Summary
- Modern games are too expensive and lengthy to make, leading to unsustainability in the triple-A game industry.
- Shorter development cycles and more frequent releases, like Insomniac Games, offer relief from the long waits for games.
- Kingdom Hearts series' downfall linked to longer development times, lack of smaller experimental games & more frequent releases.
Modern games are too expensive and take too long to make. This isn’t an opinio🎐n that’s going t🐻o blow anyone’s mind at this point. It’s pretty easy to see how unsustainable the triple-A game industry has become.
When a massive studio like 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Volition can fold entirely overnight, when a game like Alan Wake 2 can be a massive award-winning critical success and sell over a million copies in a few months and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:still be a commercial failure, and when every publisher from Warner Bros. to Sony is taking a huge gamble in the already saturated live-service market because they’re too scared to invest in single-player games (even after having massive hits like Hogwarts Legacy) it’s cl🐻ear that there’s a big problem with the way games are made these days.
Not long ago I called 168澳洲幸꧃运5开奖网:Insomniac Games the future of triple-A. Its commitment to shorter games and frequent releases has been a breath of fresh air amidst the typical ten-year development cycle the big studios are all stuck in n👍ow. The first three Uncharted games all came out in the span of four years, now we wait a decaꦅde for Cyberpunk 2077, just so it can disappoint.
1ꦦ68澳洲幸运5开奖网: Kingdom Hearts Is Too Hard To Get Into 🙈
Trying to ꧑brea🔯k into Kingdom Hearts is a nightmare.
The expectation is that longer development times and bigger budgets will lead to bigger, better games, but that often isn’t the case. The longer we wait, the more disappointing 🐻it is when the game doesn’t turn out to be a mind-blowing, transformative experience. A game like Starfield wouldn’t be so heavily criticized if there hadn’t been so much hype built up over suc🧔h a long time. This is the downfall of many mediocre triple-A games released today, from Saints Row to Halo Infinite to Dead Island 2, but the series that suffers the most from the way games are made today has got to be Kingdom Hearts.
Kingdom Hearts 3, a real disappointment of a game, if you ask me, debuted 14 years after Kingdom Hearts 2. Of course, that’s not the whole story. There were six games released between K𝐆ingdom Hearts 2 and 3, not including the HD remaster collections, the remakes of Chain of Memories and Coded, and the mobile games. For the first 15 years of Kingdom Hearts there was a new game almost every year, with the longest break between releases being just under two.
Most Kingdom Hearts games are pretty bad. Even as a diehard fan, it’s easy to admit that games like Coded, 358/2 Days, and Re: Chain of Memories are all pretty lousy. That said,🐽 they’re not irredeemable, and they all have their own charms if you’re willing to give them the time. The early years of Kingdom Hearts were full of experimentation that demonstrated a willingness to try and fail. That has its own value. But in the modern game development landscape, there’s just no room for messing around. Studios have to be more risk-averse today, and you can see how that has affected Kingdom Hearts as a series.
Those early Kingdom Hearts games worked because they came out so frequently. They could tell small stories that helped build the bi𒊎gger arc, and they could have weird one-off mechanics and niche appeal. Chain of Memories is an action card game, and it’s hard to imagine Square spending the time and resources 🌼on a game like that today.
The seven year gap between Dream Drop Distance and Kingdom Hearts 3 was the most damaging thing to Kingdom Hearts 3’s reputation. Those seven years𒐪 led to high expectations for gameplay innovatไion and narrative payoff that the threequel was never going to deliver. Now we’re five years removed from 3 and anticipating Kingdom Hearts 4, but without the little games to fill the gap, it feels like we’re just getting set up for another disappointment.
I mis🍰s the days when games were smaller, weirder, and worse. The Kingdom Hearts fandom was built on lots of little, kinda lousy games, and it doesn’t seem like the series can sustain itself on big event titles like Kingdom Hearts 3 that take nearly a decade to make. The gachapon mobile games have not managed to fill that gap, and I don’t have a lot of hope that the Pokemon Go-style Missing-Link coming this year will be able to tide us over either. I don’t know if Kingdom Hearts 4 will be good, but I do know I’d enjoy it more if I didn’t have to wait so long to play it.
