Ongoing design problem, AAA games that are boring to play.
Already for a while big game companies don’t get in touché with the actual demand from the gaming market. In last year’s, good games, we did see rather from small teams.
As today’s Big Games Industry try to reach as many people as possible, by having accessible and simple games, “jack of all trades”, where you try to include lot different stuff to appeal for many people, is a bad game concept, as people prefer games that do at least make one thing right, than 100 things wrong. A game for everybody is a game for nobody.
Crucible is a perfect recent example, where after 8 years development big budget Amazon Studio failed after mere 2 weeks post launch. It combined elements of the hero shooter genre and Mobile Online Battle Arenas (MOBAs), trying to be like an cross between Overwatch and League of Legends.
Gamer Reviews were very negative, mostly because the game was lame, boring, lacked originality and was all together very forgettable. There are meanwhile quite lot such games, where companies did invest lot of money, but result was lame and flopped.
https://bit-tech.net/news/gaming/pc/amazon-unreleases-its-big-budget-release-crucible/1/
AAA do fail by so many crucial things.
-marketing, that has almost nothing to do with the actual game
-underwhelming campaigns and story
-repetetive level design
-no proper post-launch support
-inconsistencies between franchise and lore
-Microtransactions and Grind, that do cut away fun and fairness
and worst of all, they forget games do require minimal challenge to be fun.
Somehow AAA RTS teams in last years didn’t even grasp the most basic things.
-how is game supposed to entertain people, if the scripted skirmish AI is bad?
I mean, all it does is produce 1 unit and send it out on same way to die.
Higher difficulty merely increases the frequency, but doesn’t make it smarter.
And there is no variety how AI does attack, its merely frontal suicide assaults.
-how is game supposed to entertain people, if the story missions are boring?
They all are done like this, you have to move small group of units for a long time over the map or do have to slowly create an army from scratch to beat up several lame waves of brainless enemies. And the cherry on top, lame destroy 1 big object or unit on map. That would summarize 90% of all RTS story missions. It just lacks inspiration.
-how is game supposed to entertain people, if gameplay wasn’t thought trough?
Gamers want to build their bases and armies,
but the game forgets to provide enough resources for it.
Gamers want to destroy a specific strong type of units,
but the game forgets to provide units to counter them.
Gamers want to know how specific strong type of unit is to counter,
but the game forgets to provide info for it.
Gamers want to finally win the match,
but the game forgets to provide proper tools to do so,
making it very long and lame.
And there are many more examples for design problems,
people didn’t experience in old games.
-how is game supposed to entertain people?
AAA tends to recycle concepts dry or put something very weird together. RTS kind of suffers from both to be honest. Problem is, what might be seen as accessibility issue, actually might make the game fun to play in first place.
What does RTS need to be actually fun to play today?
A casual RTS, simply sounds like casual dark souls, a game with very low skill setting and broken controls won’t appeal casuals and people who seek a challenge. An RTS focused to be deep and complex, with challenging and fluent gameplay just sounds too impossible, by goals of today’s AAA companies. Is Age of Empires 4 even allowed to be a fun and good game?