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I agree, luckily we have games from indie developers to fill in that gap. The tradeoff is that you have to sacrifice good graphics and a perpetual alpha/beta development cycle for gameplay. There’s been so many great indie games, such as Minecraft, Rimworld, Stardew Valley, Terraria, Prison Architect, Rust, Undertale, etc. In the good ‘ol PC gdays I used to buy 10-15 AAA titles per year on release day. Now I only buy a couple only on a heavily discounted Steam sale.

The last AAA game I bought on release day was SimCity (5). That was a huge disappointment for me and I wouldn’t do that again. I should have knew better.

> Video games have gone Hollywood.

Only the triple-A developers.

> [...] small-ish creative studios could compete. Games were popular enough to make it profitable for studios to make them yet not too mainstream to dumb them down for the lowest common denominator.

I would venture that Ninja Theory with "Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice" fulfills this - they're were[1] a small studio with a game you can't really call dumbed down and it was a profitable game with a relatively small budget (<$10M).

[1] Now they're part of Microsoft.

All good points. You're certainly right about the costs involved in 'triple-A' development. Indie games are out there, though. Some of them even look great, just not photorealistic (such as Limbo).

> Yet I was still discovering hidden things in the original Deus Ex 10 years after I first played it

Ever play the PS2 port?

They had to rework the maps to cope with the PS2's memory constraints. Everything's familiar, but a bit different. Worth a shot if you want another hit.

No - but I was waiting for years for the Deus Ex: Revision mod to be completed, yet have not found the time to play it yet.

How many games have you played in the last, say, 5 years?

I suspect that many people in this discussion reference big names because they played in the past, but don't play anymore, therefore talk about what they actually see advertised.

> Largely because of improvements in graphics, game budgets have gone way up and studios are afraid to take risks [...] 1997-2004 [...] good enough that cool things could be made yet bad enough that small-ish creative studios could compete

Big studios are only a part of the gaming production landscape.

There is a lot going on in the small/indie studio segment; I've randomly picked up the first link for "Best 2017 pc games", and roughly half of it was not AAA.

Nowadays, with the availability of game frameworks, the entry barriers to game development are pratically non-existent, to the point that at least one critically acclaimed game was made with... Game Maker (in fact, lauded for the narrative).

I agree on the indie games. I enjoyed VVVVV and Doki Doki Literature Club. Out of recent AAA titles, Prey was very encouraging, GTA5 was pretty damn good, the recent Hitman is quite good also. I just think that the time period I mention had a higher number/density of great AAA titles.

Second Book plug because you're correct on all counts (I really want this to get funded :( ) https://unbound.com/books/rocket-jump/

90s FPS was my most treasured era of gaming… watching the tech evolve inspired me to get into computing and become a dev.

Maria 1 was the Grand Theft Auto of 2002/03.

Wasn't Vice City was the Grand Theft Auto of 2002/03? ;)

More to the original point, the first GTA remains along with Age of Empires one of my all-time favourite games. It's easy to forget in light of the franchise it became what a novel and crazy little game that was.

What I find absolutely fascinating is that there are only 16 years between the release of GTA1 and GTA5. How could such amazing progress have occurred in such a short timeframe? It's unbelievable.

GTA3 was actually released roughly at the same time and probably overshadowed Mafia. I think Mafia was the better game overall, though.