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The state of video games in the year of our lord 2025 continues to astound me. I continue to wonder when the inflection point was, between the ascending art form, and it's degenerate form we see today. Insane stories nobody wants to hear, ugly unlikable worlds, artless current year lampshading, technical issues out the wazoo, "gameplay" that seems to revolve around trying to hook into as many addiction centers as possible and draping casual-tier game mechanics over top of it as a fig leaf. it's a disgrace.
An obvious flashpoint was Gamergate, and that's been beat to death. But before Gamergate, Bioshock Infinite killed the AAA title as it was understood up until that point.
Arguably, Bioshock Infinite was the perfect game. Gamers loved it, reviewers loved it, it was philosophical with something for everyone (except a few wokies who got upset that it depicted both sides as capable of great evil), and most importantly it sold gangbusters. And it still couldn't earn it's money back (allegedly1), the developers basically closed down, reducing in size to a mere skeleton crew that never released another game. I'm struggling to find good sources for it, but I recall this sent shockwaves through the industry. I remember panicked headlines on Gamasutra which I had been reading at the time for some fucking reason. Suddenly everyone was shitting their pants afraid that they'd been shoveling money into a business model (big budget AAA singleplayer games) that would lose them money. And to my memory, this is when the changes began.
Publishers were desperate to do anything but a AAA singleplayer game which would lose money even if it succeeded because it cost so damned much. You saw more games as a service, more DLC, more online requirements, more courting of controversy to make up for obvious lack of quality. Or maybe the woke shit was just a convenient hack to get free publicity and better reviews from a gaming press that Ziff Davis had centralized in San Francisco and then abandoned. Who's to say.
I'm obsessive. I keep a spreadsheet of all the retrogames I aspire to play again, the year they came out, the issue of Computer Gaming World they got reviewed in, which of my stable of retro PCs I should play them on, etc. Around 2015 the list stops. The last game on it is Rebel Galaxy. The last big budget AAA game on it is Borderlands 2 from 2012. I didn't stop at that date because the games weren't retro enough. I stopped because as I was perusing lists of top reviewed or most popular games year by year, that was roughly the time upwards of 80% of them became Games as a Service. Either always online DRM, a multiplayer focus, or even 10 years of perpetual updates chasing "engagement" made them unsuitable for a list oriented towards posterity and nostalgia. Which once again, is more or less right around the time Bioshock Infinite and it's disastrous aftermath was rippling through the industry.
Arguably, Ubisoft has been fighting the good fight. I make fun of Ubislop titles, and their super generic, open world, casual action adventure mechanics. But they are still ostensibly offline big budget single player games. Which really only leaves woke-baiting as a tactic to try to punch above their weight. Alas.
In the 2000's I think it was, Nintendo announced they were no longer going to devalue their games by reducing their prices. It was customary to release $20 versions of games that had sold a bunch. It was easy in the back half of a consoles life to stock up on all the classics pretty cheap, and brand new to boot. Nintendo argued this created a race to the bottom, and quit doing it. People were upset, accused them of being greedy. Gamer entitlement is quite the sight to see. But in the meantime, I think Nintendo was largely vindicated. The first party games that released for the Switch were all 1000% worth the money, especially when compared to the GaaS titles Xbox or Sony were pushing. One again Nintendo is pissing gamers off raising prices. Switch 2 games look to cost $70 or $80, and the console itself is priced at $450. This could be greed. Or like in the early 00's it's Nintendo insisting on being paid what they are worth. Unless you want them to start whoring it up on the corner of Woke & GaaS.
The perfect bioshock infinite was called Prey ... and nobody played it.
The death of the golden age of gaming came with the death of the speed part of moore's law in 2006-sh. I am trying to assemble history of how and why.
But I would say that the first canary in the coal mine was Warcraft 3. It was the game that showed me that something is starting to get wrong in the industry.
I'd love to hear that thesis about Warcraft 3. I remember from early previews it felt far more RPGish than it turned out and had far more races and campaigns that got cut (they planned 6 didn't they?). But ambitious design documents getting cut back isn't anything new.
The whole feel was wrong. The previous blizzard games were rooted in some dark and gritty and I wouldn't say realistic, but logical graphics and feel - you had ships, oil spilled around them. Starcraft had actually good story in which the characters were acting believable. And they showed their sides. When Raynor was forced to leave Kerrigan to die you felt it - both as a player (the doomed mission) but in the characters and the world.
In Warcraft III the story - the best I can tell about it was that it was manufactured. I don't think that anyone felt any kind of connection to any of the characters. It felt that the story was trying to tell you what to feel about the characters and not make you (btw - problem of the woke movies too) feel it. The graphics were off - they were too cartoonish, the gameplay itself was totally meh, the camera and the field of view that was available was absurdly tiny - so you couldn't S in your RTS.
It also started the trend of Blizzard pushing characters on the players. No one liked arthas - and yet they made him the big bad. His story arc was supposed to be epic, but on every front they only delivered cringe. That also continued in World of Warcraft. The stompeaks story line of Thorim totally overshadowed Icecrown. And once again they showed that they had no idea what actually makes their successes successful. Because they suddenly decided with the Ulduar patch to replace the big blue battered vrykul both with something shiny and polished that no played had connection to - both in the raid and in the outside world. But talking about Icecrown - did anyone actually like the stupid way the storyline ended. It felt so forced, so tryhard.
I think that this is what was Warcraft III problem - it was tryhard all the way, and that is why it felt fake. So for me that was the canary in the coal mine - the try hardiness of the people in the gaming companies that tried to make people that were not the buyers of the games view them as REAL ARTISTS
This is why we got the terrible terrible surreal God Of War 3 ending (kratos is hope he is chasing a little girl to the light), terrible Mass Effect 3 ending( little girl and the light) and the whole gears of war.
After that the tryhardiness conitued to infect more and more. rockstar tryhard with GTA4, the way the brilliant prince of persia games mutated into Assassin's Creed game (although there were problems with two thrones)
Once again - this is not a coherent post because the whole thing is not yet coherent in my head. But the decline proper started with XBOX360 and some signs were visible slightly before that.
Yeah, Blizzard's writing has always been more like a series of events that happen to occur chronologically rather than any kind of story with a plot. Sometimes you get the sense they expect something will have a big emotional payoff and give it a big cutscene, and it's just a character introduced 20 minutes ago randomly doing something for random reasons invented on the spot.
The Warcraft universe kind of feels like if you trained an LLM on Tolkien, D&D, and heavy metal lyrics, and then had it create a fantasy story. Everything is an exaggerated version of the shared consciousness about what a "dwarf" is or what an "elf" is or what medieval fantasy looks like. And sometimes is just an exaggerated version of the real world for some reason, so we get New Jersey gangster goblins and Jamaican Trolls who love the Loa, mon.
A lot of this stuff just feels like the 1990s-early 2010s. Anyone remember early Five Gum ads? Or heck, Bionicle. There was a trend towards hard-edged and tryhard atmospheres, everything had to be edgy and serious even if it didn't warrant it. People praise those Playstation 2 ads, but they seem like surrealist nonsense with no actual connection to video games. It really does feel like the "burgers?" meme.
Exhibit A was The Matrix, there were so many neat elements of it and it's remained in the popular consciousness for that reason, but it had to go eerily spiritual in a film series about technology. Who the heck was that grandma, anyway? What does this chosen one nonesense have to do with robots using humans as batteries?
I wouldn't say I'm into hard science fiction, but I think you need to be careful about inserting vague spiritualist nonsense in a story about technology. The spiritual and humanistic elements of a story about technology have to arise from the impact of technology on people and how it changes their perception of the world, not from spiritual powers imposed from the outside.
I enjoy stories about technology, but the problem with science fiction is that its authors have always been too Big Five Open for their own good and have squirted strange new ideas onto the page alongside the thoughtful reflections about the future of science and tech. I will say, for a cluster of people so committed to materialism and atheism, science fiction authors seem strangely compelled to write about beings of pure spirit and gods.
You can tell a compelling genre story about characters struggling against evil, but you have to think about characters and their motivations and have them act accordingly. I don't understand why game stories leaned so heavily into pseudo-mystical elements to add depth (poorly) instead of character motivations, which is the way in which deep stories actually stick with people. Your game will not be the source of a spiritual awakening, but it might inspire someone to strive for what is just and right, which is an important message that's easily possible.
I increasingly think Carmack was right. Story in games is like story in porn. You need just enough to get the action going. Most of my memorable moments in games come from overcoming challenges, rarely story beats. I rarely want to replay a game with a good story, because it takes so much work to get through it. If I want a story, I'll read a book or watch a movie. Increasingly just read a book these days.
The singular exception to this was ICO, who's environmental story telling was so masterful, which tied it's game mechanics into it so subtly, it blew me away with it's story in a way no other game has since. You were buying into it in ways you didn't even realize just playing the game normally. Raw genius.
Outside of that, I think I just want unpretentious serviceable game plots.
I disagree -- not because I think your preferences are invalid, I just have totally different ones. Story in games is hard to do right, but I do believe it can be compelling if the story is actually part of the interactive elements of the game and not just a framework for the gameplay. That's only the case if you're actively making choices that affect the outcomes for particular characters and having to make tradeoffs to accomplish an ending that satisfies your concern for the characters and their world. That's why people were so angry at the Mass Effect 3 endings -- all your choices and progress meant very little in terms of the conclusion, you just had to pick from a fixed set of options based on your progression in the third game rather than having your particular choices throughout the trilogy result in a unique ending.
So game stories only matter if participating in the story is part of the player's set of choices. Linear stories with no branching paths or player choice are to player-driven stories what walking simulators are to gameplay. Branching stories with mutually exclusive options are also deeply replayable, because you can make wildly different choices each time and see different parts of the game. Note how players keep replaying and replaying Fallout New Vegas, Witcher 3, Skyrim, Mass Effect, etc.
I would definitely be curious what your gamer motivation profile looks like. Mine doesn't really match up with any of their archetypes, I like the immersion and creativity motivations almost to the exclusion of the others. So I'll engage in gameplay if it rewards me with positive story outcomes or character immersion or a cosmetic that fits my character's style or something I can use to create a thing in the game world, but I don't find gameplay inherently compelling, except for racing games, for some reason. Games are for me an excuse to exercise imagination in an interactive fictional world, not to demonstrate competence or achievement except insofar as those drive the fantasy. (So I might think of my character's progression in terms of the obstacles they've overcome or the achievements they've made, but it's not all that important that I've overcome them.) I'm a game world enthusiast and I see a player-driven story as part of participating in the game world.
I got Skirmisher and Slayer, huh.
The closest one for me was architect. But I did notice in some of their marketing materials for their consulting services the QF people talk about "World Designers", who have the fantasy and design motivations that are my strongest, and is described as "almost entirely women in their mid 20s." So that's... good to know, I guess.
I looked at the same PDF and they happened to give a profile of skirmishers (no such luck for slayers):
You're breaking my heart here. :( But I'm guessing "slayer" came up for you because you're more likely than the skirmishers to value story.
It says you are unlikely to enjoy Dragon Age, Portal, Crusader Kings, The Sims, The Witcher, Cities: Skylines, Fallout 3, Knights of the Old Republic, and for some reason Tetris. Do you happen to enjoy Halo, Apex Legends, Cuphead, DOOM, Cuphead, or PUBG?
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