Why The AAA Industry is Making The SAME Games (But Worse)

it seems like the AA gaming industry has now reached a Tipping Point in its creative bankruptcy you might argue that we were already there but I think the latest crop of hero Shooters three of them that are releasing this summer really show off how bad the situation is and I was inspired to take a deeper look at exactly what AAA is trying to do and why they are doing it so poorly thanks to this article from PC Gamer which says in its headline it's hard to complain about hero shooter fatigue when Concord looks this good and don't worry when we get to Concord we're going to go through this article because I think it really highlights some of the worst parts of not just the AAA industry but the people who cover it as well but just in case you don't know what I'm talking about Sony is releasing their next big first party exclusive concour which is a live service hero shooter but more or less within the same summer time frame we are also getting Marvel Rivals the first in-house developed game by net ease which is a third person hero shooter and it seems very very likely that around the same time frame we will also see deadlock which is valve's new game which you guessed it is a third person hero shooter and I know some of you might think that there is nothing wrong with that that video games tend to follow Trends it's how the industry Works actually it's how most Industries work but there's a very big difference with video games and other Industries I could reach into my closet and pull out some jeans from 30 years ago and people would probably think that they're brand new because it just so happens that the cyclical Trends are in favor for that pair of jeans right now but because video games are so close to Tech if you aren't pushing boundaries if you aren't trying something new if you aren't iterating innovating and taking advantage of Technology there's really no justification for trying to repeat a new trend in other words the reason that my 30-year-old jeans can look new today is because the newer jeans don't come with RGB lights and this is the true point of creative bankruptcy video games by their very nature are iterative throughout their entire history people have taken the different innovations that have happened and then they have copied them they have done the same game but slightly different and we have seen this over and over and over again what is Smash Brothers if not a fighting game plus platformer what is OverWatch if not the classes of a firstperson shooter mixed with the heroes of a MOA and every time something new pops up it is then iterated on what is Elden ring if not Dark Souls but open world and while these are very extreme simplifications of these Concepts they still hold true the basic formula of having developers take something that they love and then trying to twist it and find a new spin on it trying to combine it with something else and leading to an entirely new trend has happened over and over and over again so how is it now possible that some of the largest AAA games that are looking to compete in the most popular in the most sought-after space in gaming right now being the free-to-play live service space have absolutely nothing worthwhile to offer now that is speculation and I would love absolutely nothing more for them to actually be hiding all of these wonderful new additions these new twists on a formula that I very much love being the hero shooter but except for one of the three games that we're talking about today they're doing a really good job at hiding it if it is the case Concord which I covered a bit more indepth and in a more reactionary manner in a different video to me is the worst one of them all it is the one with the biggest red flags and the one that feels the most like it started its development back when certain design choices were acceptable within this hero shooter sub genre another byproduct of the absolutely ridiculous budgets that these games require and very extended development timelines where when a game can enter production and when it comes out the entire Market could have shifted in those maybe four or 5 years Concord is being developed by firewalk which is a new studio that Sony bought that includes some bungee people that left and jumped ship and from the game game play we have it looks and feels very much like OverWatch plus Destiny and hey I will be honest I love how Destiny feels as a game and if it's PVP had people that cared about it and managed to sustain it I would love to get into Destiny 2 PVP but that doesn't exist so maybe that's what Concord will be the problem is that as a hero shooter it only seems to offer two distinguishing points from anything else the first one being that certain abilities and deployables can persist throughout an entire match this means that a character that can set up a wall or a shield can just place it and it'll be there the entirety of the match meaning that you can fundamentally change how a map plays depending on which hero you choose but none of those abilities are particularly new the new part is that they don't go away the other big distinguishing factor is that some of the characters want to be more different from each other than in other games the big robot oneoff seems to be huge in comparison to other Heroes which means that there's probably Heroes that are tiny or Heroes with very extreme differences in mobility and we would imagine in health pools as well but I would say that we see a lot of that in a lot of other hero Shooters also be that with vertical mobility horizontal mobility or size differences which I guess isn't that common Beyond OverWatch but it does exist it's just a bit more exaggerated here the PC game gamer article that I mentioned before Praises how the people from Bungie know what they're doing they also say that Concord reminds them of OverWatch but they're sure it's an arena shooter even though we don't know that for sure and they even quote the success of EX defiant as more of an arena shooter which I don't know if they've played X defiant but the main game mode that they want to push is actually a payload map where you push a payload they praise that the big robot gives them hope that the heroes will will feel different that it has a huge roster of 16 characters at launch and that is apparently very praiseworthy and not the bare minimum of what you need to compete in this sector and then finally they mention how Concord isn't free to play that we know of and they're excited that it's actually a premium game that is going to be priced between $30 and $40 completely ignoring the fact that a game like this in such an oversaturated Market cannot actually be successful in that way they compare it to Hell divers 2 but the difference is that hell divers 2 exists in a genre that is not populated at all being this Co-op sandbox kind of emergent gameplay systems that it just drops you into for you to have fun in a strictly Co-op environment Concord is a competitive 5v5 hero shooter there are dozens of them if you're also going to ask people UPF front to pay for it and and this is what you're willing to show there is absolutely no reason that somebody would pay for it instead of going to play any of the other free Alternatives and everything that they say they would like to see in the game being characters that are unlockable at a reasonable Pace no randomized Cosmetics a store tab that is distant and progression trees that never expire referring to battle passes like the ones in Hell divers 2 are all very easy to do in a free-to-play game if you just decide to do it it's really disappointing to see that a game gets received so poorly for the lack of innovation that it's showing and for how it betrays a lot of what the philosophy of PlayStation has been over the years but we need to have people on hopium trying to think that it'll be great actually oops in the time it's taken me to edit this video it's actually been revealed that Concord will cost $40 and feature free content updates as if that's something that the free games don't get and I completely stand by what I've said I think that putting a price tag on this is very different than putting it on something like hell divers 2 but the good news is that Concord will have a beta so if it has something very impressive something incredible something that actually sells us on it we will get to play that before putting down the money so it does technically still have a Fighting Chance it could still be successful it seems clear that Sony wants to emulate the same exact system that they had for hell divers 2 I just think that those are two very different genres and you can't operate the same between both of them just because one of the games did well does not mean that following the same business plan with this next game will go well especially when we remember the fact that Sony is going to force all PC players to have a PSN account for this game and that the limitations on PSN and therefore who can buy this game on PC are still in place and I don't think the community is going to overlook that as easy as they think they are just remember vote with your wallet anyways but that's enough of Concord let's talk a bit about Marvel Rivals net ease knows very well what they're doing when it comes to publishing and helping push out games but this is the first time they're making their own the part that has me quote unquote hopeful about it is that having obtained the Marvel license it's very difficult for me to understand why they would choose to go into the hero shooter Arena they could have done many other things with this IP that would give them more money and less hard work to develop and with a much higher ceiling for spending including things that are more gacha centered because we shouldn't forget that hero Shooters are some of the most difficult games to develop the reason that they're so popular in the first place is because by giving people different Heroes with different abilities it really keeps every single match fresh the incredibly long long list of different interactions that can happen and how each hero and their abilities can shift the game plan depending on the fight that you're in and the circumstances around it means that it's very rare to have the same situation play out twice and as we'll see later on if you start involving things like item builds in that you go into the mooba territory where even if for some reason you were fighting the same 5v5 with the same five characters on each side it would almost never play out the same it's a sort of of Evergreen gameplay with an additional hook of getting people attached to a character that leads to people spending so much time in them and then justifying a lot of in-game purchases but creating a game like that from the maps to the heroes and each individual kit animation voice lines making all of this work and then on top of that keeping it balanced and functional and fun is a very difficult task but that is what nety has decided to do because Marvel Rivals is a 6v6 OverWatch but with Marvel heroes even its UI is eily similar and the things that it's bringing to the table that are different are well one the camera perspective being third person two having all of these Marvel heroes three the destructible environments and four the teamup attacks where the heroes can combine their ultimates to do special ultimates I guess aside from that all it's doing is banking on that Mar Marvel license and that people are going to want to play these kits based on characters that they're familiar with and a lot of Marvel Rivals is going to be dependent on how original and creative and true to the characters those kits can be from the characters we've seen there's plenty of the typical archetypes and even a lot of the same abilities that every hero shooter from Rainbow Six SI to Apex Legends shares there's even characters that are e similar to some OverWatch but the fact that it's a 6v6 shooter that seems to understand exactly what it is and it's not trying to be anything else might ironically be the reason it Finds Its Niche I know a lot of people who are very disappointed in OverWatch 2 and miss the days of OverWatch one's more chaotic nature and maybe this coupled with that Marvel license is enough to hook some people in along with maybe net ease actually cares about making this a good game there are real reasons why that might be true by the way net ease being this huge publisher and distributor that hasn't really made a game of their own pretty much ever used to be Blizzard's publishing partner for many many years in China there was a huge falling out involving the human money meatball of Bobby CTIC that actually led to Blizzard's games not being available in China anymore as their deal with net ease fell through after the Microsoft buyout of Activision Blizzard King that deal is back on the table and all of these games are back and available but that didn't stop net E from apparently wanting to make their own version of OverWatch and man were they really familiar with OverWatch because it's not just how many different kits borrow from OverWatch or other hero Shooters but it's also how much they are willing to go wild with it honestly when I saw that doctor strange can open a portal for you to go through but also you can shoot through that portal it is just it's a portal it's like a real portal in this game it's just an ability a character has it gave me just a bit of faith that these guys are going hard on wanting to make this game good also Doctor Strange is kind of the Reinhardt Shield character which is a weird combination of mobility and defense and support they might be cooking the problem is will that be enough when the game at its core is still just OverWatch and there are plenty of Alternatives there you can't just Bank everything on the license and knowing net ease you can bet your Bott dollar that you can expect $0 to $40 skins you probably need to start selling some of your internal organs today just to finance some Spider-Man skin in the future God forbid they put out ultimate skins or something like that because you better be ready to remortgage your house and I know that this isn't a popular opinion but as long as the game doesn't limit anything gameplay-wise from the player based on how much money they spend I'm okay with however they want to monetize these games I think that there is a way to do free to play and that means not gaing things behind money Beyond cosmetic as long as they keep it all limited to Cosmetics they can charge however much they want if they make a good game and people choose to spend money on those Cosmetics well hey congratulations to them and I feel kind of sorry for the people who spend it and I really am trying to remain optimistic and I want to play these three games but they aren't doing near new things they're just doing the same thing a little bit differently to varying degrees they don't offer incentives for people to play them and they don't push the medium forward or even the genre when you have a space as competitive as this where you have so many players that are already entrenched in their own games I really think we're talking about a plateau most people who play games know if they like hero shooters or not and most of those who do already have one this means that for Success these three games are banking on either finding some unicorns in a forest that have never played a hero shooter before but want to give one of these a try or on ripping people away from the games that they have already dedicated hundreds of hours to sometimes thousands and sometimes the same amount in dollars and that is not easy to do when you're not offering anything new but hey I guess that if it all fails s they can just blame the players for not being interested in their game instead of blaming themselves for making some absolutely stupid decisions when it comes to what projects to Chase and what motivations they have primarily selling a lot of skins for chasing them the only one that might be an exception and one that is receiving a ton of hate is deadlock people seem to have a very negative perception of valve these days it's true that they barely make video games and a lot of people like to meme on the fact that artifact was not a very good game and objectively a flop that they also don't know how to make good games anymore when before a lot of what valve would put out would stand as cornerstones of gaming from halflife 1 to two to its episodes to portal to Left for Dead to halflife Alex to DOTA and Team Fortress 2 pretty much anything that valve puts out has an almost Nintendo likee seal of quality but that perception has been eroded over the years and some of their missteps and hatred towards things that Counter Strike has done people not liking Counter Strike 2 upon its release people not liking how they're treating Team Fortress 2 which is very very poorly # fix TF2 has led people to have a different opinion of valve these days and that wasn't helped when we've had so many different leaks that the next game by Valve deadlock is a third person hero shooter the reason that it's the one that I'm the most interested in is because it's the only one that's actually trying to do something that has never been done at least successfully before I personally don't consider Team Fortress 2 to be a hero shooter even though many people call it the beginning of them even though Team Fortress 2 gives us very unique distinct characters that fit each class at the end of the day for me it's a class-based shooter that's because you have nine classes that now we can very much customize although upon release they were very fixed they had what they had but even within their customization they fill very specific roles and they are all very necessary within a match for me the line between class-based and hero shooter is drawn when you have that flexibility within each role much like you would in a MOA you have tanks and skirmishers and assassins and supports and there are many different characters that can fit within that role with some degree of flex ability each of them unique each of them bringing something new to the table and giving you a reason to really master that character and identify with them those big dramatic variations in the characters themselves and in their kits is what allows that emerging gameplay to happen and for that Eternal replayability to function just a little bit differently than it does in TF2 which again upon release definitely wasn't and today is much closer to what I think a hero should shooter is with those customization options but not quite there so I don't think that deadlock is stepping into the same territory as TF2 not to mention that it's not even a firstperson game and that's because deadlock is not just OverWatch but made by vow it seems to be gigantic or Smite or a combination of those ideas more like a third-person shooter MOBA it has PVE with creeps or their equivalents and different objectives that include PVE encounters around the map it seems to incorporate elements of Tower Defense it does have items for you to build your character out differently throughout a match and it has four lanes for people to go down this is a fundamentally different type of game trying to combine the more strategic and teamfight aspects of a MOA with some of the more Twitchy reaction-based shooting elements of a first-person shooter and while its art style can be described as well valve knows that Dishonored exists it is at least coming from a giant developer that has absolutely no reason to make any game unless they just really wanted to make it and with plenty of resources to try and fulfill this Vision that I think has never been chased before either because of the complexity of making it the potential that it's just too Niche and too specific and probably very hard to get into that it would never find its audience without the proper marketing push and the proper support behind it are more likely some combination of the two but valve doesn't have those sorts of problems people have been quick to write off most of what deadlock shows off despite it being in very early and rough shape when I think that in all honesty it is the one of these that deserves the most attention for actually trying something new even if it is just blending some ideas together but this is truly how bad things have gotten I have to come out to bat for deadlock with all of the negatives that people point out about it including the hero shooter fatigue that PC Gamer is trying to ignore there are a lot of hero Shooters and the truth is that they all fit their own little niche be that more Counter-Strike or more tactical like Rainbow 6 Siege or battle Royals like Apex there's a lot of different takes on the basis of the genre and while I think that there is a spot for more hero Shooters beyond that fatigue there is a general feeling that we see this same framework too often that doesn't mean that we can't have more successful hero Shooters it just means that they have a steeper Hill to climb they need to distinguish themselves further and actually fit in a completely different Niche than the ones that are already occupied and at the end of the day deadlock could just not be very good or be too complicated or not have the charm necessary to keep people playing but at least it is trying to find a different Niche because it's at least doing something in the right direction of trying things with other games like Concord and Marvel Rivals trying absolutely nothing at all it's hard for me to look at all of this and not notice that the chase for safe guaranteed profits an industry that would rather make a mediocre sequel to a mediocre game than to try something new is slowly killing any sort of creativity as they are just trying to make more and more flavors of the same godamn thing it's disappointing and it's sad and it's just another symptom of the inevitable death of AAA that we keep seeing implode over and over again and once again I would like nothing more than for these games to come out and be good and be experiences that I enjoy I'd rather have the problem of not having enough time to fulfill the 17,000 requirements that these games have for their battle passes and their play time as they try and become your new job then for them to be so bad that I don't even want to see them but I have a feeling that even if they end up being decent the overall direction that we're headed in is the wrong one but hey if there's one thing that you can count on 100 100% of the time is that if a game is very fun to play if it's just a very well-made game designed to be enjoyable it will find some success one of my favorite games that I've played in the last year is actually project Loki which is a top down Battle Royale think something like a cross between an action MOBA something like V Rising but with Heroes and Battle Royale on paper it doesn't sound that great but when I played it I fell in love immediately so there's all always a chance that the Optics don't match the reality of the situation and we shouldn't underestimate the possibility that even if a game does absolutely nothing new if it does it better than the ones that exist it does have a very outside chance of at least finding some success you never know when lightning strikes enough people are disenfranchised and tired of the games they are playing that they'll switch over to one that is new and plays better even if it is incredibly boring I just like to make sure I offer a glimmer of hope somewhere in these videos instead of the constant total negativity that I tend to see these days because while there are a lot of things to criticize I think that being negative all of the time doesn't bring anything positive as I keep saying in my more recent videos go out there and play some indie games go out there and play some games from people who are truly trying to innovate remember to vote with your wallet and tell the industry what you want you want new experiences that are fun not enough another version of the same damn game that wants to be your second job but hey uh like I said I could be wrong let me know how you feel about the state of hero Shooters and the constant Trend chasing within the industry and if you really think that it's gotten worse I think it has but hey maybe I live in my own bubble and while you're headed down to the comments section which hey I do read every single comment maybe hit the like button if you enjoyed this video and if you want more of my reporting and my opinions on the industry and my big reviews and essays on video games I've got a very big couple of retrospectives coming out before the end of this month consider subscribing or at least checking out the channel thank you for watching and thank you to my patrons for supporting me up on the $1 Patron wall more information on how to join and support what I do in the description below I've been mug thief and as always I will see you again very soon

Channel: Mugthief

Views: 42,659

Keywords: aaa games, aaa gaming, triple a gaming, marvel rivals, netease games, concord, playstation, exclusives, new valve game, deadlock, new valve moba, tf2, fixtf2, someordinarygamers, mutahar, skillup, hero shooters, destiny 2, asmongold, asmongold reacts, gameranx, essay, long form video, overwatch, flats, emongg, bogur, new overwatch, apex legends, arlo, new multiplayer games, summer games fest, announcements, aaa gaming is dead, video games, mugthief

Id: EqDkXzu0IbI

Length: 26min 29sec (1589 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 06 2024