There is a very long running problem with video games of late, one which is utterly destroying the industry. It's sad because the fans know why, but seem unable to to simply stop buying the garbage that has been released lately.
First I must demand no more zombies!!!! Seriously, this wasn't even that great in the early games, why are there so many zombie based games being bought? Stop buying them, if the theme is "zombie" then just avoid it, pretend it doesn't exist.
Zombies were used as a single and rare encounter in older games, one encounter of many. Even games like Resident Evil didn't focus on the zombie, they were just the first thing you see before the really scary stuff started chasing you.
Now they are the staple, the primary encounter. Zombies are cheap, and any bugs or glitches can be ignored as "expected zombie behavior" which excuses the laziness we now see in developers. But it's up to us gamers to stop paying for this laziness, so stop buying games where zombies are the primary protagonist.
Now the rot that this has created, while the developers have been awarded for their laziness they made it a feature of all games now. Even Minecraft is becoming one massive mess of bugs, glitches, and poorly implemented additions.
All the newest content for most of the major games are a mess, sloppy and hastily thrown together to try to remain relevant while the fans jump on the "next big thing" which ends up being a huge flop anyway. To the developers I say:
Stop worrying about the fad hoppers, they'll always come back, take your time and get back to what you love doing. The profits will always be there.
To the fans, stop jumping on fads just because the developers of said fad paid a streamer or youtuber to play their game. Preordering, getting early access, it's just a bad idea.
Games like Valheim and Last Oasis turned into huge flops, but because everyone was rushing to those the Ark developers panicked and released two buggy messes full of redundant grindfest content known as Genesis and Genesis 2.
Minecraft developers got so lazy they decided to merge into the Xbox ecosystem. This merging added so many bugs and problems that this move will actually kill off the Java version.
Conan Exiles was the first to fall prey to this problem with the release of Isle of Siptah, breaking many of the core mechanics in the game and ruining the graphics system in a sorry attempt to beat the rush to newer games. The only games that seem to maintain composure during this mess are Guild Wars 2 and Final Fantasy 14.
I don't like FF14 anymore, but it's not because they rushed the production, it's because one of the stories they released broke the lore too much for me to appreciate. GW2 is going strong though, looking forward to the End of Dragons expansion, even pre-ordered it because I trust they'll release it when it's finished and not a day sooner.
So what made the successful ones so great before they broke? Newness, that's it, they each offered something completely new to the genres they focused on.
But all of the newer games are not doing that, Last Oasis tried but it was too little of a thing to build an entire game from. Valheim was just a low end version of Conan Exiles, so I have no idea why anyone even thought that was worth the purchase.
But in spite of the mistakes made by the developers, the primary fault lies in the fans. Everyone flocking to something that's "the best new thing" and then never returning to the games that still hold up in spite of their flaws hurts the developers, they think they lost everyone to a fad so they start moving to projects that are just more short term fads.
This makes game development a fool's game.
