The Wednesday letters page fears that VR gaming may be dead for another generation, as one reader wishes 8-bit classic Elite would get a big budget reboot. Games Inbox is a collection of our readers’ letters, comments, and opinions. To join in with the discussions yourself email gamecentral@metro.co.uk
Out of fashion
Depressing, but not surprising news, about how single-player games aren’t selling right now. I know it was July they were talking about but why wasn’t Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced in the top 20? We were told that did well and yet it was nowhere to be seen on PlayStation 5, beaten by a bunch of multiplayer games I didn’t even realise were still going.
The only thing I hold to is that these things seem to go in and out of fashion, with a big hit suddenly reminding publishers that people do like this sort of game. EA seem to have gone back and forth on the concept a bunch of times over the years. I can only think of Capcom though, who just truck on making whatever they want, most of which is single-player only, and everyone seems quite happy to buy it. But I’m going to guess their budgets are a lot more sensible than a lot of these big US games. $400 million for Gears Of War: E-Day seems like insanity to me.
Warm-up act
I enjoyed the Fire Emblem games on 3DS, but I really think that was the best format for the series. Unless Nintendo is going to give the Switch games a proper budget they just look so cheap and basic. I could easily see the games running on an Xbox 360 or Wii and we’re at a point now where a lot of indie games look better than that.
Its real problem though, is it’s just another Nintendo game that you’ve got to get out of the way until you get to the good stuff. I think that’s why they’re not talking about Zelda or The Duskbloods yet, because they know that as soon as people are properly look forward to those they’ll just ignore Fire Emblem and the other minor games completely.
Customer retention
I can see what Microsoft is trying to do with all this Xbox 360 games on PC and creating a disc-to-digital system, but it’s not going to work. They’ve realised that one of the main reasons for people sticking with one family of consoles now is so they don’t lose their collection of games from previous generations. But I really don’t think people are going to spend £1,000+ on Project Helix, just so they can play Blinx: The Time Sweeper on it.
You’d prefer to keep all your games, but I don’t think it’s going to keep many people from abandoning what is clearly a sinking ship. Not that I think anyone’s going to be in a hurry to spend the same on PlayStation 6, but at least they won’t rule it out completely.
Nothing new
RE: Valve and consoles. As well as the Half-Life and Portal games they released the two Left 4 Dead games, with EA handling the physical Xbox 360 releases, which were very popular and Counter-Strike on console. Most of their catalogue has shown up on console, they’re not a prolific publisher on any format.
The reason why they’re all old is because Valve pulled back somewhat from making games a long time ago, mores the pity. Many of us hoped Half-Life 3 would stop being a meme with the Steam Machine release but alas not. The 18 year wait since Half-Life 2: Episode Two continues. But while games were more of a priority many made their way to console and I think that would probably be the case today if they were more active in game development. Even though the walled garden and exclusives of consoles runs counter to their philosophy of an open ecosystem.
Cost of gaming crisis
As if the recent announcements about Sony going digital-only was not bad enough, and Microsoft increasing the price of the Xbox, now both Nvidia and AMD have announced GPU price increases for PCs. I guess my old Radeon RX 6650 XT GPU is going to have to last longer. Hopefully the rest of my PC will be as reliable as the wireless Xbox 360 controller I still use to this day for it.
Reality’s end
I was reading rumours about how the price of Valve’s new VR headset has also gone through the roof, to the point where it’s going to be thousands of dollars, like Apple’s attempt at one. I’m not sure if it’s definitely still coming out but it seems obvious that it will be one of the last attempts to make VR games a thing. Not even that, it’s probably just a pet project by Valve that they don’t expect to sell to ordinary people.
For a minute there it seemed like VR was really going to break through. The PlayStation ones were both really good, inside and out, and the Meta ones were nice and cheap. They also put a ton of money into making games, which was really important as they realised that you’ve got to have the software to support the hardware. It didn’t work out though, as we all know, which is a shame as I think some of it was bad timing, with the cost of living crisis and now the component crisis… basically too many crises, where the last thing most people were thinking about was spending hundreds on gaming hardware that might flop.
VR has been hovering around on the edge of being mainstream for decades now and I do worry that this last chance was the final one. Hardware is only getting more expensive nowadays, so if they tried it again I think things would only get worse. It’s a shame but it seems the future just isn’t happening.
Rumour control
So I read an article saying Xbox are now thinking of not having third party sites, like Steam and Epic Games Store, selling games on Project Helix and just another Xbox. The reason is they don’t make any money off people buying their games off those sites, instead of buying the Xbox games off them. So one of the main attractions of being a hybrid PC console may be removed…what a mess.
GC: That rumour has been downgraded to merely the possibility that Microsoft were thinking about it. And they definitely do make money from sales of their own games on other websites, just not as much as if they controlled everything.
Elitist suggestion
I also enjoyed the interview with the ZX Spectrum recreation guy and it got me thinking, as it always does when this topic comes up, of how they could reboot some of these games for the modern day. I don’t really see how things like Jet Set Willy or Monty On The Run could ever work but there are some games that do seem to have much more obvious potential.
The one that stands out to me is Elite, which isn’t even a Spectrum game. It’s even older than that and was originally made for the BBC Micro! And yet it’s what we would call today an open world game, with complete freedom to go wherever you want in the galaxy and be a pirate, a smuggler, or an honest trader. For some reason it’s a concept that only really seems to have been popular in Europe, but I think that’s because the US and Japan don’t really know it exists. There’s only been a few American clones, like Privateer and Freelancer, which I think were quite successful, but that was a long time ago. There’s also Star Citizen, but I wouldn’t touch that with a bargepole. Unfortunately. Starfield has probably killed off any interest in making something similar, which is a shame as it barely scratched the surface of what Elite was and didn’t have any trading aspect at all.
I would love a big budget reboot and would be perfectly happy if they attached a licence to it. like Star Wars or Guardians of the Galaxy. Anything to just get the game made, but alas all we’ve got is Elite Dangerous, which seems to be on its last legs and was never much fun in the first place.
Inbox also-rans
It is very hard for me to imagine any scenario where a God Of War TV show ends up being good. It’s just too fantastical and weird for that and everyone’s going to end up looking silly. Poor Dave Bautista.
So basically all Sony said about the PlayStation 6 is that it’ll probably be less than £3,000. Well I’m sure my wallet is happy to hear that good news. I’ll pre-order it now.
