(electronic sound effect) - [Host] Gaming has been on the uptrend for a couple of years now. 2023 was a great year, but that doesn't mean there aren't some less than desirable
patterns, let's say. (upbeat music)
Hi folks, it's Falcon, and today on Gameranx,
eight recent gaming trends that absolutely suck. Starting off at number
eight, it's bad game UIs. User interfaces for the lay. They've been a joke for years now. I'm pretty sure that original underwater escort mission
picture is 12 years old. And I know people have
been making fun of bad, overly cluttered UIs
from even before that, but things seemed like
they were improving. And honestly, if you look at
the overall gaming landscape, the UI is generally getting better, if you're the type of person who likes as little UI
as possible, that is. I am that type of person. There were a lot of games in 2023 that had simple unobtrusive UI elements that were not really distracting. But that doesn't mean there
isn't a trend of bad UIs that exists alongside that. We call that a parallel
trend and oh, does it exist. So there's been a mix of
positive and negative impressions about Suicide Squad from
Rocksteady in terms of gameplay, but the UI design on the other hand, I mean, look at this cacophony
posted by Reddit user, krrl. It's literally like all those
UI joke images come to life. Like remember that game Gearbox did that was meant to be an
Overwatch killer, Battleborn? Suicide Squad's UI looks a lot like that, but somehow actually more
cluttered and confusing. The thing is, separately, a
lot of this stuff isn't bad, but altogether it really overwhelms. There is just simply
too much going on here. Maybe Rocksteady will ease back and fix this crap before launch, or at least give us the option to turn some of this stuff off. I don't know. But seriously, ugh, this is too much. And it's hardly the only recent game that's been lambasted over it's UI. It's probably one of the most
cluttered I've ever seen, but I mean, I guess another
macro problem is tiny text. I don't think we can accuse
Suicide Squad of that, but do you ever remember trying to play Dead Rising
on a CRT back in the day? It was just unreadable and for whatever reason it doesn't seem to have gotten a lot better. It seems like developers
just assume people are playing on huge monitors, but I don't know why they're overlooking the rise of handheld
PCs like the Steam Deck, which is hugely popular. You would think that they'd
add in some kind of option to adjust tech size as a
matter of accessibility, but there's just nothing, and a lot of games are bad about this. It should be easy, just resize the UI to make it readable on certain displays. I know it's not trivial or anything, but it's more trivial than a lot of other accessibility
settings that games have now. Why isn't there a text size slider? And number seven, terrible
license games are back, somehow. A trend that I just didn't
think would come back. For years it seemed like
the bad license game had finally been banished
to the mobile games market. But somehow in 2023, these half baked overpriced piles of crap have managed to scrape
their way back onto Steam, the eShop and the PlayStation store. I'm talking about garbage
like Kong Skull Island, Lord of the Rings Gollum
or Walking Dead Destinies, just total junk that
publishers have the gall to sell for nearly full price. These games are not worth
20 bucks, let alone 50. It's tempting to call
them lazy cash grabs, but from reading about them, you find developers were clearly
overworked and underpaid, like it's a miracle
these games even came out and it's publisher greed that ultimately makes these games bad, not necessarily the developers. I mean a lot of the time they're
given impossible timetables and pathetic budgets
to put together a game that's selling for the same price as like Baldur's Gate Three or Elden Ring. It's such a strange contradiction. Like 2023 was without a doubt one of the best years for
gaming in a long time. But I ended up playing a ton of bad games just because of GameMill. It's shocking that a company
has been around that long with their primary problem in the name. This is a company that
was founded 22 years ago, with that name, doing what they do. Like these games should be sold for like three dollars on phones, not as $50 premium experiences. And license games saw a bit
of a resurgence in general over the last year. We got a great Robocop game,
a great War Hammer 4k RPG, got a couple of League
of Legends spinoff games that ended up being pretty good. But those IPs like kind of work
perfectly with video games. If you go back in video game history, a lot of the reason licensed
games were so bad was twofold. Firstly, the games themselves were kind of an afterthought in marketing. Oh, we should have a game
to promote Ghostbusters Two. And the second part is that
all the norms of video games were still being developed during the era where there was an onslaught
of that type of game. A game that we might
consider a clunker today might be somewhat innovative 20 years ago, so there was a little
bit more margin for error and they could get away
with a little bit more. That isn't to say that they
weren't bad games then as well, but expectations were different. I'm still gonna say, however, that nobody was asking for
a Lord of the Rings game where you play as Gollum. And number six is developers
responding to reviews on Steam. Love them or hate them, Steam reviews do serve
an important function and I am personally glad they exist. Yes, they can be dumping
grounds of nonsense or tedious culture war battlefields, but as a way to gauge general
impressions of a game, Steam reviews can be helpful. I mean you actually have to read them because often there is
strange, opinionated nonsense. But in terms of indie games that tend to fly under the radar, they can be especially helpful. One feature that Steam affords devs is the ability to
respond to Steam reviews. And I want to make it clear that it isn't always something that sucks. Sometimes it serves an important function like offering technical advice
or explaining game mechanics or even telling people
that they're aware of a bug and are working to fix it. For smaller developers,
being able to reply to reviews is useful for engagement and allows them to acknowledge problems and offer a solution. The very concept of devs
responding to reviews is not the problem here. The problem is how this is being utilized, particularly by big developers
and publishers like Bethesda. They've been taking some heat over attaching these massive replies to Steam reviews on Starfield. They're not really addressing issues, they're trying to resolve
technical problems. They're basically just
arguing against game boring, crafting sucks type reviews by saying there's lots of things to do
in the game and the crafting, it's actually pretty good,
if we do say so ourselves. (laughing) And I don't think that Starfield
is incredible or anything, but I'm certainly among the people that are more likely to
defend it than attack it. But that's bat shit insane. You look demented doing that,
Bethesda, stop doing that. Like all this trying
to drown out criticism with walls of text comes
off petty and delusional. And again, I'm not necessarily saying that everybody ragging on Starfield in their reviews are right either. Like I just said, I'm among the people who are likely to defend the game, even if I will do so while also saying they need to switch to Unreal immediately and just give up on their stupid engine. It's not a terrible game. Those people, however, are
entitled to their opinion. And one of the biggest
developers of all time, coming in to try to flop
it's dick out on the table in the comments, it seems like
it should be beneath them. I don't know, maybe some people like that Bethesda's willing to defend their game, but I'm weirded out when somebody flops their dick out on a table. I think it seems desperate and weird. Sorry. And number five, the war against mods. I don't mean like moderators,
I mean modifications. The mod community is often the
thing keeping a game alive, well past the point where
a developer gives up on it. Like look at Thief: The Black Parade, a fan made mission pack
for the original Thief that came out in 2023, about 25 years after the original game. And it's good, also. Mods are what keep games alive. But recently it feels
like a lot of companies are kind of turning on them. Probably the most recent
example is Capcom, who just last year said they
consider mods to be cheats and we're trying to figure out how to block them in their games entirely. I mean, there could be an argument to be made here for multiplayer games. Some mods could affect
the balance of the game in a way that's unfair, but Capcom is targeting everything, including single character
model replacement mods. Like remember all the
goofy Mr X replacement mods when Resident Evil Two remake came out? Capcom wants those to not exist. Like that's something that makes people like your games, Capcom. And the way that they're stopping people from modding their games,
they're adding DRM to them because yeah, DRM, people love that, and they're doing it to such an extent where they're adding it to like old games like Resident Evil Revelations. Unsurprisingly that backfired. The DRM broke the game for many people and it was eventually removed almost as quickly as it was added on. For now, most mods and games like Street Fighter Six are safe, but Capcom seems pretty serious about blocking mods from the games. And I hate to single out Bethesda again, because normally they're one
of the better devs out there when it comes to mod support, but they recently patched Skyrim in a way that didn't just break
many mods for players, it also added a new paid
mod store on top of that, just to add insult to injury. They may not be actively
trying to stop modding, but they don't make it any easier. And again, that's what I think
would be their main argument for staying on the creation engine, and they seem to be, you know, coming up with another good reason why they shouldn't stay on
the creation engine here. And number four is soft aim hacks that are hurting online multiplayer games. This is an issue I haven't
really seen widely reported on, but it's a growing issue for online multiplayer
shooters that's getting worse. You're probably aware of blatant cheats like aim bots and stuff like that, the sort of thing that gets players straight up banned from games. But there's another category of cheat that's a bit more of a gray area. These soft aim hacks. Instead of breaking the rules of the game, these cheats just modify the
tools that are already there to work in your favor a little more. The most popular variety
allows players with keyboards to emulate controllers,
giving them the benefits of using a mouse and keyboard while also taking full
advantage of the strong auto aim given to controller players. It's kind of the best of both worlds, which is great when you're using it, but it sucks for everyone else. The worst thing about it is
it's just taking advantage of the systems that are
already in place in the game. And these sorts of tricks
are pretty hard to detect. Multiplayer devs want to
have the largest community available all the time, so they want people with keyboards and controllers to play together. Many of these problems can be solved by just making controller
based matchmaking, but that's a step too far for
a lot of these game makers. One recent example of a game played with soft hack
issues is The Finals, a game that has extremely
powerful auto aim for controllers. In most cases, devs just kind
of let these issues fester, but the company's credit,
they actually did come in and adjust the auto aim
to make it less powerful, which limits the
effectiveness of soft hacks and makes the game more
fun to play in general. Cheating issues with online
multiplayer games suck and it seems like they're getting worse, but at least there are a few developers who seem serious about keeping this sort of cheating out of their games. And number three is
terrible, no good PC ports with PCs becoming more and more people's main source of gaming and with more previously console only games getting released on PC, you'd think publishers and devs would start taking ports
a little more seriously, but unfortunately in the last
year, that hasn't improved. In some ways it's actually gotten worse. I don't know how that's
possible, but it has. A lot of ports really came out in rough shape these last years. Not just talking about indies. I mean like games from huge
studios like Naughty Dog and multiple games published by EA. Like Last Of Us Part One
PC port was a disaster. Tons of people were
complaining about the crashing, the missing textures, a lot more. Red Fall also has a pretty
abysmal PC port though. In that game's case, it didn't run great on Xbox One X either. The king of bad PC ports in 2023 (cheering)
has to go to EA though. Dead Space remake, Wild Hearts and Star Wars Jedi Survivor all got ports that should have been handled much better. They were stuttery, slow and unoptimized. Jedi survivor was especially bad, and even more than six months later, there's still pretty bad
glitches and issues on PC. I will say Dead Space remake
plays pretty well for me now. I don't know what they've really done. I know they've patched a few minor things, but it does seem significantly better for me than at launch, at least. But it's kind of more the type of thing you'd expect from a no name
indie studio with no resources, not the biggest game
publishers in the world. I am getting sick about
complaining about this and I'm sure you're
probably sick of hearing it, but it's not like getting better. And number two is even
worse, switch ports, sometimes it's easy to
forget how good you have it. Sure, those PC games I mentioned
ran worse than they should, but they were at least recognizably whatever game they're supposed to be. With some of the switchboards
from the last year, I'm not sure really what to say. Like look at the footage from Mortal Kombat One on the Switch. It's kind of cute that they
even decided to port it over, but holy Lord, it is not
worth the asking price. And it looks like one of
those potato mode mods that people post on YouTube as a joke, but it's a real product. It looks hideous and the load times are apparently unacceptable as well. And that's nothing compared to the Batman: Arkham Knight Switch port, which is a disaster from top to bottom. There's of course expected stuttering and slow down in the open world, but when you get in the
Batmobile, it becomes unplayable. Cut scenes go out of sync, certain challenges are
impossible to finish. It's disgraceful all around. They're not even letting
players buy the game separately. If you want Arkham Asylum
and Arkham City on Switch, you've got to get Arkham
Knight too, no refunds. I know the Switch is getting old so it shouldn't be a big surprise, but to see the port jobs this bad for such high profile games sucks. Like why is Doom and Wolfenstein
possible on this platform in a manner that's good but
certain other games aren't? And finally at number
one is this mass layoff and studio closure problem. Hate to end it on a downer, but if there's one trend of the past year that sucks more than any
other one, it's this. Over 9,000 jobs were lost in the video game industry in 2023, and those are just the ones we know about that have been announced publicly that we are completely aware of. Like it's not required that
a studio report layoffs, at least not if they're
not publicly traded, and you can find developers
talking about it. And I know it's a trend of layoffs that's affecting the entire tech industry, but it sucks either way. I don't care if there's
reasons for it, it sucks. The reason I think makes
it suck worse, actually, especially when you start
talking about Embracer who bought up every dev they
could to get their hands on you know, like a huge
roster of insane crap, and then they couldn't,
you know, fund themselves. Like so many great studios got embraced only to end up as another
casualty of the failed Saudi deal. Like look at Free Radical Design. They were picked up by Embracer, started work on a new Time Splitters game, which by the way, I can't
tell you how much I want, and then they were shut
down before Christmas. There are countless
stories coming from studios picked up by Embracer that
sound exactly the same as that. It's such a pointless waste of talent. We can only hope this is one gaming trend that cools off in 2024 because obviously you don't want to see people lose their jobs. Like that sucks. It ruins your life. Like that's 9,000 reported
lives ruined, right? At least temporarily. Obviously a lot of these people
will be given opportunities and land on their feet and I really hope a lot
of the Embracer stuff ends with a lot of these studios reopening under somebody else because somebody buys
the name or something. I don't know. I mean, this just sucks so much. I feel so bad for so many people. And that's it for today. Sorry. Like I said, ending it
on a bit of a downer, but that is all. Leave us a comment. Let us know what you think. If you liked this video, click like. If you're tired of this crap, we want to hear about
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