this post was submitted on 10 May 2024

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Nintendo president: “Game development will become even longer, more complex, and more sophisticated” (mynintendonews.com)

submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 56 points 6 months ago (2 children)

I love long complicated games, like breath of the wild, but I think the world also needs more concise games, those 20-40 hour masterpieces that keep you wrapped up without having to memorize 3600 pages of back story to remember where you left off.

What the studios (especially Nintendo) don't understand is you can't charge the same ~$60 for both games. People don't hate shorter simpler games, they just hate paying the same price for less content.

Right now, Nintendo is selling the Switch version of Link's Awakening for only $10 less than TOTK ($60 vs $70). That's right, a remake of a 20+ year old game with a pretty limited story is selling for almost the same as the largest most complex and expansive game Nintendo has ever produced.

I don't know why they're so fixated on matching prices between games that took orders of magnitude different amounts of effort to produce.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 6 months ago

the world also needs more concise games

Yeah!

those 20-40 hour masterpieces

...wait, concise?

[–] [email protected] 41 points 6 months ago (1 children)

"And games will be less fun of course"

[–] [email protected] 15 points 6 months ago (3 children)

Has Nintendo slipped in quality? Their practices aren't the great, but when it comes down to it, they have some of the most consistently high quality games.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 6 months ago

They also have some of the longest tenured pros of game design and programming in the industry in its entirety… something sadly far more rare outside of Nintendo… but especially Japan.

Shigeru Miyamoto, for example, has been designing at Nintendo for literally 4+ decades at this point.

Turns out you can master a craft after doing it for a majority of your adult life.

But - in the US at least - the executives at publicly traded game companies would rather shut down literal smash hit dev studios like the guys who made Hi Fi Rush than cultivate a few master class devs of their own over a few decades…

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago (8 children)

I thought BotW was pretty mediocre. They basically took the "bigger and better" strategy to one of their iconic games and made it "bigger and worse."

It's an unpopular opinion apparently, but that's my take. Hopefully it's notb the start of a trend of Nintendo following other AAA studio trends.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 months ago (1 children)

BotW was my favorite gaming experience of all time. Hours and hours of joy for me.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Eh, it was the worst of the Zelda series for me. To each their own I guess.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago (2 children)

You already explained you don’t like it. But your anecdote and my anecdote cancel out the anecdotes.

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Anyway...Have y'all tried Animal Well?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

It's on my list. Finishing inscryption first. Is it good?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I'm only an hour in, but I'm getting masterpiece vibes

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

That's awesome to hear. I'll have to check it out

[–] [email protected] 18 points 6 months ago

It has never been easier to make A Game. The only thing getting harder is meeting shallow expectations imposed by empty suits. What a small team can accomplish in a few months keeps expanding, and unless you chase some zillion-dollar trends, what they can do is plenty.

Shareholder puppets like Microsoft should figure this out - they demand instant turnaround. They own enough studios to have several of them try cranking out six games in two years. If you want it to happen faster, use fewer people. I dunno, build a friggin' pipeline for indie devs to slap together a killer idea that gets fixed-up, art'd, and polished by different teams. Then you can sell more things to more people for more chances to trip into a brand new trend. You don't have to perform ritual sacrifice when a decade-long project makes a shitload of money! You can still get angry when the actual profits are less than the number you made up in your head! Just-- put money behind cool things that cost $20, instead of constructing situations where people have to spend $140 each or you lose. It's like a fuckin' Mad TV skit. Spend less, sell more.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 6 months ago (1 children)

There are too many breakout indie hits developed by one person or a small team that prove this isn't true across the industry.

AAA development may be that way because there are higher expectations, just like blockbuster movies invest heavily in special effects and A-list celebs. But at the end of the day gamers just want to be entertained.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

I think that one could also say something similar about Hollywood, though there maybe I'd agree that scale is more important.

Terminator II was, for its time, pretty expensive. I'd be sad to not have Terminator II -- it was a pretty good movie.

But Twelve Angry Men is a pretty good movie too. It has essentially no special effects. The costumes are mostly everyday business casual. Most of the movie takes place in a conference room, with a very small part in a courtroom and a bathroom. I don't know what its budget is, but it has to be simply tiny in comparison.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

Exactly! I especially like your point about T2. I don't think it's wrong to put a lot of money behind a AAA game, but there needs to always be a balance weighted toward the creative/entertainment value (whether it's innovative game mechanics or story driven).

Once that balance shifts to the business side by focusing on recouping the investment is when a project is at risk for not being received well.

I think all gamers are ok with studios making a profit on their games, but don't try to fleece us.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 6 months ago

What he's saying is that major studios are locked playing chicken with each other, and that the industry is going to remember the 1983 crash fondly in comparison with what's going to happen.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 6 months ago (1 children)

We have to go back

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 months ago (1 children)

"I want shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less and I'm not kidding 😎"

Indie games are kind of this, but it's hard to make the "paid more" work consistently at scale. Largely because there's a shitload of people making really good indie games and I can only play so many of them.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I think in this context the original poster was lamenting the loss of AA gaming.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

Fitzsimmons actually got it even better than my kind of brainless appeal to nostalgia. That's what I want

[–] [email protected] 8 points 6 months ago (1 children)

It doesn't have to though. Tools are so easy to use now and the gaming industry will never have a shortage of people trying to get jobs in it, there is no reason that so many games need to be spending 5+ years in devepopment.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Have you ever worked on a game?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Yes, I have. A small team can launch a small/medium size game in less than two years using current tools. Game jams, albeit almost never ending up with complete games, last for usually one week and the end result is basically a vertical slice of a game nearly always built by a single person.

Again, there is no reason a game spending 5+ years in development should be considered average or normal.

Even in the past, AAA studios could complete successive games in a shorter amount of time. Metroid Prime 2, Star Wars Battlefront 2 (the good one from 2005), and Legend of Zelda Majoras Mask were all developed by reusing code and assets from the games that came before them, and game development tools were not as easy to work with then as they are now. Metroid Prime 1 was developed in 3 years, Ocarina of Time was developed in 3 years, and Battlefront 1 was developed in 2 years. All of these were developed with AAA funding and took less than 5 years on tools with less accessibility than modern tools.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

Some of the games I like the most -- some roguelikes fit into this camp -- had very small teams working for a long period of time on a game, spending a long time iteratively refining the gameplay.

I'm not so sure that I prefer the "wide" model of many people for a short period of time versus a few people for a long period of time. Certainly there are things that the "narrow" model can and has done well that the "wide" model hasn't.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

Among the games I've recently played and enjoyed:

Nova Drift
Rule the Waves 3
Dominions 6

Those are all one- or two-man efforts.

I also like some games with much larger teams, but I'm not sure that things are simply getting bigger.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago (1 children)

They're definitely getting bigger, but not with anything meaningful. I'm playing through Cyberpunk 2077 and it definitely feels like a lot of the side missions are unnecessary filler to pad out an excuse for the major names they got involved. I'm guessing other AAA are the same, "we need to do more than last time" whether it's impactful to the story and experience or not.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (2 children)

You look at the credits to a lot of games these days and notice that the vast majority of people are in the various art departments or management with, like, 3 people programming it all and the same or fewer people in QA. And it can take upwards of an HOUR to get through all the credits because there are THOUSANDS of people working on it.

Small teams deliver more concentrated quality, IMO.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

I don't know if I can reduce it to the programmers making the game, though. Like...yeah, the most-replayable games I've played rely heavily on the code, and less on the assets.

But there are also games where the art is pretty critical that I enjoy. Like, imagine games in the Myst series without the art and sound. Like, none of the code is particularly impressive. The puzzles are...okay, I guess. You play a game like that for the art and sound.

Or Lumines. I mean, yeah, they had to get the gameplay loop right, but technically, it's a very simple game, just a falling-blocks game. But the audio and to a lesser degree, the appearance, is important.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bboWlUppp-s

Rez is maybe a little fancier codewise, but it's just a rail shooter. It's really about experiencing the art and music.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZLHB5e90pU

And I definitely did enjoy those. In the case of the latter two, those were not AAA games, didn't have huge teams creating assets, but it was still really the assets that made the game.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago

how about no?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Sooooo

Phisticated

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Antici

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

phistication 😎

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Just as long as they don't hop onto the procedurally generated bandwagon. While I appreciate the attempts at making unique gameplay while focusing less on level generation, those types of games end up making me feel like a hamster on a wheel.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago (2 children)

I think that many roguelikes or Minecraft wouldn't really work without procedurally-generated worlds, and that they work fine there.

I think that it's more that procedurally-generated world still isn't a substitute for handcrafted world. You can't just get infinite handcrafted world for free with procedural generation.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

A roguelike without procedural generation is like Tetris where the order of the pieces is the same every time. Some roguelikes let you save the seed and replay the same run but this is generally referred to as cheating and done for recreation/research purposes, not for seriously attempting to win the game.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

I agree that generally the two are linked, but to nitpick, there are some roguelikes -- games that I would call roguelikes, at any rate -- where the world is to greater or lesser degree hand-crafted.

ToME 2, as I recall, did have a procedurally-generated underworld, but a more-or-less hand-crafted overworld. Been a long time since I've played it, though.

Caves of Qud has a most of the underworld being procedurally-generated, and has many individual overworld maps being procedurally-generated, but the overworld map tiles and many individual overworld maps and some underworld maps are static.

But my point is more just that I don't think that it's right to say something like "procedural generation of worlds doesn't work". I mean, there are games where I think that procedural generation of worlds works, and works well. It's just that we haven't hit that Holy Grail where humans don't have to handcraft worlds for games that rely on handcrafted worlds any more, where the procedural generation engine can just make as much handcrafted-like world as one wants for no cost.

I think that for roguelikes, what makes it work is that rely on creating different, well, tactical scenarios via randomization. Like, you have to play differently based on the environment you're in, and so random generation gives you a stream of unknown environments so that each session is mixed up.

For many traditional games, where the point is exploration or story...we don't have procedural generation that can make interesting plot and characters yet. Maybe we could make aesthetically-pretty procedural worlds, but we don't have software that can generate stories with characters and plot events that we emotionally care about even remotely as well as humans can. Maybe LLMs or something are a tool that can help us get there, but we're not there in 2024.

I don't know what exactly makes procedural generation work for Minecraft. I guess it affects how one plays. It's more-or-less irrelevant from a tactical standpoint, the combat doesn't change up much, but it affects what resources one has, what problems present themselves, what constraints are imposed on how one has to build and act. Maybe games like Dwarf Fortress and Oxygen Not Included and to some extent Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, all games with procedurally-generated worlds, would fall into that camp. Starbound. Terraria.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Funny you should bring up Caves of Qud. That game is pushing the envelope in terms of procedural generation. They want to do a ton of the world building and background stories with procedural generation while leaving the main plot hand-crafted. They also do a really fun procedural detective story with one of the quests, so the clues and evidence you find when investigating the crime are different every time.

I think a lot of the fun of that game is with exploring the procedurally generated environments and doing the random quests. There just needs to be more research into generating branching plots and simulating events, with chains of causality. Dwarf Fortress does a lot of this in its world generation, for example.

I think what works for Minecraft is the spatial nature of the game. Procedural generation gives the player a new environment in which they can role play as an architect and engineer. While nothing stops you from building exactly the same structure every time — block for block — it’s more fun to design your structures into the landscape itself, like a real architect would! The same goes for Daarf Fortress and the like. It scratches an engineering/managerial itch.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

Starfield got a lot of flak for using procedural generation which was technically impressive but...it's a game that doesn't really benefit a lot from it. Like, the player doesn't need to do much to adapt their gameplay to the procedurally-generated environments. It mostly just provides aesthetic variety.

I wonder...like, roguelikes have tactics that rely on the environment. If someone were to go and mod Starfield such that the tactics in the game relied on the environment a lot more, that might be interesting from the game's shooter side. Like, say someone got the ability to morph into something that could slide through pipes, or there were enemies that could walk up magnetic surfaces, or water had a meaningful role (it did in Fallout, with the Aqua Boy perk). Maybe have vehicles or enemies that can only travel on certain types of terrain. Get the ability to lock doors. Right now, the procedural environments are just outdoors, but if it included indoors, maybe stuff like the ability to leverage with electrical systems or lighting. As it stands, the only things that really affect tactics is the availability of cover and the ability to climb on something so that some melee-only enemies cannot reach someone. The environments are basically just eye candy, don't really create different gameplay problems for the player.

Or from the base-building aspect. If, for a given outpost, the resources became a lot-more significant, so that a base really had to be designed around the limitations imposed by the environment. Like, I don't know. Temperature of a given piece of equipment, taking shade into account. Being able to make use of hydropower off waterfalls. Some machines having outputs that create more issues that the player has to deal with, kinda Oxygen Not Included. Designing a defensible base being more-important.

As it stands, the layout of a given base is virtually irrelevant aside from choosing a base location that has a circle that contains a given amount of easy-to-build-on flat ground and as many different types of resource as possible. Like, Bethesda built this whole fancy landscape-generation engine, can create a huge variety of realistic-looking environments, but didn't really do much with it in terms of gameplay.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

I agree on Minecraft. For that play style, it works.

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