hootOS

HOOT_OS - V.30

Stryxnine Amity Pulsatrix
(30/🇨🇦/Saskatchewan)
NACRS Organizer
esports broadcast producer
plural, autistic, adhd
disability & queer activist
hobbyist archival researcher
bylines in Traxion.gg
loves @kadybat and @traumagotchi and @kaceydotme

57RYX9 DESIGN - Visual FX and Graphic Design North American Cohost Racing Series organizer & founder
Big Muddy Archive News


MSN Escargot
hootwheelz@escargot.chat

Noodle posted a great video about the unsustainability of the video game market as it exists today. One particular point he makes is that many mainstream blockbuster releases are trying to be everything games now, with mind-boggling scale we've never seen before.

The thing is, to me, what's mind-boggling is how we've seemed to forget that this has always been a significant issue in the video games industry. It ain't new.


One of my favorite games in recent memory is Cyberpunk 2077, and it's the perfect example of executives and creative directors overburdening their staff with huge ideas that couldn't be reigned in before it was too late into production to chuck the useless shit out. CDPR wanted to take the success from The Witcher 3 and plant it into a setting that was suddenly coming back into trend; a hyper-cyber dystopia where corporations fight territorial wars against other corporations, mercenaries are a dime-a-dozen and your cybernetic rocket arms are the only thing separating you from a guaranteed flatline.

I'd pre-ordered the game as soon as it was financially feasible for me to do so. The thing I'd forgotten leading up to CP2077's release, however, was that CDPR's Witcher 3 - the quality of which had basically sold me on their Cyberpunk game - was the latest attempt from the company to make a good fantasy RPG. The previous two installments of the Witcher video game franchise are... underwhelming, to say the least.

My brother warned me of this when I told him I'd pre-ordered Cyberpunk. I was curious, watched gameplay of the first two Witcher games... and refunded my pre-order. My brother was right; the track record for CDPR was more miss than hit, and I didn't wanna risk dumping seventy fuckin canuckybucks on a disappointment. The game came out, and it was a shitshow. Money well saved.

Later on, about Patch 1.6, I decided to "Acquire" the game for a bit, test the waters, see how the patches had improved the game. And sure enough, the game was running relatively smoothly - a much more comfortable experience than I'd had a couple years before with Skyrim, for sure. And that's the way I saw this game; a smidge less buggy than a Bethesda game, but with a hell of a lot more personality to the story. I bought it on sale. Money well spent.

V flashing a pose for the camera

Update 2.0 is out, with its DLC "Phantom Liberty." V is thrown into a whole situation with the NUSA and the Feds, thanks to an excruciatingly talented netrunner who works at the NUS President's side. It's a spy-thriller, with some extremely thrilling twists and turns. I've only played through one ending, but unlike the main campaign of CP2077 i feel compelled to play the other endings, to see all the ways the loose ends get tied up and some knots get left untied.

Given that the last update had the game in a pretty comfortable, minimally-glitched state, this huge update - naturally - threw a lot of instability back into the game. Performance hitches on my more-than-sufficient PC, periodic but consistent crashing which I think is a result of texture or shader errors given the visual cacophony of people and cars rapidly fluctuating colours before it happens, and the 3D model for V's personal link will sometimes freak WAY the hell out and fling humongous spikes of black virtual geometry violently across the screen.

Compared to the update before last, Cyberpunk has gone from being "Skyrim but more polished and the writing isn't dry as shit," to "As buggy as Skyrim but Bethesda wishes they could tell a story as exciting and interesting as this one."

But back to the matter at hand: the sustainability of the current video games industry, and Noodle's prediction of a likely crash in the industry market.

Where I deviate from Noodle on this unsustainability issue is that I don't think the games industry is going to crash. We've been saying this about many other industries in the past, but they never crumble to dust; merely stumble. While he's right that we won't see something like the Gaming Crash of '83, I don't really think we'll notice anything different. It'll look practically indiscernible from what we're seeing now; massive layoffs, a little bit of executive churn, and that's about it. And like the global stock market crash of '08, nothing will change.

V staring at the camera in ominous lighting.

The thing is, this 'unsustainability' issue isn't a new development - and yet it's being talked about as if it's so. Games have been buggy and imperfect because they're too big for their britches ever since the start of video gaming. CTD's are as common in big games now as they were in the 2000's. graphical errors happened as often in the 90's as they do now. visual trends like piss filters and mechanic trends like 3rd-person cover shooters were replaced by raytracing and open-world sandboxes, but the actual stability and performance of games these days aren't much different than the Games Of Yore.

I replayed Gran Turismo 4 recently. granted, I ran it on an emulator so not 1:1 accurate to how it'd play on the PS2, but I'd be utterly stunned if it was any better than what I experienced. It's a solid game, don't get me wrong - but not the ludicrously high quality game people remember it as. at least, not while using a lens that isn't stained pink.

GT4 is obviously dated. The AI entirely ignores you as you drive alongside them, the wheel's force feedback is way too strong and is constantly clipping - a significant issue that plagued GT until the seventh installment came around to allow for adequate FFB adjustments - and some of the events you're tasked with running are just nonsensical. Take the Gran Turismo World Championship event series in the Professional Events hall. You're tasked with driving prototypes - which is fine enough, they're the fastest cars in the game so you drive them in the late stage. What ain't fair is what circuits you're driving them on; Hong Kong, Opera Paris, and fucking El Capitan. Three of the absolute worst circuits to take a prototype to. They're extremely bumpy, tight street circuits (or in the case of El Capitan, a sickeningly dangerous mountain road) that force you to drive below the effective speed for the aerodynamics of the car - meaning you're too damn slow during 95% of the lap to gracefully tear through the circuits in the terrifying machinery you're piloting.

V leaning against her black Quadra Type-66

My point is this: shitty big games aren't new. What's new is our understanding of the environment developers are working in to create these big strings of spaghetti code, the vibrant rose hue on our glasses and the optimizations developers have learned over the past quarter-century of gaming. And here is where Noodle and I merge again; the issue is not that big game developers Just Need To Be Better, the issue is that we, as gamers, keep expecting absolute fuckin perfection out of studios made up of hundreds of developers, dozens of executives and thousands of investors who all want different fucking things out of the game they're all involved in. Shareholders want their investment return, executives want to give their shareholders that return to keep their jobs and their fat wallets, and developers want to make good games. When only one group of people is all for The Good Of The Game while the other two groups outnumbering them just want Number Go Up, the latter are going to win out. It's been like this for decades now, at this point. The flaws just become that much more noticeable after over 30 years of streamlining done to gameplay mechanics, control schemes, interconnected gameplay systems and general development processes.

We, as gamers, need to stop fucking acting like the games from our childhood were hot shit. They weren't. Hell, my favorite game of all time is NFS Prostreet - a catastrophically janky pile of fuck that I cherish, flaws and all. Thing is, I don't sugarcoat it; I don't pretend it was flawless, I don't act like it didn't often crash-to-desktop, and I certainly don't say it's the best game in the franchise. It's just my favorite.

My conclusion is this: my favorite game from my childhood is a buggy, flawed mess of a game that reminds me of a time when I was less terrified of the world around me. I had optimism and hope, then. It's time to be an adult now; I'm not getting the naivety and innocence back. I'm gonna stop projecting my nostalgia onto the video games of today, and recognize all games - past and present - as what they are; imperfect executions on artistic and capitalistic endeavours, forged by the inherently flawed humanity within us all. People aren't perfect. never were and never will be. it follows that the art people create isn't perfect either.

Games were never perfect. Even the games you love aren't perfect. You aren't perfect. So we ought to stop expecting perfection - from ourselves, from others, and from the games we want to play. Stop getting mad at developers for "going woke and going broke" or whatever the fuck, because a game that has fucking pronouns in it isn't broken because of that - and furthermore, the games that "didn't have pronouns" or whatever weren't that great anyway. We're basing our standards on what a good game looks like from flower-coloured spectacles tinted by our childhood-selves naivety towards game development. We need to get a lot more realistic about what we should expect from our games - and stop flinging shit at the people making stuff for our enjoyment.

Games always sucked because shareholders need to make their returns. They'll get their gambles back, one way or another. Often, it comes at the art's expense. If you're gonna be pissed at somebody, go make Wall Street your new urinal.

V making a silly face through a silver balaclava.


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