So answer the poll.
Anyway, as someone who has played a lot of games I've been thinking a lot about what I enjoyed about specific games and what they had to offer. A lot of games in the past were about both gameplay and immersion.
Gameplay is essentially how a game plays, does it feel rewarding? Does it feel Challenging? Is it relaxing?
Gameplay itself is something that is varied across what people enjoy. There are many forms of gameplay.
Then there is something else that people will continue to buy into a series for.
That is immersion.
Now you may ask, what is immersion?
Immersion is the connection you feel with a game, it's characters or its world. When you enjoy exploring that world, or enjoy the way the people talk or do things. One game I can remember I got immersed in was Sleeping Dogs (an older game) where the main character is basically an undercover cop with the triads. The characters were distinct, they each had an agenda and I was genuinely interested in how the story and the world progressed.
It was a game that also didn't beat around the bush and had a lot of cultural sayings I remember like "A man who hasn't eaten pork buns is not a whole man" or something like that. I liked it so much I've been hoping for a sequal that never came.
Same with the game Days Gone. Even if the gameplay wasn't the greatest, I was fully immersed as the Biker Deacon Saint John.
The reason I could be immersed was because I could on a level connect with how someone would feel in his situation and the difficulty of surviving a world full of freaks. Accepting life and loss interesting.
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And now we talk about the games today.
I've thought long and hard about why I am enjoying Marvel vs Capcom collection so much (even if it's just a bunch of retro games), and no I never played those old MvC games, or even the Old Street fighter games so I don't have nostalgia glasses on. Yet somehow I'm enjoying it. I even decided to pick up an old game called Beyond Good and Evil, the first one... I had never played it before but I ended up enjoying that one too.
So, that's not nostalgia... there was something inherently different... and I thought about it a lot and I've come to the following conclusion.
The reason why new games suck.
Gameplay.
It sucks now because instead of making a fun/relaxing/challenging game, many developers (fromsoft excluded, there are a few good makers still) are focused so much on monetization. How can they get the most money from the player? So what ends up happening? Even single player games have monetization to where they make season passes, pre-order bonuses, and if you don't get certain things the game itself will be even more of a grind to play.
You hear games journalist and companies push out "single player is dead" even if single player games are still profitable. It's like they're trying to social engineer us into these multiplayer endless dlc games so they can continue to harvest and extract money from us.
So because the goal isn't to make it enjoyable to the player, MANY MANY games
nomaspin-casino.com now are making games with stupid game mechanics and stuff that doesn't make sense and isn't fun because they're used to making things cost more. There is even a CEO who once said he wanted to charge Call of Duty players, or shooter players, for ammo. I just have to say... stuff like that would make games more stressful than fun.
As such, many of these games with huge open worlds without much to do in them except collectathons are just there to try and prey on players who easily get addicted to completionism even when completing everything isn't fun. Once you do something that isn't fun or beneficial to you in anyway because you need to 'complete' something, that's when they got you addicted. A lot of games are now made that way because it's easier to squeeze money out of you to pay for those 'treasure maps' instead of just making worthwhile quests or bosses to get the loot.
Immersion.
Immersion these days sucks.
I posted about this before, people are always complaining about 'ugly' characters in games, then you got people saying "stop being horny" but that not addressing the issue in the first place.
The issue is immersion.
When you take Warhammer 40k with decades of lore and people who have fully immersed themselves in their universe, then you suddenly bring in female customs, you've just broken all the immersion and rules that have been set up. While in the long-run, this is meaningless since it's all fiction and people will go on with their lives, for those who have invested so much into the lore it's straight up betrayal.
The companies have essentially destroyed all the time and investment that the fans who have supported them over decades into something that is supposed to be one way, and so why wouldn't they be upset at it? Lore and immersion only works because it is consistent. If it becomes inconsistent then it becomes betrayal, unless of course the series was meant to be inconsistent all along. Warhammer 40k however, was meant to a series where mankind is nearing its own end times and decline because they refuse to change, but like all empires, it goes down slowly and bloodily.
It's the same with star wars. All the old fans hate the 'changes' they're making because it goes against the consistency of the lore that had been established for decades. It has nothing to do with hating underrepresented groups, or anything like that, and confusing this issue rather than acknowledging it doesn't allow old fans to engage or be immersed anymore.
You think about how much you enjoyed something, you spend money on it because you enjoy it and you want to see it continue on in that type of world. Then all of a sudden, because of politics and social engineering now they decide to change the flow of that series or world because some new people who haven't even been a fan of that series think their vision is better. How are you supposed to feel about that?
These are what you call, immersion breakers. You can't be immersed because the established lore is destroyed. Now, you can try to be immersed again, but if people are so willing to destroy the established lore and tradition that you were immersed into in the first place, would you still want to spend time and money on it?
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I think game companies, media, and the people today just can't understand what it means to be a fan of something for so long only to have someone else come and ruin it just because they want to push their own agendas. Historically, the loss of loyal fans in the long run will harm a brand far more than any of the new ones they may pick up along the way.
