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[808mate]

If Chinese studios continue to make great games that I want to play, I'll play them.

 

[R6Rider]

If Chinese studios continue to make great games that I want to play, I'll play them.

Enough said.

 

[March Climber]

There are a few misconceptions here. Lore and worldbuilding is AMAZING in good Chinese games. In fact, that's one of the key success factor for any gacha game. It's the storytelling that fails (too much exposition and text walls, which is also a JRPG flaw).

Kind of. I'll explain my issue below.

As for the "copying", this is a thing from the past unless your idea of copying is so broad that can be applied to everyone nowadays. The infamous "genshin is a Zelda clone" is a Pikmin argument that proves itself wrong as soon as you start the game. The game loop is completely different, and it's not even the same genre. Going by the same argument, Astrobot would be a Mario clone or TLOU copies The Walking Dead. Nonsense.

If anything, the new games are borrowing Mihoyo template (too much for my taste) just like every western open world game borrows from Ubisoft. Is Ghost of Tsushima a copy, too?

Astrobot is a derivative of Mario, and you will see people complain about that on this forum. Same with Ghost of Tsushima being a derivative of an Ubisoft game and there have been complaint posts about that here too. This is where I reiterate this point:

There have been too many times where I will see a game that is just...."Famous I.P. copy, but instead with _____" and I know everyone here can name quite a few games from China that feel that way, and they feel that way very blatantly.

Even if there was genuine inspiration behind the new title, it gives off the feeling of a copy+paste money grab and they need to find a way past those optics.

It's an optics issue, and part of this is because the difference with the games you have mentioned and the Chinese ones is in the approach.

Other developers will take a concept and put their own unique spin on it in some way. Chinese games feel like they will take an already finished drawing and start making edits, additions, and changes to it. And then afterwards they finally start writing a story and more ideas around this. That's why it appears that their stories and concepts feel less interesting from an optics standpoint. I have played Genshin and it took an extremely long time for the story to grab me, because in the first 50+ hours of that game it felt like they were just writing just to write, with basic anime tropes, personality types, and concepts, without a clear enough vision. The Genshin-likes are not helping their case either, which are a derivative of a derivative, essentially like taking a nice drink and watering it down over and over until there's just a hint of flavor. Wuthering Waves, while a fun game, feels blatant.

This same issue goes for when I played Tarisland, you know, that game that suddenly popped up once World of Warcraft was no longer supported in China. Look at this trailer:



Listen to the nonsense narration. Look at the armors, the way the game looks, etc. This is the type of mess that I'm talking about. Even if Tarisland is a new and somewhat different experience, the optics here in this trailer look really bad and blatant, and I could see it easily turn off an audience outside of China.

And again to make this fair, there are times where you can see this happen in regions outside of China. There was a Warhammer MMO that copied WoW's look and some of it's mechanics, and it's long dead now because of that, because why would anyone other than a small subgroup of Warhammer fans want to play a very derivative WoW clone with slightly different graphical features and less content. No really, look up gameplay of this game and you'll see why most people looked at it and said 'nah I'm good' or 'This is just WoW, I'll play WoW instead'.

I need you to understand I'm not saying all of this because I randomly picked up Genshin and said 'oh, it's like Zelda!'. No, I was there man. By there, I mean the 2000s and 2010s when every MMO known to man was trying to claw it's way to the #3 spot after World of Warcraft and Lineage 2.

While you guys were playing Gears of War, Halo, Uncharted, Lost Odyssey, and all of the greats from that gen, I was busy playing all of those MMOs back then. Some of them good, some of them very, very blatant copies of more popular titles. It was a mess, and publishers like Perfect World would constantly throw games out there until one or two of them stuck. There were a trail of dead MMOs by the end of the 2010s that I remember playing and I was not surprised when they died. So I remember quite a few Chinese MMOs back then that just took Korean and/or American games and even their UI at times, but put a Chinese lore-spin on it.

Just as a final note, I'm not saying Chinese games are bad. I'm also not saying they can't come up with their own concepts, lore, and stories. I just need to feel that difference better. I need to feel it more.

I'm just saying, it's bad optics.

 

[Pasta la Vista]

Now they just need to grow up from their anime and "edgelord" phase cause that's all I see coming from that direction. Still ain't buying that shit though cause fuck the CCP.

 

[FreeY$L]

Japan is the only region churning out AAA games with quality these days.

Maybe you’re still living in the 2010s and the collapse in quality of American AAA hasn’t dawned on you yet.

Can you read? My post was in the past tense, i didn't conflate the two time periods at all. Japan's output is still nowhere near the quality of the 6th/7th generation, they're beyond washed. Capcom is doing nothing but remakes, and Chinese developers will usurp both regions.

 

[rubik's dude]

Unironically, Showa is the game I'm looking forward to the most this year:

It looks bonkers in a No More Heroes/Deadly Premonition kinda fashion. I initially mistook it for a Japanese developed game, but nope, it was developed in China.