Any weird/controversial opinions? I’ll start. Before the remake, the best version of Resident Evil 4 was the Wii version. The Wiimote controls old Resi’s tank controls better than any other controller at the time. The PC version had a bunch of little bugs and detractors that the Wii version just doesn’t have.
I’ll extend this by saying that the Wiimote is actually pretty damn good for shooters, and particularly good for accessibility. Not having to cramp up my hands to press buttons is awesome for having arthritis. Aiming with the Wiimote and moving with the nunchuck just feel really natural, you barely have to move your fingers for anything.
What was the collapse?
If we consider the golden age of video games to be between 2007 and 2013, a lot of the stuff that caused that era to be so extraordinary was companies taking risks and succeeding at making something people had never seen before. Part of the fall from there was that companies stopped taking risks because they found massively successful formulas. Another part of the fall was companies realizing that video games could have a 10 year lifecycle. That meant that video games became an investment that had a far longer window for success or failure so the successes would pay off far longer and the failures would hurt that much worse, so staying with established formulas and making things more vanilla paid off more than taking risks.
Valve did a lot of smart things in focus testing and sanding off rough edges back when there were some really bad examples of rough edges breaking good games, but eventually everyone was sanding so much that everything was a fisher price toy.
If the formulas were so successful, everyone would be doing the same thing. I’d argue that Golden Age of Video Games is more so now than the far past. It’s an Age where anyone can make a video game and be recognized as being among the greatest games of all times.
Also, companies definitely take risks. They take a lot of risks, it’s just that a lot of those risks don’t necessarily play out and we never really hear about it. If you only focus on the largest companies putting their entire company on the line, then that company wouldn’t have been so successful in the past anyways. Risk doesn’t make a game good and honestly, with stuff like Game Pass these days, developers are way more likely to make riskier games when they don’t need to make a return on that game to actually keep going. For instance, Pentiment by Obsidian, in their own words, would have never been a thing if things were as they were in the early 2010s.