r/gaming • u/CiabattaKatsuie Console • Oct 01 '24

The games industry is undergoing a 'generational change,' says Epic CEO Tim Sweeney: 'A lot of games are released with high budgets, and they're not selling'

https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/the-games-industry-is-undergoing-a-generational-change-says-epic-ceo-tim-sweeney-a-lot-of-games-are-released-with-high-budgets-and-theyre-not-selling/

Tim Sweeney apparently thinks big budget games fail because... They aren't social enough? I personally feel that this is BS, but what do you guys think? Is there a trend to support his comments?

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u/kdebones Oct 02 '24

Welp, he was right in the first half, a lot of high budget games aren't selling. Tho because "they're not social enough" is a level of brain rot that's indicative of the overarching real issue.

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u/worldDev Oct 02 '24

Saying this right after a single player game sold 20M copies in like 2 weeks is crazy, too. How out of touch can this guy be?

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u/LuckyPlaze Oct 02 '24

Hogwarts Legacy was one of the best selling games last year. No multiplayer, no online and microtransactions. Just a solid game.

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u/foreveraloneasianmen Oct 02 '24

I'll gonna be honest .

I bought the game day 1 and dropped half way .

The quest and rewards are awful , it's just numbers. Very repetitive

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u/Smaynard6000 Oct 02 '24

Agreed. It's beautiful, but as shallow as a puddle.

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u/OkReplacement4218 Oct 02 '24

I've not played it but my wife was hyped for it for like a year.

First week after release she had nothing but praise for it. Then i noticed she wasnt playing for a while and asked why. She said she got bored and had no will to play. It's still left unfinished and untouched for months.

Everyone i know that's played it has done the same. Never met anyone who's finished it.

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u/Pixie1001 Oct 02 '24

Yeah, that was pretty much my experience - exploring hogwarts and immersing yourself in the school and all the cute characters and seasonal decorations was really fun for the first 10-15 hours, the cracks started to show.

Your choices don't really matter, combat never gains any more depth, enemy variety just kinda stops, it's using the same open world mechanics as Assassin's Creed 2 back in 2009...

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u/theivoryserf Oct 02 '24

It's just AAA Game No. 3412

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u/yonderbagel Oct 02 '24

I haven't played it, and I'm not disagreeing, but 10-15 hours of fun before it gets boring doesn't sound so bad to me.

That might just be because I'm getting tired of games earlier and earlier these days, though.

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u/Endorkend Oct 02 '24

10-15 hours of fun in a game that massive is bad.

You need 10-15 hours just to discover the whole thing. And then quickly you find out that having discovered and seen everything the first time, is about as deep as it goes.

If the game had been a 10th the size, it would still have been the scope of the first few movies and there would still have been plenty of things to see and much more room to flesh out things to actually do.

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u/Pixie1001 Oct 02 '24

I mean, you're not necessarily wrong - like sure, it won't be many people's obsession or thing they got hundreds of hours out of, but also I don't regret the time or money I spent on it.

I think I sequel could be a tough sell though, now that players have kinda seen past illusion though - they can't just add more content to explore, it would need actual solid mechanics to back it up.

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u/Dmienduerst Oct 02 '24

It will be about execution but they should probably do more persona 5 style day to day.

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u/Greenhouse95 Oct 02 '24

Your choices don't really matter, combat never gains any more depth, enemy variety just kinda stops, it's using the same open world mechanics as Assassin's Creed 2 back in 2009...

Even though I mostly agree with you, you just defined most games with those examples.

· Your choices don't really matter: In 99% of games choices don't matter, you just play the story they created and that's it. And most games just give you the illusion that you have a choice, but in the end you don't and the path still leads you to the same place.

· Combat never gains any more depth: Very rarely does a game add combat depth hours into the game, at most you get new techniques/abilities which help you in combat, which this game also does, as you learn new spells.

· Enemy variety just kinda stops: Isn't that literally every single game? Even Elden Ring reuses minibosses, etc. Some games have more variety, but most have x amount and just reuse them. Also what would you add extra? You're a Wizard who is fighting wizards, so most enemies are Wizards. And then you have a few other creatures.

· It's using the same open world mechanics as Assassin's Creed 2 back in 2009: Not sure what you mean with this one. It's an open world with locations to visit, things to find, and quests to complete. So like most open world games. What is the alternative? No Quests, no things to find?

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u/Pixie1001 Oct 02 '24

I mean you do kinda make a good point that those are all things a lot of games struggle with to some degree!

I think Hogwarts Legacy is just more apparent about it? Like sure, I think there is different endings for the major quest chains, but it starts to feel less meaningful due to the limited number of dialogue options? More like you're more playing a game on rails than a true RPG. And similarly, the world just isn't very reactive.

Similarly, I think the new spells just don't really do enough to shake things up. They feel like more of the same, rather than letting you apply your game knowledge in new ways, or 'come into your build', like a lot of other similiar games?

I think a lot of games will add more complex act 3 enemies as well, for you to sink your teeth into, but Hogwarts Legacy doesn't really seem to do that, so it can start to feel like the fights are repeditive.

As for the 2009 open world, I guess it's that very map based activity completion gameplay loop? You don't see a cool thing off on the distance, you see an activity on the minimap to collect. It feels very 'do the scout mission, visit the locations in order, move on'.

I think Hogwarts castle was very well done with lots of little treasures to find and easter eggs to discover in the winding castle, but the rest of the world felt like it wasn't as dynamic as a lot of modern open world games? The zones not as different as a game like Elden Ring? Instead it's all castles, trees and hills the entire game regardless of what area of the game you're in.

You never stumble onto something truly unique, or look over the horizon past the first few hours to see something that excites you.

You never enter a new hamlet and think to yourself, wow what's the story behind this little village? What strange secrets might it hide? Instead they're just kinda repositories of generic side quests.

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u/JeanClaudeCiboulette Oct 02 '24

I think its because you’re alone and have no one to share that world with. Like title is saying.

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u/SELECT_ALL_FROM Oct 02 '24

I think the mid game hump was just a bit boring. Up until then it was great exploring

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u/teddy5 Oct 02 '24

Yeah it gradually opens up to a bigger world and new things are being introduced, both mechanics wise and world wise.

But then you realise that all the coolest puzzles were back in hogwarts and you're just having to fly around to get specific things and unlock fast travel points so you don't have to fly as much, it gets repetitive really quickly at that point.

To their credit they threw in some extra mechanics at that point like the pet breeding and the crafting systems... but you keep having to go back to the room of requirement and it mostly just feels like busy work.

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u/Endorkend Oct 02 '24

That's my sense of the game, it's absolutely beautiful and detailed, but it's horribly shallow in part because it's so beautiful and detailed.

In the castle, there's a lot to discover and everything is animated and has a "scene".

But mostly all you can do is see those scenes.

You can't do nearly enough interacting with any of it.

It's more like a Disney ride, where you are taken through the world and can see the world being alive. But you can't interact with most of it.

On top of that is a mediocre hero fantasy story that just connects with some of this beautiful scene, but mostly plays out outside of it.

And then there's the issue from experienced gamer perspective, where some things are obvious unfinished, things, since the game sold well, should've been fleshed out or finished in patches and expansions in the past 1.5 years since its release.

You had the pokemon section of the game, which has all the elements to give it depth, except that the depth itself wasn't implemented fully (there's clear markers there that they intended to implement it tho).

There's no actual Quidditch playing.

The classes would've been so much better if you actually learned something in them or had more minigames to do them.

And in general, there needed to be far more interaction with the world rather than being a spectator of that world.

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u/[deleted] Oct 02 '24

Same. The primary selling point of the game is... exploring Hogwarts. Once you've done a few quests that all take you from one end of the castle to another, then you've done the main part of the game that you wanted to do. Everything else is sort of boring or tedious.

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u/Superficial-Idiot Oct 02 '24

I finished it except for the Pokémon stuff. Ain’t got time to force magical animals to shag.

But the rest of the game was pretty fun. Enjoyed being able to 1 shot anything using avada kadavra.

There’s some really simple storylines and some amazing hidden gems that turned out to be a lot longer and interesting than the main story.

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u/Jertimmer Oct 02 '24

The designers ran out of ideas on day one and just gave up it seems.

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u/ifandbut Oct 02 '24

People said the same about Skyrim and that game ended up being wildly popular.

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u/grokthis1111 Oct 02 '24

people are still high on the nostalgia for the books.

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u/oldredditrox Oct 02 '24

Yeah 'solid game' is a stretch to me, sold by and large on the idea of RPing in the IP

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u/101stMedic Oct 02 '24

Agreed 100%. I consider myself a decent fan of the Potterverse, (rowling's bullshit aside) and once I got over the OOOs and AHHs I didn't feel like there was any point to progressing. I just started putzing around on my broom and checking things out, then once that got old (maybe 3-4 hours tops?) I put it down and haven't gone back.

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u/MasterGrok Oct 02 '24

OK but this was an entirely new entry. A lot of great franchises have started out that way. They did a great job of building the world. I agree that the mini games and quests left a lot to be desired for but overall I enjoyed the main quest and I absolutely loved the world.

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u/StoicFable Oct 02 '24

It was way too big of a world for the shallow amount of content. If they had just focused on hogwarts and its grounds, the forest, and hogsmeade, it would have been so much better.

Could have had a few more field trip like missions with fig or another professor, too.

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u/foreveraloneasianmen Oct 02 '24

Yea game is too big and there's not a lot of skills and potions to learn , you max it up very early in the game and nothing else to do .