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Why do modern highly-touted games seem less attractive than older and indie games?
I'll start by admitting that I've played very few if any of the newer top-of-the-line/highly-touted/triple-A/big-name/whatever-you-wanna-call-them releases, especially among PC games.
But they're just not attractive. It's like, I look at trailers and cover art for these sorts of games, and I feel that they're basically glorified storytelling devices. This goes for both western FPSes and eastern JRPGs. It's like, I'll require a high-ish-end computer and be taking a day to download ten gigs of data, but those ten gigs of data are going to be good for telling a story, and one and only one story, and not much else. And the time I expect to spend playing them is will feel like me doing menial tasks in order to shuttle the story along. So basically, I'll be reprising an interactive movie by recompiling and running the animation studio's footage and sequence data.
I already had that feeling with FFVII. It felt like I was moving my character, fighting battles, and doing minigames only in order to move the story along, from cutscene to cutscene. (The irritatingly long and unskippable animations of Cloud jumping on and off platforms and ladders didn't help at all.) I've felt this same way with trailers for everything from Hydrophobia: Prophecy to Bioshock Infinite. (Yes, I own H:P on Steam; no, I can't get it to work at a competent speed even on my current computer. I hear it's that bad because they did a great job with simulating the water.)
See I look at some older games (JRPGs somewhat excepted) and some indie games and they look like toys I can mess around with. Like, I can control this character and move around and mess with my surroundings to some extent.
That doesn't mean they don't tell a story. Super Metroid has incredible narrative power, for example. But it's not done by shuttling me through the story; it's done by growing it "organically" from the gameplay experience. In the process of discovering the events, the script (where there is any), the locales, the characters, all these pieces, piece by piece, I come to understand the narrative.
Narrative doesn't have to be story. Narrative is the sequential experience. And I want to be able to place myself smoothly into that experience, and when I get into it, I don't like to be reminded I'm playing a damn game. For example, I just now realized one reason why boss doors are actually not really a good thing in Castlevania metroidvanias, especially when coupled with the recent way of designing the games. See, in Symphony of the Night, you'd keep on wandering, and wandering, and suddenly you'd wander into a room without music. That would be a boss room. On the other hand, in Order of Ecclesia (which otherwise had the strongest narrative since Circle of the Moon or Aria of Sorrow), whenever I saw a specially-marked door, I knew it was boss time. I knew to that's where I "should" be going next; I knew to look nearby for a save room (and there always was one). As a result it felt awfully predictable; it didn't feel like I was exploring a mysterious and intriguing countryside the way I felt I was exploring a mysterious and intriguing castle in Symphony.
(Of course, there are some little games that don't even have story. All those minigames, and puzzle games, and such. Yeah. I'm talking about the games that do have narrative.)
Bonsai Forest, over at TV Tropes, found a couple of mock "modernized" gameplay vids of DOOM, and had a few words to say about them. You should check them out. It seems I'm far from the only one who feels something's wrong with the method of narrative conveyance. And I was laughing with sadness at those achievements in the second vid.
Comments
Publishers have become less interested in quality control and more interested in homogenizing genres into what they think will sell more reliably. That generally means developing an allergy to exploration, experimentation, and long-term survival difficulty in favor of railroaded paths pockmarked with twenty-second (at most) skirmishes. This is exacerbated by their use of focus groups that have the attention span of fucking goldfish.
Being too open can be a disadvantage, to be fair. NES Metroid hit a nice medium in that it at least had a limited number of paths and regularly gated most of them with obvious obstacles that you could remember and come back to, and you could at least survive and poke around if you went to the wrong place too soon. You could at least build a manageable list of hotspots in your head.
To contrast, NES Zelda was if anything too open (to say nothing of how accessing the last few key areas had more to do with reading the programmer's fucking mind than anything) and provided no direction whatsoever. NES JRPGs had a lot of problems with opening up the entire map fairly early on with little to no restrictions, giving no indication of where was the next feasible place to explore, then brutally killing you if you stepped a square in the wrong direction -- in some cases (FF2) placing late-game areas directly adjacent to the starter zone and discouraging exploration from the very outset of the game. In both cases, death meant losing a LOT of progress.
The better design principle is typically providing several distinct threads of exploration, even if they're not explicit (like Metroid). Modern western RPGs are often explicitly designed around this principle, allowing you to take whatever pace you want while still making prospective targets clear, and making it relatively obvious from a distance if you're about to get in way over your head but not actively stopping you from doing so.
The more money that's being spent on something, the more companies become terrified of losing money off of it, so they become increasingly conservative. Smaller projects are easier to toy around with; if a company would make multiple smaller projects that cost less money, they might be more willing to try new things with them.
This is making me slightly more inclined to try some modern western RPGs.
I guess I do have Oblivion sitting in my inventory...
Sometimes there'll be an AAA game that'll actually catch my eye.
That doesn't happen often.
The only three triple-A titles I've played in the past year are Halo 4 (longtime fan of the franchise), Borderlands 2 (worth the money I spent on it but I've yet to finish it), and Transformers: Fall of Cybertron (good, but most of the appeal comes from playing as a Transformer rather than any objective merits).
I also got Sonic Generations which was imo a step down from Colors, but I don't know if Sonic is even triple-A anymore.
Of course, I tend to find old "triple-A" games very boring as well. But that's just me, and I'm in a minority opinion there.
I too am sick and tired of the "AAA" genre. I loved Nintendo Land, and I've been playing New Super Mario Bros. U with my brother a lot. I hate where the big budget industry has gone. Very creatively bankrupt.
Both of those could be counted as AAA games, but the sentiment is clear enough.
As an example of a AAA game done right, I posit Rayman Origins. There's not really any sane way that many studios could possibly come together for one game and have it not be a clusterfuck, but goddamn did they pull it off.
It's a budget problem, really. As budgets inflate, games tend to get more generic. After all, it's easier to make something ten million people will be okay with than something ten thousand people will love.
Worse, publishers often market games as generic, even if they aren't.
For example, Bioshock Infinite is a story about political ideologies and quantum physics, starring a Disney princess. The cover art is a generic action hero posing with a gun.
It's ultimately the content that matters most.
I looked at the logo and cover art and saw the following:
* guy with a gun
* 1920s-ish U.S. setting
I watched two trailers and saw the following:
* game engine good enough to render cutscenes
* magic from his hand
* action sequences involving sliding around with a hook
* chaotic boss fights