Responding to the post: "The problem isn't DICE, it's the community"

 So, I came across this post on reddit, but didn't get to it fast enough in time to respond to it and it got locked. And given this is very much...blog material given my blog at this point extends to gaming discussion if it has some deeper intellectual merit, and given I've posted on several adjacent topics, I wanted to give my thoughts here. 

 You can read the full post on the above link, but I'll copy the TLDR, as while I agree with the premise of the discussion, I very much don't think he made a positive argument for modern gaming, and I would actually hit the red button here to some degree.

 TL;DR: BF6 maps take longer because they’re way more complex. Paid DLC doesn’t fix that; it only adds paywalls. You won’t get BF4-style map quantity unless you accept BF4-level simplicity. You can’t have 2026 fidelity and 2013 output speed. The end.

 So...first. Let's discuss the obvious. DLC. This post was made in response to the myriad of whiners in the community going on about how paid DLC was SOOOO much better than live service. Hard disagree. Even if we got more content, it was more expensive. people are complaining we'd be on our way to getting our 3rd DLC if we were on BF4's release schedule, and how we got so much more content back then. The argument is live service is worse because the content is free, which disincentivizes businesses from making it. I would actually somewhat agree with the premise, but you know what? FINE. 

I HATED DLC. I HATED season passes. I'd rather get 1-2 maps free every few months, than have to pay almost double for a game to get the full experience. And from what I understand the business model wasnt that successful anyway, since only a small minority actually bought and played the premium maps. IIRC, origin actually gave a lot of them away later for free just to get people playing them again. 

But yeah, DLC sucked. I hated it, I'm glad it failed as a business model and largely disappeared. I'd rather get half the content for free, than to get 2x as much but then have to also pay 2x as much. I paid $90 for BF4 back in the day with the premium. It was one of the few games I ever bought with it since i despised the model, but I just loved BF so much I shelled out for it. I paid $40 for BF2042 and $50 for BF6. I paid as much for BF4 as I paid for 2 BF games, and that's with inflation. F premium. Even if BF4 was a very good game in part because of the strong level of support. 

Now, with that out of the way, let's address the post. Basically, this guy is saying even if we changed the model, we couldn't get more content now because gaming takes more time to make maps. Okay. Well...I am VERY opinionated on 2020 gaming and think that games being too ambitious is part of the problem. I've previously discussed my idea of peak gaming, and how the ever increasing complexity of games is making development cycles more expensive, last longer, and also require increasingly ridiculous hardware demands while the price of computing is also going up due to moore's law. Basically, this guy is saying we can't have 2013 level content output any more because of this complexity. 

And...you know what? Go back to 2013. or, more specifically, 2016-2018. Still gen 8, still beautiful looking, better than 4, but not as good as modern games in theory. Because let's face it, I barely notice the difference these days. As I've said lately, I hate how modern games look anyway. Developers in modern game play cycles make games have such good fidelity on paper that gamers can largely no longer play them at native resolution, and the games tend to try to scale down using TAA, or FSR/DLSS by default. This makes the games extremely blurry. And you know what? I dont care how good your lighting and other effects look if the game is running at fricking 720p just to hit 60 FPS on low on a $250 GPU. I really don't. It looks like TRASH. And I keep feeling like, playing my new 2025 era games that I'm like, whats wrong with me? Why is everything so blurry, is my eyesight going back? And then I see some old game from like 2007 and it looks so much clearer even with lower graphical fidelity and I'm like "oh, it's not me, it's the game." I HATE THIS, DEVELOPERS! STOP DOING IT! I don't give AF about your art style, if games look blurry AF on reasonable hardware. I swear, we are seeing the downfall of gaming with this stuff. And I almost kinda wish for a video game crash like the 1980s, where these big budget blockbuster games fail because they bite off more than they can chew and their business model becomes unsustainable, so that the market resets to something that works.

I don't want to wait until 2029 for TES6. I don't want to wait until the 2030s for fallout 5. It used to be in gen 7 that you could pump out a new game every 2 years or so. Don't believe me? Oblivion, 2006, Fallout 3, 2008, Fallout New Vegas, 2010, Skyrim, 2011. Now it takes 5-10 years just to make one. I'd rather have more content at lower fidelity....than to keep doing this 2020s era BS.

Btw, since that post from last month about modern games being blurry, I looked into modern AA methods and why we dont use the old ones like MSAA. And it's the same arguments this guy is making above. The technology of modern games is different. It's supposed to be better, but in terms of anti aliasing, I think it's markedly inferior. Because it DOES basically impose blur on the player. TAA is horrible. It's such a joke this is the default. It's SOOO BLURRY. AMD's suite of ideas like FidelityFX CAS and FSR are better, but not perfect. Apparently DLSS and its AA version, DLAA are great, but you need to buy nvidia which is overpriced for that. And yeah I know some are gonna say I should've bought nvidia, but I shouldnt have had to pay 50% more just to get games to be less blurry. I just want good old native resolution. I HATE this new tech. Again, if we could go back to like 2016 or so, that would be great. I always hated this modern tech, it's always been forced on me, and when you're like "oh but you see, you gotta go back to like 2013 to not have these issues with modern gaming" like it's an own I'll say DO IT, DO IT NOW! SLAM THE RED BUTTON, SLAM IT! Because to me, those games still look good. Again, ideally I'd go like 2016-2018, but the point is, I would go back to before this modern crap existed. I dont think games in the 2020s look appreciably better than that stuff, if anything, they look WORSE because of this stuff. While being more demanding. Again, peak gaming. Learn about it.

So yeah. The 2010s can keep their crappy DLC business practices, but if the problem really is the 2020s era tech being so hard to use, yeah, go back to the previous gen and stay there. I'd rather have my games look reasonably good and get content in a reasonable time frame than for it to take months and years to make content only for the games to look like crap at the end of the day anyway. That's my take at least.  

As for the community...is OP right about the community? Yes. And I've stated my own thoughts already on this. This community is in a state of collective delusion and bashing the best game we've had in a decade. Now they're screeching over content release cycles (which are pretty standard and reasonable tbqh) and going on about how DLC is better. I think it's wild we literally got a group of people defending DLC as a model. It sucked then, I'm glad its gone. And again, if the devs listen to these people, they're gonna ruin the game. Their views arent based on reality but on some weird sense of nostalgia about how great the game used to be while not living in the same reality as the rest of us. I like the classics too but I aint completely and utterly delusional about them either.