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.
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Kinda funny that a larger team with better tech struggles to recreate what a smaller team with more limited tech did 25 years ago
“Newer” does not necessarily equal “better.”
The real problem is how basically game dev is an untenable long-term career from a AAA standpoint… or at least it is outside of Japan.
Almost every major dev is not being run by anyone with more than 10-ish years of dev experience.
Why? Because studios shut down and fire everyone, or they get bought… and fire everyone… or the grizzled vets get burnt out, or find out that work-life balance shifts when they get old enough to want to start a family, or discover (like I did) that general software pays better, has less turnover, and doesn’t shut down as often.
Look at all the major players in the FPS game for example from the past 15 years… The guys who made Perfect Dark, the original GoldenEye, Killer Instinct, Banjo Kazooie, and Conker’s Bad Fur Day? Mostly not in the industry anymore or struggling while working on small indie projects. Some of the companies still exist, but the guys who’d be in their 60s with 30 years of game dev and design mastery under their belts? Gone.
Cliff Blezinski isn’t working on games anymore. John Carmack isn’t at id. Half of Bungie’s OG staff has moved on to other stuff or switched to 343 or some other smaller studio.
I said “outside of Japan” earlier btw because meanwhile Shigeru Miyamoto is still at Nintendo. Dude’s an absolute elder god of game design, and all he’s been doing is working on them for more than 4 decades at this point.
Kojima’s been making games since the 80s, so has most of the folks at Capcom, and the From Software guys have been doing the same thing for 15+ years at this point.
And then there’s the rare tiny studio or re-org of a once awesome team like Respawn after all the Activision / Call of Duty stuff or indie effort like the guy behind Stardew Valley… but other than those handful of exceptions, there’s no one but 20-something recent grads that pad out the teams at these giant game companies like Ubisoft, Activision, EA, etc. Even Blizzard is a pale shadow of what it once was. And Valve doesn’t really make games anymore b/c they don’t have to…
They aren’t making great games - but NOT because they’re “stupid…” they’re making bad games… because they just started… and all the old farts who they should be apprenticing under like you do with ANY other respected artisan type career are gone.
And every year some $10 million / year bonus paid suit shuts down an Ensemble Studios, or a Telltale Games, or fires half of the team at Square Enix b/c the new Tomb Raider 6-year project didn’t make a bajillion dollars after some exec decided that should be their target since “Clash Royale” only took 1 year to pump out and just basically prints piles of money.
They’re not exactly building the same game, surely.
I’d imagine there’s online multiplayer to add for a start.
There’s much precedent for that kind of feature in other games. Why should having online in a PD reboot be any harder than Halo, CoD, Fortnite etc?
The comparison is to the original PD, not to more recent games.
Mediocre Dark
Microsoft could fire half or all the development team. That surely fixes everything. 🙄
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.
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.
It’s funny how much survivorship bias we have. Movies, Music, Games. It’s so easy to forget how bad some previous stuff was.
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.
I would not agree with that, no. First because I’d say mechanics are almost always the most important part anyway, and also because I’ve probably come across more stories that have held my interest in recent years than I did 25 years ago. Stories were pretty basic back then, more often than not. In fact, these days, I’ve been carried through mediocre gameplay by well-told stories more than a few times, and I don’t think that ever happened 25 years ago.
As someone with an avatar of the Q from Quake 1, I can avidly say that writing was not better in the past.
Just off the top of my head from the last decade:
-Baldurs gate 3 -Firewatch -Return of the Obra Dinn -Disco Elysium -Tyranny -Shadowrun Dragonfall -Red Dead Redemption 2 -Witcher 3 -Hellblade Senuas Sacrifice -Life is Strange -Prey (2017) -The Red Strings Club
Seriously, go check the story to Perfect Dark. Hilarious? Yes. A “good story”? No.
There are myriad issues in gaming now that weren’t there in the past, but good writing is (thankfully) still around.
