90s games were simpler due to lot of restrictions, but most main stream titles were quite polished.
this company sure made several mistakes on the hiring process and team management, I just can't imagine how something like this went to production.
That's just not fair. Expectations have changed, technology has changed and team sizes have grown to accomodate the desires of the audience. With this extra scope comes extra risk which has been poorly managed.
> but most main stream titles were quite polished.
This is your nostalgia talking, and there's a huge amount of survivorship bias at play here. There were plenty of games from the 80s and 90s period that were anything from crap to just straight up unplayable, and they were just left in that state.
Vampire survivors, a game developed by a single person provided me with more fun than cyberpunk, the game is played with just WASD.
Horizon forbidden west released late last week and is a AAA title that has been well received, is polished and great fun. There are still many AAA titles released that aren't unfun buggy messes.
> Vampire survivors, a game developed by a single person provided me with more fun than cyberpunk, the game is played with just WASD.
That doesnt mean all AAA games are bad.
They might not suck, but they are so often bland and unoriginal. Like they owe it to their 100 million dollar investors not to rock the boat too hard.
There's plenty of original and not-bland AAA games releasing regularly. Teams take risks, sometimes they work out and sometimes they don't.
> Like they owe it to their 100 million dollar investors not to rock the boat too hard.
This is just shitposting, frankly, and is the sort of comment I'd expect ot see on reddit, not here. Cyberpunk is many things, but unoriginal and bland is not it. It definitely _tries_, and there's not really anything else like it (Deus ex is maybe the closest thing). That doesn't mean it's fun, and that doesn't mean that all AAA games are unoriginal bland and unfun either.
It's all about expectations. 99% of what makes vampire survivors fun is that it's a $2 indie game. If the same exact game was released by a AAA studio for $30-$60, everyone would say it's shit, has terrible graphics, doesn't have enough content, etc. It would completely change your perception of the game.
In that vein, I played through cyberpunk and had a lot of fun. I didn't rage quit the first time I encountered a physics bug. I allowed myself to have fun, which is something a lot of gamers can't seem to do anymore.
Agreed on this point.
> End result is that on average games were much more stable than modern games are at 1.0.
Have you got an actual source for this? I think you're missing a large amount of pure crapware that was released. I have memories of playing the Sierra adventure games being incredibly unreliable for example. Ports for DOS were unbeatable without cheating because they were so sloppily done[0]. E.T. [1] which has been associated with the fall of major games companies and is widely known as the worst game in history, or Bubsy 3d which is literally meme material. 95% of boxed games that were released were complete and utter crapware.
[0] https://kotaku.com/that-time-a-teenage-mutant-ninja-turtle-g... [1] https://www.npr.org/2017/05/31/530235165/total-failure-the-w...
This I agree, nowadays people start with a lot already done, no need to write a custom audio codec, or image compression trick or whatever, not only there is plenty of code ready for doing so, but there are plenty of computational resources to use on runtime.
Back then you would see advances first in the games and later on being documented, now they are released as papers, you hope that it will be implemented on some engine somewhere, and games using these techniques will be at least 5 years away from the paper release.