Re:More than 300 game developers lost their jobs in one day,...
by Cumpiler69 on Thursday December 05, 2024 @12:08PM
(#42330109)
>I call this Product Manager driven game design.
I call it game design by HR. Everything today by big western games studios is designed to be so super safe and sterile just in case to not be offensive to absolutely anyone, so you end up with a limp-dick experience that's not fun to anyone.
Or worse, game devs insert their own social and political ideologies into the games like for example in Star Wars Outlaws you play as an outlaw who can only rob the police but not the civilians and can't kill animals only pet them.
People got into video games for the escapism from reality, not to have even more constrains than in reality placed upon then just so the game studio can tick all the $CURRENT_DAY social and political safety boxes. Nobody wants to buy that.
As games got more and more "accessible" and shipped more and more quality of life features added, here was a game that decided to add friction to everything. You can't pause. You can lose EXP/money when you die. There are cheesy gimmick deaths just to screw with you. You can't replay dialogue. There is no quest log and there are missable quest steps all over. NPCs will disappear and travel to unknown locations.
Demon Souls and to some extent Dark Souls 1 were positively niche but the games went on to be genre defining giving birth to "soulslike" games and Elden Ring waz justly rewarded with mass appeal and awards.
I don't have a problem with games being accessible but I relish a story of someone going all-in on taste/vision driven-design and succeeding. I am also a little bitter of many AAA games becoming busywork simulators because games must deliver engaging experiences x times per hour which then just leads to bloated fetch quests and checklists and busy screens full of quest markers