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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.
I remember reading the Warcraft 2 game manual multiple times as a middle schooler. It was dark, gory, and realistic. There were heroes, but they weren't larger than life and sometimes they got died. It read like a chronicle of Aztecs invading England, it was badass. I especially enjoyed how each Orcish clan was essentially a separate tribe with it's own rituals and cultures, lovingly detailed. Shout-out to my homies from the Bonechewer and Laughing Skull. The human kingdoms also had interesting histories, I loved the stories of Lordaeron and Alterac. Even the heroes were cool. Aleria, Turalyon, and Uther were badass.
Warcraft 3 pushed all of this into the background to focus on goofy Arthas. The gameplay was good, but the SOVL was gone.
(Controversial take -- I feel very similarly about Final Fantasy VI and VII.)
I also enjoyed in Warcraft II how you weren't the hero. You were a commander doing his job. And got promotions along the way.
This is a sentiment I've heard a number of people express. Borderlands 1 being preferable to 2 because in 1 you play as a nobody merc while 2 makes you the savior of the world and center of the narrative. Classic WoW being preferable to later expansions because you're a nobody adventurer as opposed to Azeroth's Greatest Champion. Half Life 1 vs 2. Seems there's a kind of gamer that doesn't like the conceit that the player is always the center of attention.
Single player video games almost always require the player character to be the Chosen One, because in a meta sense, they're the only one with free will, and they almost always follow a unique set of rules compared to NPCs. I think, as storytelling in video games took more prominence, too many devs saw this as an opportunity to be clever by making the in-universe story reflect this, leading to it being done so much that many players got bored of it. There's something to be said about the power fantasy of being the Chosen One, but that also can make the player feel like their success in the game is pre-planned rather than earned.
This is why I personally didn't like Commander Shepard filling such a special role in Mass Effect rather than being the right soldier in the right place at the right time to save the universe. Doomguy in 1993's Doom was more that, and I was disappointed in the narrative of the 2016 Doom making Doom Slayer the Chosen One. I think From Soft games tend to do a good job at finding a good balance between the 2, where the player character is usually a member of a class of characters with special abilities including resurrection, but they're not a particularly special one of those, other than that the player controls them to accomplish special things which earns them the status of a
GreatChosen One by the end.I don't think it hurt, mostly because it was earned. As in - after the first 2-3 bigger fights it is obvious that you are indeed the slayer. Also the enemies treated you as a regular marine - they tried to rip your guts out and wear them as a scarf.
It is a bit like Kratos being the god of war even if underpowered at the beginning of 2018 GoW
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