I’ve been pretty upset with the state of AAA gaming with the pricing increase and the rather shaky launches, but my time with a couple February releases this year has given me a couple reasons to try and stay positive.
I worry a lot about the state of gaming with some of the turns it takes, but I think that taking a step back and giving a look from some other perspectives can help curb my fears. This is, of course, not to be used to excuse things like crunch time in development and greedy microtransactions in games that have plagued gaming for most of the 21st century. The story today comes courtesy of two big hits during February that came at $70 price tags—Sid Meier’s Civilization 7 and Monster Hunter Wilds.
The two games came out far enough together that I had a good amount of time to play them both, but their same month release date meant it was a really bad hit to my budget. Fortunately, I was kindly gifted Civilization 7 by a friend (more on that later). The two games are a very good example of what I imagined when hearing $70 games and were emblematic of the problems I always mentioned—buggy, unoptimized, and borderline unfinished. I held the stance that a game at $70 should feel polished and full—in my eyes, the game’s full price tag is a sign that the game should meet a high standard of quality. Games like Elden Ring deserved their price tag, and other AAA games failed to hit their mark.
It was Civilization 7 that finally got me to change this perspective as I learned how my stance could be actively challenged. It was due to how I received Civilization 7—even if I was willing to break the bank on release to play the game with friends, I was gifted the game by my friend. The most important detail for this is that this friend is a developer on the team that shipped Civilization 7, which intrinsically changed my way of interacting with the product. In the traditional way, receiving a gift obviously makes me want to play it so that I don’t squander the generosity. It also, however, brought my anti-$70 stance to question as I mentioned directly when explaining it in a group chat discussing the game. The game’s release was shaky—with the natural dooming from fans over the game’s changes and how much worse it was than previous entries in the series also came a sweep of bugs and missing features that earned the game’s “Mixed” reviews on Steam, something that is echoed within the community. It was the exact thing that I argued was an issue with the $70 price tag on all games and why I never purchased any $70 games—the issue now is that this was directly opposed by a developer on the team that shipped the game.
A large level of topics and various details about what I believe in games was challenged, and since then I’ve changed. A note I made was on the classic “day-one patch” in which a game would receive a rapid bug fix within the first 24 hours to address crashes or broken features that were impossible to ignore. I am barely old enough to remember the first time this was publicized heavily—one of Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed games that was ridiculed for the need for something so soon to make the game playable. I criticized it as a lazy solution to the issue of incomplete testing and lacking QA, but my friend noted that a lot of these patches are simply to the benefit of players and a product of technology allowing for this to be possible. With the power of how well our hardware and infrastructure has gotten, the ability to push frequent updates as soon as issues are apparent is a helpful tool for devs that want a lot of these issues to be fixed as soon as they can. While some amount of issue still lies with the publisher and the need to produce a finished product, the developers are still working as hard as they do in order to create the product they’ve been enjoying building. It’s that mentality that made me realize that, despite minor bugs and unavoidable visual issues, I really enjoyed my time in Civilization 7. I’ve logged over 100 hours in the game and had numerous joyous moments shared with the friends who join me for long marathon game nights. Despite the issues, the game was incredibly fun. And, with each patch from the devoted devs, the game will become better and better.
I want to highlight how Monster Hunter Wilds fits into this as well—as a game I specifically purchased at $70, it also held a certain standard of expectation that I held for it. As a testing of my new perspective, the game’s enjoyment was enough to get me to a similar playtime as I did with Civilization 7. The issue was the game’s optimization, something that many have criticized after the shift to a dynamic weather system and open map that requires a lot of space to be loaded and managed. The frame rate issues were something I worked on for a long time to get a stable experience, but even then I learned to enjoy the game that I had paid for. The updates that came didn’t improve my performance by significant margins, but I still had an enjoyable time hunting monsters at a shaky 50 fps.
While these experiences are nowhere close to universal, it gave me a more gentle perspective on the issue. While I don’t forgive some publishers for their greed and the way they can rush projects out without a completed product, I have a lot more respect for the developers behind a game and don’t turn my head away from a $70 experience just from a couple of negative reviews. My stance is a lot more complex, something I take pride in as we move into this year of gaming and I find myself more in control of my financial situation. While I take a price tag into consideration, I no longer allow it to rule my direction when it comes to purchasing games. As I’ve said before, some of the best games of our time are $20 and don’t have the issues I’ve mentioned in this article. While those experiences are amazing and I want to enjoy as many of them as I can, it’s unfair to reject the work of a lot of developers just because of the price tag. I understand this position comes from a level of privilege based on my ability to purchase $70 games as well as being gifted some, but the discussion of $70 games does need to be more nuanced in order to properly illustrate the issues that come from it as well as the benefits that can spawn.
But I still think if you haven’t you should spent the $20 and play Celeste as soon as possible.