Comment by reactordev

Money is not the limiting factor.

I agree there are many games and tons of hours of content available. That is never my issue. There’s lot of games. Games I play. I see the same mechanics in all of them. Some of them because there’s no better way to do it given our current input scheme, others, because they did it. As my kids are now grown, I no longer play kids games like Lego or Zelda (although I do recommend you play them, they are fun) but my argument about peak gaming was that we were still pushing the boundaries of what was possible, hardware wise even. Today, it’s more standardized, polished, refined, as we developed PBR rendering pipelines to recreate realism. My hill I’ll die on is that after that era, it’s been mostly rehashed franchises and game design we have seen before. Yes we have new stories, new graphics, new characters, but you’re still “kill X monsters” or “loot X from Y” style task rabbits. I am jaded because I know we can do better, it’s just the people who hold the purse won’t let us.

We have pushed technology but we have been limited in how far we can push narratives and reality. This gap is closing though. As for storytelling, there are some great stories out there, some predictable ones as well. The freedom of choice in games like Last of Us and Tell Tale Series helped push that a little further but we are still constrained to a linear timeline of events like it’s a movie or a book. Even games where it makes no sense to have it, has it as a way to tracking your level, or progress, or what areas you can visit.

Some stories should be told linearly. Some stories shouldn’t be. There was a time when you were given just enough narrative to understand the world you were in, but nothing more. Your story was your own making.