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Comment by AlexandrB | Hacker News Reader

AAA gaming feels so tired (and tiresome) that this news barely registers for me. The last EA game I played was the excellent C&C remaster - and EA's main contribution was getting out of the way of the project. They still own the rights to a ton of legendary IP - SimCity, Command & Conquer, Battlefield, but I don't have illusions that new iterations of that IP will be any good.

I know this is probably part of the Saudi strategy of "sportswashing"[1], but I don't really care about EA or their legacy anymore.

[1] https://www.eurogamer.net/ea-sports-fc-24-boss-on-sportswash...

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> The last EA game I played was the excellent C&C remaster - and EA's main contribution was getting out of the way of the project.

Not only did they get out of the way, but they actively hired the studio that sprung up from the corpse of the original developers (Westwood): Petroglyph. Not only letting the original designers/developers do their thing, but giving them a chance to work on their own baby again.

It’s rare for larger companies to be willing to humble themselves for something like that, so they gained an iota of respect from me.

> The last EA game I played was the excellent C&C remaster - and EA's main contribution was getting out of the way

I still remember the “Westwood Studios Proudly Presents…” on the RA2 intro cutscene and that pride really shined through. Even the installer for the game was a blast (full-screen, dropped you into a faux game-UX and gave you a military briefing with their kickass soundtrack while the progress bar ran). Modern AAA games lack the soul that games of this time had.

> soundtrack

The tracks in FIFA 14-15 was also so much better than the tracks in today's FIFAs. In every way. They handpicked not-mainstream songs too

Being a 1970's child that grew up with games alongside the industry, nowadays I mostly play retrogaming, retrogaming inspired, or digital versions of board games.

The quest for realism without gameplay of many AAA games, with exorbitant prices, and GB sized textures, is not something I care about.

I may spend more time playing something with Atari 2600 graphics, and enticing gameplay than caring about latest COD.

I would be busy for hours playing Laser Squad, Quazatron, ATF,....

I recently watched a youtube video by a gamer about 20 years younger than me who had discovered older games and was reflecting on how deeply different they feel compared to modern games.

The big difference she observed is that older games don't hold your hand the way modern games do. They expect you to think hard, work hard, use trial and error, and generally, in her words, "use your brain." She spent a while talking about how old games have a manual where new games have a lengthy tutorial, automap, quest log, helpful companion constantly telling you what to do next, etc. etc. etc.

She didn't quite get there herself, but the juxtaposition really brought it home for me: the reason modern AAA games hold your hand is because they have to. Because they're just too big: too many game mechanics, too many locations, too much story, etc. etc. etc. If they tried to just sit back and let the player play the game for themself, nobody would would even scratch the surface of the game before they get bored and leave.

It was a little liberating because I finally realized I really can just stop paying attention to AAA games in general, and I don't have to feel weird about it. I'm not going to say they're bad. Plenty of people enjoy them enough to support a company the size of EA. But I'm now prepared to recognize that the kind of gameplay experience that I grew up on and continue to find most compelling is fundamentally incompatible with a AAA-sized budget.

> the reason modern AAA games hold your hand is because they have to.

Their target consumer now is as high a percentage of the population as possible; they aim for the lowest common denominator being able to play and thrive in the game. Hence, needing insane levels of handholding and guidance in the game.

In the past, it was mostly just geeks/nerds playing video games, and so things didn't need to be dumbed down to that level.

This reeks of a superiority complex.

Plenty of my friends who were less than geniuses enjoyed these same games I did.

Games now just focus more on lower engagement players. It's easier than ever to get into a game but, easy come, easy go. Frustration just serves to get someone to move on rather than buckle down and persist. Previously, when gaming was less easy to get into, the population of gamers self selected to people who had already significantly invested in the hobby and were much more dedicated to it.

I think the ability to solve the obtuse puzzles and deal with unexplained mechanics had a lot more to do with lack of alternative options and the sunk cost fallacy rather than superior intellect.

I think this is more relevant. Like everything, most games today are optimized to maximize engagement and keep people with low attention spans hooked. There are plenty of intelligent people who could invest a bunch of time into solving a puzzle but just don't care to.

I remember playing Myst as a not-particularly-bright grade schooler and banging my head against puzzles for weeks without making any progress. It wasn't some great intellectual challenge -- I was just bored and didn't have any other games to play. I can't imagine I would have stuck with it if I could have watched YouTube or played Fortnite instead.

> In the past, it was mostly just geeks/nerds playing video games

This just isn't true. I was there in the 80s and 90s. To an approximation, everyone played video games. The limiting factor was wealth more so than nerdiness; games cost a lot more in real terms back then.

Some specific games, like CRPGs, tended to be aimed at nerds. But that was about fantasy RPGs more so than video games - it goes along with tabletop RPGs and Dragonlance books. But you also have people who went out and bought a new computer with a CD-ROM drive just so they could play Myst, because that game was legitimately a pop culture fad that summer.

And then in modern media we have some selective retelling because a lot of the history is being told by people who themselves are deep into geek culture and also have a case of main character syndrome.

> the reason modern AAA games hold your hand is because they have to.

This doesn’t touch on one key difference between games now vs. games then: there were some secrets in games that you just didn’t ever know about unless there was a (printed) walkthrough, or through the word of mouth of friends. The Legend of Zelda is a great example.

Nowadays, many games can be 100%’ed without even having to jump online or ask someone for help. I’m not saying that’s necessarily a bad thing.

I’m playing the Metroid Primer Remaster on the Switch 2 (originally for the GameCube), and even it can be 100%’ed without having to look much up or without even a manual.

A _great_ spin on this is Tunic, which has an in-game manual that you find pages of as you play, and is written in an in-game language so you kinda sorta need to work things out based on the diagrams and other notation.

At a base level, it tells you about abilities that you have from the beginning of the game but don't know the buttons to press to trigger them, but it goes much deeper.

Great game, 100% recommend.

> The Legend of Zelda is a great example.

Shoutout for the Chris Houlihan room.

Back in the day, I remember a Blizzard interview on pre-Wrath WoW raid design. They explained how they didn't like that they spent a ton of money and effort developing end-game content that less than 1% of their playerbase would ever see. And development costs have only risen since then.

Moreso than needing handholding due to game mechanics or "too much" anything, I've always felt that it stems from a developer need for players to experience what you made. Or even just convincing the accountants that each additional cost of development will directly impact the majority of players (aka they don't get stuck or give up halfway through.)

Exactly. It makes little sense to fund development that few players will ever see. A developer/publisher could instead cut that content and keep the money as profit.

That's why I think novelty and 'old AAA game' richness has a ceiling development_cost : unit_of_content ratio.

There are things that were feasible for Fallout 1 to do that accountants would lose their shit over today, precisely because they were relatively cheap then and astronomically expensive now.

... the real travesty is the corollary of that though: that gameplay/difficulty must ensure a maximum number of players see all the content.

Which has led to the 'impossible to fail' gimmicks that make modern AAA games feel less satisfying.

Honestly, it feels like Rockstar and Valve are the only ones making truly great AAA games these days...

(But mostly because they're on stable financial footing and willing to take as long as it takes)

> Because they're just too big: too many game mechanics, too many locations, too much story, This was my thinking exactly while playing the two most recent God of War games. So many more mechanics, endless weapon crafting/upgrade options, side quests and minigames. Maybe I just have rose-tinted glasses, but the originals seemed so much more focused.

Elden Ring not having a questlog is just dumb. I don't play everyday, I don't remember exactly where I went and did what, and coupled with bizzare questlines it results in poor experience.

So I wouldn't pull in questlog with rest of stuff. You need history if you have any sort of side quests.

Elden Ring is a game that I really wanted to like. I really tried to like. But it failed me, so I dropped it, never to return.

I enjoyed the exploration, the setting, the cryptic writing. Even some of the more obtuse game design decisions appealed to my tastes, such as the lack of a quest log and a map that is just a geographical representation of the world, with minimal markers. It forced me to pay more attention to the world, recognize the terrain, learn the paths to navigate, etc. It was a game where I really was ready to lose myself in.

But it ultimately failed to have minimal respect for my time, and for that I hated it.

First when I accidentally killed a boss that could be spared. I didn't want to kill him, I just happened to be too strong and failed to react mid combo when he surrendered. The game fucking auto saved and I had to start over from scratch.

Second time when I was in the middle of a conversation when I was interrupted by my wife. I couldn't load a game to watch the cutscene again. It fucking autosaved again. I had to read a transcript online to understand what was going on. Total immersion killer.

Lastly, I remember a boss that took me like 40 attempts to kill. I am okay with the challenge. I am not okay with having to go through a mostly boring gauntlet of enemies for each attempt. It offered no challenge, I just felt like I was filling a form before each attempt. A long, 10m long form.

After killing that boss I uninstalled.

Rant over.

Elden Ring doesn't really have side quests though

Maybe 4 things in that game are what I would describe as quests and mostly they don't matter if you do them or not

You can use pen and paper.

Elden Ring did exactly what you described and had great success. Not every game has to hold your hand.

hear me out: I think this is a function of distribution mechanisms to at least some extent. when I was a kid in the 90s you could make a game that deep because when I bought or rented it it was the only game that was both new and available to me, so I focused on it for weeks at a time. When you got bored you couldn't quickly switch to a new game, so you explored the game you have because the only alternative was switching back to a game that you've already beaten up for 200 hours. Why was tony hawk pro skater such a great franchise? Because it rewarded you for being good at the game mechanics by opening up new parts of each level as you got better at things, meaning exploration and skill development went hand in hand. Why do I know that soldiers in metal gear solid do a cute little booty wiggle if you point the gun at them long enough? because I played the game so often and for so long that I've done things like point a gun at a soldier for 10 minutes just to see what will happen. I don't actually think that modern games have to hold your hand because of their size. I think that players will explore a big open world left to their own devices. I think that there are games like minecraft and dorf fort that throw you into a complex world with no tutorial beyond trial and error and that players love them for it. I know these aren't technically AAA games but minecraft is the best selling game of all time so the broad appeal is there. I just think that the way we used to play video games followed a really high level loop of frustration->exploration->gratification loop but now every moment of frustration has to compete with the ability to get immediate satisfaction from a different game that can be downloaded and installed in 2 minutes.

I am, however, very with you when it comes to not paying attention to AAA games despite being the kind of person who plays games every day. I agree that no one is offering deep experiences anymore outside the Soulsborne genre, which just isn't fun for me, so I end up focusing on novelty more than anything. My favorite game of all time is a top down roguelite stealther called Heat Signature that I've put hundreds of hours into and done at least one thing that the developer believed to be impossible based on the tutorials (kidnapping someone using only a lethal weapon). The last game I was truly excited about was a quest 1 VR game that was called Help Yourself at the time. Its changed its name since, but the idea is still really cool: it's a puzzle game that involves shooting targets with a gun. It's a bit hard to explain but the tldr is that you have to orchestrate multiple copies of yourself across multiple runthroughs until you shoot all of the targets. A typical level might have to targets with a wall between them such that there is no place where a player has line of sight to both targets, but there is a gap between the wall and the ceiling. On the first runthrough, an instance of you shoots the target on the right, then throws the gun over the wall. On the second runthrough, an instance of you is recreating the action of shooting the target on the right and throwing the gun over the wall, and another instance of you that you're currently in control of walks over to where the gun will land, waits for it to be thrown, then picks it up and shoots the other target. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GENqINO7pXY has some gameplay footage. I haven't had my brain bent by something like this since Portal came out.

> I may spend more time playing something with Atari 2600 graphics, and enticing gameplay than caring about latest COD.

The first good console for me was the NES. I enjoyed the Atari 2600, but only because it was the best at that time. But I can still enjoy a good NES game.

There aren’t many games on the Atari 2600 that I would still consider fun today. Maybe not necessarily because of graphics, but the graphics were pretty bad too.

It’s interesting that most modern retro-style games seem to keep a higher color and resolution than even the last great 2D generation (SNES/Genesis).

There are some games that hold try to that generation’s specs, though, but I don’t see many go as far back as the NES (and especially not the 2600).

There’s a small niche of people that make/have made modern NES games (actual cartridges for the actual console or remakes of the console), and those that play them, but I’m not aware of any super popular ones. If anybody’s aware of any, let me know!

Usually magazines like Retro Gamer are a way to find some of these.

https://www.gamesradar.com/retrogamer/

They tend to have a section with homebrew for classical systems, there are also a few quite good podcasts around,

https://retroasylum.com

https://theretrohour.com

"Graphics" is really the key word in that sentence.

And even then it's just the aesthetic that's fun. I don't think anyone aside from a small core of enthusiasts who really enjoy a technical challenge are particularly nostalgic for the 2600's sprite count or palette limitations, let alone the compute, memory, and data storage constraints.

Fellow retro gamer here, though I typically find my fill in 8/16 bit era games. I too seldom get enjoyment from contemporary AAA games, and have stopped paying attention to those many years ago.

When I to find joy in recent titles, it is typically indie games, or titles from small studios.

Part of it may be that photorealism as a graphical style does not appeal to my senses, but that is not all. I think that in many ways contemporary games have the need of keeping me busy and engaged. When I hear that a game is 200+ hours of content, instead of being intrigued I feel just overwhelmed.

RIP Mass Effect and by extension BioWare.

One of the most groundbreaking trilogies in gaming with tons of potential and it’ll get relegated to the dustbin of history no doubt.

If I was absurdly rich I’d buy up lots of underused and/or abused IP and start a game studio around it. I feel like that would be a good business if you have the capital to handle game dev costs

I assume the acquisition is mostly about the sports games and Battlefield but EA really is sitting on some fantastic IP: Bioware, Westwood, and Maxis were all great studios.

I think "were" is the correct tense. EA's dictates for SimCity (2013) ended up crashing that franchise entirely, and a decade into The Sims 4, EA has admitted it's planning on endless expansion packs for Sims 4 rather than making a Sims 5, with the community largely debating whether or not the best Sims game is Sims 2 or Sims 3.

The Sims 4 was a shockingly awful product, being a retool of an in-development Sims MMO after the dramatic failure of the always online SimCity (2013) it lacked (and probably still does lack) the majority of features from the previous installation, such as an open world.

Right, they have plenty of good and dormant IP, they're just uninterested in or bad at executing on it. Cities Skylines (1, not 2) did well, for example.

The Sims also still prints money and there's a new version due soon-ish. But, basically, yes agreed.

For those who want to play it. Mass Effect Legendary Edition plays great on a Steam Deck or medium pc, but also has 4k reolution. It’s €6 at the moment.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1328670/Mass_Effect_Legen...

Part of the EA autumn sale. More discounts here:

https://store.steampowered.com/developer/EA/sale/ea-autumn-s...

> RIP Mass Effect and by extension BioWare. One of the most groundbreaking trilogies in gaming with tons of potential and it’ll get relegated to the dustbin of history no doubt.

Maybe I started with BioWare too early, but everything after NWN felt incredibly empty... in that 'world breaks if you look left or right of the main plot' Call of Duty way.

Which is fine, but always gave me an itch that I was really strapped into a plot-on-rails amusement park ride rather than a world.

> AAA gaming feels so tired

When first person games became a destination for gaming (and not just another genre that we move on from — like "fighting games") is when I checked out of gaming. I know, I know, there are no doubt plenty of cool indie games out there (and other genres) but I guess in the meantime I found other ways to spend my time and haven't really looked back into games.

(I think too "AAA" as a moniker is kind of a huge red flag for me anyway. Like how "Now a Major Motion Picture" means it will be artless and instead appeal to a broad demographic in the most banal of ways.)

A new civilisation game just got released, the most well known mainstream gaming series are either third person (GTA) or sport games (Fifa), there is the witcher - in no way has gaming be reduced to first person games, not even AAA.

EA is a big publisher, so things like Split Fiction/It Takes Two get sprinkled in with their yearly shovelware of new paint jobs for Madden, NHL, FIFA, The Sims 4, etc too. I'll also give them credit that not every remaster is crap (Mass Effect Legendary Edition was great).

Which is ironic given the origin of the name, Electronic *Arts* once positioned themselves as a haven for “software artists,” treating games as creative works on par with music and film. Now they feel more like a licensing machine, recycling IP until it’s dry and chasing live-service revenue. The contrast between what the name promised and what the company became is kind of bleak.

The irony really kicks in when you start to remember all the arguments for how capitalism leads to the best products. Seems we forgot to clarify "best for who?", but it's clear at least shareholders won something.

Indie games are a product of capitalism too. RimWorld, Stardew Valley, Minecraft, etc. All products a functioning market just as much as the latest AAA shovelware is.

It's thanks to capitalism that you get to choose which one you want to play.

Eh, I think we'd probably have a lot more indie games if we did not live in a society with few safety nets where one really needs a good paying job to survive.

You're saying that like it's some obvious truth, and only exists because of capitalism, yet you provide no proof it is actually like that.

I'd argue indie games exists despite of capitalism, not because of it. But that's my opinion, I won't claim that's some universal truth.

> You're saying that like it's some obvious truth, and only exists because of capitalism, yet you provide no proof it is actually like that.

You're statement about EA and capitalism implies that the current market is a result of capitalism. If the market is a capitalist market, as you a state, then all the products of that market can be equally attributed to capitalism, can they not?

Capitalism (the free market, more accurately) is what led to those games existing and your ability to choose to play them. You can easily imagine a world where software engineers were subject to licensing requirements (like lawyers, doctors, etc) and software that was run on your PC was subject to a state approval process.

The ability of a single person to use their time and money how they see fit to create products that other people can choose to use (or not use) based on their own personal choice is the ideal of capitalism.

> You're statement about EA and capitalism implies that the current market is a result of capitalism.

Why does it imply that? The only implication that is clear from what I initially said is that capitalism can turn good companies like EA into whatever it is today, not that every single product on the market is the result of capitalism.

>but I don't really care about EA or their legacy anymore.

They own the entire sports gaming genre, and it's a massive money maker.

Yeah, admittedly my perspective is that of someone who thinks sports games peaked with NBA Jam (1993). The only other sports games I play are racing sims - which are also in a bad place, but I digress.

NBA Jam; NFL 2K (and 2K1, 2K2) on the Dreamcast; the first three Tony Hawk games, the THQ "pro wrestling" games on the N64; Ice Hockey, Punch Out!, World Cup, Dodgeball (really, any of those Kunio Kun sports games) and Bases Loaded (first one only) on the NES; the Mutant League games on the Sega (especially Hockey). What the Golf?, Golf Story, the Mario Golf games. Mario Tennis (any of them, they're pretty much all good, the latest one on the Switch is great). Super Baseball 2020 on the Neo Geo.

There are two big audiences for sports games, I think, and I'm in the one that doesn't give a shit about realism or real team names or real-world rosters. I have no interest whatsoever in modern EA-type sports games, and most (not quite all) of my favorites for any give sport are from the '90s or '00s. I would characterize myself as a pretty big fan of sports games, actually (look at that list! I have put lots of time into pretty much all of those! I didn't even list all of them, like snowboarding games) but don't have any interest whatsoever in the latest EA NFL games and such.

they've rebooted mutant league football if that's of any interest to you. it's an awful lot of cheaty, cheesy fun just like the first one

I wanted to get into sim racing but paying for mods is not something i like.

well then clearly you cannot be trusted on this issue, as sports games peaked with nba jam tournament edition (1994)

fr tho you and the OP are talking about two different things here. it's possible to be an avid gamer who just does not care about sports games, in which case EA is both an absolute titan of the industry and of little to no relevance to you

Not entire - football has Football Manager (def a niche compared to FIFA/EAFC, but still pretty major), and FIFA will one day publish their FIFA game (there was a licensing disagreement, so EA rebranded their game to EAFC, and FIFA kept the name and will presumably launch a game with it some day).

well, for football and handegg anyway

NBA Live hasn't caught up to 2K for a long time and Sony still has MLB

The PIF of Saudi Arabia has been a big investor in Take-Two (the parent of 2K Sports) since 2021, which is relevant to the larger discussion about Saudi "sportswashing".

I mostly agree about AAA, but to be fair Battlefield 1 was/is a really good game. You'll never find an experience like that in an indie studio.

Thinking about EA (or any big publisher) as a monolith is quite counterproductive to generate a mental model. In practice it is several studios with an overlord. Some studios might still be independent enough that the overlord just stays out of the way.

While that's true, there's also often a noticeable trend of games moving in a similar direction across a publisher - for example the disastrous live service attempt from Bioware (Anthem). Whether this is due to top-down pressure or just corporate vibes or culture, publishers definitely seem to have an impact on what kind of games get made.

I believe that Battlefield 4 was the last good Battlefield game. Biggest asset was fully self-hostable servers that provided progression, community control, and allowed gaming clans/organizations to actually community-build. Nowadays, forced matchmaking and limited party sizes really eliminate the ability to build large communities.

The consolidation of publishers/developers in controlling all of the online experience has started limiting online gaming's ability to be a reasonable third place.

BF4 was broken on launch, with servers crashing from people simply playing the objective. These studios have been serving people garbage for close to two decades by now. They deserve their fate.

Battlefield was always jank built on top of an innovative (or just finally achieved) idea of large battles with vehicles that worked. 1942 wasn't really innovative but the technical achievements of player count and not shitty vehicles made it a novel experience.

The further they moved away from that, the more generic it became. I don't want to say any one was really the "last good one" but the last one I put significant time into was BF2 but I played all pc versions up to 4 and you're right, it was absolutely broken on launch. It's not why I haven't played one since but I never did go back to BF or even really FPSs since. They all seem like CoD clones now, even (or especially) the CoD franchise and it's tiring.

BF4 was a massive redemption story. It started rough, yes, but it went on to become probably the best sandbox shooter ever released. Sorry if you didn't have the patience to make it through the initial 6 months. You missed out.

As much as I love bf4, I will say bf1 really hit it out of the park. It was a fantastic game that ran well at launch and basically only got better with the dlcs. It's servers also seem to be immune to a ddos that regularly kill bf4 servers.

To their credit, the new Battlefield had an extremely well recieved beta and feedback from ongoing private tests is overwhelmingly positive.

They're even shipping Godot based modding tools.

I'm sure the game will be well received, but the beta was enough to put me off from buying it, and you're talking to someone who bought bf5 and 2042 despite misgivings, so I have a pretty low bar.

The maps I've played are pretty much all close quarters maps with the exception of liberation peak. It's pretty clear they're courting the COD playerbase. The maps that do have vehicles are so small it makes no sense to have anything but humvees. They've once again given assault pretty much everything it needs to be a god class. No thanks. Not my battlefield, and I say this as someone who's got like 4k hours in bf3/4.

> To their credit

How much of the new Battlefield actually been coming from EA though? I feels like the relatively new "Battlefield Lab" (which EA seems to have a really hands-off approach with so far) seems to be the main credit for that.

Has there been any interviews or anything that clarifies how much EA been involved? Otherwise I'd continue give credit to the developers rather than the publisher.

Battlefield Studios is just a bunch of EA owned studios, DICE, Criterion, Ripple Effect (formerly EA LA). It's not a separate entity. EA corporate put Vince Zampella in charge of the whole thing.

Labs is the name of their playtest program.

Except that it enforces kernel-level anticheat, and hence is incompatible with Linux.

Between the fact that I'm on the "no time" part of the "time to play but no money, money to buy but no time, pick one" saying, indies, some still-functioning Japanese studios, and the burgeoning "AA" segment of the market, where people in the 2020s use 2020s technology with a team of maybe a dozen or two to put out what would have been AAA games produced by hundreds of people in the 2010s, I've had no use for the AAA space for a while. Or the gacha space; you don't need to create an open wound in your wallet just to play some decent games.

I've noticed this attitude is not yet "mainstream" but the first and the second derivative of its prevalence ought to worry the AAA industry. If their moat essentially collapses to "we can afford to spend a bazillion dollars on marketing" their death won't be too many years behind.

> I'm on the "no time" part of the "time to play but no money, money to buy but no time, pick one" saying

You should try Factorio, it'll find the time for you.

EA has an interesting strategy on offering a good value for their paid EA Play and EA Play pro plan. For example, if you find yourself in these specific genres:

Sports:

- Madden

- FC Soccer

- F1

This area should grow to cover other major sports. Others have mentioned how strong the sports offering is, and it’s also worth noting how strong Wii Sports was for the monumental success of the Wii.

FPS:

- Battlefield more or less

The Battlefield universe can cover anything you can dream of when it comes to FPS, so that’s another platform that is still a growth sector imho.

I think this is a very lucrative approach.

next up Ubisoft. Last Assassin's Creed was also a snore fest.

They still have some exclusives or older titles locked up - I think American McGee's stuff?

I wonder if the new owners would care to port it or sell it again.

The new battlefield actually looks pretty good

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