Nier creator Yoko Taro reveals the sad reality of modern AAA game development, “there’s less weird people making games”

I have. Watched two beings play it. I sincerely hope the person(s) who made that game make more games.

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.

The only recent example I can think of is Death Stranding.

Hmm. On second thought, maybe games were a mistake.

What's a jock if it isn't the highschool quarterback?

Non usa-ish here

Too many business majors joined game dev teams

+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

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.

Imagine having 10k employees and not setting aside an indie dev team or two for passion projects.

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 all their minds that a game could 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.

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

Indie games are great and all, but everybody I know is still waiting for great AAA games again that we can play together.

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?

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.

I couldn't agree more

Kojima is only getting weirder.

Touché!

Fair play!

weird people the lesser