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Comment by maccard | Hacker News Reader

> apparently more budget, more advanced technology and team members a game has, crappier it gets.

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.

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I agree there is a lot of survivorship bias, but it seems like every triple AAA game that releases is an unfun buggy mess. It feels like they like passion and have become too corporate. Like they focused on what features the game has to have instead of being a fun game. And by having so many features of course you have more area for bugs.

Vampire survivors, a game developed by a single person provided me with more fun than cyberpunk, the game is played with just WASD.

> but it seems like every triple AAA game that releases is an unfun buggy mess.

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.

> 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.

> They might not suck, but they are so often bland and unoriginal.

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.

The end result of Cyberpunk is that the world is bland. The city is empty and lifeless, the AI that is there, is really brain-dead. We are not in the PS1 era of open world games, where pioneers in the genre were happy to just have a few people and cars on the street. In 2020, this is some of the worst open-world implementation in recent AAA game development.

> Vampire survivors, a game developed by a single person provided me with more fun than cyberpunk, the game is played with just WASD.

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.

Not just survivorship bias imo. You had to ship a stable game because you couldn't patch it later. And the scope of games was much smaller, in complexity and game length, so it was easier to QA. End result is that on average games were much more stable than modern games are at 1.0.

> And the scope of games was much smaller, in complexity and game length, so it was easier to QA

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...

> Expectations have changed, technology has changed

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.

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