If you haven't played Arkane's Prey (2017), do so.

Having played System Shock and games like it since the original came out, it's a very good successor to it, closer in concept than Bioshock was and very well done.

Prey is _the_ high watermark for this kind of game, I was so surprised to hear what a commercial failure it was, but it's such a work of art. The sense of exploration, dread & mystery, the weirdness of finding the first ending, then the next ending, then the next...

And yeah, I started replaying Bioshock a few weeks back - aesthetic is still lush but it's thin, much more of a combat game - you have to git gud more than I remember.

I never understood why big publishers not throwing money at smaller studios and why older game designers are sidelined. Imagine Scorsese not getting funding after Goodfellas... mind boggling.

It's like a no brainer. Get Warren Spector on board, give him a black suitcase and order as many strawberry cakes as he want. Let him assemble a small team, and give them 3 years of devtime with an established engine, and 20 hours of gameplay max. Let it roll.

Nooo, somehow that's not possible when 200 mill usd AAA games are coming off the assembly line.

As much as I'd like to see that, Spector's entire output since Thief 3 has been Epic Mickey and consulting for the abysmal crowdfunded Ultima Underworld spiritual successor, and who knows how much involvement he actually had with the latter. As legendary as these game designers are, you can easily see why big publishers would be leery of their ability to reiterate their past success in a completely different modern development environment, after all that time.

This is true of other legends as well. Brian Reynolds' entire career for the last decade has been FrontierVille at Zynga; I would not trust him with a new Rise of Nations nor a new Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri. At this point, I'm not sure if anyone could be trusted with those franchises of yesteryear. On the flip side, the fans gave Chris Roberts one of the highest-crowdfunded projects in history and look at the state of Star Citizen. Heck, even Carmack is more interested in VR and other technical challenges than making a new Rage, let alone Doom.

At some point you have to let the past go and hope that new designers will rise to the challenge. Hopefully inspired by those legends of the past.

If I remember right WS always wanted to do a third game, but EA (I think they had the rights back then) never gave the green light.

Btw, it's a team effort. Most of the time the unknown team members matter a lot.

There are ample good indie games/designers pop up every year who could use some funding.

I agree, I think big publishers/studios deserve most of the blame for mismanagement, misaligned incentives, and risk-adverse behavior. I actually do agree with the proposal of showering devs, both past legends looking to make new games (such as Julian Gollop) and unknown indies, would be a great way to break out of the current bloated AAA process.

But I just think that appealing to past glories is looking at things with overly rose-tinted glasses. When you start to listen to war stories from a lot of the game designers from past hit games, you start to realize many of those titles were lightning in a bottle. I listened to a good interview with Clint Hocking of Splinter Cell fame and it basically established that it and Chaos Theory were made under very specific and strict circumstances, back when he was young and able to power through 70 hour weeks, unblinkingly, creating a new type of stealth game that hadn't existed before.

I'd love it if big studios tried to do that with seasoned designers by giving them fat stacks of cash and the mandate to make experiments as they like, but I doubt that they will usually yield the same level of greatness. (Not to mention, a lot of these designers might not even want to return to their past IPs- didn't know that Spector was, after Invisible War was a disappointment.) The originals were products of their times. It's a messy process.

It's a bit like dark matter. It's there, it's not visible, yet somehow pulls the fun out of games.

Okay I’m trying to engage with your posts in good faith but that is a one-line content-less banality that could be made in response to any number of points I’ve brought up in the past two comments, it’s like chatbot generated text.

Yes, that is a very banal truism which is a teeny tiny subset of my post.