Bleeping Lobster

I’ve been playing Control on and off since 2019… I finally completed it this week.

There was always something that halted my progress… Frustration with the map, boredom with progression, unfixable crashing. Decided to give it one more go on a new gpu and finally it clicked :)

Now I’m doing all the awesome post game content.

It’s a hard question to answer I know! Racking my brains here, the most novel thing I can think of is Portal.

You make excellent points. Personally, I rarely have a problem paying for proper DLC (and buy proper DLC I mean, additional story content that wasn’t obviously cynically cut from the OG game). Notable past examples for GTA, stuff like ‘The Ballad of Gay Tony’ were amazing expansions.

Also sticking with GTA, they’re a good example of bad practice nowadays (imo). They pivoted to online-only DLC once they realised how lucrative a pay-to-play system can be when leveraged against not being bullied by players with more disposable income. There was amazing single-player content in dev for GTA5 and they cut it to focus on MP. Worse, they left the dregs of that content in the game, allowed a ‘GTA5 mystery’ concept to flourish and left people hunting for the mystery thinking they were going to find something like GTA4’s bigfoot. Knowing all along it didn’t exist. But of course, happy that people were still playing and hoping they would get bored and try online mode.

Yep, it’s a real quandary. I’m not sure what the solution is, or if there is one from our perspective… it’s no point voting with my wallet when there’s millions of others who won’t.

This was what I meant. It’s these smaller devs that seem to be innovating to any extent at the moment!

Maybe I’m just a bit jaded due to being an old fart nowadays… I remember playing the original Doom / Wolfenstein so especially FPS feel so overdone to me. When was the last time you saw a truly novel game concept? I’m sure I’ve seen a few over the last few years but can’t remember (see, old fart).

This is the big problem with modern gaming. Too many companies are now in hock to investors and publishers. To those at the top of the hierarchy, making a game is an investment, a bet. Innovation is stifled in favour 9f ‘safe bets’, no wonder gaming is stagnating.

It’s not all doom and gloom, there are still exceptions to the rule. But it’s certainly not looking good for fantastic single player games.

I’m expecting gta 6 to have a much shorter single player campaign with most of the focus towards online (and more obscene earnings from shark cards 2.0).