Opinion: Kill The Big Game

mmorpg.com:

Games are always messy. Making them, launching them, playing them. That’s fine. 

If you ask any game developer about the messiness of development and launch, they’ll tell you it’s a miracle. After all, games are a conglomerate of often-hand created parts, the fragile art of software coding the least of worries. Quality assurance only has so many hands; to release a game is to, in essence, bump up the scale of playtesting by no less than a thousand-fold. 

But bigger things usually leave bigger messes, and the past few years have shown that these messes are getting too big to ignore. 

So it’s time to kill The Big Game. 

It’s the AAA golden child, attached to the beloved, historic studio. This time, more than ever , the graphics are better than ever, the gameplay is outrageously fun, the world is vast, and you’ll spend dozens of hours traveling to the vast edges of the special seamless lands to see each buttcrack of every unique NPC. 

…gods above, aren’t you sick of that yet? 

If you’re not sick of it personally, then at least you’ve seen this exact game straining against the collective sanity of the games industry for a few years now, met with anxiety about whether it’ll live up to the fraction of its anticipation. It’s one thing for games to be messy, but at this point, the sheer weight of every AAA release bringing burdens of time, price, and collective attention in the industry is getting too frustrating to handle. 

When building the “modern game experience,” the leaders of the largest development companies proclaim to its audiences that the sky’s the limit, then ask its developers to architect a new bridge to those heavens.  

Achieving better is always good. But achieving too much, too fast, too quickly already