In a year otherwise flying the flag for “why you should be getting into video games” (minus the mobile market, anyway), it would take something mighty stinky to divert enough attention away from the good stuff.
But that pendulum swings both ways.
The vast majority of developers and publishers have cottoned onto which genres and formulas work, and from Spider-Man to God of War, Sekiro to Devil May Cry, pure mechanical innovation is pretty thin on the ground.
For the most part it’s not an issue – being somewhat bereft of new control schemes didn’t hurt the aforementioned games one bit – but it does mean that the difference between a 7/10 game and a 6/10 game is bigger than ever.
Either you’re going to check something out for a few hours or through to completion, or you just never will. Where one of the worst things you can become is forgotten, even notable trainwrecks like No Man’s Sky can eventually be good; their buzzworthy names generating interest and headlines when “fix all” updates do come around.
For the likes of the following though? In many cases they’re losing millions of dollars through poor planning or conceptual mishaps, and when we’re this far into the generation, that just won’t do.
