In my previous opinion piece discussing the change in game design, I lamented about how the video game industry, as it continues to grow and succeed, has lost focus on what the appeal of video games are – namely, to have fun. Fun, while an abstract concept that gets harder and harder to describe as I get older, used to not only be the justification for why we play video games, but why video games were produced. Why was Mario a plumber, jumping on turtles heads and traveling through pipes? Because it was cool and sounded like a fun game. Why is there a super fast blue hedgehog that needs to collect rings in order to not die? Because it’s awesome. Early video game design did not know the rabbit hole that is ‘immersion’ and ‘polish’. You could create a video game with a dozen people and a budget under $100,000. Hell, indie games do this nowadays all the time. But it seems that the current trend is to make only 10/10 video games – a game so polished, so immersive, so big budget that it is impossible to fail. The budget for God of War Ragnarok was (reportedly) $200 million. The budget for The Witcher 3 was (reportedly) $81 million. Assassin’s Creed Shadows (estimated) $300 million. I really enjoyed God of War 2018. I love every Assassin’s Creed game to date. I really enjoyed The Witcher 2 and 1. But I miss the days of the AA video game – the 7/10 – the dark horse, shot in the dark, passion project that felt like they were throwing everything at the wall and seeing what stuck. I miss when video games were for fun.

The video game that always comes to mind when I think about 7/10 video games is Darksiders (both the first and second). Darksiders was a product of an incredible concept (the apocalypse was incorrectly heralded and you, War, are stuck on earth), and incredibly derivative gameplay (think legend of Zelda mixed with devil may cry/ god of war). Darksiders was a gorgeous game with artwork done by comics industry great Joe Madureira (Joe Mad), had an NPC voiced by Mark Hamill of all people, and was as close to playing 3D Legend of Zelda as you could get on Xbox 360. The combat was visceral, weighty, and rewarding. The puzzles were clever and innovative. The game design and level layout were easily recognizable and diverse, didn’t involve too much back tracking and felt like there were new things around every corner. The lore and character design were unique, and, to this day, I believe the best depiction of Angels and Demons is from Darksiders (sorry Todd!). But, alas it didn’t take the industry by storm, and had some really odd pacing issues and poorly-fleshed out mechanics like the horse and the huge guns you had to use in the city section at the end of the game. In spite of all that, the game was FUN! And you could tell that the people involved in the making of the game were having fun as well. It was the game that they wanted to make, in the way they wanted to make it. Yes, Darksiders 2 would be released a few years later and completely change the gameplay loop (this time, ditching the DMC/GoW influence for Diablo and Prince of Persia), but retain all of the pacing issues are underbaked second half. But this franchise is the epitome of AA 7/10 video games, and nowadays, when you can buy the remastered editions for $20 or less on PSN/ Xbox Marketplace, is well worth the pickup. I have yet to get around to Darksiders 3 or the one with Strife (even though I own both of them!) but I’m sure I would love them just as much. 

Pivoting a little and moving away from the AA 7/10 game, I’d look to take a closer look at AAA 7/10 games, or at least mechanics in those games that I believe to be 7/10. Sly 3 Honor Among Thieves had a metric shit-ton of half baked mechanics and gameplay elements that, as a whole, probably detracted from the overall score of the video game – but in my eyes, made the game super fun and enjoyable. Jumping on the back of a guard as the Guru and running him off a cliff was hilarious for 9 year old me, and I must’ve played the Outback level for hours. The sailing mini game was super fun, as well as the flying mini game in the biplane – even though both felt tacked on. The first person swimming as Dimitri gave me motion sickness and made me want to vomit – but I still remember it fondly years later. Sly 3 felt like a ‘last-hurrah’, even way back in 2005 I think we all knew in the back of our minds that this would be the last Sly Cooper game (minus Sly 4 which I loved dearly), and all of the tacked on mini-games really felt like they were just having fun coming up with wacky antics for the gang to get up to. There is a level of charm to a video game when the developers are just trying mechanics out and seeing what works and what doesn’t. In the era of shareholders and excess, video games don’t have the luxury of adding things that aren’t super polished or thought out. Every part of the game gets thoroughly play tested, vetted by analysts and consultants, and ultimately ran in front of the board of shareholders in the early planning stage. Look at early assassins creed games – starting with Brotherhood they would have a multiplayer game mode with abilities on cool-down and feature assassination targets from the single-player campaign. Was the multiplayer particularly good? No, not really – but that didn’t stop 14 year old me from playing for hours and hours, even going so far as to make classes themed around Iron Maiden song titles. Just because a concept isn’t a 10/10 doesn’t mean you should ‘trim the fat’ and throw it away – some of these mechanics would be used in later games to great effect. Look at the sailing introduced in Sly 3 – that sailing, I believe, can be directly followed into Assassin’s Creed 3, Black Flag, Origins and Odyssey, even into Sea of Thieves and Skull and Bones. Without some guy from Sucker Punch in 2003-2004 saying ‘Sly in a pirate hat would look hilarious’, we might not have ended up with these great open-world pirate simulators.

I know I am not alone in this mentality: there have been dozens of articles and videos already on this topic (shoutout NakeyJakey’s “In Defense of the 7/10 Games“), but I don’t think this is a trend that is changing any time soon. Video games are only getting more expensive to produce (whether that is valid or not is a whole other can of worms), and no one wants to be the one to produce a game that doesn’t make profit. This coupled with the fact that games are getting more expensive to purchase, and gamers are also having less patience with “bad games”. Maybe I need to shift my mentality, and delve deeper into the world of Indie Games, similar to what I have been doing with Comic Books, but I think there is a happy medium that can be cultivated. Tainted Grail: Fall of Avalon appears to be a spiritual successor to the AA video game, and Clair Obscur and Balders Gate 3 are great examples of dark horses taking the industry by storm. For the time being, I’m going to go back and play Darksiders 1 and remember a time when there was such a thing as ‘good enough’.