Gaming is also a form of pop culture, and it is influenced by various trends. For example, Max Payne popularized the slow-mo bullet-time feature just like in The Matrix, Grand Theft Auto created a wave of open-world games allowing players to do whatever they want, and Gears of War introduced a unique third-person shooting mechanism.
Of course, some trends help improve certain game genres for the better, but there are also trends that cause games to lose their diversity and richness.
Here is a list of 10 games that have contributed to the current shallow state of gaming.
Open World with Abundant Content – The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
The Witcher 3 is an extremely famous game due to its vast and realistic open world. Moreover, the content and quests in the game are meticulously designed.
Because of this, The Witcher 3 achieved tremendous success. However, it inadvertently spawned a wave of mediocre action-adventure games with similar ideas.
The Witcher 3 pushed the open-world genre one step further, and because many publishers sensed the profit potential in this genre, they rushed to jump in. For example, EA’s Mass Effect Andromeda has a world that isn’t very “open,” Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed Origins, despite aiming to elevate the series, still failed in terms of storytelling and had an overly convoluted map.
These are just two examples, but we can see that The Witcher 3 is the culprit that generated a series of half-baked action RPGs with empty open worlds that lack depth. Even the missions tend to be repetitive and lack creativity.
Battle Royale Genre – PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG)
Although Fortnite was the most successful battle royale game at first, PUBG is the game that popularized and brought this genre to the gaming community.
With the very simple mechanic of “Only one player can survive,” PUBG quickly became a phenomenon on PC despite its rocky launch. Since then, PUBG has become one of the best-selling games of all time.
This success has attracted the attention of many developers to the battle royale genre. Soon after, a flood of games in this genre flooded Steam, along with AAA games like Call of Duty, Battlefield, CS:GO, Grand Theft Auto, and Forza also hopping on this trend and adding battle royale modes to their games.
While some games have been appropriately invested in, there are also many shallow games created just to squeeze money from gamers. Instead of innovating a new gameplay mode, developers cling to the battle royale genre to make a living. Initially, it was still enticing, but now this trend has become saturated.
Souls-like Difficulty – Dark Souls
Few games have had as wide an influence as Dark Souls. It can be considered one of the most “difficult” action RPGs warmly welcomed by gamers.
The difficulty of this game has become a measuring stick. Whenever there’s a game with similar difficulty, gamers compare it as “Souls-like.”
Many publishers have released games inspired by Dark Souls, but they often forget that FromSoftware encourages players to learn from their mistakes to become better warriors. Meanwhile, similar games often fail to achieve this.
The most recent game resembling Dark Souls is Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order. Although theoretically considered a “Souls-like” game, in reality, the “learning from experience” element in Dark Souls is not fully exploited, leaving players without a sense of progression through each battle.
Creating a game that is difficult yet doesn’t discourage players is a task that requires meticulousness and care in game design. Difficulty alone is not enough; the rewards must also correspond to that difficulty. Unfortunately, many “Souls-like” games forget this.
Season Passes – L.A. Noire
While currently the “money grab” mechanism is more popular, let’s not forget its predecessor, the season pass.
It emerged around 10 years ago, allowing gamers to pre-order expansion packs (DLC) at attractive prices. At the same time, it also provided publishers with upfront cash before these DLCs were completed.
L.A. Noire was the first AAA game to introduce the season pass, leading to hundreds of other AAA games adopting this model.
The problem arises when the content in the season pass is often not clearly defined. Worse, if the game does not succeed in sales, gamers may never see the promised content.
Some publishers even resort to cutting parts of a complete game and selling them as a season pass. This means that gamers have to pay twice for the same thing.
Games like Rainbow Six Siege or Destiny 2 are prime examples of the season pass model, releasing an annual season pass to continue extracting money from gamers even after the game has been out for several years.
Now there are loot boxes replacing season passes, but it was thanks to those season passes that publishers learned how to extract extra money from gamers without having to create new games.
Online Services – Fortnite
It cannot be denied that Fortnite is a very successful game, and although it is not the first game to support live service, it is the most successful game operating on this model.
Fortnite is a free-to-play game. It primarily makes money through its Battle Pass system, allowing gamers to pay a small amount to purchase a “pass.” With this pass, players can grind and complete assigned tasks to unlock in-game items. It’s like an upgraded version of the Season Pass.
This is an extremely profitable formula. Coupled with Fortnite’s continuous updates and content additions each month to attract and retain players, many publishers have applied this model to their games in hopes of achieving similar profits.
But reality is often disappointing. Take the game Anthem, released in 2019. EA intended for this game to follow the online service model, but upon release, it failed miserably as gamers realized that Anthem’s content was very poor, with nothing to explore.
Creating a realistic game world and maintaining it over time requires serious investment. Therefore, not many developers use this model. Especially in an era where games are cheap and plentiful, do gamers want to “dedicate” several dozen more hours to a game that was released last year?
(To be continued…)
Source: What Culture, translated by Gearvn