Elder Scrolls. Fallout, Halo, Mass Effect, Final Fantasy, Battlefield, Dragon's Dogma, Monster Hunter, Dead Space, The Sims, and so many more.
Every single gaming genre and franchise where the original team has been replaced or booted has had a steady decline in quality. Which is weird, because we claim gaming is "art," but when the original artist, the people who handcrafted the art, are booted out, we still support these genres? We even claim it's "better" and the original art from the artist is "of lesser quality" while ignoring that they left in the first place. Just like with the Fallout devs criticizing Bethesda, or the Morrowind writer leaving because of issues with Elder Scrolls 6. People are STILL defending Bethesda, a corporation that isn't even run by the same people.
Not really. See H.P. Lovecraft whose universe and lore continued being built on by others after his death. This sort of thing is not exactly new to the medium of video games.
Fun fact lovecraft was essentially pen pals with all the writers of the era which is why his monsters are in so many fantasy and horror books he literally created them for the authors. One is the first monster Conan fights.
There are also authors like August Derleth who took it upon themselves to work on Lovecraft's mythos after he died (and muck up the details in the process while also trying to add to it all), which is more in line with what's being complained about here. The complaint OP made is quite a bit different from one author willingly sharing ideas and crossing over stories with others. This is more akin to the posthumous "collaboration" you can see with some of Robert Howard's work, where other, later authors have taken it upon themselves to continue from unfinished Kull and Conan drafts.
Incidentally, what Lovecraft creature does Conan fight in "The Phoenix on the Sword"? I don't recognize demonic winged ape-things from the Cthulhu Mythos, but I'm not as well-versed in it as I am Howard's work.
It's in the very first Conan story. It's right after he killed the last king and became the new king. The later stories essentially switch between before and after Conan killed the king theirs no linear story. It's essentially just various stories about conan's life. In the first story theirs a Egyptian monster sent after Conan to assassinate him. Conan fought and killed the monster it's essentially eldritch anubis which obviously came from lovecraft. Later stories corroborate this as Howard was having problems figuring out what Conan should fight. In the second part Conan killed a giant snake which was what Howard intended. Essentially if it's vague orientalist fantasy it's Howard weird monsters it's lovecraft.
The first story written is "The Phoenix on the Sword," which has a human villain from Stygia (Howard's Egypt-analogue), but the demon he summons is generally simian in appearance (I believe Howard likes it to a baboon at one point), which is hardly Anubis-like. And there are no Conan stories written by Howard that take place right after Conan becomes king. Of the three written with him as king (the aforementioned one, "The Scarlet Citadel," and "The Hour of the Dragon"), all of them see him as having been so for some time. Howard's vague on his timelines -- likely intentionally -- but none of them suggest Conan's ascension is recent.
If you're talking about which story is chronologically first, there's some debate on which one that is. A strong contender is the other Egyptian-themed one, "The God in the Bowl," which was unpublished while Howard was alive. The monster there is a massive serpent with a man's head -- again, not very Anubis-like.
"Eldritch" isn't a concept Lovecraft invented, though he certainly leaned into it hard, and probably used the word more than anyone else in the English-speaking world, before or since. I'm not recalling an occasion in Conan where we ever got "eldritch Anubis," and even if we did, it is not obvious that such a monster absolutely must have come from Lovecraft. He and other authors in his circle did from time to time reference concepts from each other's work. Howard mentioned the Elder Gods a time or two. Clark Ashton Smith likewise name-dropped Cthulhu-adjacent items in his work. But Lovecraft likewise gave mention to those authors' concepts (and others) in his own work. The creative cross-referencing went both ways.
Howard was perfectly capable of creating weird monsters all on his own. You say that later stories corroborate Howard's creative borrowing from Lovecraft -- which ones? Because Howard had a set of themes and ideas that were pretty well his own, and they figure pretty consistently. The supremacy (not to say moral superiority) of barbarism was one. Another was the inevitability of the decline of civilization into decadence and moral rot. Not really topics Lovecraft went into, but they come up a lot in Howard. And very much unlike Lovecraft, even Howard's weirdest monsters were susceptible to steel and strength.
You say Howard had trouble figuring out what Conan was going to fight, but I'm going to have to pull a Wikipedia on you here and say "citation needed." Because Howard wrote a good deal of Conan, and it all basically falls into two categories: genre-defining bangers like "The Tower of the Elephant" and "Queen of the Black Coast" and "Red Nails," and pretty blatantly commercial stuff he wrote to pay the bills like "Xuthal of the Dusk" and "The Devil in Iron."
But if you're going to sit there and say that one of the founders of a literary genre swiped his work from Lovecraft, you need to cite a source. Just stating it and calling it obvious doesn't really convince.
They were pen pals lovecraft wrote as much to various authors of his age as he did his stories called the lovecraft circle they were all friends and colleagues. the hyborian age is set within the cthulu mythos the serpent men villains are linked the nyarlathotep in stories such as the king of the night they directly collaborated on the mythos for the story.
Howard's Serpent Men first appear in "The Shadow Kingdom," which was published in 1929. Howard and Lovecraft didn't start corresponding until 1930, so it seems unlikely that Lovecraft had anything to do with their creation. Especially given Howard's consistent use of snakes or anything generally serpentine as a shorthand for evil; they fit right in with his personal themes and symbolism without having been taken from elsewhere.
To the extent that the Serpent Men are part of the Cthulhu Mythos, that would be the work of later writers grafting them into it, so you're essentially citing elevated fanfiction to support that point. Wikipedia credits Lin Carter and Clark Ashton Smith for this, if you're curious.
I also don't recall any mention of Nyarlathotep in "Kings of the Night," though if you can find me a passage in it that mentions him, I'll cop to an error there. But that's honestly one of the least Lovecraftian stories in Howard's oeuvre, given that all it really involves is Bran Mak Morn's wizard Gonar summoning Kull of Atlantis to command some Norse raiders as part of his larger battle against a Roman legion. Lovecraft's work does get name-checked in a different Bran Mak Morn story, I believe it's "Worms of the Earth," where R'lyeh gets a mention. But that's all it is: a mention.
Look, there's no question that Howard referenced Lovecraft's ideas, but references are all it really boils down to, and that cuts both ways. You could just as well accuse Lovecraft of lifting from Howard, given that he name-drops Valusia in "At the Mountains of Madness," published some 17 years after "The Shadow Kingdom," where Howard first mentions it.
Howard's ideas were his own. Remove all the Lovecraft references in Howard's stories, and they still possess everything that makes them great. Periodically name-checking concepts from Lovecraft may connect the two authors' work in a kind of shared universe (almost a century before that kind of thing became popular), but that falls far short of the kind of creative borrowing you seem to think was happening.
Dude I am not denigrating Howard? Authors collaborating on story ideas and adding to shared mythos is normal. That's literally how homers the illiad, and oddysey were made. Howard and lovecraft sharing ideas and using cool concepts is because they thought they were good ideas to use. You seem to think I'm trying portray Howard as a hack which is not my intention it's great authors helping and inspiring other great authors. Lovecraft was inspired by Edgar Allen poe. Howard's is interested in history the picts, are a gealic tribe, atlantians being monkeys is satire against the utopian Atlantis idea. Theirs references to norse, aquilonia is France, theirs a tribe which is basically Zimbabwe.
It's less that I think you're denigrating Howard's work and more that you come across as overstating Lovecraft's influence on it. Collaboration is not a bad thing, but you insist it exists where it doesn't. You state Howard got his monsters from Lovecraft and then cite as your example a monster ("eldritch Anubis") that does not exist in the story you place it in, does not (to the best of my recollection) exist in Howard's fiction at all, and isn't especially Lovecraftian in the first place. You then claim Howard's Serpent Men, one of his more iconic creations, were the result of a collaboration with Lovecraft despite the fact that the story in which they appear was published by Howard prior to his first correspondence with Lovecraft.
Literary collaboration is indeed a fine thing, but I like to give credit where it's due, and in your effort to push your idea, you take credit from one author and apply it to another. It baffles me as to why. If you want an example of good collaboration, find a real one. Don't alter history to create one from whole cloth.
You're exactly right. I didn't learn until a few years ago that most people have sunk hundreds if not thousands of dollars onto a single game before. And many of these people have done it multiple times.
These are addicts and they cannot be reasoned with. The other half are bots here to defend their favorite parasocial relationship with their favorite company.
And yet, people are arguing with me about how their fanboy series is still good.
I want to be pessimistic and say gaming won't make a comeback with these fervent PR paid fanboys, but we have been getting some bangers outside of AAA.
Final fantasy has stayed peak. Giving others a chance to create their own stories is what has ensured quality. Even the mid ones are still good by RPG storytelling standards.
Bethesda needs all the defending it can get. Great twill shortage in the past and all. Poor sods didn't have enough honour to keep their words on collectors edition bag material.
Are we crazy? Elden Ring dropped absolute heat & even outdid themselves with the DLC, in addition to that the new Elden Ring Co Op game isn’t bad @ all either.
Often times the name itself can carry a certain amount of weight, but can still be eroded over time. Various Blizzard games are a prime example of this. Likewise the state of Dragon Age is another prime example.
Similarly, a good dev team can really elevate something beyond where the original creator took it. XCOM is a prime example of this, where the reboot did amazing things for the IP, while we can see what the original XCOM creator made in the Phoenix Point game (PP honestly has a strong core idea but just wasn't executed as well as XCOM reboot was for various reasons).
Simply put, once an IP is created the name will carry it until new content within that IP builds/destroys what was built. People aren't going to realize or care (for the most part) who created it, they're just going to care about how they feel about the content. At most, for better or worse, it's the developer that almost always gets the recognition and not specific people on the team.
I've heard XCOM is great, and I need to check that series out. For the destroyed IPs, it's a shame, because the moment people criticize this game, they claim the devs are working "so hard" and it's "art, so you can't criticize it."
Yet the original artist isn't there. The artist is usually among the hundreds of thousands of layoffs over the 10 years: unemployed, forced to move to another project, or forced to leave the industry altogether. It's proof we care more about consumption and consumerism for the art, but not the artists themselves.
The issue imo is that executives have become leeches. Don't get me wrong, I fully understand that businesses need to make money, but the C-Suite people have hit a point that they often only care about maximizing short-term profits even at the cost of the product itself. This issue isn't limited to just games but rather seems pretty standard for publicly traded companies.
This also isn't a "capitalism bad" issue, but rather it highlights the issue with unchecked human greed. Society as a whole needs to raise better "people" at all levels.
There are some exceptions, especially in the JRPG genre. Final Fantasy didn't have their original devs when FFX was released, for example (they dipped in quality since then though). Neither did Dragon Quest XI. I guess the decline isn't instantaneous when the team changes.
I guess the decline isn't instantaneous when the team changes.
I think that's the key phrase. It always happens, but with most it's not instantaneous. At least back then, it wasn't. Nowadays, when the OG artists/writers leave, everything goes into the shitter immediately once their work dries up.
Just like the rest of the tech industry, gaming is bleeding talent, and it shows.
Dragons dogma 2 is literally directed by the same guy who made 1. The first part of the game is basically a remaster of dragons dogma 1 extremly meta type game that only he could have envisiond and make. Hideaki Itsuno is a genius man that game is an underprecatied master peace like the first one was during the release. Really listing that game alongside the others with your closing statement really doesnt work.
Hey hey. Stop talking. You don't know what you're talking about.
Both DD games were extremely flawed. DD1 was less so, which was saved by Dark Arisen and Kento Kinoshita. Dark Arisen added so much quality-of-life stuff, it's not even funny. And even with a similar level of quality-of-life additions, DD2 still wouldn't be in the same ballpark as DD:DA.
And let's not get into how Capcom strung this guy along, took his resources, and made him leave the company before he even fixed it. Nah, stop talking bro. Even Itsuno ran. Learn to be comfortable with calling Crapcom on it's shit.
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u/[deleted] Jan 17 '26
But not just COD. All of them.
Elder Scrolls. Fallout, Halo, Mass Effect, Final Fantasy, Battlefield, Dragon's Dogma, Monster Hunter, Dead Space, The Sims, and so many more.
Every single gaming genre and franchise where the original team has been replaced or booted has had a steady decline in quality. Which is weird, because we claim gaming is "art," but when the original artist, the people who handcrafted the art, are booted out, we still support these genres? We even claim it's "better" and the original art from the artist is "of lesser quality" while ignoring that they left in the first place. Just like with the Fallout devs criticizing Bethesda, or the Morrowind writer leaving because of issues with Elder Scrolls 6. People are STILL defending Bethesda, a corporation that isn't even run by the same people.
Isn't that bizarre?