[keerthiko]

I'm in the exact same boat. I feel like the game industry has made this really distasteful shift, of the big AAA companies just adding shoe-shine on existing projects -- whether that's servicing a SaaS like League of Legends or World of WarCraft, or doing remake after remake of Age of Empires, Homeworld, StarCraft, Final Fantasy, etc, while leaving all the innovation and creativity to be explored at the expense of indies, mod creators or mapmakers. DOTA2, LoL, and the entire MOBA craze was spawned because of the success of a custom WC3 map, and since then AAA have 100% adopted this as an R&D strategy. DayZ/H1Z1 from the mod community spawning battle royale, DOTA Auto Chess custom map spawning DOTA Underlords, TFT, and Epic Games' Auto Chess (the newer big trend).

Once in a half decade we get a AAA game with a novel concept or a new IP (Overwatch, Fortnite maybe?), but even sequels are starting to just feel like polishing phases or DLCs on a tested IP and gameplay formula.

The indies used to look to the AAA for inspiration and something to aspire to, but the tables have turned in a way exemplifying the capitalism and diluting the art of the medium.

[ufo]

Overwatch is a riff on the class-based FPS genre, which was pioneered by Team Fortress, a game that started its life as a Counter Strike mod.

[enra]

Team Fortress started as Quake1 mod, which then Valve made to a Half-Life mod TFC, and later as the TF2 [1]. Also Counter-Strike was a mod as well which again Valve made official versions of.

I started with the Quake TF and now still pay TF2 sometimes. Basically been playing the same game for ~20 years.

1:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Team_Fortress_2#Origins_and_ea...

[Insanity]

Some games are just good so you can play them for a long time. As long as there is a community. I occasionally fire up HL deathwatch and have people playing. Plus CS:S is almost 15 years old and that is quite active (surf communities anyway)

[AJ007]

* Quake mod

[crowbahr]

Fortnight was a rip off of PUBG which was arguably developed from Arma as a mod originally (spun off of the DayZ mod there was a sort of Battle Royale mode).

[RandomTisk]

No argument/doubt, Brenden Greene was the guy behind all those in some manner, shape or form.

[notSupplied]

The bigger the budget the smaller the risk taken. This is pretty natural. AAA studios don't take risk because budgets have ballooned so much. The team that made Warcraft 3 would be considered a "medium sized AA team" roughly akin to Dauntless today.