this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2024
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It's not great! 2023 games that I have really enjoyed this past year have been Tears of the Kingdom, Cassette Beasts, and Hi-Fi Rush.
Oh, man, I had forgotten those were this year.
My list also includes:
Pikmin 4
Baldur's Gate 3
Spider-Man 2
Street Fighter 6
Mortal Kombat 1
Dead Space and RE4 remake
The Talos Principle 2
And I didn't even get around to Alan Wake 2, which everybody's been raving about. Or that Dave the Builder thing. Or Lies of P. Or Jedi Survivor. And I guess I'm not counting the new Prince of Persia because that's this year, technically. And I'm not into 2D Mario games, so I'm guessing skipping Super Mario Wonder makes me a bit of an outlier.
Look, I know it feels good to be jaded and edgy and cynical, but... yeah, no, it was an all-time great year for games in 2023. And a terrible year for the games industry. But the games? So good.
Too bad pretty much everyone, including Larian, Owlcat, all of these "we're doing it for the game and for the fans" adherents have also fallen for the "Rush to Market, Fix It Later" mentality. Been deep-diving Rogue Trader for the past weeks and playing through rough Beta content really isn't fun when the game is considered launched and complete. Same for Baldur's Gate 3, I binged it at launch and had to stop in Act III because most of my quests were soft-locked, or displayed incorrect information in the Journal.
You could have figured that out in the century it spent in Early Access, I suppose.
Honestly, yeah, I do think devs need to reassess what is a showstopping bug and what isn't. Not much question on that. But also, I have seen worse. I even played a ton of Cities Skylines 2 at launch. Which paid off weirdly, because once they fixed the balance (or at least improved it) my starter city is now an insane utopia.
In any case, my backlog is enormous, I can wait for games to be actually finished before I play them. In BG3's case, I think there was the one quest that didn't pop once, but I spent a hundred hours on it just fine... and then had to go live my real life, so I still have to do the last act at some point. I'll get to it.
None of that changes that this year had banger after banger, from studios large, medium and small. You can complain about many things relating to the business, but man, the skill, creativity and artistry from game developers of all stripes is nuts.
Again, too bad completion doesn't show up on that list. The games eventually being good is no excuse for shoving half-finished software out the door at full price, no matter how you cut it.
True, but that cuts both ways. Games being shipped before they are finished doesn't mean they're not good games when they're finished. Sometimes even before they're finished, because being technically sound and being a good game are different things.
The industry needs to redefine what a showstopper issue is and what ship-ready means... but the games are still good.
No, the industry needs to stop selling half-baked goods because they know they can get away with it. Having to patch a game for months, non-stop, after launch day, after it's been, as you've said, a century in Early Access, is not a misunderstanding of bug severity, it's focusing on profit more than on the product. Not taking away the games' 'goodness,' but just as an underbaked cake, you still have to swallow a lotta raw eggs with that goodness.
Wow, that took a turn, there's some tonal whiplash in going from complaining about lack of creativity in gaming to calling games "goods".
It has a lot to do with misjudging bug severity (and on PC with compatibility testing, which is its own thing). All games are under pressure to ship late in development, all studios are under pressure to clean that backlog in any way possible and all games ship with known bugs. That's all fine. The question is which bugs are a dealbreaker. The console first parties used to be more stringent about stuff, patches used to be harder to distribute and the whole thing culturally just looks at crashes as the original sin that must always be stopped but will often put a lot of pressure to fix everything else later and ship nominally on time.
It's a bad call and it needs adjustments. I'm glad that peoplpe are angry and not super understanding about it. That will help.
While I understand your point, I still tend to disagree. I've had ten years of experience working in QA, both on games and on misc. software, and the amount of bugs with which games are shipped as of late shifts the discussion from severity and prioritisation to volume - it isn't a question of what should have been fixed first when basically everything is busted. As such, it becomes a business problem entirely.
Another aspect which underlines this is the fact that, taking Baldur's Gate 3 as an example since we started with it, it's usually the latter half which is most affected. These trends taken together indicate a front-loading with QA in order to sell, then (hopefully) stealth-fixing the latter half before people get to it. Which doesn't work, because you get maniacs like me who spend 200 hours in-game during the first two weeks after launch. Same goes for Rogue Trader, for example. Game's all there, technically, first two Chapters are pretty much sterling, but how is one supposed to appreciate the creativity behind it considering half of the game may be inaccessible due to bugs (talking about soft-locking quests, busted progression triggers, busted scripting, and even more mechanical aspects which require trial-and-error with repeated reloads in the hopes that you stumble upon the right combination of actions which bypasses the bug).
In my perspective, creativity, while it is to be appreciated, becomes sort of moot in this case - it'd be like ignoring the fact that half of the painting is drafted on napkins with a big TODO stapled to it, or being sold a partly assembled phone with the promise that they'll send you the rest of the components later on down the line.
I agree that when the game doesn't work it doesn't matter how creative it is, what I'm saying is that when it's fixed and it does work that doesn't make it indefinitely worse.
The late-game thing you're talking about is a good example of why I think prioritization habits are a bit busted. I do think it makes sense to say that hey, this part of the game is only going to get seen by a small portion of players, so it's a lower priority than the parts that are going to get seen by everybody...
...but if a bug is a major showstopper that prevents any amount of players from going through the game, then it's a major showstopper, you can't just push it to a patch and call the game shippable.
I'd even make a big distinction about minor bugs... and minor bugs that do something peristent. You'd be struggling to convince the average producer to do a late fix for a minor visual glitch, but if the inor visual glitch stays there forever it makes the whole thing look unacceptably broken (which is where some of those BG3 glitched quests would fall for me, btw).
We're getting into the weeds now. The point is that yes, revenue and money are a factor, but I think the current issues with reliability and technical polish in games are coming from more places than that. There's a culture of prioritization that is looking at things that will block shipping externally or that are software-end dealbreakers where the whole game crashes. This has to do with both applying only software development logic to game creation and from having historically relied on first parties to draw the line of shippable quality and a period there in the early 2000s where people were getting very mad at eternal delays and vaporware. That culture needs to change and producers and QA need to start being rated on how clean the game ships, not just on whether it ships on time. Again, the weeds... but it's relevant that it's not as simple as "greedy publishers".
Oh, also to be clear, when I say "prioritization" that also means what gets shipped versus not fixed. That's also a prioritization choice, not just which bugs get fixed first or later. Especially if the dev cycle doesn't end at ship and instead ends five patches and several years down the line.
... your list is basically all "20+ year old franchise/licensed property". bruh if there's that little that's fresh or origninal then I' argue that's a terrible year for games.
Talos Principle 2 does demand my attention though, the first one was stellar and still looks gorgeous.
That is a very weird take.
So let me get this straight, Street Fighter 6 is a "20 year old franchise" so not fresh and original (it is maybe the biggest redefinition of the series since SF3, but hey). Somehow The Talos Principle 2, a direct sequel to a 10 year old game... not that.
But also, Dave the Builder, Sea of Stars, Hi-Fi Rush, Life of P, Lethal Company, Terra Nil, Humanity, Against the Storm... even going by new IP alone it's been a great year. Not that I accept your premise, sequels and licensed games can obviously be, and indeed have been, fantastic and innovative.
I am very confused and you are either being disingenuous or so comitted to arbitrary requirements that any year is an equally good year.
"the nth iteration of sold-out BRAND that's older than most people reading this that belongs to a genre so niche only its dedicated fanbase can tell what the hell is even different from the last entry is at least as fresh and original as the sole sequel to a one-off game that was actually made in this century" and "looking forward to an original game you liked getting a single sequel makes you a hypocrite for not also thinking the 2893598th BRAND niche game most people can't tell from its predecessor is equally exciting" strike me as outright bizarre things to say and it's weird and sad that when you reach for "fresh and original" the thing you come up with is [moldy franchise] [#].
i just looked up sf 4 5 and 6 and if you put these all in front of me i absolutely could not tell you which one was which. much innovation, very originality. ditto for the last like ten spider man games. like bruh talos principle wasnt groundbreaking or anything but i'm not over here acting like they revolutionized gaming by making more clever variations on rock paper scissors.
I said one thing on that list sounded interesting to me and you're having a tizzy because i think the rest sound like the brand cash-ins they are. Sorry I don't think "they made another DnD CRPG and a Spider-man game the way they've done thrice a decade for forty years" makes it "a great year for games".
It's also weird that you take time to dissociate BG3 from the rest of the series despite the number, and then go on to pedantically assert that I should care about spider-man 2 as much as talos principle 2 because number (I think that was your point anyway, it's not very lucid). I'm tired of elves and wizards and superheroes and fucking remakes dude, it's so fucking stale. It's not fun to me - sorry for being happy about the puzzle game I liked getting a sequel while being shit-tired of grindy crap and dead genres.
how dare i say that I'm glad the weird existential puzzle game got a sequel while not also simping over FRANCHISE that I was bored of by the time I hit puberty like a good consumer?
man are you still crying because I said I don't give a fuck about the billionth entry in a forty year old franchise, but was glad about a sequel to a puzzle game? get a fuckin life you loser.
bruh you went nuclear and started being an asshat because I wasn't impressed or interested by the 40th spider man game or the eleventeenth street fighter coming out and tried to turn it into a debate like a fucking neckbeard. go outside on occasion.
you mean the games i kept saying you should talk about instead, while you continued harping on me for caring about a sequel to a game i played and liked a lot but not spider-man 2 even though they both have a 2? or whatever your moon-logic was.
After Cyberpunk I decided to be done paying $50+ to take up a quarter of my disk with a highly-acclaimed game that turns out to be the same old cookie-cutter 3D game with an expensive makeover. Anymore I mostly just play small indie games that friends recommend, and generally have a way better experience for it.
After this supposed stellar update dropped that overhauled the game or when the game initially came out?
This was back when it was new - my thoughts the entire 30 hours I was playing were things like:
"Johnny Silverhand is more annoying than Jar Jar and I will do anything to not hear his stupid fucking voice anymore" "this 'hacking' is one of the worst minigames I've ever seen" "the setting is ripped straight from PK Dick and doesn't feel like it really lends anything to the story besides 'high tech stuff that looks flashy on screen'" "oh the background i spend ten minutes consiering before choosing does fuckall about shit except slightly reword a few dialogs" "my god, every single character is insufferable" "oh wow, my inventory is full again already, and not a single thing in it is worth fuck for shit" "these physics are just as shitty as that Witcher 3 game I wasted money on last year" "this button feels really awkward to press when i need it but i don't feel like editing the config by hand again" "holy shit when will this cutscene be over? There we g- DAMN IT THERE'S MORE? STFU ALREADY"
It was buggy but the bugs were the least of my worries. I came away feeling like I was promised Mexican food and then was given a cold soggy leftover Taco Bell burrito, and frankly after having basically the same experience with the super-awesome totally-finished fully-patched all-dlc-included GotY version of The Witcher 3 I really don't trust CDPR to fix shit.
Thanks for the write-up, sums up my experience with both games
I couldn't get behind Tears of the Kingdom. Idk what it was, just didn't draw me in. Couldn't keep at it. Put in 10hrs and haven't picked it up in....3 months?
Part of it for me was that the people you meet in the first game don't reference the first game. Like pyrah for example has a massive crush on link in BotW yet in TotK she acts distantly to him. Also I felt it was repetitive, especially when I've already done similar if not the same things in BotW like korok seeds.
It did really feel super samey. I think if I hadn't played BotW I would have seen TotK through to the end, but sadly I did.
The steam reviews for cassette beasts drove me away from it, what did you like about it? Also what's your in game time, if you don't mind me asking?
It's just Pokémon but if the series grew up with the fanbase instead of stagnating on the age group it did.
It's a really good "monster collector" game with solid gameplay and a mature story.
I played ~30hrs and there is still a lot to go.
That being said, it's not AAA by any means.
I'm curious considering it's currently at 96% positive, what about the reviews drove you away? For me, the game captured the feeling of playing Pokemon for the first time (Heart Gold) again. It was similar enough on a basic level to draw me in, but all the fundamentals and mechanics are totally different and bring a wave of fresh air to the stale Pokemon formula.
If you've played Pokemon on the DS and didn't like it, this game probably won't be your kind of thing. If you did though, Cassette Beasts has a lot going for it. It has creative monster designs, a cast of unique side characters with their own story quests, a very memorable soundtrack (including my most played song of 2023), a not-overwhelmingly-massive open world with plenty to do, and just a smidge of analog horror.
I have ~30 hours in it iirc.