I don't think big companies know how to make a good FPS campaign anymore, let alone hone in on classic deathmatch multiplayer. The last FPS I bought was Half-Life: Alyx four years ago, and the first one to come along and interest me since then was Phantom Fury, but I'm letting that one iron out bugs for a few weeks before I pick it up. Even former TimeSplitters devs, given the opportunity to make a new TimeSplitters, made another Fortnite instead. Likely this new Perfect Dark was built to turn it into a live service that keeps players playing it forever rather than just making a fun deathmatch to play with your friends a handful of times, which would be missing the point. And all this is to say nothing about how those devs must be feeling when even a great game that sells well won't save you from Microsoft laying you off.
Has Microsoft put out a single worthwhile AAA title in the entire console generation? I bought an Xbox Series X after the Bethesda acquisition and I’ve used it once to boot up Starfield and then quit after 15 minutes when I realized it was boring as hell.
They have this uncanny ability to spend more money on acquisitions and then completely stall the output from that company until every game blows.
They had one good franchise that they didn’t run into the ground, Halo. And after they got control of it they killed that too. They own half the industry now and I feel like they produce less games than ever before.
I feel like they’re going to get bored, kill their games division in 5 years and the whole industry will have to rebuild.
They've actually stated within the last year that they are in fact considering moving away from the games industry if certain things dont happen for them. This came out during the whole court proceedings surrounding their attempted Activision buyout.
I can't remember the details and I'm too lazy to look into it again lol. There are some interesting articles out there tho
They want to be a cloud gaming provider and sell Xbox fire TV sticks instead of consoles, with controllers that connect directly to the azure server running their games. Why do you think Nvidia and the UK weren't happy with Microsoft a few years ago and they made so many deals with cloud gaming providers like boosteroid and GeForce now?
Microsoft turned every Windows PC into an Xbox overnight with XCloud and they had little to no overhead costs. That's where their business is right now, cloud and AI, not gaming, Xbox will take a backseat and I'm going to bet we will see them transition from a console maker to simply publisher that conveniently sells a cloud TV stick that can play games.
Ground Branch on PC has some of the best I've ever seen. NPCs will, for example, if shot in the neck, clutch their throat and dynamically transition into a ragdoll as their animations become more sloppy until they go completely limp. It's actually kind of unsettling how brutal it is.
What's sad is that this game is a low budget passion project made by former Rainbow Six devs (the OG R6 games), not a AAA game backed by a massive corperation.
Writers these days just seem to not know how to write an enjoyable story period. So much bad writing in the entertainment sector now, its not like back in the 80s and 90s where movie theaters were showing slapper after slapper, you'll be lucky to find maybe one or two that match up to the likes of Jurassic Park, Ghostbusters, Star Wars, or Titanic.
Its similar with games, but shifted forward a decade to the 90s and 00s. Games these days have a very hard time matching up to games like Ocarina of Time, Chrono Trigger, Silent Hill, or Metal Gear Solid. While games like Silent Hill 1 have laughably poor quality voice acting by todays standards in terms of sound quality, the story was well written and kept the player's interest. Of games from my recent memory, the only one that matches up is Elden Ring, which has gone the direction of basically removing all the writing from the game.
It’s easy to remember just the successes of the past and ignore the fact that the vast majority of media then was shit too… we’ve simply forgotten about the things that ended up being mediocre. Survivorship bias is really really strong.
An example a lot of people here can relate to is thinking about game consoles and handhelds they played growing up like the GBA.
There were likely some great games produced for it but there was also a lot of shovelware movie tie-ins and horrendous ports that were misrepresented in advertisements.
I can think of plenty of games with writing I've really enjoyed in recent years, not the least of which is Baldur's Gate 3 just last year, but FPSes in particular are in one of only a few genres where I haven't been well served lately.
BG3 is another good example but surely you can agree that was like a drop of water in an ocean of sand. Games that well done are incredibly rare, and it mostly comes down to just writing. The actual game mechanics and graphics quality of games now are better than they have ever been for the most part. But the games are bad, not because of those things, but because the writing fails to capture the players interest.
Idk, my favourite writer is Brandon Sanderson and he still keeps writing with the supersonic speed. Maybe that's just you. Unless you mean writing in games and movies specifically, for which I am not qualified enough to say
I was specifically talking about writing for video games and movies, I haven't read very many books or comics lately so I couldn't know if it applies there as well or not.
Probably not exactly what you're looking for, but Tiny Tina's Wonderlands was a great campaign that's technically an FPS with a lot of RPG heaped on top.
Not exactly, but I have found a taste for loot games lately, so maybe someday I'll get around to that one. It still wouldn't scratch the same itch though.