Happened across this video on YouTube:
https://youtu.be/dls1vkI8xY8?si=CcWuDaltwJyC_xYMAbout halfway through the video, he makes the comment: "It would essentially be making the bet that the best games that will ever come out have already come out."
Looking at that, what are your thoughts?
When you ask people about the best game of all time, so few of them would mention a recent release. I think that's partly out of a social fear of being thought of as presumptuous that a new game will stand the test of time like something like Super Mario 3 or Ocarina of Time have for a lot of people.
But also... I kinda agree? What are the hallmarks of modern gaming?
Microtransactions up the wazoo mean that to experience the "full" game, the barrier of entry often becomes too high, particularly if you are late to the party and haven't been buying incrementally. (Not even going to get into aggressive free to play models that punish players who don't pony up the cash)
Live service means games are never really complete anymore, and some aspects of a game that you really enjoyed might be cycled out (or worse, made irrelevant) in a future season's update.
Online multiplayer games are only as good as the pool of people who are still playing them, and even that's assuming the servers are still up.
Extremely high development cost means a single game can make or break a studio. Most publishers want to play it safe, so the only innovators are the indies on shoestring budgets.
For people like me, even the content of a lot of modern games has gotten to the point where it makes me uncomfortable. Overuse of foul language (the first M rated Final Fantasy game), the realism of the blood and gore (a far cry from the comedic dozens of rib cages and skulls from an exploded foe in Mortal Kombat 2), and tacky sex scenes that you'd feel real awkward if your partner (or your kids) walked in and saw you playing).
Maybe there is an element of nostalgia talking as well, but the creativity that developers have when they actually have constraints makes for far more interesting games.
That being said, I think we have seen some modern games that are objectively better than their classic ancestors.
I love Super Mario 3, but I think either of the Super Mario Galaxy games by far exceed it.
Ocarina of Time is a classic, but I feel like any of the modern 3D Zeldas from Twilight Princess onward are easily better games.
Some games, but not all. For an example:
At Akaicon in July, we were running the video game room. One gentleman came and asked if we had any Tekken games. We had a disc for 6, and 7 installed on one of the systems, but he said he was looking specifically for the older games, because the new ones had too much complexity added to them. I went over our ps1 and ps2 games and we had Tekken Tag Tournament, so he and his son played that together for an hour or so. And it was regularly played after that the rest of the day (unlike tekken 6 or 7) so we never swapped it out for something else.
Although we had a Street Fighter 6 tournament, the SNES Mini was often busy with people playing Street Fighter 2.
Personally, I think the potential is there for the best games of all time to still be out there somewhere, just waiting to be made. But due to how game development costs a significant amount of money (and that amount is constantly increasing), there are fewer companies willing to take significant risks. It's a completely understandable stance to take when a single big failure can essentially put a non-behemoth publisher out of business.
A developer getting bought by a big publisher has its own set of problems. One flop (or even just a modest success) and the publisher might choose to shut the studio down and either shuffle thr IPs they developed to other studios to be driven into the ground, or locked away somewhere never to be seen again.
So are the best games ever still to come?
If so, it's probably going to be from the indie developers.
But then again, back in 2011 when Ubisoft was in peak AAA or shovelware only mode, among the 70ish games they released that year was Rayman Origins which is one of the best 2D platformers of all time (although bested by Rayman Legends two years later). A lot has changed since then though.
