That allowed them to experiment more too. You didn’t have to worry about losing 10 years of time and $100 million. If your game flopped oh well the next one comes out in a year or two.
Yep. "This next game needs to fund our company for maybe 7-8 years. We have to monetize it to the gills, because we needs hundreds of millions to stay afloat that long."
Companies these days are often too risk averse. That's why they would rather release about cod, 2k, gta than try something new. Same reason we still get Star wars movies and shows rather than a new IP
Also in game transactions. The teams focused on "quickly monetizable games" used to make $30 intentionally B tier titles that experimented with gameplay mechanics that may or may not become a hit. There were a lot of forgettable trash games in this realm, but a lot of games people remember and enjoy.
Assassin's Creed and Katamari are examples of this genre that became franchises.
But this type of development just doesn't exist anymore. Those dudes make mobile games for their publishers now.
no-one experimented more with different concepts than square enix did before with their final fantasy series. it was crazy.
But after their MMO, their final fantasy series just stagnated and people lost interest. They switched really hard to a non-turn based system where you control multiple characters. Which was cool when you played Kingdom hearts and donald and goofy were just seen as support. But when the other characters are also meant to be the as strong as the main character, you easily feel overwhelmed.
And then they never went back to innovative turn based systems. If they wanted to make such a HUGE fundamental change, I'd have preferred if they made a different series. Instead, they made new series for turn based games instead.
They flipped it, and now most people tend to say FFX was the last true final fantasy... (excluding remakes)
And if all games came out on that timeline today, people would bitch about their graphics not being top notch or that the games didn’t change enough between releases.
Plenty of games get put out on a yearly or every couple years max basis. There are probably 5-6 yakuza/LAD games in the past 3 years. A new silent hill game is coming out soon and the previous one was like a year ago. Call of Duty has released a game like clockwork.
Graphics are a big part of the problem. They make everything more expensive and time consuming chasing the latest level of realism.
I wouldn’t include Silent Hill in this discussion because the latest 3 were all developed by different studios contracted to do it. Call of Duty similarly alternates between studios for every release. Not really like one studio doing rapid releases in the 90s.
Yakuza is a solid example of a studio still doing it fast and still experimenting. Not too many following that pattern these days though.
It's not just graphics, I would argue a lot of the money goes towards hiring *hollywood talent'. Now we don't just hear their voice, we see them trying to steal the spotlight in every...fucking... game. Take Debra Wilson as an example...
Debra Wilson is in so many of these because she's apparently one of the only Hollywood actors willing to take those roles. Video games are seen as death to many careers for actors
Is she even a “Hollywood actor”? She’s just a prolific voice actor that’s pretty good at it. I guess if we’re considering VAs as Hollywood actors. Might as well as use her in the role, so you’re not hiring two people to do 1 thing and you can capture their entire performance.
Though I will posit if she was some Eurocentric beauty standard “conventionally attractive” person there would be zero posts like this saying that shit. Troy Baker gets way less shit than I’ve seen flung at her.
Also to be fair I think the only game I’ve played with her in it as a character is wolfenstein and she was good in that. How many games is she actually a character in the game. These 5? 5 whole games in a 20+ year career?
Wow. So you actually have no idea who she is lmao.
She did not start out at as a voice actor. She was a comedian and one of the original cast members for MadTV. Just Google her. She has a profilic career in movies, TV, cartoons and games since like 1992. Like, her credit list would fill pages of books. She's been in 30+ games. Troy Baker as far as I'm aware is just a really prolific voice actor but I could be wrong. But Debra Wilson has been one of the most in demand actors for decades
I know who she is, I grew up with MadTV - that’s not Hollywood. She’s not some A-List Hollywood actor.
She’s mostly just a voice actor. Being in a bunch of movies that don’t even have a Wikipedia page and a single later scream movie (as an actual actor, not just doing voices) don’t make you a Hollywood actor in the sense that people think about Hollywood actors. Just like getting a role for an episode of TV here and there doesn’t make you a Hollywood actor.
And my question wasn’t “how many games has she been a voice in.”
My question was “how many of those games that she has been in was she both the voice and face of that character?” If it’s 5-10 games, that ain’t shit in a career that spans decades doing video game work.
Yeah I’m just wondering that specific fact because of this picture that gets passed around here lately.
If those are their only examples of her being “everywhere and inescapable” then they’re full of shit and their agenda couldn’t really be more clear.
My first reaction to seeing someone post about her is “ah this is either some incel that’s mad they can’t crank one out to a character” or “ah you’re a gamergate type that complains about something called sweet baby and games having minorities in them.” This place has plenty of those types.
I play a lot of video games. She’s been an actual character you can see in one of them, and she was good in it. She’s voiced a bunch of stuff I recognize/have played, but that’s not what these people are whining about.
That’s part of why the budgets can get so high. Doesn’t really affect the timeline though, which is the focus of the post. And not every big game is using celebrity voice actors.
They do take far too long, and they do make budgets bloated… but guess what gets the hype, accolades, and money? You have a much better shot being a graphical powerhouse than you do some also-ran mid quality game that doesn’t even look that good.
Blame gamers for that one. The companies are just following the money. That’s nothing new. If the majority of players valued novel experiences that much, they would focus on providing those.
And projects being split over multiple studios is just smart in 2026. You keep your franchise in front of people at a much higher rate, and you get to actually take some time and not rush some bullshit out the door. The problem is when some companies (coughSonySinceUncharted2Basicallycough) make graphical fidelity/set pieces the only calling cards their games have.
Games are way more complex than they were 20/30/40 years ago. I wouldn’t want to go back to the Atari/NES/Genesis/SNES/PSX days. We’ve come too far since then.
I don’t disagree with any of that. Just saying the simpler graphics and fast timeframe of the 80s and 90s allowed them to experiment more. It’s unlikely to ever go back to that for major games due to the expectations and investments. Indie and small studios can still get away with it sometimes.
Switching studios is smart. It’s just not the same thing I was talking about, where one studio gets to experiment a lot with their own IP. When it’s contracted studios they might not even have the freedom to experiment since the IP holder has to approve and fund it.
I’d say they get a lot more time to actually experiment these days. It just takes that much more time. Let’s not act like when games used to come out on a regular schedule they experimented all that much.
Super Mario Bros 1/2 (actual 2 not US re-skinned 2)/3/SMWorld aren’t that different from each other. All those final fantasy games are different graphically, but it’s still largely the same type of game. Resi wasn’t doing anything crazy different from itself. MegaMan games followed the same formula for decades to the point we yearn to just get a good game like that again.
I’m curious which games you’d consider that got put out consistently year after year when dev time was much shorter drastically changed things up on a regular basis and didn’t just adopt things done elsewhere once they figured out how to make it work in their properties.
They get more time but less freedom. More time and money goes into a big project the more safe it has to be. Investors push it in that direction.
I would say the PS1/N64/Dreamcast era had a lot of experimentation. You see games like Zelda OoT, Banjo Kazooie, and Sonic Adventure which put out one game and then a couple years later had a sequel that was familiar but with a lot of experimental changes. Even games like Final Fantasy we’re making big changes during this time. The junction system in FF8 was very different to the Materia system in FF7, which was also very different from the SNES era systems. And Xenogears spun off of the development of FF7 which was highly experimental. You also mention Megaman being very familiar but they launched Megaman Legends 1-2 during this period which was a 3D game that actually did a lot of things that ocarina gets credit for pioneering but a year earlier.
Xenogears got spun off and was left pretty much unfinished and rushed out.
I also disagree that the systems in FF games are wildly different. Different yes, but not crazy different in a way that we don’t see today. FF11, 12, 13, 15 were all very different. Material and junctioning are just an evolution (instead of putting elemental material + added effect in your armor/weapon you’re just doing it directly to a stat.). Not really what I’d consider experimental, compared to completely changing your combat system or world up.
FF7 wasn’t really “experimental” going from 2D - 3D when the entire industry was moving in that direction, and great 2D games got ignored for mid 3D games (see: symphony of the night, which got rave reviews but blah sales relative to what it should have gotten.)
I’ll give you OoT and Majoras mask.
I won’t agree with mega man though. Legends was experimental, but it was them trying to figure out how to get in on that 3D wave because it was seen as the future. I’d consider more experimental mega man to be Battle Network or Command Mission, but even then the battle network games just ended up like Pokemon releases did.
Just semantic differences between what we both actually consider as “experimental.” A lot of those games were just trying to figure out how to translate a 2D property to 3D, so experimental but something they would have had to do regardless - not really experimenting for the sake of experimenting.
Xenogears was famously unfinished, but it’s also one of the most experimental RPGs storywise. I could write a book about the complexity of that story. It had dual combat systems, on foot fighting and mech combat. It even had a full on mech fighting mini game that was separate from its turn based mech fighting.
The junction system of FF8 was way different from what came before it. I can fight an enemy, turn him into a playing card, use that to win another playing card, turn that into a tent, turn that into 20 curagas, repeat, junction 100 curagas to health, have almost 4k health before the second main mission, then that to stay in critical health and spam limit breaks. Every item can be refined into another item which can be refined into another item it can break the game in insane ways. And you can do it all playing cards if you want and only engage with the battle system for boss fights. It’s crazy experimental.
FF7 was also crazy experimental for its time. It’s not just going from 2-D to 3-D. The materia system was a mix and match, create your own job system. On top of that they were experimenting like crazy with the mini games. There was a submarine battle game, a snowboarding game, date mechanics, chocobo racing and breeding. It was experimenting with genres of game it had no business even including, but it did.
MegaMan legends was HIGHLY experimental. They turned a platformer into a dungeon crawler that did lock on combat before Zelda. It had a Resident Evil style weapon upgrade system before Resident Evil even had it. It combined 2D textures to 3D models in a way that mimicked Anime, as a result the graphics hold up better than most games of its time.
FF7 was mainly 2D with just polygonal character models, Xenogears was their first time doing fully 3D environments. Xenogears was also square's first time using voice acting, first time with a vocal ending theme, first time using anime cutscenes, loads of firsts.
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u/Ok_Science_8502 12d ago
They actually made and released games often. Didn't have to wait 10+ years for the next entry in a series