I Hate Modern Gaming Part 5 – Graverobbing

I haven’t owned a games console since the PS3/Xbox 360 era. That’s a little misleading, as I built a gaming PC back in 2016, and was able to play pretty much all modern releases up until the point where Steam decided they’d not only stop supporting Windows 7, but actively stop working on that OS. However, for the most part I didn’t bother, as the AAA games industry has been so bad for so long that I’ve already gone through the phase where I aggressively denounced them. At this point, I’m pretty much entirely apathetic.

I haven’t finished the above video. I have no idea if I’d agree with most of what he says, but the title and opening line resonated with me.

Imagine a time traveler went to today and said “oh boy, I can’t wait to see what new games are being released in 2026.” What would they see?

The Kingerd shows a compilation of various remakes. Halo, Assassin’s Creed, COD: Black Ops, Gears of War, Star Fox, Resident Evil, Legend of Zelda: OOT, Rayman Legends, Silent Hill, God of War, and a few others are undoubtedly not mentioned. I’ll circle back to the remakes in a second, but before we get to that, indulge me as I rant about Madden.  

I owned two games in the series growing up; Madden 99 for the N64, and Madden 10 for the PS3. I played both of them to death back in the day, and enjoyed them both for what they were. However, I would never in a million years have considered playing ’99 over ’10. By any objective measurement of quality, be that features, simulation accuracy, graphics, sound, etcetera, there was no question that Madden 10 was the superior product.

Although opinions differ as to exactly when, somewhere along the way fans stopped assuming that a new Madden game would be better than the last. Eventually, they stopped hoping. 

The modern versions are not simply broken, but missing many basic features that used to be standard in the PS2 days. This is irrelevant to EA, who churns them out in a blatant, soulless, and never ending cash grab. I get a company having a consistent moneymaker. There is a demand for yearly NFL games, and if they delivered a competent product, good for them. It’s the astonishing lack of pride in their work and borderline contempt for the customer that rankles me. Like they get a kick out of making the consumer eat slop.

If you had told my eight year old self that this would be the state of the franchise, I’d have laughed. Even in 2010 I couldm not have believed that things could get this bad. Sure, there had been some duds, but in those days the general trend of the videogame industry was ever higher cultural relevance, technical competence, and artistic merit. Nowadays the opposite is true, and it’s been that way for so long that no one bats an eye. 

It should be no surprise that Halo:CE is one of my favourite games of all time, although it is far from a perfect experience. Most notably, parts of the story are flat out missing, many combat arenas are repetitive and confusing, and parts of the sandbox are either useless or broken. It certainly is a good candidate for a remake. Luckily, it already got one. No, not the awful Halo:Anniversary edition, or the recently released Campaign Evolved. The one that was made with love, Ruby’s Rebalanced mod. 

I will never play Campaign Evolved. I appreciate the upgrade in graphical quality, although I am something of a framerate whore, who’d rather play with potato graphics at 120fps than bump mapped raybling at 60. Also, I lived through the N64/PS1 days, where the assets were of such low quality that you often had no idea what you were looking at. Graphical improvements were a huge deal then, but Halo:CE looked great back in the day, still looks great now, and while the new version generally looks better, it’s about as important to me as the garnish on my beverage.  

However, I was moderately intrigued when I heard they were making new missions. I always thought the Halo universe lent itself well to creating a ton of scenarios as in-game simulations. You could play it up like you’re running through training scenarios, and if the work was good players would love it. 

Instead, 343 Industries Halo Studios decided to make entirely new missions that ostensibly take place within the Halo universe, and should thus be considered lore. They also star Master Chief and Sgt. Johnson. I remember reading a few Halo extended universe novels as a teenager, and enjoying them. My tastes have changed, but I’ll bet they still hold up as decent action fare, and the point is that there are a lot of pre-existing stories already written with different SPARTANs that could be trivially adapted for games.  

I never liked the direction that Halo series took, in gameplay or story. The Covenant never needed to be humanized, we didn’t need to go to Earth, the flood didn’t need to be controlled by some super ancient Gravemind thing that makes no sense. Nevertheless, while Staten and Co’s writing was always hit or miss, I cringed in anticipation of Nu Halo’s cinematic brilliance. Nevertheless, I bit the bullet, and was treated to this. 

I don’t know which of these two cutscenes is worse. I always hated the prophets, from a worldbuilding standpoint, but they were never this bad. This guy below is an alien religious leader of a conglomeration of different alien species. He should be incredibly unusual, borderline incomprehensible, yet his speech feels generic and derivative. Like he’s a villain in the Marvel Cinematic Universe making a guest appearance to sell toy merchandise.

Even more normie Halo fans noticed the abysmal dialogue. It’s kind of hard not to.

9:00

So, elephant in the room. Sgt. Johnson is a one of a kind performance. David Scully, his original actor, retired, so of course they had to get someone new. What’s strange is that the replacement for Johnson in Halo Wars 2 – that was like the closest you could get to the original. It genuinely sounded like him, or at least talked like him. This performance isn’t terrible, I think it’s just that the dialogue for him is… really bad.

I gave up on the series so long ago that I bothered with 4 or 5. I played one of them on a friend’s console co-op for about thirty minutes, and that was enough. Halo, once a triumph of technology and creativity, has been turned into another Madden. I loved it as a child, but if you told ten year old me that the best we’d get was a remake of dubious quality, I would have been so disappointed I’d have probably quit gaming on the spot. 

We’ve had twenty five years to improve not just the technical aspects of gaming, but the depth of the mechanics, the quality and integration of storytelling, and everything else. In all that time, the best they’ve been able to come up with is making the same game, arguably worse. And the original was hacked together by a small group of passionate twenty something on a relatively tiny budget. 

The rot is terminal at this point. 

The layoffs, which started en masse in 2022, have shown no signs of abating. According to GamingLayoffs, they’re at almost 9,000 jobs this year alone, up 144% over where 2025 was at this point.

A lot of this is a correction, the industry cutting out the deadwood they preferentially hired starting around 2015, but really accelerating through 2020. Imagine the people you see at the NDP convention as your coworkers, and understand that this is the reality for a lot of games developers. Hopefully that explains why games no one likes and no one plays take ten years and hundreds of millions to develop.

For the record, Adrienne Smith is the name of the speaker, and I actually knew a woman who’s daughter was groomed by that thing directly over text messages into trooning out. The mother saved her daughter, at least last time I checked.

Anyway, the reason the modern games industry sucks, is because the people in the industry suck at making games. They get installed at these studios because (((Blackrock))) and (((State Street))) and (((Vanguard Capital))) and other zionist financiers monetarily reward developers for preferentially hiring their golems.

Hiring useless people is the most important factor, but there are others, and someone other than Jason Schreier could write an entertaining and important series documenting the decline. Or perhaps not, as only someone like Schreier would be given the institutional access required to cover the breadth and depth of the problem.

Whatever the combination of systemic issues, we’ve hit a new low that is almost frightening. It was one thing for individual gamers to give up on the industry, it’s another for the industry to give up on itself. We’re in some sort of Greek Fire forgotten technology situation, where the creativity, competence, and institutional structure required to make something new and wonderful no longer exists. Orient game studios as DIE jobs programs that specialize in bilking the user for long enough, and they eventually lose the institutional knowledge required to produce great art. Eventually they forget how to even try.

In the meantime, there’s not much I can do other than keep my head down and churn out Escape From Epstein Island. I’ll have another update tomorrow, continuing my switch to much shorter, more frequent articles.