Games Inbox: Are 3D platformers a dead genre?

Bubsy 4D – beggars can’t be choosers (Atari)

The Thursday letters page has some big ideas for the future of Assassin’s Creed, as a reader thinks Capcom is purposefully trolling Dino Crisis fans.

Games Inbox is a collection of our readers’ letters, comments, and opinions. To join in with the discussions yourself email [email protected]

Living dead platformer
I have a terrible confession to make to you, GC. I’m actually looking forward to Bubsy 4D. I know the earlier games are awful but the developer on this one is good and I liked their previous game Demon Tides. More importantly, I love 3D platformers and I’m pretty much starving for anything else to play.

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

There hasn’t been a Sonic Frontiers sequel, which is also crazy to me because I thought the first one was actually pretty good. And that’s pretty much it, because nobody is making 3D platformers anymore. Not Rare, not Naughty Dog, not anyone for Crash Bandicoot or Spyro. Even the Yooka-Laylee guys don’t seem to be doing anything new.

Do I just have to accept that the 3D platformer is dead? Just with the odd Mario game every decade and a few low budget indie games? I guess I probably do.
Thompson

Review manipulation
I see the developer of Outbound had to apologise for asking people to remove bad reviews of it from Steam. Why is that doesn’t get any outrage online but apparently Mixtape is the worst thing ever to happen to gaming?

It’s pretty obvious that the people complaining don’t care about indie gaming at all. They probably don’t care about any game more daring than Fortnite, so it’s terrible to see a game be torn down for no reason. I have no interest in it and will never play it but why can’t these haters just stop there and accept it’s not for them?
Temol

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

I hope Hexe is good, and I will give it a chance, but I feel the series needs something more than just switching settings every time. Maybe it’s time for it to evolve into a different franchise? Assassin’s Creed is basically just Prince Of Persia with a different hat on, maybe they should make some actual historical games without all the pointless sci-fi stuff?
Gaston

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A fair price
I feel like an idiot for saying this but I have to say I think £100 for GTA 6 is probably fair. That’s assuming it’s of 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 in some way, I don’t see how you don’t get £100 of value out of it.

I’m not saying I’d be that 1% of people that said it should cost more, in that survey, but I think we need 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 for any old game but when you know what you’re getting and it’s something that only comes round once a decade I don’t actually have a problem with it. Bragging that you spent 300 hours game and then you only paid £40, or whatever, for it doesn’t seem quite fair to me.
Branton

Inevitable outcome
Sony has faced significant financial losses due to the impairment of Bungie’s assets, which has led to a $765 million loss for the fiscal year 2025. This loss is attributed to the underperformance of Bungie’s portfolio, including the struggles of Destiny 2 and Marathon. I think they paid nearly $2 billion for Bungie?

Not good for gaming, would love Bungie to do another Halo but as things stand that’s not happening. Destiny is done and Marathon has failed but making Marathon’s gameplay a steep learning curve was always going to alienate a lot of gamers. More jobs losses I guess.
TWO MACKS

Time compression
I haven’t got any obscure anniversaries to shock you with today but I did just read that it’s now been longer between GTA 6 Trailer 2 and now than it was between GTA 3 and GTA: Vice City. In other words, they made a whole game (one of the most famous of all-time) quicker than they’ve managed to make a new trailer.

I’m sure they could’ve done a new trailer quicker if they wanted, of course they could, but it does drive home how much quicker games were to make back in the day. I’m sure they were crunching like hell back then, and the game is basically a total conversion of GTA 3, but it’s still quite the achievement to get it released that quick.

I think this is an important thing we’re missing today, where you can not only not tell a proper story between games, because it takes too long between new chapters, but you also can’t make these sort of expansion pack style sequels either. 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 be no way to make it quick enough that it wouldn’t just be easier to make a brand new game.

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

Extinct hopes
I can’t believe what a dissing Dino Crisis took in that Capcom report. They already didn’t have enough games to mention, because they did Onimusha when we already know it’s getting a new franchise. Why couldn’t Dino Crisis have taken that slot?

And then there’s 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 way. Jurassic World is still big, why would you think Onimusha and Ōkami are worth another shot but not Dino Crisis?
Korbie

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

Real gamers
Looking at the discourse around Mixtape I have to say gamers don’t do themselves any favours, the whole thing is just weird. We also had the bizarre Marathon and Crimson Desert back and forth earlier in the year, that to anyone not terminally online is just baffling.

As far as I can tell Crimson Desert is the real gamers’ game of the year? Because… reasons… and anyone who doesn’t like it is a shill for the ‘woke mafia’ I guess. Then whenever Marathon and Bungie are mentioned it seems to rally nutters to say the game’s ‘dead’ and the userbase inflated due to some cabal of journalists and powerful publisher interests. Guys… it’s just an online shooter some people like and some people don’t.

Obviously, we live in a time were everything is a conspiracy, from politics to sport thanks to social media. You’d expect gaming to fall victim to that too, by just existing in the same space, every mistake or attempt to expand the audience is actually some nefarious scheme out to change something against the ‘will of the people’.

I also wonder if part of it is that gaming does seem to be getting more hardcore? Older gamers are drifting away through the pressures of family and work commitments, or for the young it’s just the endless supply of other media to consume.

Most of the next generation either don’t games like we did in the past (I remember the article some months ago saying gaming was now competing with gambling and adult internet content) or do game and are deep in the walled gardens of Roblox, Fortnite, et al. That’s leaving an ever smaller over-invested player-base behind, who see themselves as gate keepers and lash out at anything they don’t like.

It seems to me this increasingly unpleasant online chatter is as much a threat to the future of the medium as ever-increasing hardware and software costs. We need to expand the audience and get more normal people involved, not shrink it.
Marc

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

Inbox also-rans
Hang on, so that Steam Controller costs £85 and it doesn’t have a speaker? I know PC hardware is expensive at the moment, jeez…
Topcat

I didn’t realise so many different people had tried to blow up Nintendo before. Between this and constant layoffs, being a games developer sounds like no fun at all.
Jester

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The small print
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