape a price point, too, regardless of if they had spent as much or not? furthermore, who the fuck would buy that explanation, and who amongst them would buy a ticket? me, personally, i would hope that people have at least a touch more autonomy than to see "x franchise +1" being, like, $60 for a ticket, when "x franchise -1" ran them $35 and think that's in any capacity okay. i don't exactly think that we, the people who are going to be the ones who consume the product - the times of any grand theft auto even attempting to be 'art' have long passed - should be punished for the fact that, by virtue of expectation and effectively wanting to childishly swing your dick around to prove you have the scratch in the first place, have reportedly spent more than a burj khalifa's worth of money on this shit. $2 billion is the current estimate for the game, all in. which would make it the single most expensive piece of entertainment. not just game, you understand. piece of media, period. funnily, it would seem that the closest is monopoly go!, which is amusing, yes, but it becomes harrowing once you realise that a frivolous little monopoly game cost $1 billion. i'm not being fucking funny here, but if we've somehow reached a point where a version of a board game that you get on your phone is costing astronomically higher to make than the numerous, practically fucking endless prior console iterations, i feel like that itself is pretty telling of where priorities are at right now. but to spend double that, and on a game that, realistically, just as with monopoly go!, will likely not serve to revolutionise anything about its formula that it has kept for decades, is true fucking madness. madness that should not be on the people partaking in its product. i don't know - me, personally? i'm good not paying double the price for a game that'll have equally as much to do and to say, i.e. nothing. god forbid i miss out on some slightly higher-fidelity grand theft auto. however will i live without driving to these specific places to shoot these specific blokes to drive away from that specific place, and how will i deal with the pulse-pounding possibility that there might be some total shake-up to the formula like, gasp! following a specific car to the specific place to shoot the specific blokes? woe is me!
this is not to even begin to mention the truly insidious conditions at rockstar. all of their branches, yes, but most notably rockstar north. already, we knew that they were horrible to work for; i can only imagine that red dead redemption 2 was not too fun to work on when you are having to commit genuine work time at the office to ensuring that the horse bollocks are correct because we totally need them for muh realism. but we now have proof of union-busting just in case they wanted to get a cent for their troubles. union-busting efforts that are likely in direct correlation to a growing dissent within the company for being required to focus on hyper-detail on a now-13 year running project breeding a desire to at least get some decent fucking money for the trouble. raised expectations and budgets should duly lead to raised pay. except, it hasn't. not even close. not only the money matters, of course, the workplace has been decried its fair share too, for the astronomical levels of crunch that they're under.
but then, the more baffling one to me was thus: strauss zelnick claiming that pc players are not gta vi's "core" audience, and yet that "with regards to a big title, pc can be 45, 50% of the sales" in the same interview. fucking what?
this kind of set me off. pc players are not the core audience of grand theft auto vi, and will be having to wait an undisclosed amount of time before the game is released on the platform, and yet you simultaneously acknowledge that they are constituent of a big meaty chunk of your profit? what exactly is the play, here?
is it that, in order to make the first wave of money, you need to release it to the console people who, charitably and kindly speaking, exhibit little-to-no awareness of games other than the mass-marketed big releases for their respective platforms of choice, championing those platforms so hard as to continue to participate in console wars and other such trivial disputes, who will likely be a loud enough crowd to champion it and give that sweet sweet word-of-mouth advertising, to instil FOMO into the PC crowd to drive hype up?
or is it yet another repeat of this situation that already dampened my excitement for grand theft auto v and red dead redemption 2 where you need to, yes, instil the FOMO, but are likewise relying on people chomping at the bit to play the next iteration of Drive Around And Shoot A Bloke that they'll purchase a console just to play your game, and then double-dip on pc, because you know that precise situation played out with the aforementioned games? you would think that after the highly, highly successful launches of gta v, red dead 2, and hell, even the over-a-decade-late red dead redemption pc port, that they would just pull the trigger. doubly so when consoles are, and have been for the last two generations, little more than a race to the bottom to see who can be the shittiest pc the quickest and little else. but, of course, to say that would be to willfully ignorant of the fact that each and every time that those pc releases have happened, as a result of them being months, years and again OVER A DECADE spread from their initial releases, it re-generates hype - the cycle starts anew, and with the hype comes a large new influx of cash going like the clappers. why else would you be so willingly highlighting that pc makes up for half of your profits, and yet transparently shaft them from a day-in-date release? it's obvious! the reason that it makes half of your profits is because you are simply launching the game a second time! it is selling the same game that is already popular again! of course it'll generate a full second launch's worth of profits, i.e., overall, in the most bastardised way of speaking, half!
you could go the far more pro-consumer route of just making it available on all platforms at once, especially because even the hardware architecture between all of those platforms currently sits at a thinner differential margin than ever before, but why should they concern themselves with that? after all:
they know it's going to sell regardless. why not do something so blatantly antithetical to the consumer's current situation as to get them to buy into a wholly different ecosystem, to nickel and dime them further, and then present them with the opportunity, the privilege, to pay, in full, a second time, to be able to engage with it on the platform of their choice a year or two down the road? shit, i know a dude who got flummoxed by that exact strategy with final fantasy xvi, and egg is fully on his fucking face given it's PC release, but it's that precise same principle in motion.
i could wait for a milkshake bar to open down the street from me, or i could go across town, spend fuel money, and be in a more expensive region of town and therefore have to pay a premium for that milkshake from an already open place. and when everyone and their mother is likely not going to shut the fuck up about the milkshakes for a while, it'll eventually get tempting, incredibly tantalising, to give in to that desire.
for some. me, personally, i frankly have too much on my backlog, and besides too much umbrage taken at this point with how rockstar, take-two and all involved parties have conducted business for the last fifteen years to where i can confidently state that i am no longer excited for grand theft auto vi.
at least, not in a conventional capacity. my excitement comes in the potential it has. if it really is just an overpriced texture pack for gta v, and people rightfully reject it for the blatant cashgrab that it is, that would mean something big. it would send the AAA industry into freefall. something that is excellent and very much something to be looked forward to in my book.
(it was at this point in my original rant on discord that i received my first and only response - that being a simply put 💔. thank you, kevin, if you're reading this, please never change.)
i would claim i hate to say it, but... no. i relish in that statement. AAA has been an exercise in copying the other guy into stagnation for the last few years more than ever. sure, you had the infamous gta clones of the 2000s, or hell, even doom clones in the 90s. but not only were a fair chunk of these eventually given sequels and thus personalities of their own independent of the competition, but there were other games releasing. there were other ideas being had in that space. it's quite tricky to find two high-profile releases from the 2000s that have direct feature parallels with one another. name me one game in recent memory that hasn't had a battle pass, season pass, DLC or sequel hook ending, or some sort of catch that reminds you, grounds you in the fact that it is, yet again, a AAA game. the only exception that i can maybe consider is fromsoftware's output, and even then that is tenuous both on account of there being somewhat of an expectation since dark souls that there will be at some point a DLC released, and their stature arguably being closer to a AA studio in the first place.
nintendo have been releasing games unfinished and patchworking them with DLCs and "free updates" for their last generation, and it has done gangbusters for them, because it is now an expectation that a game is going to come out and not be finished, so why don't they join in? this same idea would have had you laughed out of the fucking room a few short years ago.
sure, skyrim and oblivion were and still are acclaimed games, but there are no shortage of jokes from back in the day at their expense due to their immense bugginess; this was a product of them releasing at a time that generally did not have day-one patches as an expectation to make the game function properly, and so their intense instability made for a point of contention. they now seem quaint and dwarved by the comparative shitshows of fallout 76 and starfield, which each make liberal use of battle/season passes and DLC baiting respectively, with each promising the world after literally years of updates to maybe be good now. fallout 76 released in 2018, man, and people are only just now considering it playable after eight years of "oh we fixed this inherent glaring issue" updates, some of which you had to pay for the privilege of experiencing! starfield, likewise, has more or less coasted off of the concept since its release, despite that concept truly not being delivered on with the gameplay effectively amounting to "what if launch-day no man's sky had fallout 4 combat"? you get an utterly banal, uninteresting and unevolved game, which is then later promised to be getting interesting by the dangling of the car keys of dlc in your face. please ignore that our design director said that you just don't get it. and it's mad! this same shit, this reliance on making the exact same gameplay loop in the exact same engine is coming from the same studio that once tried to deliver on radiant AI - a system that is now hilarious because of how quaint and shit it is in comparison to more modern systems, but it was undeniably at least an attempt to push the boat out, to reach for some degree of innovation on their prior formulas with a big USP enhancement.
bungie fell from creating some of the greatest, most innovative, interesting and creative first person shooters that have ever hit the market, to making a game that was thought up by an executive because they didn't like that people ran through big halo maps that were a linear experience, and wanted to keep them playing the same game for hundreds of hours by focusing on "exploration". in reality, it is transparently because they wanted to make a few large maps that could be theoretically re-used for infinite "content", to ensure player retention that would keep them playing the game every day, as opposed to merely discussing it and praising them for years to come. because praise doesn't get money! as a result, there wasn't care placed in a string of genuinely well-thought out campaign missions, nor was there exactly a clear-cut "campaign" in the first instance. why make a game that actually threads you through a decently well-done story when you could just hire some writers later to do some text dumps into some codex files that nobody will read, and have the actual plot amount to fuck all else other than party a saying "worrr we're the goodies" and party b going "worrrr i'm the baddie" and the two meeting at infinitum until they got bored? forgive me for this, but i don't think that destiny ever benefitted from effectively making me have to read dark souls weapon descriptions to get any story out of it. in fact, i would say that the reliance on that very thing is what makes destiny's world feel so utterly shallow and disappointing in comparison to the arguably exact opposite halo franchise that was their prior pedigree: that shit is so granular to where everybody just kind of believed the old joke that the mjolnir suit was jacking off master chief because that's the kind of intense detail they'd go into, but that was secondary to the plots themselves, which were far more often actually willing to. you know. have a plot. destiny 2 has went on since 2017 and has been effectively allergic to any sort of large plot developments that entire time - and no, an ultimately insignificant secondary character that was there for awesome reddit chicken jokes, that mattered so little that they didn't even get his original voice actor back for his original death scene, but the second that the game was in trouble, oh, now he's back? yeah, no, it doesn't fucking matter. they have at least started to slowly drag themselves out of the pit gameplay-wise with the recent marathon reboot, but that itself speaks to another issue! original ip can no longer exist, it always, fucking always has to be tied to some pre-existing franchise whether it be in name or in story.
i don't want games as a whole to die, far from it. hell, i don't even want the mainstream sector to die, inherently; i want the people who are putting down actually interesting ideas, who deliver and concept the exciting, creative and boldest that the larger sector of the medium has to offer, to be able to continue to flourish as they rightfully deserve to. it just so happens that not a soul that constitutes those qualities is in an AAA space, and if they are, their passions are crushed by the machinations of the company that controls what they can and cannot do.
if we can wait 18 pissing years for metroid prime 4, only to have it suck ass? for it to mostly not be a metroid prime game, with the main crux of the game focusing on a concept that is antithetical at a baseline level to the strengths of not just prime, but the entire metroid series, with no attempts to make it compelling or in line with those expectations, and the few glances into a more prime-like experience to be effectively just prime 3 again, echoing its same exact mistakes, but also somehow including mistakes that marred other m, to make a game that in all regards is a complete and utter disappointment, needlessly continuing on with a series that was already dormant, and somehow for it to still be rushed after 8 years of development? why bother?
not a AAA example, but if vampire the masquerade: bloodlines 2 can be in-dev for 20 years, and when it releases be effectively unrecognisable as an entry in that series, let alone a sequel to that specific game, then what is the fucking point?
ubisoft has been reheating the nachos of far cry 3 for 14 fucking years! and they were already shitty the second time around, let alone, what, the sixth?
if the biggest game that the industry has ever seen - no, the most expensive piece of media that the world has ever seen - is required to fail in order to incite some form of reaction to this overbearing stagnation, if we need another video game industry crash that weeds out the chaff and leaves only the truly most devoted to this craft, both on a creator and consumer level? so be it. if i have to wave some of the very scant few remaining AAA series i give a shit about goodbye to get a consistent level of quality in the medium as a whole again, that is fine by me. i would prefer for things to end whilst they're still good than being driven into the ground for another few laborious decades of disinterest from all parties.
i actively pretend that silent hill as a franchise ended with 4, because they have released very little in the way of games that i feel are enjoyable or that even understand the original intent of silent hill in the first instance since that title. obviously, sure, there are exceptions that at least are captivating, but they're just that - exceptions, and certainly no rule. there's something like 21 games in this franchise now, and about 5 of them are any good. previously, we were decrying these games for needlessly bringing back elements of silent hill 2 for nothing other than brand recognition, but now the industry at large is heralding a remake of it that misses the mark on its intent on so fucking many bases as one of the best games of that year? what the fuck happened? we would have killed you with rocks and hammers for doing this shit fifteen years ago! at least steven soderbergh had the decency to wait 41 years before he remade ocean's eleven.
and as these games get marred down more and more by frankly fucking absurd costs for all parties, both costing far, far more to make and considerably more to purchase, that second part only getting worse as time goes on with an over-reliance on digital, and the slow but sure extermination of physical pre-owned copies, at what point does something have to give? especially considering the fact that even sequels to games, which were previously pumped out in a year or two, yes, under crunch, used to be these great leaps forward?
let's go back to that earlier allusion i made to ubisoft. far cry 3 releases in 2012. far cry 3 is a game that is rightfully celebrated; it very much evolved in a different direction from far cry 2, but one that felt a lot more palatable to most people with the removal of some of its more obnoxious systems, but that was in turn made up for with a refinement of the rest of the surrounding gameplay, and garnished nicely with the addition of vaas, an antagonist whose charismatic performance and the effects of it still echo throughout the industry, and the minds of people who played that game, to this day. far cry 4 then released in 2014. okay, they aren't doing a fundamental shake-up like last time, and they re-used a fair majority of the content, but you know, it's whatever, they made a game this big in two years, probably less, and the iterations that it did make are really compelling and fun, with a compelling plot. sure, the main villain is another charismatic bad guy, but it's of a distinctly different cloth from vaas. 2016, far cry primal releases. okay, this is quite literally just the map from far cry 4 but upside down with the textures swapped, but okay, fine, you had to develop a weird-ass caveman language for this game, you had to fundamentally rethink the whole combat loop with the absence of guns, fine, whatever, it is at least something creative and inventive with the formula if nothing else. far cry 5 released in 2018 and is just americana-flavored far cry 4. the story's themes are more blatant, the supporting cast (including the antagonists) are significantly more one-note, most subtext is gone outside of the most shallow "joseph was right??" bullshit, and that's a word for the game as a whole - shallow. not only this, but it was so incredibly buggy that i remember getting on the game with my old friends to play, and it largely devolving into seeing what the fuck would happen because you couldn't so much as cough wrong without something fucking up. there's not even the argument to be made for the gameplay being innovative - we're back to more or less the exact same systems in far cry 4 that have seen little in the way of iteration, the few elements that have changed have been in the interest of introducing multiple currencies to either grind for or to buy on the ubisoft store to cheat your way to better materials and, by extension, weapons, as unneeded as they are because the game is on autopilot at most times - even including a literal autopilot feature, but hey-ho. it's a back-to-basics re-grounding after the absurdity of primal, maybe it's just setting some groundwork before they go all-out next time.
far cry 6, and i cannot stress this enough, is just far cry 5 again but with mildly better presentation and a slightly different backdrop that is ultimately inconsequential. it's another villain written to be cuh-raaazy for the sake of it with no actual depth, it's another resistance group, it's another vapid meaningless shoot-em-up without any dwelling on what it means to our protagonist. and the straw that breaks the camel's back - it echoes that same far cry 3 homework-copying by even just having a mission where you burn down a field of drugs with a flamethrower whilst a licensed song plays in the back. it's still shooting up baddies at outposts to reclaim them. it's not like these games are inherently bad, but they are not inspired. they aren't pushing the boat out in the same way that there was a clear trajectory and evolutionary path from far cry, to far cry 2, to far cry 3. they have found a formula and have went on rehashing it for a decade and a half.
hell, i fucking love yakuza. but the switch to and settling on the dragon engine was so they weren't remaking everything again and again and could reuse more assets than they already did by just directly re-using the exact same models from prior games, maybe with a minor touch up, or even a slight design alteration if you were really lucky. maybe tweak the lighting here, change a texture there. but it was driven largely by just being able to drag-and-drop and then do some minor tweaks. gone are the days where it felt like the next sequel was a massive leap forward - again, i point to the progression between yakuza 2, 3, 4, 5, 0, and then 6. those games are so fundamentally different from each other, each being an iteration on the graphics, musical style, gameplay, minigames, locales and so much more to where what little was rehashed seemed reasonable in the face of the tiny budgets that they were making these grand narratives and kooky games with. there is now a prescribed list of substory songs, a set few minigames that'll keep appearing unchanged from how they were presented in their first iterations in the dragon engine, whether that be in 6, judgment or like a dragon, and, much like silent hill, the only thing setting them apart is a blatant disregard for the source material that they ape the imagery of without actually respecting it.
even my favorite franchises are victim to this idea that bigger is better, that more money means gooder game, that prettier graphics must mean superiority, and that overworked staff need to either spend years pouring over every little facet of each of these to at least have something to show in the form of a technical showcase - oh, look, you can see yourself in puddles now, or something equally banal - or, alternatively, that despite those industry-spanning raised expectations, budgets, graphical fidelity and penchant to make these eyes-bigger-than-your-stomach choices, the choice to blissfully ignore the time allocated to these projects and push the staff to turn around a blatantly lesser game inside of a year, if not months in some extreme cases like we're still making these shits on the fucking ps2!
the technology has stagnated, and in turn, so has a lot of the creative well. ultimately, AAA is and always has been focused on showing you the bigger, bolder, flashier things, jingling the newest car keys in your face, and if the technology that adds further things to dangle off of the keychain has hit such a nadir to where the difference between two generations of game is effectively imperceptible to the layman, then what else do they have to rely on? that's the whole reason that "the cinematic game" dominated the industry for so long - it is a hand-wave of "we're pursuing realism over gameplay for this one to make it feel like a playable movie", which everyone took and ran with to focus on "realism" and attempting to write for shit c-list films and making them playable without actually stopping to realise "hey, wait, these are dogshit as actual games!" sure, it's cool, i suppose, to see something as realistic as the last of us, but for me personally, i feel as though it's too wrapped up in its lofty ambitions and desires to be this grand scope cinematic narrative to deliver anything particularly of note on the gameplay front; ironically, i believe that despite its narrative spitting in the face of the original, the last of us part 2 does a better job of making an engaging gameplay loop. i would prefer, so very much, that a game would be focused on the gameplay, if it came down to brass tacks. don't get me wrong, i do like stories in games. i am, by nature, somebody who is intensely invested in a litany of games' plots, and their ongoing franchises' larger pictures, too. but if every AAA is trying to be a tech-wank exercise that is presenting itself as a "playable movie" above being a "video game", and being a "movie" that you have to pay a second time halfway through the story to see the next act, no less, i can't help but feel like a dominant margin of these products are missing the mark of what makes video games such a compelling medium to work with and to experience.
kojima's games are often argued as patient zero of the focus on cinematics in games. and whilst, yes, they are very wordy, and will happily show you cutscenes for upwards of 45 minutes, that is not all that there is to show. they are resolutely grounded in, and proud of the fact that they are video games, frequently doing wacky shit and mechanically asking at least the most minor of attention from you, to be mindful, to engage with what are typically unique mechanics. death stranding is a walking simulator on the face of it, sure, but it is constantly asking you to consider your actions. how much cargo do you take? how do you balance it? what route are you gonna go on? how will you get through that route? and those are just a few questions that are shooting through your mind on a regular basis - you are permanently engaged in some degree of planning, or interaction, or thought with these games. sure, he absolutely loves his films, and he wears his influences on his sleeve, but he does so without it being as overbearing as to attempt to shadow the fact that he is ultimately working towards making a video game. he revels in the interactivity. every button is always used for something. and that stretches far back - metal gear solid is one of the franchises that really got the dualshock off of the ground, so you could detect the mines in mgs1. there was interaction with the analogue buttons on the ps2 controller in mgs2. the system time uniquely interacted with the world, your items, snake, and even some bosses in mgs3. each of these takes advantage of you being on a games system, and not a movies system that happens to let you control what's happening.
kojima is passionate about his interests.
grand theft auto: vice city is a passionate love letter to 80s mobster flicks, revelling in their ability to get in actors from those movies as acting talent to heighten the work, spending a great deal of time and effort and, again, money, on creating a game that felt distinct from the prior in mood, atmosphere, time and tone. vice city is an embodiment of 1980s miami as presented in over-the-top movies and TV of the time brought to an even higher extreme, both in tribute and in loving mockery of the tropes presented.
grand theft auto vi returns to vice city because it is reaching a point in time where it is a nostalgic game. it knows that you know about vice city. it also knows that it's upgrading a ps2 game visually so it has a favorable comparison to the prior representation of this specific location, and can blaze on scot-free showing nothing but cinematic trailer after cinematic trailer because "wow vice city looks so good now", driven forward entirely by tech wank and a hollow requirement to drum up hype without actually showing anything compelling about this video game and instead opting to wallow in visual fidelity yet again.
people were fucking creaming themselves over that stupid bottle with the liquid physics that seems frankly quaint if you've booted any of valve's offerings in the last, what, half-decade? and i was just sat wondering "okay, now where's the gameplay?" and as of writing, on the 6th of may 2026, there has yet to be any gameplay shown whatsoever, despite the fact that the game is currently set to release on the 19th of november of this year for those unfortunate enough to be afflicted with the curse of owning a current-gen console. if they show footage at summer games fest this coming june? cool! it's far fucking later than it ever should have been and its frankly ridiculous that the first look at what your 13-year project actually plays like is coming four months before it's set to release, but it's at least something. if they don't show any gameplay, and it's another cinematic trailer? i can genuinely foresee this turning into a watch_dogs level swindle where a whole lot of people feel robbed, and it's going to be far more consequential because it is, to reiterate, the most expensive piece of media, in a franchise infamous for being representative of ballooning industry costs, but one that has garnered a reputation for being rather high-quality and near-universally enjoyed, having it's next iteration with a lot of expectations having mounted after 13 long years that could quite easily shatter if mishandled.
valve are not going to make half-life 3, at least not by that name, because they are acutely aware that they have no place to take it technologically, and that the expectations of that theoretical white whale game are far, far too astronomically high to be anything but a disappointment. they gave up the ghost on that so much that they took what worked from it and started applying the ideas to new projects, as is shown by the evolution of an ice path-spewing SMG that looked like a roblox path giver item in their prototyping of a theoretical episode 3 to the abilities of kelvin in deadlock.
even fucking todd howard had the self-awareness to eventually throw in the towel and ask us to forget that he announced the elder scrolls 6 eight years ago. he's saying to "pretend we didn't announce it. doesn't exist". if you can have fucking todd "mold-helmet touting, fallout 3 will have like 200 endings" howard somehow demonstrate more self-awareness, for him to come out and throw his hands up and say that he fucked up? then yeah. i think that the industry is probably checked the fuck out of any degree of sensible goings-on right now.
i personally think that AAA continuing in the way that it presently is will be and has been nothing but a continual blight on what few creatives do remain in the space. if there was a simple way for them to go independent and not have to consign themselves to trends and appeasing shareholders, to allow them to express themselves creatively in any which way they desired, that would be ideal. of course, i realise that itself is a flawed line of logic; leslie benzies split off from rockstar and went on to found build a rocket boy and then release mindseye, a game that very much does not live up to the expectations set by his past endeavours, to speak charitably. to speak truthfully, it's one of the most bafflingly misguided attempts to replicate the grand theft auto formula this side of the godfather for xbox 360, and at its best moments is only car-crash-fascinating. it would be fine if he owned up to that, you know, learning from the first time he's running an independent studio after his departure from rockstar... but instead he tried to pin its failures on internal 'saboteurs' whilst pushing staff to the brink of mental and physical illness, even after launch. there is an inherent flaw to this idea of paying attention to any given one creative mind because of their past work; a creative should be given their flowers for their work, yes, but that should not immediately and directly correlate to their next work being hyped up beyond belief. you can certainly be interested, god knows i kept my fingers on the pulse of the careers of suda51, swery, shinji mikami, hideki kamiya and toshihiro nagoshi because of their past works being some of my favorites ever, to name a few examples, but i have never went in expecting the exact same experiences as they previously delivered. i wanted to see what mikami did after resident evil not on account of me wanting his take on resident evil without the license, but instead wanting to see his creative vision and what his project was gonna be. and i subsequently enjoyed the evil within! hell, i am one of the few insane enough on earth to say that i genuinely was marginally interested in and somewhat enjoyed balan wonderworld to at least see what yuji naka and naoto oshima were banging on about.
but that isn't how that works for most people. you see the name warren spector, you immediately think of thief and deus ex, much to his chagrin, as he very much wants his entire team at ion storm to see recognition for their work, but inevitably the shorthand and recognition becomes "hey! he's the guy that made deus ex!". and that's one example; people were disappointed when slitterhead was marketed on the premise of being "from the creator of silent hill", because whilst touching on similar themes and certainly being grounded in the horror genre, it is not silent hill. i wonder how many people who lodge that complaint know that keiichiro toyama also made gravity rush after he left team silent. you know - the game that was far more influential on slitterhead in the first place? that, and siren, but most people do not have prior awareness of either of those franchises, despite how fucking amazing they are and how much they ooze creativity and personality that toyama may have never been able to explore if he stayed shackled to team silent, or even konami, on a larger scale. it's utterly dreadful to see creatives be reduced to their works, and even when they have the opportunity to spread their wings, many an unsavvy consumer will deride their attempts because "it's not what i liked you for". i may be pretentious for this suggestion, but if you're not interested in the creativity of, well, creatives, maybe don't pursue them. look into the genre that they made a good entry in, and see what you can find that's similar. do not impose unneeded restrictions on what you can and can't see from specific creatives who wish to explore their concepts and ideas. reserve that scorn for the companies who quash these creative directions, or direct misguided nose dives of pre-established franchises.
i simply wish that indie games and AAA games could be equally as platformed as one another; in theory, if anybody and everybody were on a level playing field, i would hope that the actual quality shit would rise to recognition. it's the exact same reason that hollywood is shit for films; they are driven by money, designed by committee, and made to appeal to the lowest common denominator. conversely, independent films are often lauded as some of the best to hit the medium in years because they are unrestricted by the need to appeal to corporate shareholders, or even have mass appeal in the first place. their limits are their imagination.
no marvel movie is going to make you feel or think or be genuinely contemplative on the meaning of not only its medium but perhaps even human emotion and existence. i would be stunned to hear of an a24 film that has not done that
by the same metric, and to hold them to the same standards and expectations of the films that they so desperately want to be, there is going to be no AAA game that sticks with you or keeps you coming back in the same way as a really well-crafted indie game. because of the strengths of this medium, too, that doesn't even have to strictly speaking be from the plotline, it could be that it has a far more compelling gameplay loop. it's why breakout indie hits happen and why they every-so-often get cannibalised by corporations - if it was just another game, minecraft would not be owned by microsoft. proof being, when the fuck was the last time you ever heard anybody mention scrolls?
i want to close with an admission that my knowledge of all AAA games is far from what it once was, as with a lot of AA offerings. i used to play a lot of shit on my ps3 and wii back in the day by virtue of the fact that it was easy to find lots of as-many-as-you-can-carry games for like £15. i am cracked at guessthe.game when it covers the early 2000s to mid 2010s as a result of this, but chances are that if you put a post-2020 instalment of even a franchise that i enjoy in front of me, i'd likely not recognise it. a lot of this rant and this mindset could indeed be a byproduct of my loosening grip on all games, and my inability to have an encompassing knowledge of the greater zeitgeist driving me to have a belief that things are significantly worse due to my surface-level knowledge of the proceedings of the day, in comparison to my previously rather in-depth knowledge of what things were like marring my ability to see the bigger picture here. this is a chronicling of what i felt were my observations and opinions, and not a statement of fact.
that said any attempts to enjoy AAA games are on the same level as being a serial killer in my book so dni bro.
