Dec 24, 2024
Nov 30,2024
Opinion: after years of blockbuster titles and massive creativity by designers and developers, video games just feel so tired now
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All forms of entertainment have a so-called "golden age", a time when a specific mode of storytelling was at its peak. The golden age of Hollywood, for example, is typically seen as having lasted some four decades, from the late 1920s up until the 1960s. It was an era marked by technological advancement, the emergence of the cinematic production values and stardom we recognise today and a time of experimentation when the narrative and aesthetic values of American cinema were defined.
While there is a temptation for each generation to herald its own culture as elevated from all that has come before, it is natural for the perceived critical value of art forms to wax and wane. A golden age doesn’t refer to popularity: what’s popular shifts with generational tastes and market trends. Rather, it is a period during which the achievements in a particular mode are so great that anything which has come before or comes after will forever be measured against that isolated time of greatness. People who have lived through a form’s golden age know it, because once it’s over, nothing feels quite the same.
And so it is with video games. Now a hugely popular leisure time activity, video games are tricky things to historicise. Compared to forms like music, literature, cinema and television, video games haven’t been around that long, but they have changed a lot over the course of their relatively short existence.
From The Act Man, the decline of gaming
Video games are dependent on media technologies which have undergone exponential growth in recent decades. The first commercial, general release video games appeared early in the 1970s. Only 50 years have gone by, but contemporary video games are now unrecognisable from their predecessors. Such hurried evolution has brought with it many periods of transformation, some of which might be considered a golden age. Certainly, the 1970s and 1980s were seen as a golden age for arcade games, the cultural influence of which can still be seen in mobile games.
The 1990s was an era in which the creative potential of developers remained constrained by the limited capabilities of early consoles and domestic computers. The developers of the 8-bit era made the most of the hardware available to them, and pixelated arcade style games seemed quite cutting edge at the time. But the technology just wasn’t sufficient to deliver rich, immersive playable spaces: a developer’s imagination and what could actually be made into a game were worlds apart.
This all changed in the mid-2000s with the advent of triple-A (or AAA) video games. These are usually developed by major studios and publishers, involving large development teams and budgets. Triple-A titles deliver what most players now want from video games: narrative-driven, compelling gameplay set in expansive, immersive game worlds. Triple-A titles are big, beautiful blockbusters – they have done to video games with Hollywood did to cinema. While the late 1990s hosted a few titles that could be labelled triple-A, such as Final Fantasy VII (1997), such titles were a dime a dozen (or rather, at least €70 a pop) a decade later.
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There have been many great triple-A games including Rockstar's hugely successful and critically acclaimed Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption series, the Assassin's Creed franchise by Ubisoft, the Mass Effect games, Skyrim, The Witcher III, Horizon Zero Dawn and Ghost of Tsushima. In the early 2000s, online roleplaying games like World of Warcraft also emerged. The Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG) genre offered people vast, virtual fantasy worlds which they could inhabit alongside hundreds of thousands of other players.
The last two decades have been, then, a golden age for video games, but that golden age is over. While there's still a steady stream of Triple-A titles released each year, the allure isn’t the same. Part of the problem is that games are all feel so similar now, with many new titles offering little more than re-skinned and re-packaged versions of successful predecessors. Tried and tested game mechanics have become stale, as evidenced by the waning popularity of the MMORPG, which developers have been unable to reinvent.
Where the games of the last 20 years represent a major advance on the arcade classics of the 1970s and 1980s, that advancement has started to slow (if not stopped entirely). Just look at Elden Ring, a massive, big-budget production released in 2022 for which George R. R. Martin penned the backstory. The game is beautiful, but its mechanics feel like something from 2004: hit one button to dodge, the other to attack. It’s a common complaint: you’re either dodging or parrying then countering. Rinse and repeat (oh, and collect some stuff).
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Where Horizon: Zero Dawn was a triumph of original play and storytelling, Horizon: Forbidden West is the essentially the same game, but with a few extra gadgets and stuff underwater. Assassin's Creed Origins was well-received by consumers, so they changed the setting (from Egypt to Greece) and re-released it as Odyssey. Then, they re-released Odyssey as Valhalla (this time set in Norway and Britain). Same game with the same repetitive quests and systems, just different settings (and lots of bugs).
There was a time we didn’t notice the repetition and mimicry because we were in awe of the beauty and scale of games. But now, beauty and scale are the norm, so great games need something more. Something we’re not so used to. Video games just feel so tired now.
Truly great games just feel original. Even if they borrow or build on the mechanics of older and other games, they draw players into their world in a way that only the most immersive of stories can achieve. There was a time when consumers could expect such a game at least once a year – that is a golden age.
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Start in the early 2000s, and think through, year-by-year, all the great games. Every year, there was at least one release which in some significant way sets itself apart from everything that has come before. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and World of Warcraft (2004); Shadow of the Colossus and Resident Evil 4 (2005); Medieval II: Total War and Gears of War (2006); BioShock and Assassin’s Creed (2007); Fallout 3 (2008), Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2009); Mass Effect 2 and Red Dead Redemption (2010); Skyrim and Minecraft (2011); Far Cry 3 and Journey (2012); The Last of Us and GTA V (2013); Destiny, This War of Mine and Diablo III (2014); Bloodborne and The Witcher III (2015); No Man's Sky and Dark Souls III (2016); Breath of the Wild and Horizon: Zero Dawn (2017), Red Dead Redemption 2 and God of War (2018).
But around 2018 or so, the supply lines changed. There have been good games, even some great ones, published since then, but rattling them off as a lengthy list is not easily done.
Those studios that are still considered to be masters of their craft – Rockstar, for one – are adopting increasingly lengthy development cycles so that they can ensure their reputation for quality gameplay and storytelling remains intact. Fans of Grand Theft Auto have now been waiting ten years for a new instalment (aside from the money-spinning online version of GTA V). Rockstar took eight years to develop and release Red Dead Redemption 2, the follow-up to Red Dead Redemption. This is understandable, as making a great game take time, money, and commitment. In the meantime, players are stuck with the annual rehash of some once-great blockbuster.
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And so ends the golden age - but golden ages can begin anew.
Television is often considered to have had a golden age in the post-war era, beginning with the first broadcast of Kraft Television Theatre in 1947 and ending with the conclusion of Playhouse 90 in 1961. Both live anthology dramas (Broadway-style productions that aired live on TV), they represented a time when television was truly about storytelling, about the craft of imagined people and struggles. But around the turn of century, television started into its second golden age with the release of shows like The Sopranos, The Wire and Breaking Bad. One might argue that we are still enjoying this second golden age.
Maybe we have to wait for a new generation of digital storytellers, designers and developers to emerge
Video games will have another golden age, but it’s difficult to predict when that might begin. A moment of struggle for triple-A titles might allow smaller, independent developers to have a golden age of their own. Maybe virtual reality will finally move from feeling like a passing fad to something more. Or maybe we have to wait for a new generation of digital storytellers, designers, and developers to emerge, a new generation capable of giving us narrative experiences we can’t yet imagine.
While the first consoles and computers didn’t possess the hardware necessary to realise the creative ambitions of developers, now it seems that the technology has surpassed the studios. What’s possible is now constrained by the limits of the storytellers themselves. Whatever the future holds for video games, for the moment at least, it seems that the form’s greatest days are now its past.
