- [Falcon] As time passes, we
expect things to get bigger, better, or at least develop in some way. But there are some things that are going in the wrong direction. Hi folks, it's Falcon and today on Gameranx, 10 game features that are evolving backwards. Starting off at number
10, it's Unlockables. Now lists like this can easily
dip into old man yells at cloud territory, just a bunch of out of touch complaining
about games these days. So let me just start off
by saying that in general, gaming is better. You could even say it's
better than it's ever been, from a technology standpoint,
from a variety standpoint, from a possibility standpoint. There's just more a developer can do. There's also so much stuff out there, it's nearly impossible to play all of it. There's so much that for pretty much all of the complaints listed here,
you'll be able to come up with a counter example from a modern game that didn't evolve backwards. So I wanna nip that right in the bud. I am completely aware that there's stuff that does things right. That said, video game Unlockables
seem like they've kind of been on a downward decline. What used to be a bunch of
bonus material, extra weapons, new costumes, stuff that
rewards players for completion, and adds re playability to games. It's been replaced with Microtransactions and in-Game stores. All that stuff that used to
be free has been ripped out and sold back to us. Ubisoft particularly bad about this. Take any recent Assassins Creed game, and you'll find a cash
shop filled with stuff that older entries would've
just had you unlock it by, you know, playing the
game that you bought. There are counter examples,
Insomniac's Marvel's Spiderman, gives you a ton of costumes that can all be earned in the game. There are a few pre order bonuses so it's not a perfect counter, but same time they give
you a lot for free. Well maybe not free, time is money, and you get it with your time. But still fighting games, however, have really
gotten hit hard with this. Take some of the older Dead or Alive games where you could unlock seven or eight costumes for each of the characters and it was all free. And then look at the most
recent game, Dead or Alive Six, you don't even get a
fraction of that for free. There's hundreds of other costumes, and you have to pay for them. And that's not even getting
into multiplayer games where the Battle pass has taken
over as the preferred form of Micro transaction. There's still the classic unlock
track where you get rewards for leveling up, but now you
get the privilege of paying to level up like it's a
better system than Loot boxes. Not gonna say it's not, it is. And a lot of these cosmetics
probably wouldn't even exist if not for the battle pass. But it's also hard not to look
at the state of these games, and wonder if it really would be so bad if you could just
buy a multiplayer game and play it, you know, without
the whole getting nickel and dime at every single corner approach. Like I, it really does feel
like that's a de evolution. So crack that whip. We're gonna continue on with number nine, multiplayer modes in single player games. Do you remember when for a
while every single player game had attacked on multi-player component? There were a lot of bad ones, but there were a few that
were actually pretty fun. Also, they would not exist
in today's gaming landscape. I, I'm talking about stuff like Assassin's creed multi-player, or Last of Us factions, stuff like that. Both Last of Us remakes, cut factions even though it was in extremely
popular mode for a while. Multiplayer games are just in general struggling at the moment. It seems like for a game
to last, it either needs to be small enough to survive
on relatively low player counts or be the biggest thing ever. So many multiplayer
games have been canceled or had a beta then get quietly dropped. Not 'cause the game was bad, but because it wouldn't be profitable enough. It's not confirmed, but that's probably what
happened to factions. Multiplayer games can't
just be fun additions that add some value to the
game, they have to be cash cows that will generate
infinite wealth forever. Obviously that's not true of every game. There's still some games that
have a pretty large amount of fun added via multiplayer, but there are so many games where single player is the focus, and multi-player is planned to split off, but it's just abandoned. And I know that like in all honesty, I've complained a lot
about there not being enough single player games. But I'll also say this,
this used to be something that you just thought about
with single player games. How do they make this
into a multiplayer game? Because so many single player
games had a multiplayer component, even if you didn't necessarily think it was the best thing ever. And I know it's also odd to say something like this in a world where games like Fortnite, a
free game brings in billions of dollars a year, and Call
of Duty always tops the charts with multiplayer games, whether
they're standalone or not. Like the big fish, you're doing just fine, but everybody else is
struggling to keep up. I wish more multiplayer games came out that were just creative and clever, and were less about trying to find new and exciting ways to extract
money out of the player base. And, and maybe that's
the real problem here. And number eight is in-game level editors and mod support. As gaming on the PC grew, one thing developers did
to build community, which to include mod support, and give players access to a level editor. Of course some of the biggest
games right now do have this. I mean that's basically what ROBLOX is and Fortnite's creative
mode keeps getting bigger. Hell, Halo Infinite's Forge
mode got a big update recently that puts AI into the maps. So it's not like level editors are dead, they're just not what they once were. Games like Duke Nukem
3D, Crysis, Far Cry two and five, at the list it goes on. These games had some really amazing tools that let the community run wild with their creations. Some games remain relevant
just because of level editors. Like the Doom community is
still going strong 30 years later, three decades in,
because of fan created content. At a certain point though,
many developers just started to give up on including
editors in their games. For a lot of reasons too. Some devs wanted a curb rampant cheating. Others maybe not necessarily
entirely on the dev side, maybe on the publishing side
realize there isn't a lot of value in editing tools. Kind of gives the player infinite content that they don't have to buy. So that kind of gave up on 'em. These days the only games that
have level editors are kind of specifically made for level editors. They're games that are
still heavily modded, but it just requires some
extremely dedicated fans reverse engineering code to do it. Games like ROBLOX and Fortnite
are closed systems as well. It's not like the golden era of PC game Modding in the late nineties, where games like Half Life
had entire communities extensively modding the game to essentially create new games. So many amateurs were able
to take their creations, and build a career out of it from there. With games like ROBLOX, you
make something to the game, and it's the property of the developer. You can make some money off of it, but I, I, it is a really
exploitative business model that's actually arguably
employing child labor. I don't know, if you wanna
go look into that one. It's, it's depressing. And number seven, damage
in realistic physics. This one is a sore spot, and you'll find out why immediately. In the Xbox 360 slash PSS three era, there were some truly reactive worlds. We had games like Red Faction
Guerrilla, Battlefield Bad Company two, I mean
we really had potential. Rockets didn't leave a black
scorch mark on the wall, they blew the wall the hell up, chunks flew off of walls, ground deformed. Red Faction Guerrilla let me destroy buildings with a hammer. It was so good. But even so there was
room for improvement, and then it all just stopped. Instead of trying to make more destruction or more realistic
destruction, games stopped. Everything became static, less reactive. Like look at Far Cry, like look at the second
game versus the later games. At some point developers were
just like, you know what? I don't really care what happens to the tree when you shoot the tree. They gave up on what happens, and focused on what it looks like. Which yeah, a focus on fidelity
definitely does result in everything looking more realistic when you're taking a screenshot. But I mean it's a play set.
Big old plastic play set. Like not to say that, games don't have impressive destruction now. When they feel like it, this stuff usually only
happens in like scripted events or in places where they
decided to put in the effort. But it's always selective and limited. There's just been no other game
that it has attempted to do what Red Faction Guerrilla did
with its destruction physics. And that's a huge shame. Some, some will say, ah, there
was a Red Faction Armageddon. It, it's no, for whatever reason that is an extremely limited
game versus Guerrilla. First off, it's not open world. It's based almost entirely in corridors. And you'd think that that would mean, oh well the destruction
physics can be ramped up. They were not, they were
actually not as good. They were there but not as much. I don't know if it was a
hardware thing or what, but it just felt like less than Guerrilla. Nowadays games are so busy looking good, running in 4K, and having Ray tracing that a lot of immersive elements
like this have fallen to the side and it's a shame. Yeah, Ray tracing does look great, and there are instances
where I will definitely agree that it adds to immersion. When a mirror doesn't look like a big slop but rather it
looks like a mirror. I don't know that does
actually help the world, but it's expensive, and destruction clearly is less expensive. They were doing it a long time
ago with much worse hardware, and realistic destruction
doesn't just look cool. It makes the games that
have it way more fun. At number six, commanding allies in FPS or third person shooter games. Almost every game has an ally
tag along with you nowadays. And there's usually two options
for how you can control 'em. Either you get full control
of your allies at all times, and it's an RPG or it's a
hybrid and something else and you get zero control. At Balder's Gate three full party control. But what about Final Fantasy
16, they just do whatever. Ashley, and the Resident Evil four remake requires less babysitting. And I'm gonna say that in
a way it's an improvement, but the loss of control also does feel a bit like a regression. I, I feel like the Resident
Evil four remake maybe has a bit more of a both sides
discussion merited than we have time for here. But like the original Gears
of War, it allowed you to command your allies and
move to certain locations. It gave it a little bit
more of a tactical feel, and no other Gears Game had it
or, or the mass effect games. You could order your
teammates to positions. Use special abilities, and it made these games more fun. There's just enough tactical depth here to make these fights more interesting than, if it was just a
first person shooter. Andromeda took those games away much to the game's detriment, and
also look at these people. Oof. Another perfect example of this kind of de evolution is in
the Rainbow Six games. They started off as
hardcore tactical shooters, where half the mission was
just planning out your teams and movements, giving
them orders, you know, well later games kept dumbing it down more and more until we got
to Siege, which might as well be a completely different game. A good game. I'm not gonna
say Siege is a bad game, it just has nothing to do
with where the series started. So many games used to give
us control of our allies, but it, it not a lot anymore. Now they're mostly just
there to let you know that they exist, but don't
do a lot other than that, at least that's the way
it is in most games now. And number five is enemy AI. Early stealth games put a
lot of emphasis on enemy AI. They weren't just dummies for
your main guy to brutalize. Each enemy was meant to
be a challenging puzzle the player had to overcome. The AI in games like
Thief were hardly it's, it's not genius stuff, but they reacted
differently to light levels. The sound of footsteps
on different surfaces. Like in Metal Gear guards would
notice your footsteps in the snow and metal gear solid two, they wouldn't give up just
if they lost sight of you. They'd go through and
check, see if you're hiding. Maybe that's not the
smartest thing to do in terms of staying alive, but like in terms of the job description, they're doing what they're supposed to do. No one lives forever Two was a game with some really clever guards. They would notice if doors were left open, they'd go and close them. If the lights were off, they'd
try to switch 'em back on. If lights were shot out for instance, they'd react appropriately to that. It was cool seeing AI
evolve in all these games. And at a certain point
they just kind of stopped, and they didn't just stop
actually, they regress. They got dumber. At a certain point, a lot of developers recognize smarter guards didn't automatically equal more fun. And yeah, you get a game
like Batman Arkham Asylum that had fun reactive
enemies that raised the bar, but everything else
had brain dead enemies. You could just run circles around basically, most
Assassin's Creed games is what I'm pointing at here. As stealth games have
gotten more forgiving, guards have become
nearsighted, slow witted, dinguses, ding guy. No, that sounds like dingoes now. Stupid people that are easily fooled by the most obvious tricks. It makes stealth seem easier and smoother, but what are you really
accomplishing when you sneak by Simple Jack? (tense music) (swords clanging) (gun firing) And number four is Easter
Eggs in oddball modes. Gaming used to have all
this like nerdy outcasty type stuff in it. And it's because it used to be for nerds and outcasts, it wasn't quite the billion dollar industry it is today. That's not a bad thing either.
I'm not, I'm not saying that. I actually like that games are
made with some consideration for the idea that normal
people might play them, but it has taken quite
a bit of personality out of a lot of modern games. (techno music) One of my favorite optional modes in games was the Wild Wasteland
in Fallout New Vegas. A totally optional perk, that you can take the start of the game. It adds a bunch of jokes, Easter eggs, and weird encounters in the
game that aren't normally there. The old Fallout games too
filled with Easter eggs. In Fallout Twos case, maybe too many of them. But it gave the games a
sort of scrappy character that you just don't see
nowadays, this willingness to pull back the curtain
and make a joke about stuff. Another thing you don't see a a lot of anymore is developer rooms
or even developer messages. I I guess with the internet making devs more accessible than ever. They don't feel the need
to include this sort of thing in their games, but
to me at least, it's kind of a shame that this sort of thing isn't as popular as it used to be. It's nice to be reminded that
devs realize it's just a game, especially inside of the game. I don't know, as far as these things go, it's not super important, but after Star Field's,
mostly dry Easter eggs. I kind of long to go back to the days of the Wild Wasteland in a Bethesda game, although that is also an obsidian game. We don't have to get into, how much more I think obsidian
gets Bethesda than Bethesda does, yet again. But yeah. And number three is graphic settings. And maybe this isn't super fair, but it feels like recently PC
games have been not better, with performance actually worse. And you'd think tools like
DLSS, FSR, and frame generation, frame rates should be overall improving rather than getting worse. But yeah, this isn't everyone, but instead of taking tools
like DLSS as something that could be used to improve frame rate but isn't a requirement,
developers are kind of using it as a necessary part of getting their games to run at stable frame rates. Sometimes it's worse too. The whole thing is, umm, I don't know, and there's these really
bad in game settings that forced ray tracing
on higher graphical settings, et cetera, that kind of thing. I don't know, it just feels
like lately frame rate, and graphic settings have
gotten more complicated and yet also limited. It's very frustrating. You'd think now that
PC ports are so common, developers would have
this thing figured out. But I mean we've made videos
about that not being true. I search gameranx, PC ports, and you'll see what we're talking about. But even though like a lot of the time games are clearly
running on superior hardware with the PC, they're ported in a bad way and do not run well, and it's not 'cause
there's a hardware issue, they're just not optimized well. For at least a little while, things like DLSS was a net
positive for PC gamers, but lately it feels a
bit like an albatross. Developers, I don't wanna say are skimping because a lot of the times
it's not really their decision. They're given a certain amount of time and money to complete a task, and optimization ends up kind
of falling by the wayside 'cause they can fall back on DLSS, but it's not a silver bullet solution. It's become exceedingly
clear that it is not that like, also can we just
say it's not even designed to be a solution at all. It's designed to be a thing that makes games run better on top of already being optimized
and running well. It's not good. And number two is the camera in RTS or Top down games. It's one of those things
that's extremely specific, and maybe I'm the only one who caress. But seriously, why does every modern RTS or top down game have a camera
that's so close to the ground and you can't zoom out. It's not StarCraft anymore.
These are not sprites. They're 3D, and you can
move the camera wherever you want, but you also can't. Games like Supreme Commander, and World in Conflict solve these problems more than a decade ago. You could zoom out the
camera and rotate it. Players had control over how
they saw the battlefield, and ultimately that
helped you see everything very easily and well. But for some reason, every new
game that comes out now wants to be StarCraft two, which
means the camera's locked down for no reason other than it's
like that in StarCraft two. It adds nothing to the experience, and it makes these games
more frustrating to play, and it's just a case to follow the leader
rather than innovating. I know that's harsh, but it is not so hard to have a functional camera
in a top down game where to be frank, angle is not something you're really worrying about a lot. It's 2023. I think we can
push the camera back a bit. I know everybody wants to be
the next pro MLG eSports king. But is having the exact same camera, as a game from 1995 necessary for that. I don't think it is. - Reach the last way point. (explosion booming) - [Falcon] And finally at
number one, the interfaces. This is one of the most
common complaints I hear about so many games that are released lately. The menu and interface. You'd think at this point menus
would basically be a solved problem, but it's not even close. Like Windows has remained
basically the same since the mid nineties. You could argue it, it looks better now, but maybe not as good as
it did a couple years ago. But I, I mean if Windows is like that, what hope the video games have, the latest innovation is
basically copy Destiny two, which is basically a PC menu with a cursor that you
control with the stick. Aesthetically it can look okay, but for a lot of players these
are clunky, awkward, crowded, and slow in terms of actual use. And I am very much in that Camp. Bethesda games require a ton of menu navigation and
inventory management. And although I, I, I
don't want to like say that there's no improvement on that front. Fallout 76 sucks ass, but they added this new items
thing to your inventory, so that you had a chronological
way of accessing items, so you could toss out something
you didn't want to pick up. They included that in
Starfield. That's great. I like that. Good feature. But like somebody came out with a mod for Starfield almost day one, that greatly improved the menu UI. And unsurprisingly, a lot
of players swear by it. Like why do developers
still struggle so much with crafting a usable set of menus? We're talking about AAA
game development here. Millions of dollars and decades
of experience to draw from. Like we've seen menus for decades! Now, I'm not gonna claim
to be like a professional graphic designer or anything. I probably shouldn't be
asked what makes a good menu, but I'm also not a game developer. That being said, let's say I
am for whatever reason, allowed to hire staff to make a game. Do you know how easy it
is to look at resumes, and hire UI slash UX people? I have never been in
charge of hiring anybody, so maybe I'm wrong about this. But I feel like you could put it out there that you want somebody who's good at this and get submissions. 'cause you're, I don't know,
like Bethesda or something and people want to work at Bethesda because then their name
goes into the credits, the Bethesda game, that
a million people see. Even if it's only for that reason, many people are gonna be
huge fans of Bethesda games, and have intimate experience with the UI, possibly having many thoughts
on how it could be improved. It seems to me like this is a viable path, and yet why have no developers taken it? It's confusing to me
to say the very least, why this is devolved in such a way. But that's all for today. Leave us a comment, let
us know what you think. If you like this video, click, like, if you're not subscribed,
now is a great time to do so. We upload brand new videos
every day of the week. Best way to see them first is a course of subscription, so click subscribe. Don't forget to enable notifications. And as always, we thank you very much for watching this video. I'm Falcon, you can follow
me on Twitter at Falcon Hero. We'll see you next time
right here on Gameranx.
