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HoloDust on 15 December 2018
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DonFerrari said:
HoloDust said:

Horizon is just a byproduct of RPG genre that got to slightly more exposure at one point in late 90s/early 00s than being niche going into creative decline and massive dumbing down for the mainstream market. That started much earlier, but Skyrim and later Witcher 3 were final nails in WRPG coffin. Eventually you get to the point where people are considering something like Horizon and AC:OD to be RPGs cause big publishers are pushing that narrative, both comparing it (falsely) to Witcher 3 (which, as I said, many RPG fans don't even consider to be RPG, personally I think it's borderline case) - and I guess for AAA audience those are RPGs. Luckily, it seems that at least some devs see their chance in using current situation to fill that void.

This happened with FPS games as well, though much earlier...from games that had wide level designs, we got to CoD and completely linear designs to make them more "accessible" cause God forbid you actually explore a bit any level, and only in recent years we get to see some throwbacks to old school designs.

Now, different strokes for different folks and all that, I'm glad people enjoy their AAA games, just please stop asking for indie/A/AA games to be like them.

I certainly don't consider HZD RPG, for me it is action game with RPG elements (as almost all games have some of it nowadays). Witcher 3 I really didn't like the game itself so I won't put it related to the difficult, pandering or not being RPG =p

FPS I can certainly agree that the lack of KB+M on consoles have certainly affected FPS and may have made the genre bad for PC gamers. Can't evaluate much besides that because I don't like FPS much.

I don't want games to be all equal (but difficult option on the other genres or tiers don't make these games equal to AAA). And I certainly am sad that you have to feel there are few games for you enjoy due to companies to increase sales going in a direction that displeases you. At least we have about 30 years of backlog to dig and find gems. It could have been much worse if the bad changes in your POV happened during gen 4.

Witcher 3 is solid game, I have it at around 7.5-8/10 (though lot of thing for me in it go to 6/10 while others for to even 9.5/10), it's the RPG mechanisms that are very weak and disappointing, especially since open-world action-RPG genre was in steady decline regarding core mechanisms for quite some time and this was the game to save it (or many hoped so, given what devs were saying about their influences during development). Unfortunately, it did mostly opposite - while it still (arguably) can be called action-RPG (well, barely), it paved golden road to current trend of open-world pseudo action-RPGs (in essence, action-adventures with few RPG elements) - nothing wrong with them pre se, it's just that publishers are marketing them as RPGs and mass market are accepting them as that.

But as I said, CDPR is making Cyberpunk, which from everything shown so far, seems like proper action-RPG with stats, attributes and core RPG mechanisms, Obsidian is about to release The Outer Worlds, that is made by some of original creators of Fallout and, apart from the setting, seems to follow same design principles, so it's not all bad.

There is always plenty of good games to be played, even back in 80s, though I had NES (and later Mega Drive), I mostly played on C64 (and later Amiga), cause that's were most of the games in genres that I like were. It's been like that later with PCs and  it's only when genres that I like get watered downed and hijacked buy mass market that I take it to heart.

That's one of the reasons I liked Souls so much, it was not so much breath of fresh air for me (Severance: Blade of Darkness on PC from 2001 had quite similar feel to it regarding level design, and much better combat IMO) as much at it was something that is really good and went against most things that AAA industry pushed at the time, and luckily there were enough people to recognize it for its qualities to make it so wide known that it became one of those IPs that can influence industry in opposite direction than what major publishers were pushing for so long.