I’ve heard a lot of chatter lately about a certain kind of nostalgia, one that yearns for a particular era of gaming—let’s call it when the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 reigned supreme.
This was a time when games were typically far more digestible (10-20-ish hours to fully complete), had little padding and also sported lower price tags, usually somewhere in the $50-60 range for many AAA titles. I’m talking about notable marquee experiences like Uncharted or Halo 3 or Gears of War.
Today, the same sort of games usually start at $70 and go up from there: Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, for example. Astro Bot did launch at $60, so kudos to Sony for being pro-consumer there, and the polished 3D platformer is worth every penny, in my humble opinion.
Still, you’ll pay $80 for a standalone copy of Mario Kart World on Nintendo’s Switch 2, although to be fair, I remember paying $70-90 at retail for Super Nintendo games back in the early ‘90s, and $40-70 for original PlayStation titles during roughly the same time period, so perhaps games have gotten relatively cheaper over the years. Or at the very worst, they’ve stayed around the same price.
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Yes, modern game budgets have ballooned out of control, so I guess the money needs to be made up somewhere, but this occurs in an industry that habitually, routinely, even flippantly I’d argue, lays off its talent in sweeping, impersonal waves. Of course, this is happening while publishers make billions of dollars from the hard work. I’ll blame AI for now, and greedy executives, too.
But maybe, just maybe, we’re finally self-correcting and heading in a slightly healthier direction. 2K’s upcoming franchise prequel, Mafia: The Old Country, is launching on August 8 for a reasonable and rather old-school $49.99, $10 less than the aforementioned first-party Astro Bot. Is the game AAA in quality? I suppose that judgement is subjective, but from the preliminary footage, it certainly looks to be the case.
According to IGN, who published a solid (if somewhat spoiler-filled) hands-on preview of The Old Country, the $50 asking price isn’t the only return-to-form aspect of the game. The newest Mafia entry ditches Mafia III’s notably out-of-character pivot into open world gameplay and returns to the series narrative-driven, linear approach.
One could posit that the industry’s general obsession with open world premises and hyper-realistic visuals has outright lead to the problematic budgets I previously mentioned, so positioning The Old Country as a game which sports perfectly acceptable graphics and a campaign that won’t take you three months to complete… well, this could please a lot of gamers, including myself.
As IGN’s Ryan McCaffrey touches on in the video preview, a lot of us aging gamers have children now, as well as jobs and obligations and busy lives. Thus, 40-plus hour adventures just don’t hit the way they used to, don’t boast the same kind of appeal. There’s no official word yet from developer Hangar 13 on The Old Country’s overall length, but the welcome throwback vibe is already apparent.
This will likely be a game that you can play through in a weekend or two, or in short spurts during evenings after work and getting the kids to bed. Combine this with a potentially engaging story and that attractive $50 price tag, and 2K could have a winning formula on its hands, one that harkens back to an era when I wasn’t worried about the mortgage or kindergarten or doing the dishes.
Speaking of, I need to get back to scrubbing.
