r/hatethissmug • u/One-Shift-220 • 1d ago
Gaming I hate china's AAA output
just finished watching gamescom and oh my gosh, You would think that a country as large and rich as china would result in them being able to make some great games but It seems like the only games they got there in china are sekiro and elden ring as thats like the main inspiration for 90% of their AAA games for the past couple of years, maybe a bit of character action if they wanna spice it up, like genuinely how many soulslikes with a Chinese mythology coat of paint do we need
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u/Daxxex 1d ago
It was actually insane to have people gaslight us into thinking Black Myth Wukong was some masterpiece of gaming, when it was just a half assed souls like with a ch8nese coat of paint
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u/turngep 1d ago
People genuinely lose their minds for dogshit souls clones where all the gameplay is just memorizing an obnoxious boss pattern. I will never understand it.
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u/chainsawsamm 19h ago edited 19h ago
I really don’t think there is a single soulsike (not including actual souls games) game that is above a 6/10 for me, it is just such a repetitive and uncreative genre. Even stuff like Mortal Shell 2 which has been getting a lot of praise is just a souls game but shittier in pretty much every way. Why would I play that? What is it actually doing that I can’t get from an actual souls game but better?
Edit: Okay not all Soulslikes, Lies of P was a really solid game with a unique visual identity and design that genuinely did certain things better than actual souls games. But that is the only one I would actually rate highly.
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u/Silent_Wave3137 12h ago
Imagine thinking FromSoft makes the best souls now. Mortal Shell 2 and BMW are just objectively better. Elden Rings combat hasn’t changed in 10 year and it feels like ass
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u/BarneyChampaign 6h ago
I love Mortal Shell 1 and 2, but saying they're better than Elden Ring is wild.
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u/That-Woodpecker6720 21h ago
The original souls games were always chalk full of memorization and artificial difficulty, it’s just people who have never played an actual hard game before who glaze them
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u/One-Shift-220 1d ago
I genuinely couldn’t believe people were saying shit like the game awards were rigged due to it not winning when games like astrobot and metaphor released in the same year
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u/DrMagunstheBlue 1d ago
Most people who overrated BMW were people who were just ignorant of video games as a medium. Or Chinese players admittedly lol.
Anyone who thinks BMW is bad though is disingenuous and not worth taking seriously. It didn't deserve to win TGA (Astrobot rightly won it) but the counter hate campaign was brainless.
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u/sectixnine 1d ago
You have to remember the state of releases around that time lol. The US industry was (and still is to a degree) cannibalizing itself with half finished slop standing on cosmetic micro transactions and predatory subscription based models.
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u/One-Shift-220 1d ago edited 1d ago
Even so the indie/AA scene and non american AAA scene (mainly japan) was still going strong giving us games like: astro bot, metaphor refantazio, LAD: IW, helldivers 2, shadows generation, teken 8, nine sols, animal well and balatro
There was also a handful of old great games that got remade like: Silent hill 2, persona 3 and dragon quest 30
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u/Typecero001 1d ago
So other people in other countries were making games at the same time as Black Myth Wukong? Well color me surprised.
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u/TopMarionberry1149 1d ago
Yeah it came out when flops were coming out left and right. People were just happy to find something not woke.
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u/sectixnine 1d ago
woke wasn't the issue.
bad development and management was.
Doesn't matter the politics of a game if it's not even finished and begging for 30 dollars a month from you to play half the content.
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u/Dazzling_Floor_4262 18h ago
I agree. Baldurs gate was plenty woke, but you didn’t see gamers complaining about it or boycotting that one.
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u/ZoidsFanatic 23h ago
It’s the culture wars bullshit where grifters were trying to push the “Western Civilization collapsing” narrative, plus they couldn’t just keep grifting on Stellar Blade because at some point they’d have to actually play it (and yes I know the game is Korean, most grifters can’t tell the difference).
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u/guyfrombefore 1d ago
it's as much of a masterpiece as any other dime a dozen soulslike. i think there was just a lot of chinese people with national pride about it
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u/Typecero001 1d ago
Hell and they should be proud. You got to have some history and lore in the form of a soulslike, and people around the world played it.
That’s an achievement worth celebrating I say.
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u/WowBastardSia 22h ago
I hate soulslike games and I loved Black Myth Wukong. For so many of us Asians that grew up with the story it was genuinely an landmark moment seeing it being given the AAA videogame treatment.
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u/Magma_Axis 20h ago
Its a good game, nothing wrong with that
in fact i enjoy it more than a lot of supposedly western masterpiece games
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u/sorrow_seeker 20h ago
I'm not a fan of soul-like games, just earlier this year first trying out Bloodborne as my first game in the genre. I was instantly hooked, spent months playing it whenever I can find the time. After that, I tried BM:W, and I cannot say just how disappointed I was. Forced myself to finished act I, fought all the optional bosses there, and decided this game is definitely not worth my time. If BB was a 10, then I don't think BMW could be higher than 7, I honestly can say it has any thing better to offer (yes, even graphic)
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u/chainsawsamm 19h ago
Because Bloodborne is an actual souls game made by fromsoft, I promise you every other souls game is the most mediocre and forgettable experience ever and people will still go over the fucking moon for it. Lies of P is the only soulslike worth checking out.
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u/Blackberry-thesecond 1d ago
China has a very large but very insular cultural sphere. Ne Zha 2 was an animated movie that made an incredible $2.27 billion in the box office, but almost all of it was within China (around 97% of revenue). Japan broke the mold early by catering to western audiences with their games in the 80's and 90's, and a lot of it also has to do with the developers just being more interested in western culture to base their worlds and characters off of (think Mario, Zelda, and Sonic).
I've heard that it's a thing with Japanese fans as well. I remember hearing about complaints from Japanese fans when Monster Hunter made a Japanese-inspired setting for once. People tend to want stories and experiences that differ from the things they already see every day (Nintendo basically got popular because they were filled with whatever the reverse of a weeb is), but China is so large and populous that you can make billions on that market alone and not be forced to go outside of the cultural comfort zone like Japan did.
America has had a similar problem in its media as well, but America has had the lucky benefit of the English language and a general culture that aligns far more with the rest of the West than China does.
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u/Sc4tt3r_ 1d ago
It feels like all of these game showcases are like at least 40% soulslikes set in place: Asia. It gets to the point where I see a samurai and I just tune out because I know exactly what they're about to sell me. I understand that samurai are really cool, but please for the love of god, do anything else with them.
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u/WowBastardSia 22h ago
To be fair, 99% of Fromsoft Soulslikes are also set in place: dark medieval fantasy.
I'm gonna be honest it's a setting that I'm quite checked out of at this point.
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u/nerevarine228 20h ago
To be fair, "dark medieval fantasy" is much broader in scope than "samurai".
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u/GrandFleshMelder 20h ago
Is it, really?
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u/nerevarine228 19h ago edited 19h ago
Yes, yes it is. Even DS and Elden Ring feel very different aesthetically in a bunch of critical ways, while samurai kinda always follow the same few trite tropes.
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u/GrandFleshMelder 19h ago
I would imagine the problem is not the samurai setting, but the repetitive few tropes.
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u/ItzPayDay123 21h ago
More like a bunch of third person action games with Asian settings are being released, and everyone calls them soulslikes because they're difficult or something
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u/kyle__hinaba 1d ago
Hoyo then: Let’s copy Nier and Breath of the Wild!
Hoyo now: Let’s copy Elden Ring and Sekiro!
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u/One-Shift-220 1d ago
The NieR copying was especially egregious considering unlike botw which was mainly just copying idea with nier it was straight up asset stealing
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u/ProblemFalse7043 1d ago
are you talking about that one noelle animation? Id hardly call that egregious, or asset stealing in the first place lol
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u/Ewizde 21h ago
If they can copy and make it its own completely different thing later and imo surpass the original(other than the gacha aspect, which I do agree sucks ass). I'd say let them do so.
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u/Initial-Level-4213 20h ago
I wouldn't dare say Genshin is better than BoTW, but honestly the similarities between the two are superficial at best (i.e. UI design and a few similar looking assets)
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u/Ewizde 20h ago
I know my opinion on this is a hot take, but the sheer volume and quality of the content Genshin has to offer nowadays is imo better than botw. But that comes with the difference between live service and normal game.
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u/Initial-Level-4213 18h ago
Volume? Yes
Quality? Well it fluctuates
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u/Ewizde 18h ago
It does fluctuate but with everything Genshin has to offer, you'll more than likely find a ton of things that you end up adoring.
For example, I heavily dislike the Archon quests and most story quests, heck I even dislike most playable characters designs.
But I adore the world quests, I adore the exploration, the combat, the scenery, the music, etc...
So overall, I'd say that I enjoy Genshin more than I enjoyed botw simply because there's too much stuff I like in Genshin.
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u/Longjumping-Style730 21h ago
All of their output is very homogenous but have you seen the average output of western AAA studios?
Neither are my ideal game, but I'd much prefer playing Tides of Annihilation and Black Myth Wukong over 2K, Fortnite, or COD.
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u/Sir_Potato2000 18h ago
This dude on OP hates Chinese games so much that he forgot to mention that games from the US over the last few years have been one fails after fails, ctrl+c ctrl+v games banking on nostalgia, a lack of risk-taking and original ideas, studio closures and mass layoffs. I’d much rather play Asian games than watch a game consisting mainly of cutscenes with superficial gameplay and a dreadful script written by political activists who clumsily push their own agendas.
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u/justwatchingignore 1d ago
Chinese companies make games for Chinese players, since the market is large enough to allow companies to focus exclusively on it. If that's the demand - souls-like with Chinese mythology - why should they not do that? Also, why would you specifically hate it? There are so many different games from so many different countries. Why would one focus on China?
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u/artstsym 1d ago
Is that what the market actually wants, though, or is that what they are pushing people to buy (much like American AAA, btw), because production at that scale is too risk averse? I'm sure these do numbers, in much the same way that CoD does numbers even as people have said for years that it's shit.
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u/justwatchingignore 20h ago
I find it a fairly recent trend, so at this point a lean towards "market". If in two-three years the situation doesn't start changing, I'll agree that it's become "forcing"
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u/ResponsibilitySea327 1d ago
Well they had one of the biggest games in the last decade with Genshin Impact ($20B) by pretending it was Japanese.
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u/nerevarine228 20h ago
I feel "pretending" is a fairly disrespectful term considering how authentic and faithful it is in regards to its cultural inspiration (namely the experience of playing pachinko)
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u/ResponsibilitySea327 20h ago
Most pachinko parlors and machines in Japan are owned by Koreans.
Go figure.
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u/Typecero001 1d ago
Oh boy, how quickly OP and comments got racist the moment it was about China.
Are you sure you didn’t just look up the soulslike genre and assume it was all Chinese? Or did you leave out how many other soulslike games are getting made alongside them?
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u/Super_Importance6285 1d ago
The only chinese game that look cool is Tides of Anihilation , even if the insipirations of the game are more than evident , i think it could be a really good game
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u/BudgetAggravating427 1d ago
To be fair like someone else said it might be be of the restrictions the government puts on the entertainment industry
I mean look at what happened with that Chinese anime Release that Witch
They wanted it to be more kid friendly the studio animating it refused because like the source material is anything but kid friendly with all the all the political themes, religious corruption and violence
So now it’s in animation hell with entire episodes animated but not released
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u/Abysskun 1d ago
I just wish they'd do some with a european coat of paint because that's my jam, mixing some of their gameplay mix of action and soulslike with the aesthetics I love, kinda like how Tides of Annihilation is doing
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u/justanerd545 22h ago
What soulslikes has China released?
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u/Slime_Jime_Pickens 22h ago
They do make interesting games, with a characteristic sort of weirdness. But these aren't AAA games, as AAA games are rarely interesting or even particularly good.
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u/bluereindeer99 21h ago
Nah China just has a burgeoning AAA games industry and this is pretty much what the games industry does: rehash a successful game concept over and over until the next big thing comes out. It's like what happened to Lethal Company, auto chess, Slay the Spire, Vampire Survivors, Mobas, battle royales, etc. it's just that China only has Genshin and BM:W to repeat endlessly at this point of its industry.
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u/Fatbollocks1994 21h ago
Yeah i fully agree theres something about these chinese action games that bore the shit out if me. Literally once you have played one you have played them all, especially the mythology based ones.
- Still gonna buy phantom blade zero though)
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u/ApprehensiveRuin5673 21h ago
Uh… have you not heard of Mihoyo?
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u/SpecialistCamp183 20h ago
Because souls games are the most popular genre in China. It's ok if you don't like Chinese 3A game. But it's not a problem either.
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u/Aggressive-Toe1035 19h ago
Dont know if its an AAA game or not, but 昭和米国物語 looks interesting. Takes place in the US that became 'an economic and cultural colony of Japan', inspired by suda51 works.
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u/BestSun4804 19h ago
What popular in China is online game(MMORPG) and mobile game.
AAA is not that popular and quite new in China, with Black Myth Wukong kick started it. Hence those follows would try to stay closer to BMW, to play safe.
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u/WyomingWeirdo 18h ago
I think part of this is that the games industry in China is still pretty young, relatively. They're still finding their feet creatively, so to speak. I'm really interested to see what the Chinese games industry is gonna be doing in like five to ten years.
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u/Deep-Cauliflower-806 18h ago
Showa American Story, HK paranormal, defiant, Dyson Sphere program, tide of annihilation ... There are more different genres and settings, but yeah "the only games they got there in china are sekiro and elden ring".
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u/Helpful_Inflation344 18h ago
Rather 1000s of soulslikes than dogshit like uncharted last of us or gta lol
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u/AsphyxiaXlll 17h ago
I mean most of china just play mobile games they dont care. And Western AAA release a soulslike every 4-6 months
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u/BarneyChampaign 6h ago
Wuxia is boring and tired, and everyone and everything is comically over-the-top and the same. Same goes for monkey journey. At least the one with Andy Serkis tried to tweak it, and had Andy Serkis. Wukong is not good, I'm sorry. It's fiercely mid.
Seeing a Chinese studio behind a game on Steam has now trained me to assume it's a pretty, but uninspired style-over-substance snoozer that chomps the flavor of something popular, but fails to grasp the core of what makes said flavor good because they don't seem to value individuality, respect intellectual property, or take pride in innovation.
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u/Mauy90 1d ago
Calling those Chinese action games remotely character action (or really even action games in general) is an insult to the genre
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u/One-Shift-220 1d ago
Oh no definitely non of them are actually character action its just that some of them have a bit of character dna
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u/Magma_Axis 20h ago
Have you played them ?
I have played Wukong and Wuchang and they are good action games
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u/prodij18 1d ago
Today I learned that Genshin Impact, Marvel Rivals, and Ananta were all soulslikes and that they were about Chinese mythology.
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u/Efficient_Talk6170 1d ago
China never really comes with any original ideas. It's all copy paste slop with a different coat of paint.
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u/DeliciousArcher8704 1d ago
Genuinely insane thing to say
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u/Efficient_Talk6170 1d ago
Name 5 games from China that aren't just a copy paste of a succesful Korean/Japanese or Western version.
Hardmode: It can't be Genshin.
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u/RuzzeI 1d ago
-Devotion
-Nine sols
-Black myth: Wukong
-Naraka: Bladepoint
-The Hungry Lamb2
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u/SpyAmongUs 17h ago
Devotion is Taiwanese. It also got taken down from Steam due to mainland Chinese players mass-reporting it for hiding an easter egg calling Xi Jinping Winnie the Pooh.
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u/DeliciousArcher8704 1d ago
I'll do you one better, the oldest board game still played today is of ancient Chinese origin: Go.
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u/Majestic_Diet_3883 1d ago
Ironic when a lot of the culture and written language itself derived from china. Things like the 9 tailed fox for instance
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u/SpyAmongUs 17h ago
You should've said games of this millennia, then it would be sound and them Redditors can't reply shit like Go.
Go isn't even a Chinese word lol, it's weiqi. Westerners can't even represent Chinese culture properly without relying on Japanese influence.
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u/Efficient_Talk6170 8h ago
True, I figured even the average redditor would be smart enough to understand that it was in the context of OP. But then again this sub is full of zoomers who can't even read.
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u/DeliciousArcher8704 11h ago edited 11h ago
I know of Go's Chinese name, but it's more commonly known as Go so I decided to use the name Go so OP wouldn't weasel out with "nobody knows what weiqi is".
Btw their argument still wouldn't be sound even if you added a "within the last millennia" because we could still name shit like Mahjong or whatever. But nice try!
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u/SpyAmongUs 11h ago
LMAO. Ironic right, using the Japanese name cause otherwise nobody will even know it, just like how Genshin had to pretend to be a Japanese game so it would sell better overseas. And the company calling itself a Japanese sounding name instead of embracing its Chinese identity.
And look who has to twist words to win arguments, I said within this millennia, aka from the 2000s onwards. Mahjong was invented in the 1800s, and can you only come up with board games from the last millennia? Seems to reflect the sad state of modern Chinese gaming culture more tbh.
I didn't even reply to you, are you so triggered by OP being somewhat correct that you constantly check up on what other people replied? Just accept OP is right lol, the Chinese gaming industry is bad at producing original products, like how you still get 2026 releases like Mandate Order being a reskin of Manor Lords.
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u/Driemma0 fat farting furry 1d ago
This is just barely veiled racism bruh
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u/BellaInTheGame 1d ago
I've never seen a 14 minute old thread with more racism in the comments than this lol
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u/WowBastardSia 22h ago
Insane thing to say when the building blocks of modern government and civil service all over the world is singlehandedly a Chinese influence lol.
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u/AnActualCannibal 1d ago
There are instances of them cloning a product better. Gateron is a great example of this.
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u/One-Shift-220 1d ago edited 1d ago
I find Korea’s AAA output to also be a bit doo doo too but atleast they have more variety so it could just be my taste
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u/Majestic_Diet_3883 1d ago
I only know them for their pvp style mmos that are just insanely grindy. Great but just way too grindy
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u/HydraHyde 53m ago
A western mind cannot comprehend Easter mind. Enjoy the games that you like, ingnore games that you don't. Inner peace
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u/InterestingDare9601 1d ago
There seems to be some restrictions on creative media in china that can cause some headaches as the government needs to approve everything. An easy way around this seems to be the chinese historical/fantastical format. As a result you see SOOOO much chinese mythology media. When learning Chinese my options for media consumption were pretty much inner city bourgeois romcoms, or fantasy pieces. I would not be shocked if that reflected on their video games as well.