Game Inbox: Are 3D Platformers a Dead Genre?

Thursday’s letters page has some big ideas for the future of Assassin’s Creedas a reader thinks Capcom deliberately trolling Dino Crisis fans.

Games inbox is a collection of letters, comments and opinions from our readers. To join the discussions, email yourself gamecentral@metro.co.uk

Living dead platformer
I have a terrible confession to make for you, GC. I’m actually looking forward to Bubsy 4D. I know the previous games are terrible but the developer of this is good and I liked their previous game Demon Tides. Most importantly, I love 3D platformers and am very hungry for something else to play.

We still don’t know when Another 3D Mario it will be and I think there’s a good chance it won’t be next year, which seems crazy but that’s Nintendo for you.

There wasn’t one Sound limits sequel, which is also crazy to me because I thought the first one was actually pretty good. And that’s pretty much it, because no one is making 3D platformers anymore. Not Rare, not Naughty Dog, not anyone for Crash Bandicoot or Spyro. Even the Yooka-Laylee boys don’t seem to be doing anything new.

Should I just accept that the 3D platformer is dead? Only with the odd Mario game every decade and a little low budget indie games? I think maybe so.
Thompson

Review the manipulation
I see the developer of out had to apologize for asking people to remove bad reviews about it from Steam. Why this does not have any outrage on the Internet, but apparently MIX is it the worst thing to ever happen to games?

It’s pretty obvious that the people complaining don’t care about indie games at all. They probably don’t care for any bolder games than Fortniteso it’s horrible to see a game crash for no reason. I have no interest in it and will never play it, but why can’t these haters just stop here and admit it’s not for them?
Temol

The next evolution
Bringing back Ezio it really sounds exactly like something a company would try to do when they’re desperately hitting the nostalgia button and don’t know what to do with the franchise. I’m not against it, as he was definitely the best, but I think it’s showing that the only character he really cares about is from the second game 17 years ago.

I hope Hexe is good and I’ll give it a chance, but I think the series needs something more than just changing the setting every time. Maybe it’s time for it to evolve into another franchise? Assassin’s Creed is basically just Prince of Persia with a different hat, maybe they should make some actual historical games without all the sci-fi crap?
Gaston

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A fair price
I feel like an idiot saying this, but I have to say I think £100 for GTA 6 maybe that’s right. That’s assuming it’s roughly the same quality as GTA 5, including the size of the game world and GTA Online. Assuming that, and that they aren’t lying about the graphics somehow, I don’t see how you don’t get £100 worth of it.

I’m not saying I’d be the 1% of people who said it should cost more, in that poll, but I think we have to accept that the amount of work that goes into games and the amount of time we spend playing them justifies a high price.

I wouldn’t say that about any old game, but when you know what you’re getting and it’s something that only comes around once a decade, I actually don’t mind it. Bragging that you spent 300 hours playing and then only paid £40, or whatever, because I don’t think it’s fair at all.
Branton

Inevitable result
Sony has faced significant financial losses due to the impairment of Bungie’s assets, leading to a loss of $765 million for fiscal year 2025. This loss is attributed to the poor performance of Bungie’s portfolio, including the difficulties of Fate 2 and the Marathon. I think they paid almost $2 billion to Bungie?

Not good for gaming, wish Bungie would make another Halo, but as things stand, that’s not happening. Luck has run out and Marathon has failed, but making the game of Marathon a steep learning curve was always going to turn many players away. More job losses I guess.
TWO MAKES

Time compression
I don’t have any vague anniversaries to shock you about today, but I just read that more has now passed between GTA 6 Trailer 2 and now than it did between GTA 3 and GTA: Vice City. In other words, they made an entire game (one of the most famous of all time) faster than they could make a new trailer.

I’m sure they could have made a new trailer faster if they wanted to, of course they could, but it drives home how much faster they would make games back in the day. I’m sure they were dancing like hell back then, and the game is basically a total conversion of GTA 3, but it’s still quite an achievement to release it so quickly.

I think that’s an important thing we’re missing today, where not only can you not tell a proper story between games because it takes too much time between new chapters, but you also can’t do expansion pack-style continuity. There just aren’t any shortcuts anymore.

Zelda: Majora’s Mask, which was basically a total conversion of Ocarina Of Time, wouldn’t exist today because there’s no way to make it fast enough that it wouldn’t just be easier to make a whole new game.

There are some amazing triple-A games out there right now and I’m loving Pragmata, but that game is only about 12 hours long and took six years to make. That’s six months of gameplay or, to put it another way, at least four GTA 6 trailers!
Manx

Hopes gone
I can’t believe what disposition Dino Crisis took on this one The Capcom Report. They already didn’t have enough games to mention because they made Onimusha when we already know it’s getting a new franchise. Why couldn’t Dino Crisis take that spot?

And then there’s a multiplayer dinosaur game they had a while back that I can’t remember the name of… it feels like Capcom is trolling Dino Crisis fans and I don’t understand the way. Jurassic World is still huge, why do you think Onimusha and Ōkami are worth another shot but not Dino Crisis?
Bruise

GC: The multiplayer game you’re thinking of is Exoprimal.

Real players
Looking at the discourse around Mixtape, I have to say that the players are doing themselves no credit, the whole thing is just plain weird. We also had the odd Marathon and the Crimson Desert earlier in the year, which for anyone not on the terminal line is just baffling.

As far as I can tell Crimson Desert is true players game of the year? Because… the reasons… and anyone who doesn’t like it is a ploy for the ‘smart mafia’ I guess. Then, whenever Marathon and Bungie are mentioned, it seems to be hyped to say that the game is ‘dead’ and the user base is bloated due to a bunch of journalists and powerful publisher interests. Guys… it’s just an online shooter that some people like and some people don’t.

Of course, we live in a time when everything is a conspiracy, from politics to sports, thanks social media. You’d expect games to fall victim to this, just by existing in the same space, any mistake or attempt to expand the audience is actually an evil scheme to change something against the ‘will of the people’.

I also wonder if part of it is that the games seem to be getting stronger? Older players are being pushed away by the pressures of family and work commitments, or for the younger ones it’s just the endless supply of other media to consume.

Most of the next generation either don’t play games like we did in the past (I remember the article a few months ago saying that games were now competing with gambling and adult Internet content) or game and are deep in the walled gardens of Roblox, Fortnite, et al. This is leaving behind an ever smaller over-invested player base who see themselves as gatekeepers and attack anything they don’t like.

It seems to me that this increasingly uncomfortable online conversation is as much a threat to the future of the medium as the ever-increasing costs of hardware and software. We need to expand the audience and include more normal people, not reduce it.
Marc

GC: It’s something very depressing, we have an article today about it. But your penultimate paragraph pretty much nails it.

Inbox-ka too
Wait, so Steam controller it costs £85 and doesn’t have a speaker? I know computer hardware is expensive at the moment, despair…
Balls

I didn’t realize so many different people had tried blow up Nintendo ahead. Between that and the constant layoffs, being a game developer doesn’t sound like fun at all.
Yester

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