Imagine if they used all that resources in do… Fun gameplay.
Not trying to be a movie or a simulation of real life.
Like just gameplay. 100% gameplay. A game who is not a playable movie. A game with just gameplay. Like a real videogame.
Corporate studios keep throwing more people at big-ass projects anyway, because they want to make the kind of game only corporate studios can make. That rarified competition allows higher return on investment. They can advertise a big game all at once instead of advertising smaller games all the time. But this pushes games to seek the widest possible audience, often making them generic, formulaic, or simply overloaded. They want to have everything every other big game has, and also be the only big game that offers some exclusive thing. Making shit up is the most direct route to exclusivity.
Real-money charges have made this objectively worse. Maximum revenue now comes from getting people addicted to frustrating bullshit forever, so a fraction of them can be squeezed for thousands of dollars. Budgets follow revenue, so the scale of these projects keeps inflating, and they take forever, stagnating the market and swallowing once-promising studios. The ones that don’t simply fail and die still get roped into wasting an entire decade on one game nobody actually enjoys.
Like those in-game cosmetics that cost real money but represented by a type of in-game currency that can’t be earned by playing the game, instead playing your wallet.
Simulation systems can be very useful assets for fun gameplay, if you make a game that can make use of them. Immersive Sims are essentially all about this. They create a bunch of systems that can interact in all kinds of ways, and then they let the player figure out how to make use of them in whatever way they want.
The issue is these games are just making these systems without any way to take advantage of them. If the nails being long made you better/worse at things, and the nail clippings could be combined with other items to make potions or something, it could actually be a cool mechanic. Just doing it for “fidelity” isn’t useful though and usually just a waste of time/money/effort.
It can also make the incredibly tedious and irritating. Elite Dangerous is an incredible simulation of our galaxy that has terrible gameplay for your average player.
The simulation isn’t the reason for that. That’s just the design of the game. Plenty of people enjoy the Truck Simulator games. Elite is basically the same thing, but for space. Also, I wouldn’t call it a “simulation” of our galaxy, but a simulacrom or representation. It’s not changing. The groups expanding and building in that, the economy, and those systems are simulations, and they actually provide content for the game, regardless of if it’s enjoyable in your opinion.
Simulations that create content are when we should create simulations. Simulations that consume resources and don’t enhance the game should be avoided.
Imagine if they used all that resources in do… Fun gameplay. Not trying to be a movie or a simulation of real life. Like just gameplay. 100% gameplay. A game who is not a playable movie. A game with just gameplay. Like a real videogame.
My personal theory is that it boils down to how many people it takes to make games (too many to be useful imo). This is probably a sympton of
“hey, what feature can the new guy work on?”
“idfk make him add toenails or something”
It takes one person to make a game.
Corporate studios keep throwing more people at big-ass projects anyway, because they want to make the kind of game only corporate studios can make. That rarified competition allows higher return on investment. They can advertise a big game all at once instead of advertising smaller games all the time. But this pushes games to seek the widest possible audience, often making them generic, formulaic, or simply overloaded. They want to have everything every other big game has, and also be the only big game that offers some exclusive thing. Making shit up is the most direct route to exclusivity.
Real-money charges have made this objectively worse. Maximum revenue now comes from getting people addicted to frustrating bullshit forever, so a fraction of them can be squeezed for thousands of dollars. Budgets follow revenue, so the scale of these projects keeps inflating, and they take forever, stagnating the market and swallowing once-promising studios. The ones that don’t simply fail and die still get roped into wasting an entire decade on one game nobody actually enjoys.
Like those in-game cosmetics that cost real money but represented by a type of in-game currency that can’t be earned by playing the game, instead playing your wallet.
True. I never was able to work well in groups, imagine a work of more than 500 people.
Simulation systems can be very useful assets for fun gameplay, if you make a game that can make use of them. Immersive Sims are essentially all about this. They create a bunch of systems that can interact in all kinds of ways, and then they let the player figure out how to make use of them in whatever way they want.
The issue is these games are just making these systems without any way to take advantage of them. If the nails being long made you better/worse at things, and the nail clippings could be combined with other items to make potions or something, it could actually be a cool mechanic. Just doing it for “fidelity” isn’t useful though and usually just a waste of time/money/effort.
It can also make the incredibly tedious and irritating. Elite Dangerous is an incredible simulation of our galaxy that has terrible gameplay for your average player.
The simulation isn’t the reason for that. That’s just the design of the game. Plenty of people enjoy the Truck Simulator games. Elite is basically the same thing, but for space. Also, I wouldn’t call it a “simulation” of our galaxy, but a simulacrom or representation. It’s not changing. The groups expanding and building in that, the economy, and those systems are simulations, and they actually provide content for the game, regardless of if it’s enjoyable in your opinion.
Simulations that create content are when we should create simulations. Simulations that consume resources and don’t enhance the game should be avoided.
Rimworld is a good example of the depth of simulation making for good gameplay (also dwarf fortress…)