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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.
I forgot about that, but yes, completely agree. I played a recent Fire Emblem game (Engage, I think) and the MC is fanfic-tier overpowered dragon goddess who has a dark alter ego. In older FE games you were some guy who was good with a sword, or at best a noble who had fallen on hard times and had to play politics and win difficult military victories to regain power. I guess normies enjoy power fantasies.
Engage's story was godawful, but let's be real who plays FE:Engage for the story?
(I had a chuckle when the first autocomplete result when I tried to google "fire emblem engage* story" in Japanese was "fire emblem engage* story bad")
edit:aword
I quit when I got to the Anime Brazil continent. At that point I wasn't sure why I was playing it at all, and that setting was too goofy even for FE.
Mostly the combat system? I think Engage has one of the most robust combat systems in FE history.
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