That title might not make a lot of sense because Blood of Dawnwalker is NOT a Soulslike. The reason I worded it like that is because despite how much I love the directional attack/block/dodge system in the game, it still somehow managed to get stale for me by the end of the game...

And it got me thinking: Why is it that so many of these open world RPGs turn me off after playing them for enough time? Why do I keep going back to Souls games and playing them over and over again? What exactly is it that I prefer about one over the other, and what exactly did Dawnwalker do to make me feel this way?

After thinking about it I think I found the answer: The gameplay of most Action RPGs focuses heavily on the player character. The gameplay of most Soullike RPGs focuses heavily on the enemies.

To clarify, let's start with what Blood of Dawnwalker does well: The combat system. Dawnwalker uses a very interesting direction-and-timing system for your attacks, blocks, and dodges. Any time an enemy attacks, you get an indicator showing which direction they are attacking from. If you just hold block, you do what's called an 'omniblock' which will block in any direction at the cost of some stamina. However, if you move in the direction the indicator is pointing AND block, you'll perform a 'directional block' which will cost no stamina, thus allowing you to attack more frequently. Even better, if you time the directional input at the last possible moment, you'll perform a 'perfect block' (or a parry). This not only doesn't cost you stamina, it refunds you stamina and lets you follow up with a 'riposte'. You'll then get another indicator showing which direction you can attack in to perform a 'perfect riposte'. This will automatically cause a critical hit and sometimes even stagger the enemy for a moment so you can get more attacks in. It's a very rewarding system for skillful play, and many of the perks in the game's talent tree tie into this exact mechanic. By the end of the game you can keep going with nearly infinite health, stamina, and ability charges (for active abilities, which allow you to put out incredible damage or gain some other utility in combat) as long as you keep the perfect blocks and ripostes going.

I love this system. It's engaging, rewarding, powerful, and fun. Everything a good gameplay system needs to be. Now I do have some nitpicks about it, namely the camera and lock-on targeting system, but I have no doubt those will be improved with updates and/or mods. However there is one critical flaw with this system, and it has nothing to do with the player character...

It's the enemies.

Early on in the game there isn't really much of an issue, since you're still learning this system and trying to master it... but by the end of the game, you notice. You notice that every human, every ghost, every wolf, every bear, every vampire, and every other creature under the sun and moon is just the same enemy with a different model and different animations. Every single enemy can be defeated by watching the little indicator in the middle of your screen and timing your block (or dodge, in the case of a 'red skull' indicator) and following it up with a directional attack.

Now in the case of Dawnwalker, this problem is largely solved with 'Duelist' mode, which removes in on-screen directional indicator and forces you to watch the enemy move in real time... but at the end of the day you know that the same thing is still happening, even if the game doesn't explicitly show you anymore.

By the end of this game, which I loved, I felt the same way I feel at the end of every open world RPG. Kinda bored at the idea of fighting enemies. I was still in it for the story, and the characters, and the lore... but the combat was just... routine. And that was a shame.

So what am I talking about when I say I prefer Soulslikes? What do they do better than regular Action RPGs? Well, like I said, they focus on the enemies. The problem is still there to an extent, because at the end of the day all you can really do is move around, dodge, block, parry, and attack, right? The difference is these enemies all interact with those mechanics in different ways, and all have their own strengths and weaknesses which you have to learn, and then adapt to, and then exploit. If you don't adapt, you die.

Some enemies are small and fast, others are big and slow. Some telegraph their attacks, others do not. Some have ranged attacks, while some will chase you around to melee you, and others will do both! Sometimes you'll be ambushed or outright swarmed (which sucks) and you'll have to figure out on the fly how to survive. Some enemies are almost like a puzzle you need to solve just to figure out how to kill them before they can kill you. Most of them will react and adapt to YOU and you need to figure out how to do that right back to them in order to get the upper hand.

These games also tie their enemies to the level design in a way that feels almost symbiotic. Since enemies respawn and they're always in the same place, they're basically a part of the environment. It turns each area into a kind of puzzle that you need to work out the best way to get through on your way to the next bonfire or boss. In most open world games, the placement of enemies seems almost like an afterthought, or just as some means to 'fill up the map' with 'stuff to do'. In souls games, this placement is meaningful and a defined part of the overall experience.

Now Souls games don't tend to have big skill-trees full of unique and flashy abilities. Most of the time you just pick up a weapon and swing it. There are a LOT of weapons and usually magic systems and other things to give you a large amount of build variety, but generally speaking you're not going around doing crazy combos and slamming a 'do 10,000 damage to everything around me' button because that button doesn't exist. This is what I mean when I say the gameplay focus is on the enemies, rather than the player character. The enemies can usually do more, bigger, and better things than the player character. And that's what makes them worth fighting.

So what am I getting at? Do I think a combat system like Dawnwalker's could work with Soulslike enemies? Honestly, probably not. As much fun as that combat is, it is inherently limited. As soon as you decide that all enemies operate on something like a directional input system, that is now by definition all they can do. An enemy is never going to surprise you doing something else. It's never going to do some crazy environmental attack, and it's never going to have any specific weaknesses to a certain type of gameplay, because there is only one type of gameplay. The open-endedness and adaptability of Souls combat is what makes it special.

TL;DR: A game's combat gets boring the moment when you realize you no longer need to adapt to the enemies.

When a 1000 year old vampire and a random wolf in the forest feel like the same kind of enemy, that's a problem.

I don't like level scaling. I feel like that's a very common sentiment. That said, for a lot of games, I understand why level scaling is done. It solves the problem of the game becoming too easy. In open world RPGs this is an even bigger problem because without level scaling, the player can become overpowered through going through the game in an unexpected order. I don't know what a solution could be for this problem.

One very egregious example is Pokemon Scarlet & Violet. The game opens up in it's entirety at the beginning of the game and has no level scaling but, if you decide to tackle the game without looking up the intended order, you'll become very overpowered very fast. Alternatively, if you do look up the order and follow through with it, then the game will have a good difficulty curve but will function like a linear a game. It's a lose-lose situation.

Another example is Elden Ring. With Elden Ring, you have no level scaling but you do have some lock and key mechanics to stop if you from going to areas that are very high level such as the elevators. This gives the illusion of open world but still ends up locking in some linearity.

On the opposite end, there's games like Diablo IV. With this one, there's a strong level scaling so you'll get stronger but feel very little difference unless you're several levels stronger than you're supposed to.

So, the problem is, how can an open world game be designed in a way that allows the player to go anywhere while providing smooth difficulty curve while still making sure the player can feel powerful with every level increase?

I don't know if it's just me, but I've noticed that in quite a few games, your character will just end up punching or swinging at empty space during melee combat, even when an enemy is standing right next to you. Maybe it's an intentional skill-check? One example that I've experienced recently is in the Death Stranding games. Melee combat is an option (and pretty powerful in the 2nd game), but oftentimes, if you don't carefully line up your strikes, Sam will just punch or lunge at the air, missing a valid enemy target who's standing just a couple feet to the left or right. I also noticed this a fair amount in The Witcher 3, where Geralt would sometimes end up swinging wildly at nothing much. Even happened occasionally when controlling Cal in the Jedi games.

It makes sense that FPS games always strike at what's in front of your character, but why don't 3rd person games just auto-target the nearest enemy if there isn't one locked-on or at the center of the screen? Is it an intentional skill barrier?

There's one thing games seem to struggle with - conveying friction and discomfort. Now, you might argue that there's a lot of games rife with friction, as well as games that feel discomforting, but I think it's always done in sort of roundabout way. Let me explain.

In real life when going somewhere we usually walk. We can run and we can sprint, which gets us to our desired destination faster, but even if it would have no negative consequences (sweat, danger of falling, social awkwardness) people will rather just walk.

In video games we're almost always going as fast as we can. Games can have audio-visual cues and indicators that make the player feel like the character doesn't want to run (anymore), they can have various limitations and mechanics that prevent running all the time, but players are almost always maximizing their speed within these restrictions. It seems like the biggest insult to players is when they have to follow or be followed by a NPC who doesn't match their maximum speed. The only thing that makes me stop holding that sprint button is physical discomfort from holding it down for extended periods of time, which is quite funny.

Of course movement is just one example. Carrying things is another great example. Again, there are often mechanics that limit or reward the player in one way or another, but players will just optimize within those restrictions. If I have inventory space and I'm not hitting some weight threshold then I am going to pick up a random bauble, whereas I definitely wouldn't do that same IRL - picking up junk we don't need is just not what we do.

However this isn't just about negative experiences and discomfort, but about the opposite as well. People deeply enjoy eating good meals, but in games the only difference between hardtack and lavish feast is just some points in a mechanic that people optimize away. Relationships and especially intimate situations are another thing that games fail spectacularly at, but that's for a different discussion.

I think expressing comfort and discomfort is one of the biggest blind spots in games. The problem is that in order to incentivize player to behave in a specific way, you kind of have to add more complex mechanics, perhaps layer interacting mechanics on top of each other. That dramatically increases the game's complexity and the ruleset can quickly become too complex or overwhelming. And you can't just hide mechanics because players come with expectations from other games.

However I don't think it's impossible.

Some games have successfully baked (dis)comfort into their core gameplay loop. A great example is how Factorio leverages player's discomfort, specifically boredom into action and progression. It is possible to spend hundreds of hours mining and crafting everything required to unlock and build the rocket, which is the game's win condition, but it would be incredibly dull and boring. It's natural human instinct to want it to speed up, and players just find a pace that suites them, they instinctively know how fast is fast enough. They don't need to be told, there don't need to be any systems pushing them towards it.

However games such as Factorio focus on a very specific kind of discomfort. I have yet to see a game that does something similar with more broader range of situations and applications, for example an RPG. One thing I'm sure about is that if a game manages it, it will be greatly successful.

I beat the Souls trilogy 3 years ago, Elden Ring a year ago. And I also very recently started playing my first Metroidvania game, Hollow Knight.

I've played HK for 10 hours so far, and one thing that I always keep comparing in my head to DS is the map system of HK versus the non-existence of one in DS.

Playing Dark Souls (especially the first game) was a fun but often frustrating experience, and it wasn't because of the combat or the enemies. The frustration for me came from how easy it was to get lost and how I had to map everything out in my brain. I'm pretty directionally challenged, and I ran around in circles A LOT. I wasn't really exploring; I was just hitting my head at every wall possible until one of them cracked and opened up a path. Exploration wasn't something that I wanted to do or enjoyed doing in Dark Souls. And for a long time I avoided games that had a focus on exploration because I thought that they would frustrate me.

But I did decide to buy HK after a friend recommended the game to me vehemently and told me to at least try it once. And I'm loving the game so far. The way HK approaches exploration makes it much more purposeful and fun to just run around the map and uncover the map and its secrets. Being able to purchase a rough map of a new area by first exploring to hear the humming voice of Cornifer and then being able to fill out the map as I explore makes the act enjoyable and fulfilling. Seeing roads that lead to a place that I haven't discovered yet and deciding where to go next, and actually being able to go there by consulting the map makes getting lost a non-issue. Exploration rarely turns into running around in circles; it stays as an engaging component of the game's design.

I'm not a huge fan of games that literally death-grip your hand and tell you everything you need to do and give you the whole map as soon as you jump in, but I think having an in-game map that slowly reveals itself as you explore is much more accessible and makes exploration a lot more fun compared to having no in-game map at all. This kind of map system encourages exploration without being overly cryptic but also avoids hand-holdiness. HK is still a hard game that doesn't hold the player's hand at all, yet it is much more accessible compared to Souls because of this simple difference in my opinion.

That is why I think Elden Ring was a monumental success. Being able to uncover the map by finding map fragments, discover and mark POIs by exploring, and look at the map and decide what to do made it a lot more accessible, appealing, fun, and much less frustrating compared to the Dark Souls trilogy. A lot of people who were afraid to try From's games have become fans.

What are your thoughts?

Just to be upfront: I work in player research in the games industry. No product, no links, just an idea I want to discuss.

Here's my claim: what players actually value in living worlds is spectating and not cohabiting. If NPCs genuinely lived their own lives, most players would stop engaging with them within the first session.

Here's why I think that. Twenty years of autonomous NPC attempts produce the same two reactions: noticed behaviour becomes an anecdote we retell for years, and missing behaviour makes us call the world empty. Both are about being in the audience, neither requires actual interaction. Then when researchers recently dropped hundreds of AI agents into sandbox worlds and these agents formed jobs and even a religion, everyone read the articles, but nobody asked to be a part of it. There's a darker version too, where an NPC with real agency competes with you for authorship. A world that changes on its own is atmospheric until it builds something where you were going to build.

The best counterargument I can think of is that nobody has shipped real cohabitation, so players never had the chance to want it. Maybe the watching preference is just learned from decades of NPCs not being worth talking to.

That's the idea. I'd rather be wrong, so if your experience contradicts it, I'm listening.

With DLSS 5 being pretty controversial, it's tough to have a genuine discussion about it, so I thought it may be a good idea to try it here.

I was initially sceptical, but curious about DLSS 5. With the performance hits, I was hoping to at the very least use it on older games, similarly to RTX Remix. Unfortunately, that isn't really gonna happen.

Out of my own testing and things I have seen others do, here are the main points I have of this technology so far:

1) It doesn't like old or abstract graphics

My hopes about using it for older games were destroyed when in most older games it did.....nothing. Or almost nothing. In anything before last PS3 era, it likely won't "detect" anything that it knows what to do it, and thus won't do much. At best it may detect a face......but that is sadly often not a good thing.

2) Faces.....oh no

The faces are very consistently at the bottom of the uncanny valley. It is definitely the main point of DLSS 5, and also the most controversial, divisive, and arguably the worst point. I've seen very few cherry picked examples of a face not looking extremely uncanny. It's especially bad when it does a lot of work on the face, but barely any on the rest of the body, making the face even more detached visually from the rest. This is the main reason why if someone would want to use this, I would highly avoid any game with a lot of faces, and think it would be a lot better if there was an option to disable faces entirely.

3) Gun models, vehicles and cockpit views

This is likely where DLSS 5 is the best at. While the result often look overly similar, especially in terms of the material sheen, the general shading is usually pretty good. Due to them often being in the same position on screen for longer periods of time, it makes them more consistent too. However, I did notice in certain racing games that the lighting and shading can freak out in cases where the outside lighting changes abruptly (driving under trees for example), which leads us onto....

4) Temporal stability....or rather lack there of

Maybe this will be better with "official" implementations of it, but all the showcases of it that I've seen so far seemed to have been purely screen-based. This means it works just like ReShade, working purely off of the things that are currently visible on screen. This means that walking through a corridor, the light off screen may change from looking like sunlight, to flashlight, to room light, in a span of a few seconds, so even if the lighting in shading generally looks nice, you will keep getting distracted by it changing randomly. It also means that if some elements are frequently not visible, then the way they look will keep being very unstable. This is especially bad in some older games where it does detect a player model, but only from the front, so if it's a game where the player model keeps changing direction relatively to the camera, the way the player looks will keep changing all the time as DLSS 5 will either do different things to it, or will not know what to do at all when it doesn't see the front. This all leads to the final point and my main issue with this technology:

5) It's all just guessing

Unlike RTX Remix, which actually takes all the data from the game engine directly, meaning that it's aware of all the geometry, lighting, materials etc, DLSS 5 is literally guessing what it's seeing and what to do with it. This inherently will be problematic in any game that isn't almost completely static, as it very much will be guessing wrong frequently, and even in the good cases it is noticeable if you actually play it for more than 3 minutes. This is essentially on similar level as hallucinated videos, or messed up AI movie upscales. The issue isn't that it's wrong or looks bad, but that it may look wrong or bad the moment you move the camera the wrong way.

But those are just my thoughts on this, based on my own testing and things I've seen. I am curious what your experience with it was so far and what you think of it.

Last year I posted some anecdotes and details from my Gamescom trip as "press", it seemed to interest people. I thought I would make another post this year.

As the title indicates I might be completely off base, this is entirely based on feelings and impressions. I have been going to Gamescom for over 10 years and have been discussing this with peers, though, so I would hope my thoughts aren't completely wrong.

Even more Korean and Chinese games

The biggest trend I noted last year was the strong Korean and Chinese push into games. It is even more noticeable this year. If you watched ONL it was also quite obvious to see how these markets are taking up the space. Last year I said this was more noticeable on the public side, but this year the business side was also taken over.

Interesting to note that for western companies the divide seems to be public/professionnal, the Korean and Chinese companies divide more by business/games. Mostly meaning that games, even for press, are often seen in the public area. Business area is more for "actual" business. We asked the Tencent reception for PR business cards and they said they weren't doing game stuff in their booth.

Very expensive public booths

It's no secret that the games business as a whole isn't exactly flourishing right now, but you never would have guessed it going to Gamescom this year. Every public booth seemed more expensive and extravagant than the last (and comparatively to last year). I did notice less spend on business booths, though. Much less free food and fewer goodies. Microsoft might be the only company that felt less extravagant than the previous year.

Countries are pushing their games

On top of companies renting booths, countries (through foundations) do too. It seems like this year the spend from countries has increased as they had more of a presence. I've also started getting a lot more PR emails from country delegations rather than games directly.

The Czechs seemed to be pushing pretty hard, it reminded me of the Polish push from a few years back. It's rare to have an open bar all day pretty much open to anyone. I also noticed a bigger presence from Brazil, Australia and New Zealand.

Buggier software

I'm the only one of my group to have noted this, so take it with even more of a grain of salt. The builds I played were generally buggier than what I played in other years. Maybe I just got unlucky, but I've had more hard crashes, soft-locking or just general bugginess than any other year.

Don't necessarily take this as "software bad now". It also seemed like I was often not playing a "vertical slice" as we have gotten used to calling them. Many builds I played seemed to just be the work in progress software directly. For Ubisoft in particular, I had quite complete versions of Rayman and Heroes 3 and I was just told to ignore some stuff and not click on them.

The death of Powerpoint (let me hope)

Press presentations have been getting further and further from business presentations for a while (Remember when E3 conferences were Powerpoints?). This seems to have peaked this year. I've had nearly no Powerpoint presentations, it was all video or live gameplay.

The PC and Xbox controller are king

All demos I played were running on PC (except Gears E-Day which was on a development kit), so any controller would have worked. I haven't seen a single PlayStation controller all week. Considering the console popularity it still feels quite surprising to me. It does make sense that the Xbox controller is the most popular controller to stick in a PC, but the extent of it surprised me.

I’ve been thinking about GTA VI in a way that probably comes from working as a screenwriter. Not because film and games work the same way, they obviously don’t, but because when you work in film and TV you get very used to watching what happens to a project as the money involved gets bigger. More money means more people who need to approve things, more people who need to feel reassured, and more reasons to remove the weird thing that made the project interesting in the first place.

The comparison I keep coming back to is Heaven’s Gate. Very roughly: a gigantic auteur-driven production released in 1980, directed by Michael Cimino right after The Deer Hunter. Enormous creative freedom, a production completely out of control, an exploded budget, a commercial disaster, and one of the symbols of the end of New Hollywood. Studios looked at that kind of unchecked auteur power and said: we’re not doing this again.

GTA VI might be the opposite version of the same endpoint, because it’s probably not going to fail. It’s probably going to make an obscene amount of money. I’m just not sure that means we’ll get more games like it.
Rockstar is in a position almost nobody else has anymore. They can spend an absurd amount, take close to a decade, delay multiple times, obsess over details most studios would cut on sight, and still ship something with a recognizable personality that will also be one of the biggest entertainment products on Earth. When I say auteur I don’t mean one guy personally making GTA VI, thousands of people are working on it.
I mean Rockstar still feels like a studio with an actual point of view. That combination is what I think might be disappearing.

There will be other games with enormous budgets, maybe bigger ones. I’m not saying big-budget games are going away. I’m saying I’m not sure we’ll keep getting many where that amount of money is attached to something still allowed to feel this idiosyncratic. Once you’re risking hundreds of millions, every strange choice has to survive a meeting. Then another meeting. Then market testing, then brand concerns, then retention concerns, then monetization concerns.

I see this constantly in my own industry. Projects rarely get destroyed in one dramatic decision, they just go through enough perfectly reasonable notes that the thing that made them unusual quietly disappears, and the worst part is that you never end up with something bad, just something very competent.

Heaven’s Gate failed and Hollywood learned: never give an auteur this much money and freedom again. GTA VI might succeed beyond anyone’s expectations and the industry learns something worse: sure, you can spend this much and take this many risks, as long as you already own GTA.

Then again, I haven’t played it. Maybe in November it turns out to be a very smooth, committee-shaped product and this whole thing collapses, which would just mean the shift already happened and I missed it. Curious where people think I’m wrong on this.

Gaming analysts everywhere are predicting that GTA VI will be a monumental product, and I agree with them, obviously, but I've been thinking about how the actual long tail inertia of the gaming market is trending against Rockstar in certain ways, and whether that will be a sign of gaming finalizing a transformation into a different thing entirely. I have been thinking specifically about ways in which it will fail to meet the success markers of GTA V, and how, rather than being a cash cow in a sea of cash cows, Rockstar is the last cash cow's dying breath in a sea of legacy publishing failures.

1. Raw usercount limiting sales trajectory

GTA VI will immediately have a more limited playerbase than GTA V had. It is exclusive to PS5 and Xbox Series, which have sold less overall than Xbox 360 and PS3 had by the time GTA V came out. We do not have exact figures, but Xbox 360 and PS3 had likely sold ~150-160 million combined by 2013. PS5 and Xbox Series have probably sold ~120-130 million combined, with 90-100 million of that just PS5.

These numbers are similar on their face, but here's the catch: GTA V had next-gen and PC releases just around the corner, with many ready and willing to adapt to GTA V on those ecosystems over the next 5-10 years. PS4 and Xbox One were not only cheaper than current offerings, but crucially, became cheaper over time. We can't know for sure, but I suspect, due to inflated prices, that PS6 and Project Helix will likely be much more expensive and see drastically lower sales, with people not seeing a reason to upgrade considering the lack of offering on current-gen systems. Additionally, we have no idea if they will come out in 2027, 2028, or beyond that, considering the state of the market.

As for PC, GTA V was moderately taxing on PC hardware for its time, but came out when parts were cheap and allowed for a transition to most PC users being able to run it well on their systems. GTA VI will be both more expensive MSRP and much more taxing on PC hardware in an environment where parts are much more expensive. This does not bode terribly well in comparison to GTA V for PC adoption.

2. Lack of physical sales limiting resale, market legs, and international adoption

This is more nebulous and tough to calculate, but inertia flowing against Rockstar in western markets may lead to even less adoption in international markets. The high cost of current gen means many international consumers are still on last-gen or barely adopting current gen, and locking the game to digital stores/codes immediately limits reach to those markets in the short to medium term. Assuming it is well marketed and the empty boxes still appear on store shelves, it will be to a much lesser degree automatically than GTA V at its time due to gaming accounting for much less space in retail settings. Additionally, the inability to transfer the game physically could limit its broader cultural staying power.

3. A generation out of step

I have no way of confirming this, but I believe the playerbase for GTA VI will be older than GTA V, and have a higher attachment rate with older gen-z/aging millennials, who dominate traditional gaming spaces now, than young gen-z/gen alpha. GTA V released within a perfect window for older, legacy GTA fans and a slew of teenagers with time to kill, who did not yet have short-form video, to be interested in the game at the same time. By contrast, GTA VI will release in a market where the youngest gamers have widely adopted free-to-play and live service offerings, like Roblox, for the majority of gaming due to a transforming culture and high prices. Gaming is a hobby that requires time investment, and aging gen-z and millennials do not and will not have the time to kill. This isn't so much a problem for current Rockstar as it will be a problem for Rockstar and gaming broadly in the coming years. I believe a market will continue to exist for traditional, single-player offerings, but it will increasingly target a niche audience rather than growing or encompassing large swaths of the overall market.

4. Rockstar is the last of a dying breed

We simply do not see comparable success among legacy western publishers/devs like Rockstar anymore. Bungie, Bethesda, Bioware, Ubisoft, EA, etc. were very popular in the 2000s and 2010s, but have since seen more limited commercial and critical success. This has led to downsizing, mass layoffs, and complete deference to shareholders among public companies (EA's recent buyout by the Saudi sovereign wealth fund, for example). Success in the present-day gaming industry has been confined to massive, long-tail multiplayer offerings and low-cost, indie spaces. This is largely due to ballooning budgets and decreasing returns in the single-player space. Layoffs also decrease talent and skillset acquisition over time. The one force seemingly holding up the traditional single-player space is Japan. Nintendo, which is steadfast in its approach to pushing gaming boundaries, is a huge part of that. It is a wholesale inversion of 2000s/2010s gaming, in which western studios thrived, and the Japanese publishers of the 1990s were being questioned. This could be part of a natural adjustment process for these markets, or a sign of degrowth, considering the foreboding macroeconomic conditions in U.S./EU/Japan. There is reason to be optimistic that China and Korea are entering these markets, but their offerings thus far have leaned in a gacha/free-to-play direction, so I'm not entirely sure.

I know a lot of this is already internalized by gamers, but what are your thoughts on whether this will cause the games and franchises we have come to love to truly come to a halt?

I was watching a critique of Halo 4 this morning. 343’s first Halo game, Xbox 360 release, and return of Master Chief. The author was mostly negative, but not entirely. The thesis seems to be that 343 implanted a lot of Call of Duty features that compromised the games identity as a Halo game. Things like ADS, killstreaks, and general gameplay mechanics seemed less throughout compared to the Bungie Halo games. Multiplayer seemed to die off pretty quickly. I never hear people talk fondly of Halo 4. And there’s a lot of animosity built up over the years about 343.

All that said, I looked up Halo 4 on Wikipedia and checked the Reception section. It looks like the game was extremely well received by critics. One quote after another about how great Halo 4 is. Not a single word about a less than stellar player reception. Most of the time when I look up game or movie reception on wiki, there’s a critical reception and an audience reception. Or even a retrospective section that summarizes what the view is after some time has elapsed.

Who is right here? Was Halo 4 a well received game? It’s interesting to me that Halo 4 was released in 2013 I think. There’s a lot said these days on a disconnect between critical reviews and player reviews. This may be the beginning of the stark difference between critical and player reviews. Can anyone think of an earlier game that had this sort of dynamic - where a game gets great critical reviews, but the audience/players end up quite hostile to the game? Was the grifter economy even up and running in 2013?

Recently, I saw an ad for this game called The Lantern of the Laughless Saint, a passion project by a small group of people (or perhaps one person?) heavily inspired by Morrowind. It's essentially an open world RPG sandbox that aims to replicate the feel of early 2000s Bethesda and evolve that design philosophy in a separate direction from that of Oblivion or Skyrim. The ad caught my eye because it reminded me of this YouTube video I vaguely remember watching in my childhood, where someone said something along the lines of "there's a reason you see everyone copying NES pixel-art or PS1's fuzzy warped textures and never the gross blockiness of the PS2 and GameCube". Obviously, I had never taken such a shallow opinion as fact since the artstyles of such games can be beautiful (take Vice City, Okami or Twilight Princess), but this felt like the first time I'd ever actually seen a game specifically pay homage to that era. One question entered my mind: why are games like this so rare?

If we look at the gamedev process, making games has in general reached a never-before seen level of accessibility since the end of the PS2 era, and we'd reached that point a while ago. Toby Fox was able to make one of the most successful indie games ever made with the coding skills of an intern over ten whole years ago. And yet, with all this newfound accessibility and all these newfound resources, that video still haunts me with its remarks about how few games take the opportunity to build on the foundations of the 2000s gaming landscape. Just think about the possibilities.

In 2005, with limited time/resources and a heavily restricted optimization window, Rockstar was able to create Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, one of the most applauded open world video games ever made. The game was highly ambitious, and to this day is one of the best examples of how games can use world design to sell scale where physical map area can't. In 2026, indie developers often have lots of freetime, and if Toby Fox's escapades weren't enough to sell you then let me remind you that two of yesteryear's Game of the Year nominees were made by teams of three and thirty people respectively. And yet these two indie games, in terms of ambitions and artstyle, perpetuated this duality low-budget and high-budget games have, where all of the high-budget games are pushing the cutting edge of video game graphics relying technical performance and all of the low-budget games almost entirely rely on artstyle.

But what if we used these resources we have now and instead of trying to push the cutting edge of today, we pushed the cutting edge of 20 years ago? That, to me, is what The Lantern of the Laughless Saint has grown to represent. The devs take an idea that has proven to work with flying colors, and instead of taking same the direction the Elder Scrolls series went as though Skyrim is the natural conclusion, they decided there was too much of Morrowind's identity lost in translation and started all over again from scratch. It may be in early access and (from what I can tell) buggy as all hell, but it demonstrates a side of the gaming world that I really, really wish I saw more of. I'm sure there are plenty out there, but I wish what I consider gaming's finest era got the same amount of love that the 80s and 90s have gotten from developers for years.

PS: If I'm just not looking hard enough, I would loveeee to see what games of this sort people might recommend. Seriously, I'd love to sink my teeth into more stuff that echoes my favorite gaming generation.

I recently got into the Earth Defense Force series. While it has been a blast (literally and figuratively), one thing that stands out about it is that the inventory of weapons among the four classes is massive.

At least in EDF 2025, there are no skill trees or upgrades to speak of, so "levelling up" means getting better weapons. For any given weapon, there are multiple variants with varying stats. However, the general trend is that their stats go up overall as you unlock the later variants. While this initially can be fun as you constantly unlock new weapons, it quickly becomes clear that you're just building what amounts to huge piles of "scrap": Weapons that, due to their inferior stats and a lack of unique perks to make up for those stats, are completely useless at anything but the lowest difficulty levels. There's basically no reason to ever go back to lower- level weapons, so while you may technically have a sizeable selection of weapons, the reality is that you'll have maybe a handful of weapons that are actually good while the rest just take up space in the loadout menu. This dilemma is further aggravated by the game's randomized weapon "levelling" system, as it's entirely possible to unlock higher- tier versions of a given weapon, then unlock the lower- tier versions later on.

This dilemma isn't unique to EDF. Especially in action games of this type, it's not unusal to quickly realize that there's a lot of gear you'll never use because it's just not worth it. To be clear, this isn't the same as beginner gear, meme items, or gear meant for a specifc play style. Rather, it's gear that has the unfortunate combination of poor performance and a lack of special perks to make up for those stats. Or, in some cases, it does have an outstanding special perk/really good stats in one specific area, but the perk is either so conditional or the other stats are so bad that it's not worth bothering with. As an aside, I'd also include games that don't have a weapon "selection" per se, but have a large perk tree that lets you customize your one weapon to a fairly large degree. You see the exact same kind of dilemma, except the issue lies in the available upgrades/builds.

That brings me to my question: How can games find a "happy medium" between too little build variety and having mountains of useless equipment?

Many people share the view that videogames can be outdated which i personally don't share. And im not someone who grew up with retro games and i have no nostalgia when i play witcher 1, monster hunter 1, castlevania 1 etc. What i'm trying to get at is if indie developers intentionally copy how these games feel and play. Does that mean theyre technically making outdated games. I just want to see if your views are consistent.

Ever since I started gaming, I’ve noticed a particular storytelling mechanic that really annoys me: I call it disconnected storytelling: it is when a game has multiple unrelated storylines going on in parallel. Usually, this stems from things like side quests that are unrelated to the main story.

To give an example of what I mean: say you’re going through the main storyline in the game, and you uncover a secret plot by demon cultists to take over the world tomorrow. You rush to gather your companions….but Farmer bill needs you to find his wife who went missing yesterday while buying wool at the market. So you start looking for her…only for the local sheriff to require your immediate assistance tracking down a thief who stole a priceless diamond. You find the diamond, but before you can deliver it, a magic trap sends you to a sorcerer’s dungeon and you have to barter with him to escape. At this point, I’ve forgotten what the demon cultists are doing, and I can’t even remember who farmer bill IS, much less what he wants from me.

I find this overwhelming because I can never keep track of what’s going on, and often there will be like 10-15 parallel and completely unrelated storylines going on at once. It is even worse if the quests are timed, because it forces you to drop what you’re doing and shift focus to a completely new story. This is different from movies/books, which typically track one or two threads at a time. When I complete these quests, I usually remember next to nothing nothing about them, as they’re all over the place. I find this practice in A LOT of games also - basically every open world, semi-open world, or CRPG game is guilty of this, and even some linear games do it.

In terms of improvements, the main thing that comes to mind is cohesiveness. I much prefer when quests complement the main story and are completed in tandem, rather than being standalone experiences. And if it IS a standalone experience, save it as a separate endgame storyline after the main quest wraps up!

What are your thoughts, and how could this practice be improved? Is this something that bothers anyone else?

I think it's collectively admitted in the gaming community that killing the same ennemy over and over for that item with a 1% drop chance is not very fun and gets reptitive really fast.

I get the initial idea behind a rare drop rate : it allows you to craft/use a rare weapon, which, if it was too common, wouldn't feel as rewarding to get. It's also a smart decision to "rarify" a strong weapon, because just handing a strong weapon to the players trivialises the experience of having to play around different weapons until you find a good one.

But at a certain point, it becomes frustrating being locked out of specific equipment purely because of luck. Monster Hunter is the main culprit of this with its 1% rare drops that are mandatory for some of the stronger upgrades. I've also felt this frustration to a lesser degree in games like Terraria, where it kinda kills the pace of the game to have to farm certain mobs in order to get the best equipment (turtle shells for example).

I don't want to get rid of rare drops completely, but what would be the downside of having a system where rare drops are guaranteed after having killed the monster x amount of times ? It still adds the "you have to work for the strong items" aspect without the frustration of not knowing if it's gonna take 1 or 3 hours to get that rare drop. Have some games already implemented that mecanic ?

Heya! I’m a master's student at the University of Bristol looking for gamers to play a game and take a short survey.

Purpose: I'm studying how transparency around difficulty changes impacts the player experience.

Abstract: This study investigates player experience in a browser-based arena game for a master's dissertation at the University of Bristol. Participants will play one 10–15 minute game session and then complete a brief questionnaire about their experience. The research focuses on how aspects of the game’s design affect player perception of the gameplay experience.

Contact Info: Email can be found in the link below.

The study takes around 10–15 minutes and involves playing a quick game followed by a short survey.

You’ll need:

• a desktop or laptop
• a mouse and keyboard
• to be 18 or older

Full study info can be found in the link below. Thanks to anyone who takes part! 😄

Study link: Neon Flow

I was thinking about open world games recently, asking myself what makes a good open world game and etc. This thought was brought on by me trying to understand why I personally don't like the Grand Theft Auto series. I've always found it's open world to be very shallow, especially compared to a lot of other open world games. I compared GTA V's world to Elder Scrolls Arena and even this old-ass game blows GTA out of the water, I thought. Arena has all sorts of systems to engage with that create tons of organic gameplay. Yeah, the world isn't as detailed as GTA, but you can enter every single building, which makes it feel way more lived-in than GTA V's world.

I then realized that this isn't a fair comparison. I'm comparing a third person shooter/driving game to a fantasy rpg, but it got me thinking about how, while the two games aren't comparable in the slightest, they are both trying to achieve the same goal. They are trying to create a believable open world where a player can get lost in and have a ton of freedom in.

A question then entered my mind. Is the open-world genre defined by a type of gameplay or by the feeling that the game is supposed to invoke?

To illustrate my point, let's look at the horror genre. Horror games can vary wildly in terms of gameplay styles and mechanics. Some are walking simulators with jumpscares, some are point and click adventure games with spooky atmosphere, some are action games with scarce resources and etc. While horror games all vary in gameplay mechanics, so much so that it can be hard to compare games in the genre, they all try to achieve the same goal. This end goal is to make the player feel afraid.

What if open-world games are a genre that's similar to horror games in this respect? What if it's not like RPGs where we can compare games based on which games have better and more interesting systems?

The end goal in this case is to create the feeling of a world that's yours to explore, a feeling that you can do whatever you want in this world, even though you'll always be limited by the mechanics of the game. Even in games that people tout as "games where you can do whatever you want" are actually pretty limited.

Skyrim is one of these games that has this reputation, when I think it's pretty unearned. Skyrim isn't a game where you can do whatever you want. It's honestly just a pretty standard action RPG. What makes Skyrim feel like such an open world is it's world design. What elevates Skyrim to feeling like a true open world is how dense the game is with quests and landmarks to explore. In Skyrim, you'll get a simple quest to get a treasure from a dungeon, which on it's own is boring, but it's elevated by the fact that you're very likely to encounter a ton of interesting things between the quest giver and the dungeon. You might find a bandit camp on the way, which you might decide to clear out. That sense of discovery is what gives Skyrim such an open feeling world.

Metal Gear Solid V is another open world game but it's nothing like Skyrim. It creates the feeling of an open world through how many options you have in regards to base management and in how many tools you have access to in each mission. MGSV feels like an open world because you choose which missions to do and what actions to take in order improve Mother Base, then when you're in those missions, you have so many tools which creates so many options.

I could go on with more examples, but I think I made my point, that I believe that open world games are defined the feeling it invokes, not by content of the game. The content of the game is just the avenue the game takes to reach the goal of that feeling, but there are plenty of wildly different ways of achieving that goal.

I want to preface this by saying I don't want to defend cheating in any way, quite the opposite as you will read further.

I want to define a term, blatant cheating, what I mean by this is cheating which result of are stats not achievable by humans, i.e. reaction time, average kills, k/da. Or outliers in the persons assigned skill group.

I feel like the moment the cheating is not blatant, it is not as a big of an issue as one would think.

Because hiding the cheats is oftentimes more difficult, than just playing without them (because otherwise they are blatant).

The cheaters will get match-made into a proper skill group, combined with their actual skill and the cheat enhancement unfair added skill, but for another player, that is invisible, on the presumption the cheating is not blatant.

If you still go undetected at that point, good job, your cheats achieved not really much, you have little above average stats anyways for your skill group.

So imagine how much that person sucks, they are not able to achieve these average stats themselves and need cheats for that, how many people will still cheat that way?

Sure, you will be slowly gaining rank and getting to a rank you actually do not deserve, but mechanical skill that can be given to you with cheats is only part of what you need to know to be high level in most games.

I actually think this whole premise is a good way to think about cheats and helps me not to be all doom and gloom about the cheating situation in modern gaming.

It should theoretically be easy to detect outliers by stats and ban them. But it seems it isn't? Or it doesn't feel that way in some games.

Making videogames is a great hobby (I've made a couple), but one thing that always makes me doubt myself is that playing videogames is not a very imaginative experience. By showing the player something rich and detailed, we are handholding and thus weakening the player's own visual imagination, doing them a disservice - unlike a book which forces the reader to reconstruct the imagery from the words, and thus strengthens the reader's mind.

A few days ago I thought of a possible way out of this problem. Namely, a game could have "economy of expression": an art style that doesn't try to show the game world in maximum detail like AAA, but deliberately makes the player reconstruct it in their own imagination. It seemed an interesting idea, and in this discussion I want to ask: have you thought of something like it, and how could it work?

The extreme of this approach would be interactive fiction, but the gameplay of IF (typing into a parser) is not very fun for most players. Another possible approach is very blocky and symbolic art styles, like in Thomas Was Alone or Minecraft. A Minecraft cow or spider looks very approximate, but it's enough for the player to imagine all kinds of things about it. A halfway example is Undertale, where many of the characters are sketched out in monochrome line art so the player can mentally color them in. Meanwhile, a game like High Hell can have a great minimalistic art style, but the style itself makes a statement: you must look at it head-on, not layer your imagination on top. The artist is kinda crowding the player out. It's a fine line and I don't know if it's all in my imagination.

Hey, all!

In this thread, the rules are more relaxed. The idea is that this megathread will provide a space for otherwise rule-breaking content, as well as allowing for a slightly more conversational tone rather than every post and comment needing to be an essay.

Top-level comments on this post should aim to follow the rules for submitting threads. However, the following rules are relaxed:

• 3. Specificity, Clarity, and Detail
• 4. No Advice
• 5. No List Posts
• 8. No topics that belong in other subreddits
• 9. No Retired Topics
• 11. Reviews must follow these guidelines

So feel free to talk about what you've been playing lately or ask for suggestions. Feel free to discuss gaming fatigue, FOMO, backlogs, etc, from the retired topics list. Feel free to take your half-baked idea for a post to the subreddit and discuss it here (you can still post it as its own thread later on if you want). Just keep things civil!

Also, as a reminder, we have a Discord server where you can have much more casual, free-form conversations! https://discord.gg/truegaming

I want to clarify first that the goal of this thread isn't to be contrarian and go against the grain on unpopular opinion. What I'm trying to do is spark civil discussion about how budget affects art, not just trying to shit on a thing that's popular.

With that being said, I'm not on the hype train for GTA VI. I'm simply not a fan of Rockstar and their games so of course I wouldn't care about the new one. I've expressed this opinion in various spaces and almost inevitably, I hear the same type of argument to defend Rockstar and explain why, seemingly empirically, GTA VI will be the greatest game of all time.

These arguments are something to the effect of "The game has a budget of over a billion dollars and has been in development for so long. Nothing on this scale has ever been made. It has to be great."

I understand the logic behind that argument as it's pretty straight forward. However, the more I've thought about it, the less it works as an argument and if anything, gives me more reason to be wary of GTA VI.

To understand why I'm wary about it, I think it's worth understanding a simple rule when it comes to pretty much all entertainment. The higher the budget, the more money it has to make back to be profitable. If an artist wants to focus on making niche things, that's great but they'll have to be comfortable with working in lower budgets, since there won't be a larger audience.

This is why a lot of fantasy novels simply can't be adapted to film or television. Gardens of the Moon is a great fantasy novel but if it were to be adapted, it would need a very high budget for all the effects, sets, costumes and etc. However, to remain faithful to the source material, it would need to be complex and hard to follow, which means it won't reach a wider audience. It's a paradox.

This is why Marvel movies get high budgets, because they're designed to appeal to as many people as possible so they're confident in making the money back.

This applies to all entertainment, including video games. Ubisoft can make repetitive slop with increasingly high budgets because they expect it to appeal to the largest audience possible.

I'm not saying that every piece of entertainment that's popular is bland. What I'm saying is that entertainment that's DESIGNED to be popular is bland and high budget makes appealing to the broadest possible audience higher on the list of priorities in development.

Grand Theft Auto VI has the highest budget of any video game. With a budget that high, this doesn't just need to be a popular video game. It needs to be THE video game, the one every gamer owns.

We know very little about the story, but I can't imagine the writing being anything worthwhile when it's meant to appeal to everybody. I'm not saying that a good story can't be popular, but I have to believe that appealing to the most people possible was a high priority during development.

Where I especially imagine the writing taking a hit is in GTA's satirical edge. Grand Theft Auto hasn't had deep political commentary, but the games have had a satirical edge when it comes to portraying modern American life. The writing was never super biting, not like it was written by Jon Stewart, but there were groups and people that you could tell the writers didn't like.

How can they maintain that satirical edge when "appealing to everybody" is such a high priority? How can they poke fun at various aspects of modern America without losing any possible players, especially in times where things feel so divided?

To give an example, the game takes place in Florida. Wouldn't it make sense for there to be a character that's an analog of Ron DeSantis, controversial governor of Florida? I could imagine it fitting very well. I could imagine a bit after a heist, a cutscene could open with characters watching the news, where the state governor gives a speech, decrying the recent string of heists as the result of anti-American protesters, with the criminals responsible smugly watching, maybe making a quip like "Heh, the only thing we're protesting is being broke", celebrating recent success.

I think it would fit. I think he's an easy target for most people. But then I remember, this isn't for most people, this is for everybody. Do you get my point?

To conclude, I do honestly hope that GTA VI will turn out great just because I know people have waited so long for it. However, I can't honestly believe that something with this high of a budget can be anything more than bland slop. I think too many people see a high budget as only a good thing, without seeing the constraints that a high budget brings to art.

We all know how online game communities often provide feedback for dev tems of live service games. This is often considered a good thing, but I want people to consider and discuss the potential that this behavior might be harmful.

I have noticed lately in that I feel like there are 'factions' in online communities, often pushing for a game to go in a certain direction to serve their own taste. When devs listen to one side, another side is left disappointed. It reminds me of youngsters playing tug of war over a toy. Only one side ends up happy.

I am going to list a recurring factional trend I have noticed, where I am not a part of either faction, so I can try and relay the idea to you without bias. I haven't played PVP shooters in years, but I have noticed there are often those who advocate for faster Time To Kill (TTK) in shooters and those who advocate for slower TTK. The former will talk about how faster TTK rewards positioning and careful play. The latter will talk about how slower TTK allows for 'skillful play' after the gunplay has started. As a result, these discussions can lead a multiplayer PVP shooter game to adjust core mechanical touchstones that change how the whole game is played. It can even more minutely change the balance of which guns are good and which is bad. Everyone is trying to make the case to their online community that their favorite weapon is a respectable high tier that is not overpowered, but the weapon that kills them is overpowered and needs to be nerfed.

The effect, is it feels like the game's direction and soul is being driven by fandom, not game designers who have a vision for the game. Cynically, one could even say part of the gameplay of these games is fighting on online forums to get the game that you want. The situation in gaming is already a far cry from the auteurship that other mediums enjoy, but I believe the pendulum has swung so far away from autuership, that I find it difficult to understand why this isn't more commented upon. Art is not a democracy, although there are inherently more democratic aspects to video games. People don't get to vote on how a scene from a movie should play out, or how a book should end. There are CYOA books and games, but that is different from an author writing a story, and then changing the ending because fans demand it. There are focus groups for movies, but that is often considered very commercially driven, not driven by artistry. That isn't to say feedback is meaningless. Focus groups CAN allow directors to realize that there is something missing from the final product that needs work that still meets the director's personal vision. Video game feedback can be used for bugs and clearly broken things that the devs have overlooked and would want to change anyway to fit their own vision. But if anything, on a more fundamental mechanical level, I wish games would stuck to their guns, even if I don't like the resulting game. Allow me the chance to adapt, see if I can find my own way to enjoy the game, and if I don't, it isn't for me. It is for someone else.

A game like Smash: Melee has its fun and unique identity, partially because it could not be shaped with post launch updates. Imagine a world where Melee could be updated, and Jigglypuff or Fox got nerfed because they were considered S tier? To me, that wouldn't feel like Melee anymore. That is coming from someone that only plays the game non-competitively, and plays Roy.