[ajmurmann]

Sorry, I lost patience with the article and its premise about halfway through. Sure many AAA titles are cookie cutter and remakes now. I'd still claim that there hardly ever was a better time for video games. If you only focus on AAA that's your mistake. That said, Nintendo continues to produce innovative games. Breath of the Wild of course sticks out here. We continue to see other phenomenal games like Outer Wilds or Disco Elysium that push what a game can be and how closer to true art the medium has come. I recently played some short, relaxing games like A Short Hike and Big Ocean, Wide Jacket that would have not been economically viable at all not that long ago. There are so many phenomenal indy games that nobody could possibly play them all and many of them have innovative concepts. I feel obligated to mention Babs Is You and Into the Breach. There are some studios that are not AAA but produce polished games like Supergiant with games like Hades and Pyre.

But yeah, some Call of Duty game and The Last of Us are getting a remake so it's all terrible now and innovation is gone.

[mattmanser]

Also some now incredibly main-stream new gaming concepts that are very recent:

- Minecraft was released in 2011 and revolutionized building in most games, as well as basically inspiring a whole "survival" genre (Ark, Rust, DayZ, etc.)

- H1Z1 was released in 2015 and that Battle Royale format has taken over most casual shooters

- Garry's mod (2006) inspired a whole new genre too

- An entire genre of simulators like Farming Simulator or whatever that would have been unthinkable 15/20 years ago (I have no idea what the provenance of that genre was)

It's very easy to miss revolutionary ideas in your own lifetime because you sometimes don't realize how revolutionary they are.

EDIT: A few other things have popped into my head:

- Dark Souls-esque has become a genre in itself, and it took a while to become main-stream

- rogue-like became a big idea for indie devs to cheaply produce a game in the 2000s

- A lot of the revolutionary stuff today is happening around being able to move what were single player games into multiplayer and you can see that in recent games like No Man's Sky, Sea of Thieves, FO76, etc. (some more successfully than others ;)

- It's also easy to forget that there's been a whole lot of phone game innovation going on, Angry Birds was only 2009

[datalopers]

> Farming Simulators

Harvest Moon started that as far as I know, came out in 96/97, though it was more of an RPG with farming as the core gameplay loop rather than just a farming sim.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvest_Moon_(video_game)

[mattmanser]

I meant more the "simulator" games like Train Driver Simulator, Truck Driver Simulator, etc. that only really took off in the last decade (AFAIK).

But certainly Harvest Moon has been a genre that's now entered the western mainstream much more, and took a while to 'take off' in the western markets with things like Stardew Valley and Animal Crossing in recent years.

[kryptiskt]

The mundane simulator genre did exist in Germany way back in the 80s/90s, I remember a nice airline simulator I bought on a trip there (I'm from Sweden).

[ajmurmann]

As a kid in the 80s I was obsessed with a C64 shareware game called Agricola. You owned a farm and could buy and sell farm land, forest and farm animals. Probably the most exciting part was that you could also race horses (or rather watch them race and place bets). Never thought about it before as a mundane farming simulator. And yet it mostly was a mundane farming spreadsheet.

[0xcde4c3db]

Fun fact about "Harvest Moon": the western publisher lost the contract to localize the original series, but still commissions new games under the same name. Remakes of the original series are localized by a different publisher under the name "Story of Seasons". It's a little bit like the Guitar Hero vs. Rock Band saga.

[arc-in-space]

Absolutely, it's missing the forest for the trees. Interesting indies and mid-sized AA games like what Capcom makes are doing better than ever; every niche genre of games(aside from maybe RTS?) has been having a resurgence in the past ~6 years.

The current range of variety in game design is genuinely mind-boggling. I used to be able to keep up with most things going on in games, now it's essentially impossible.

[izacus]

Even RTS got their Age of Empires remakes, Iron Harvest and is gearing up for a new Company of Heroes.

And I've probably missed some too - e.g. Total Warhammer / TW: Three Kingdoms might even fit into the RTS bucket.

[sparsely]

None of those are really adding anything new though - they'd definitely fall into the nostalgia/copy bucket.

[izacus]

If you're this reductive, then nothing in the world adds anything new and it's all nostalgia. With that attitude you'll never enjoy anything new - maybe, like OP, you're just old?

[meheleventyone]

Being old isn't a bad thing it just means you've seen these things before and can critique them. Obviously if you missed the boat the first time round this all feels fresh and new. This is also why the past is mined because it's full of successful ideas that haven't been recently repeated and as a commercial strategy for producing commodity titles mining the past avoids a lot of the hard work.

[Aerroon]

I think Three Kingdoms and Warhammer were kind of new though. Having very powerful hero units does change how Total War plays quite a bit. Being set in fantasy is also interesting, because it allows for unit types you can't have in a more traditional Total War setting (flying stuff).

[meheleventyone]

The author is an indie game dev so I'm pretty sure they're aware of the segment and whilst it doesn't mention indie games until the footnotes I think he intends the critique to extend to that space as well. At least that was my reading of the whole thing from the perspective of being a game developer myself. Although I also know the broader context from the discussions on gamedev twitter over the past week or so. The footnote:

"One thing I really don’t like about the general direction of “indie” games is that they seem more concerned with aesthetics. It’s often aesthetic progressivism mixed with design orthodoxy. A beautiful hand-drawn art style for a puzzle platformer less complicated than Mario."

This cultural stagnation is also pretty clear across pretty much the whole landscape from fashion to games. We're looping through the same few decades of nostalgia creating more of the same with small variations. IMO it's just a result of the commodification of creativity.

[ajmurmann]

> The author is an indie game dev

I wonder if this where the different perspective comes from. As a consumer I don't care very much if 95% of what the industry producers it's boring, not innovative or otherwise bad as long as there are enough games that fill my needs. Right now there is a unbelievable amount of games being released. As an adult with a job who has a variety of interests, I can't even play a fraction of the games I'm very interested in.

[meheleventyone]

Part of the whole reason for the homogenization that comes with commodification is the goal of delivering something that maximizes the reach of the product. So you get these intense markets full of choice that is appealing broadly to consumers if not very differentiated. Hence things like competition based on aesthetics, branding and fandom versus core product differences. In games this leads there to be a niche for some innovation but it's not a very sustainable one for the developers and the market as a whole is oriented against it. Which is obviously okay for the average individual consumer but not necessarily great or health for the medium itself.

So in a long winded way I agree this is something that you'll care more about the more you care about the practice of game design itself.

[iterati]

My ever growing Steam wishlist with titles under $20 agrees with you.

[cableshaft]

We're visual creatures. Aesthetics sells games.

Games without good visuals/design can sell, but there's not a ton of games out there with ugly/sloppy graphics that become hits (they do exist, sometimes it's kind of the point of the game).

So if you don't place a high priority on aesthetics, you're taking a risk in your game not finding an audience. And I'm saying this as someone who designs games with a mechanics-first mindset.

The board game industry is very aware of this, and very few publishers skimp on game aesthetics nowadays.

When there's hundreds of thousands of both great and aesthetically pleasing games out there people could be playing, why should they waste time playing a game that doesn't look good to them?

[meheleventyone]

You're arguing against something that hasn't been said. Nothing in that statement says that aesthetic progressivism is a bad thing just that privileging it over design progressivism is. In particular you should look at the authors game Cantata because it's ludicrously obvious that they care about aesthetics.

[kkukshtel]

I know it sounds like I'm trying to hoist the majority of the complaints onto AAA, and I am, but like I mention in the article and have mentioned a few times on Twitter in other threads of the post, indies are susceptible to a lot of the same forces (if not more).

I really want to make it clear that my argument isn't "AAA BAD, INDIE GOOD", because that's far from the case. I even went back and added in some examples of indies eating each other towards similar ends, tracing the aping of Dorfromantik into two other games, and Vampire Survivors into 10 Minutes Till Dawn. There are still outliers for sure, but they are far from the norm. Also for as much as I love Disco Elysium (literally did a whole podcast series on it), it's far from "progressive" design and innovates more in the realm of tone / narrative. A lot of its appeal is that it is like older CRPGs.

[BlargMcLarg]

>That said, Nintendo continues to produce innovative games.

Nintendo is falling into the same trap if you look hard enough, and mostly innovates for its series rather than the industry as a whole. Remakes or iterations are rampant among established developers due to the lower risks and relatively high earnings.

Even indies suffer the latter. Not too many indies have a hit again when they create a game too different from their original hit. The best option they have is to iterate incrementally, not change the formula in any wild way.

This isn't even a bad thing (iterate until you perfect the formula, spin-offs and minigames to test things), but it does show how established names have a humongous stranglehold on most of the market with relatively little effort put in, and pawn off the risks to indies who have no other choice but to innovate.

[account42]

> Even indies suffer the latter. Not too many indies have a hit again when they create a game too different from their original hit.

For indies a confounding factor is that the first game often has really been in development for the creator's entire life up to that point - not neccessarily literally but by amasssing creative ideas that they can then pour into that project. For the second game to be significantly different they then need to come up with new ideas in a now much shorter time unless they take a break from game development in between.

[BlargMcLarg]

I agree with the former, I don't agree with the latter. By nature of processes, experience and software, it is obviously far easier to push out the same thing, both in terms of time or in terms of cost. However, nothing indicates that indie developer needs to make a game in a shorter timeframe than before.

They could bring the money of their former success to the new project, allowing them to push out the game in a shorter timeframe simply by living off the profits or hiring others to help them develop. But this isn't a necessity.

[dgb23]

Niche and indie video gaming is exciting these days.

Just an example are strategy/survival/simulation mashups, like They are Billions, Factorio, Oxygen Not Included, Frostpunk.

There are quite a bunch of innovative hardcore puzzle games out there. Fresh approaches to single player RPGs. Beautiful and varied click and point adventures. The list goes on.

Whenever people complain about the dullness and cash grabbing of video gaming I feel like they miss a huge entire category of games that are made by people who care deeply about them.

[kkukshtel]

FWIW I'm an indie strategy game dev (https://store.steampowered.com/app/690370/Cantata/) and am well aware of the full scope of the space of games (used to also be a game journo, and actively do a games podcast where we play most everything https://www.badendpodcast.com).

I want to be clear that my post isn't trying to be a Gamer and complain about "mOnEy gRUbbIng pUBLisheRs!!!!!!" — it's trying to look at the economic reality of making games in 2022 and how that steers design towards conservative decisions. I'm not on some moral high horse about design (and also think that game design itself doesn't sell, sort of like a notable DP in film doesn't get butts in seats).

That said, an addendum to this post is that I do think strategy games are where some of the best design IS happening (with games from devs like 11bit and Klei, like you mentioned), and perhaps not incidentally I think a lot of the best design work is happening boardgames right now. Strategy is a weird genre because it enjoyed dominance in the early days of PC gaming, but with the limelight off of it I think it's forcing developers and publishers to get more creative about what they are making. For boardgames, the economics just make way more sense — things like GMT's P500 idea act as pre-validators for design + thematic pairings in a way you can't really do for videogames (and Kickstarter similarly).

[dgb23]

I had a quick look at your game and it is the type of thing I'm interested in. Also I like the aesthetics of it. Thank you for sharing!

I also think it is perfectly OK to have strong opinions about games. It is incredibly subjective and a matter of taste and art.

For example strategy games are my "first love" so to speak, think old Maxis games, WC1/2, StarCraft, Myth, Creatures, Startopia, NetStorm, Caesar2, Alpha Centauri, Black and White to name a few that I played as a kid.

They must be incredibly hard to design, because they very much hinge on well structured feature complexity and balance. Games that don't do this part well turn me off. It's hard to find a good canonical example that isn't also to some degree minimalist like StarCraft. There the features were so extreme and orthogonal that the game almost balanced itself over decades, with minimal input from the devs.

Also most of the good stuff seems to come out of small studios. Modern AAA strategy games tend to follow fads, add superficial fluff, dumb down the gameplay and have terrible runtime performance. A game that does this really well is Factorio, it's so incredibly well designed and engineered that it allows you to build hugely complex systems out of very simple core components. And it just keeps running smoothly.

More than anything I love these types of games because they create their own little worlds with their own rules. They enable you to be both creative or scientific in figuring out what you can do and how you can do them in various ways. But I think there has to be some challenges to guide the player so to speak, meaning I quickly get bored with games that are entirely sandboxes with no failure modes or external pressure.

[kkukshtel]

As I've gotten older I definitely gravitated towards strategy games because they are often fundamentally about "player creativity". You aren't so much churning through content all the time and instead are making lots of small decisions that affect larger outcomes.

[Aerroon]

>That said, Nintendo continues to produce innovative games. Breath of the Wild of course sticks out here.

Can you explain what's innovative about Breath of the Wild? Open world RPGs aren't exactly a new concept. Their 598th copy of Pokemon isn't that groundbreaking either. Pokemon Go was, but that was more Ingress than Pokemon.

[spamtarget]

Saying 'but there are some innovative indie games' is not a good approach to this problem. The talent pool is not unlimited and this AAA money factory kinds are suck up most of them, squeeze out most of the resources from the industry, deliver almost zero artistic value in return and makes these innovative titles the exception instead of the norm. They have been poisoning the industry for decades, but you say, it's all fine, and we will all end up like the mobile games industry

[ajmurmann]

Sure, innovative titles might be the exception. There are so many games these days though that if I'm looking for something innovative as a consumer I can find lots of options.

[jcelerier]

> We continue to see other phenomenal games like Outer Wilds or Disco Elysium that push what a game can be and how closer to true art the medium has come.

Since when is it about "true art" though ? It's not like arthouse cinema make record profits compared to mainstream movies... most humans don't like it and prefer the simple fun of mainstream media.

[ajmurmann]

It's one of several innovative games I called out. It's significant since we likely couldn't have had something like this at this level of quality because it wouldn't have been economically viable. Planescape Torment is probably the closest we had gotten in the past and that didn't seem to be deemed a success by the publisher. While art house isn't mainstream there are still a lot of people who love it. I don't know exact numbers, but Disco Elysium won lots of awards and comes up in conversations online a lot.

[kwertyoowiyop]

It’s like complaining that all movies are cookie cutter now, because you’re tired of Marvel superhero movies.

[Litost]

This statement might be more poignant than you think, there's an interesting video here comparing Marvel with Star Wars and James Bond in terms of how memorable any of the music is, because it's almost all cookie cutter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vfqkvwW2fs

I think all the points here have value, I've definitely played some really good games recently including some that were mentioned above, but I definitely think there's a general risk averseness because AAA game studios are too big to experiment so a lot of games are rehashed sequels or incremental "improvements" (as in the movie industry or whatever's in the music charts).

I'd put some of the blame of this on the outcome bias, things are judged on whether the outcome was favourable (e.g. profit) not whether it was the right decision (e.g. let's try something different with novelty, but riskier).

As Julia Galef covers in one of her podcasts (will have to find the link), the exec that tries something risky might get a promotion if it succeeds and get sacked if it doesn't as opposed to getting promoted from suggesting something novel regardless of whether it worked. See also "No one ever got fired for choosing IBM".

How many films that get critical reception now, got poor/indifferent reviews initially because they were just too experimental/novel for the time, e.g. Original Blade Runner. What will people think in 10, 20, 50 years about Marvel films.

[voldacar]

>I'd still claim that there hardly ever was a better time for video games.

I think it depends on your tastes. Certain genres like arena shooter and rts have definitely declined.

[izacus]

This - heck, even Last of Us II has done some very innovative storytelling beats (and pissed off a lot of fandom in the process because it wasn't a cookie cutter Hollywood story). Not just AA, AAA games have never really been more diverse.