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I think, if you're approaching modern AAA games as games, you're gonna have a bad time. They're not games; they're stories told in the second person (like Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books) where the point of the gameplay isn't fun-as-its-own-reward, but deeper immersion/mimesis to make the story more rewarding. Almost no big-name player in the games industry is really making games per se any more--excepting the companies that just make the same sports/fighting/racing retreads over and over.

Here's another way to think about it: most games companies employ nobody with any training or experience in game design theory (they might give someone the title "game designer", but that doesn't suddenly confer them skills and knowledge they didn't have previously.) So where would you expect novel game mechanics--or even interest in "making games fun"--to come from?

The first part of this post is a really good one that I agree with strongly - the goal of modern games is experiential and immersive. Which is cool, and I dig, but you're right in that there are alternatives being left unexplored by AAA companies.

I do know people with the title of "game designer" at most of the big names, though, so that bit of your post falls flat for me.

The problem is that most of the time the medium is great (i.e. the graphics, voice acting, cutscenes), but the story/content is terrible. Repetitive quests, extremely stereotypical/cliché characters, underwhelming plot twists -- name it, it's all there.. I'd much rather have sub-par graphics and great storytelling than the other way around. Too much effort and money is being spent on the envelope. And I'm not even getting into novel game mechanics.

I think having to fit inside a game limits the storytelling, because you always need to find a reason why you have to go and battle several hundred enemies.

This is also what happens a lot of the time, interestingly, when a Hollywood director makes a movie "from scratch" without it originally coming from a screenwriter.

Maybe we could learn from that. What if the games industry followed the more standard Hollywood pipeline of "screenwriter writes a screenplay, shops it out for publication; some production company buys it and starts making it"? Imagine if we had indie game designers making their living writing game design documents and shopping them around to AAA companies--there would actually be a coherent game that the AAA edifice was hung upon! It might even be playtested and prototyped so as to guarantee it's fun before the AAA company even buys it!

Effectively, in games industry terms, you'd have the indie game makers creating the initial "game", but never publishing it--and then the AAA company creating a souped-up clone of that game, which is the first version of it anyone will ever see.

"To the moon" is a great example of the game you are looking for -- old school pixel art graphics, but it has a beautiful touching story. And the music... just listen to it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QfPDmzpC2Q

Not really. Most AAA games need to be fun and have a intriguing world to interact with. Those choose your own adventure games don't sell at all never have.

I don't know what games you're thinking of. I'm referring to things like Last of Us or the story-mode in Call of Duty. Extremely immersive theme-park rides, but not games.

I have the same problem. Somewhere around Team Fortress 2, I just stopped liking modern games for much the same reason. I don't have time to really dedicate to games anymore. I just want to fire it up and get playing.

I've found huge amounts of joy at reasonable prices with Indie Games, retro games and emulation.

I've absolutely fallen in love again with the Dreadnaught Factor for the Atari 5200, it manage to convey a sense of mood and has amazing gameplay, all in just a couple kilobytes.

Granada and Ranger X on the Genesis/MegaDrive are also games I've just discovered.

Ranger X is a AAA title from 1993, and feels innovative and fresh and never gets bogged down in useless cinematics. You fight in the set pieces instead of just watching them. The first part of the game has you tearing along the desert on your robot bike right outside the ruins of an old fortress as you fight enemies while outgoing artillery fire shoots off into the distance over your head.

Granada is an old-school style top down tank shooter with great music that's perfect for a 10 minute game session.

There's hundreds of thousands of old games you can cheaply mine through, and they're well emulated. I play Granada and Ranger X on a portable emulation device for example. My 2006 netbook is more than capable of emulating just about anything up to the SNES era...add in XBOX controllers and hook it up to the VGA input on my TV and it's basically like I'm console gaming again. Except it's better with save states and filters.

There's also tons of great indie games with smart sensibilities and great gameplay. The Humble Bundles come fast and frequent and usually have great games. You can usually score a half dozen games each time for under $7.

There's not big challenge here - just don't buy AAA games.

It seems to me that a lot of people think the old Microprose's and Id's were the AAA of their day and the nature of AAA games has mutated from something simple, fun, and authentic into the horrible monstrosity of today's overblown games.

I rather think that today's AAA games are a new phenomenon that overshadows but doesn't replace the kinds of games & game studios that most of us grew up loving. Those simpler, less overproduced games never went away.

Id started out as a shareware outfit which was the indie of it's day, instead of marketing games through app stores they distributed demos on floppy disk through intermediaries who advertised in the back of computing magazines and encouraged people to share demo versions by copying the disks with their friends. They used the shareware model for every game they released up until Doom 2. The original doom had a full 1/3 of the game available for free. I don't think early id games like Commander keen were even available in retail stores until much later.

Even in the 90s there were quite a few attempts to create movie like games, where live movie footage was mixed into gameplay. Night Trap and Rebel Assault are early examples of this. The problem they had was that there was too jarring a difference in realism between game sprites and movie footage.

> Even in the 90s there were quite a few attempts to create movie like games

Not just that - fancy animated cut scenes for intros and finales like in Dune 2 (1992) for PC. For a game that was maybe 10 MB on disk, those short animations were about 10 - 20% of the total installed size.

In any case, a team of ten people over the course of a year is typical for the time. The whole CONCEPT of a megabudget game with a hundred people solely dedicated to art and design for several years is something I've first associated with Final Fantasy VII.

The term "AAA" for me has implications of "Three million copies sold and we didn't even make back our IT budget".

You can sort of get the idea of what the mainstream games were back in the day by looking at what games were advertized in gaming magazines.

Take for example the issue of computer & video games from january 1991, right after the release of commander keen. https://archive.org/stream/Computer_Video_Games_Issue_098_19...

What were the ads? The untouchables, michael jackson's moonwalker, ghouls 'n ghosts, what's the score? (Microprose soccer game), f29 retaliator, ...

The games we remember most fondly aren't the mainstream games of their time, they're the ones that we kept playing long enough in order not to forget about them.

To be fair, most of the magazine is still dedicated to action games in ancient platforms, which have aged poorly. C64 and Spectrum were still the top bill, with some space dedicated to Amiga and Atari ST, both of which were rather short lived. The PC giant that was about to wake up was nowhere to be seen.

We also have to remember that Shareware games only really got real traction with Doom and Duke Nukem 3D, which would not come out for years. Keen was always more of a cult classic than anything else.

And despite this, I see an ad for one Sid Meier's Pirates, which is a classic. An Amiga review for Cinemaware's It Came From The Desert, another big classic, getting a 95%. An entire page of clues on Indiana Jones 3, a tremendous adventure game. An ad for an old Dragonlance RPG/Action hybrid, which was pretty fun. A once page ad for one Sim City, which is about as important a game as it gets.

The top sellers for C64 and Spectrum are dismal, but on the Amiga/ST charts, I can't blame people for liking the Strider port, but we see one Space Quest 3 in there, and more Indy, Bloodwych, and the pretty good for it's time TV Sports Football, another Cinemaware classic.

Action games sold very well, and yet, like all action games, they are quickly surpassed by some of the same with some gameplay tweaks and better graphics. It's just an issue of genre longevity.

So based on my reading of the magazine, the games we remember from the era, barring a few exceptions, just happened to be the most popular games of the era outside of the action genre. They are all over the magazine.

So yeah, the great games were still there, and well reviewed.

My favorite game right now and over the last couple of months is King Arthur's Gold. There's really no other game that draws me in like it. It doesn't have AAA graphics, it has great pixel graphics, good gameplay and is a lot of fun. That's all it takes for a great game.

https://kag2d.com/en/

yes! I have been playing a lot of king arthurs gold as well but the community is very small. There are usually only at most 2 servers with a decent number of players.

Interesting. It reminds me a lot of Terraria, which is also an excellent indie game. Lots of game play for the money.

They mentioned Lost Vikings in the description. Now I have to buy it.

Very good - the KAG trailer[1] reminds me a lot of the graphics and gameplay of the video game episode of Community[2].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6Eom7IGLRw

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEr8sO6auIA

What sold me about this game is that it was made by the creators of Soldat. I have so many good memories playing that game.

That looks like a lot of fun, thanks for posting!

Amazing .. Reminds me of one of my favorite snes games - King Arthur's world http://youtu.be/nCkymVAsoAg .. The catapults and kegs were fantastic fun. Like an olde timey weaponized lemmings.

Can't it be both? Why does the reverence of indie and/or simple gaming have to come with the denunciation of grand, orchestral-scored games with long storyline cutscenes? Each has their place, each has their intended target.

I love small, single-person-made games; and I love grand $100million dollar games. They each have their ambitions, and both of them are worthy of attention.

This is my problem with many modern games as well, they think they are movies, but the story, characters, actors, music don't quite pull it off. I love the portal/half-life games because they manage to feel movie-like without ever taking you out of the game. You can tell a good story without making a movie.

One of the best resources for indie games with intriguing plots/stories and/or novel mechanics that I've found is Kill Screen[0]. They regularly feature and write about non-traditional or non-mainstream games that push the edges of design, creativity, and emotion in gameplay.

0 http://killscreendaily.com/

> I doubt AAA games will ever go back to not being movie-like, but it just seems like a huge waste of money and time (yet another 10 minute intro to sit through for example).

I'm not sure, I remember a couple years ago going to a GDC session where a pretty high up executive at, I believe, EA was more or less predicting doom. (This was his own opinion not his employers). Anyway his point was that AAA games are inconvenient for players (short play sessions on low end computers are impossible), and extremely expensive to make (A lot of them are north of $60 million now), and that while expenses are growing exponentially profits are not. So I wouldn't be shocked if AAA games just become so expensive that they're not worth making at that price point anymore, and the giant epic AAA thing becomes more of a niche.

I can't be the only one who enjoys indie and AAA games. I'd love for both to continue existing.

You are not alone :)

As gaming is getting more money'd we're still discovering the sweet spot for what to do with it.

There are games that take "cinematic" set pieces to great effect, and create a condensed experience that can leave you emotionally drained at the end.

There is the "cutscene every 5 minutes" issue that comes up, but it seems to be an issue mainly in the beginning of games. I feel like the games industry could really use some A/B testing on intros.

Shadow of the Collosus is a game that is only about set pieces yet I will probably never forget it. The gameplay itself was somewhat terrible (some would praise it but you're basically just a cameraman, there's no real decision making in the game).

Remember when games just dropped you in a level ? I can't help but feeling bad at games chasing ceremony-wrapped photorealism.