[Arrath]

From TFA: "...even just a week ago, Activision Blizzard announced a remake of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, a game barely a decade old..."

My understanding is that the new MW2 is a sequel to MW2019 which was itself less a remake and more a reboot. Still rather creatively bankrupt, but not a plain 'HD Remaster' of yore.

Minor critique aside, I find myself agreeing with the general thrust of this article. As time goes on I gravitate more and more to indie games and even self-published e-books rather than mass market publishers, as I find that they actually try new ideas and go somewhere fresh.

If we'll excuse some navel gazing:

I wonder, how much effect has what I'll call the "distillation of the meta" had on game design? By that, I mean the community driven effort in everything from Warcraft to Diablo/Paths of Eternity to yes Call of Duty or Tarkov, to find the utterly, mechanically superior approach and gravitate towards it? To the point that public test realm data or beta patches are immediately data mined and examined with a fine tooth comb.

Best-in-Slot lists, ideal ability rotations, skill guides, 'meta loadouts', and the like.

Sure, we've always had bulletin boards, strategy guides, and sites like GameFAQs. But as the popularity of gaming has grown, naturally so has the drive to play the game perfectly, or erk out any slight advantage possible.

I'm probably tiling at windmills, and much like film, the creative bankruptcy of late is entirely economically driven.

[nh23423fefe]

re: meta

Fighting games have this to the nth degree. Fighting games are split communities (really any game that is high skill ceiling) between those that have been playing seriously for years/decades and those who just play.

SF6 is coming out in 2023 and it will be "solved" within a month or two. Once top players get to a tournament and show strats, the entire meta evolves to the rest of the community.

Just like you cant get security through obscurity. A game can only fake depth when there isn't communication. The identification of top strategies is inevitable and rapid. But the experience of executing and being a top player is completely within the realm of design.

Devs want to fake depth, but players wont play fake games.

[kkukshtel]

My 2c is that a focus on "meta" has had a profoundly bad effect on games. It's hard to see ways it could have gone differently with the introduction of the internet, but it's definitely a Bad thing. Another outcome of this is what I like to call "the professionalization of amateur play" — thousands of players watch top 0.1% players of their favorite game perform at an expert level and talk about things experts care about, and then amateur players parrot those things in their local communities (or reddit, etc.) as if they are truth or if they are actually applicable to their skill level. This also belies the fact that a meta can change organically without developer intervention, but once any pro player "cracks" the meta, players are too lazy to find counter strategies and will just wait for the next patch. It creates a negative feedback cycle that makes players less interested in engaging with a meta, while simultaneously forcing developers to develop a new meta.

[AlexandrB]

This was really apparent in Overwatch. Before the "role queue" players would often insist their teammates change characters to emulate the current professional "meta" composition even though at that level (bronze league or whatever the bottom in Overwatch is called) individual skill differences trump team composition by a wide margin. Very silly stuff, and made playing the game unpleasant.

[beebmam]

>"distillation of the meta"

Also known as Powergaming, back in the day. Powergaming is probably unhealthy in the long run for large communities in games for many reasons, and with exceptions.

But unhealthy things can often be loads of fun in small doses!

[Jataman606]

> My understanding is that the new MW2 is a sequel to MW2019 which was itself less a remake and more a reboot

The author may have been confused, because MW2 remaster was actually made. It was released in 2020 and contained only campaign.