The Death of the Simple Game · 11:28pm Sep 5th, 2021
Today, we managed to reinstall/download a game that my older brother had taken with him on his married adventure. It was the 2003 video game adaptation of The Return of the King. My brother played it playing up, and more recently, I played it a ton as well. This is a very fun, yet simple game with no DLCs, expansion packs, online multiplayer, or complicated mechanics. You can play this game for a few hours every day for a few weeks, then put it away until the next time you feel a hankering for nostalgia. Why aren't there any more like it?
Nowadays, new games being released by major companies tend to mostly fall into two categories: a crappy phone game you can play on the toilet, or a thirty-hour fps campaign with a fully orchestrated score and an online multiplayer battle royale. These games are fine by themselves, but when every game requires this much commitment, it starts to not feel very fulfilling. You need more medium-sized meals in between the big stuff. This Lord of the Rings game fulfills that role to a T. So why aren't there more like it? I can attribute this phenomenon to the revolutionary, most beloved, and single overall greatest game of the 2010s: Minecraft.
Minecraft completely changed the face of gaming forever. It's a virtually limitless game that people dedicate hundreds or even thousands of hours to alongside their friends. The only real test is how imaginative you can be. And this experience is available for only 27 dollars. How are other companies supposed to compete with that? The only real answer they saw was to make every game so chock-full of things that they start to lose the actual good experience of gaming. So many bells and whistles are now being crammed into every single game that those perfectly fine mid-tier games are being pushed aside for the higher priority of the game company seeking to make the next Minecraft.
When this happens, the developers are being forced to create products that they are unsatisfied with, and consumers end up paying more money for less content. The result is an overpriced experience that barely resembles a finished product, or an experience with terrible story, gameplay, and dialogue, but stunning graphics. How many times have you seen a game that is initially predicted to be really good, but then fails upon release?
Many times, people have been rediscovering the olden games from the 2000s and finding they're on par with or even exceed the current games being released today. Battlefront 2005 instead of Battlefront 2017. Fallout 3 and New Vegas instead of Fallout 4 and 76. The Sims 3 instead of 4. Halo 3. Oblivion. GTA San Andreas. Knights Of The Old Republic. Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga. Even Club Penguin is fondly remembered. These games were not just good back then, they are still good even now. The AAA games being released now are far too complex and far too similar between them all for most people to really care. The gaming industry is far less concerned about making compelling games and more concerned about making buttloads of money off impressionable fans.
TL; DR: The Minecraft revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.
