This is why I don’t play AAA anymore. They’re so big on the elements that are easy to market like graphics and size of the areas, but the general mechanics and especially the AI are overlooked...
This is why I don’t play AAA anymore. They’re so big on the elements that are easy to market like graphics and size of the areas, but the general mechanics and especially the AI are overlooked entirely. It’s my belief that the average gamer doesn’t give a crap about challenging AI and deep mechanics, hence why Cyberpunk and Starfield sold so well.
To be fair to cyberpunk, it actually turned into quite a great game after the 2.0 update, and that was only possible because there was a really well designed foundation. The weapons and level...
To be fair to cyberpunk, it actually turned into quite a great game after the 2.0 update, and that was only possible because there was a really well designed foundation. The weapons and level design were excellent out of the gate, and the AI was decent. What wasn't was just about everything else (including the stats, which made all your unique weapons play the same or not work at all).
That said though, it didn't need to wind up that way, and it still certainly sold well. Somewhat worse, is that this is AFTER they launched in a trash condition and devs scrambled to make the game they intended to. I feel bad for the wonderful product that never saw the light of day that could have been if they'd been given 2 or 3 years of development time, not hobbled by previous gen consoles or a rushed release.
Agreed overall. For clarity, I don’t think the final form of CP is a bad game, though I contest that CP has decent AI and I think that conflating those two items makes my original point. They’re...
Agreed overall. For clarity, I don’t think the final form of CP is a bad game, though I contest that CP has decent AI and I think that conflating those two items makes my original point.
They’re decent in the sense that enemies react to being shot, sure. However I found so many times where they got stuck behind a door, lost interest in a firefight halfway through, tried to shoot through a wall etc. with the end result being the average encounter is more of a shooting gallery than anything strategic.
Whenever I see clips of the gameplay it’s always npcs being wasted by the dozen as they haplessly stand around, ineffectually shooting at the player.
I think part of it is that open world games necessitate the AI’s capabilities to be quite broad, but what would satisfy me is if these type of games were tagged as empowerment simulator or god mode sandbox. Something to say that this game will only be challenging if you restrict your abilities and that’s not really the focus of this product.
Well this is where we get into an interesting issue. I'm really not sure how much better it can be. You cite plenty of examples of disappointing things, but I can't think of many games, especially...
though I contest that CP has decent AI
Well this is where we get into an interesting issue.
I'm really not sure how much better it can be. You cite plenty of examples of disappointing things, but I can't think of many games, especially in any sort of open world setting, that don't have those issues.
The problem of video game AI is extremely complicated, and anything people reference as "good" is often "very good at faking it" (FEAR being a really interesting example).
It's easy to say "well they obviously shouldn't lose interest in a firefight", but at the same time you've got a couple of issues with fixing that:
When should they lose interest? Realism and gameplay balance do not often mix. Realistically everyone would be on a network and the moment someone doesn't check in the whole place would lock down and go into alert for weeks. There's a suspension of disbelief point, but it overlaps heavily with the "casual players are not having fun anymore" point.
What the hell is causing it? You could have 100 cases of this behavior and each is caused by a different issue or interaction.
It's really not as simple as people make it out to be, so when it's not outright atrocious, you're probably looking at something that took considerable time and effort to get there.
Because that's arguably what it's doing. They used a different pattern for the AI than is standard, but a LOT of the glory of the FEAR AI is because of level and sound design. It sounds like...
Because that's arguably what it's doing. They used a different pattern for the AI than is standard, but a LOT of the glory of the FEAR AI is because of level and sound design. It sounds like they're coordinating to flank you. They are in fact not.
There's a paper written by the guy who designed it, and it's quite clever, but it's also not a viable solution for something like an open world game(well depending on what performance you expect. I forgot but the FEAR style AI was used in Just Cause 2, and it's not like that game gets constant accolades for it's brilliant AI)
This is a good video of what the FEAR AI does, and has in general good breakdowns of AI in all sorts of games, what i'm talking about with "faking it" is around the 12 minute mark ,but it's really a more complex subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaOLBOuyswI
I think this is down to humanity’s struggles in organizational structure. We’re able to collaborate on simple divide-and-conquer tasks like modeling a city in a video game. But we don’t know how...
I think this is down to humanity’s struggles in organizational structure. We’re able to collaborate on simple divide-and-conquer tasks like modeling a city in a video game. But we don’t know how to take the hundreds of people responsible for the logic, gameplay, and AI (which interact with multiplicative complexity) and get them to produce a coherent product.
Eh plenty of great games manage this. Hell even cyberpunk got there once they had time to actually finish the game. It’s just simply not a product made with the intent to produce quality and...
Eh plenty of great games manage this. Hell even cyberpunk got there once they had time to actually finish the game.
It’s just simply not a product made with the intent to produce quality and that’s common for any big name product that can be shoved out the door and still sell.
Worse you wind up with death by committee. Can’t have something like Jedi academies saber dismemberment cheat or unique combat. That’s going outside the “box” of things that they know works.
It’s why every ubisoft game feels like paint by numbers and it’s all over just about any industry
I disagree - clearly, given some of humanity's greatest accomplishments, we are capable of bringing many different abilities and efforts together into a cohesive whole. The problem is that we need...
I disagree - clearly, given some of humanity's greatest accomplishments, we are capable of bringing many different abilities and efforts together into a cohesive whole. The problem is that we need to be absolutely certain that the foundation and bedrock we are building upon is solid, and so often that gets overlooked in tech because it isn't flashy.
I think it would be more accurate to say "it's much harder to..." rather than "we don't know how to...". Obviously there are games that do it all well, but it seems to get lost for a lot of these...
I think it would be more accurate to say "it's much harder to..." rather than "we don't know how to...". Obviously there are games that do it all well, but it seems to get lost for a lot of these AAA games.
I guess I'm confused, the author doesn't even address the #1 issue causing this dissonance, profits. It's not as profitable to ship a triple-a game anymore, like gamers these companies executive...
I guess I'm confused, the author doesn't even address the #1 issue causing this dissonance, profits. It's not as profitable to ship a triple-a game anymore, like gamers these companies executive branches are min/maxing, but they're focusing on making money. Is it cheaper to pay testers for a few hundred hours more or is it cheaper to ship the game and make players test it? Is it cheaper hand paint beautiful and thoughtful landscapes or is it cheaper to give the computer a list of objects and let it randomly populate everything in the game? Is it cheaper to have the requested staff of people to ship a good game or is it better to cut the project to shreds and move the timeline up to a better fiscal quarter?
Indie developers are a prime example that, no, games don't have to be shit. Indie devs are making AAA quality games now, they have the tools and the tools make one person's work output like 20x that of a dev 20 years ago. Games of AAA quality still ship in great shape and thoughtful creation, because they don't have a shareholder or board member breathing down their neck.
I don't think this is the dicothomy the author is lamenting. It's extremely expensive to create all those beautiful walls, lovely faces and huge cities; you could actually save money by focusing...
Is it cheaper
I don't think this is the dicothomy the author is lamenting. It's extremely expensive to create all those beautiful walls, lovely faces and huge cities; you could actually save money by focusing on originality and gameplay - just like an indie dev would. You might argue the opposite, that they're attempting to maximize profits by attracting more players with all that glamour, but that still feels irrational to me. If their huge, hollow worlds are wasting my time with their repeated failed stealth missions, I have less time and less desire to buy their next game, and I'll definitely not recommend it to my friends.
This article resonates closely with what I've been thinking as I've been playing a AAA game lately (looking forward to ranting a bit about it when I finish it, I think in a week or two).
The author misses a lot of things. It's a stupid piece, but I've come to expect that from Kotaku, and games journalism at large at that. They almost had it, when they started waffling about how...
I guess I'm confused, the author doesn't even address the #1 issue causing this dissonance, profits.
The author misses a lot of things. It's a stupid piece, but I've come to expect that from Kotaku, and games journalism at large at that.
They almost had it, when they started waffling about how scope doesn't really matter because the game is jank, but then go on to say a 7 was a deserved rating.
In the current "what have you been playing" thread here on Tildes, one of the responses with the most replies has talked about Journey. A two hour masterpiece from start to finish.
Scope? What scope? Two hours is incredibly short yet nobody feels like they wasted their time and money playing a game like Journey because the actual game is good. And I feel like the priorities are off for these AAA studios.
You mention profits, and that's probably the largest contributor, but profits would mean reducing costs and therefore reducing scale. But we're not seeing that, it's larger and bigger and huger every time as if gamers just want that really tiny specific mostly irrelevant thing. When in reality people want a game that's fun to play first, and one that stays fun second.
The moment a game, in this case Outlaw, repeatedly messes up encounters to the point of frustration you can definitively say: This is a bad game. The scope then becomes irrelevant. How good it looks is not important. What voice actors they hired becomes moot.
With games journalism tiptoeing around games like Outlaw and weaseling themselves out of outright saying what they think you'll never see this change.
Just say it's bad. Ubisoft won't send hitmen. I promise. Because they'd probably bungle that too.
Except the author is 100% correct about everything they said. Everything from the headline through the end of the article is a perfect description of the game. It sucks but it's great but it's ugh...
Except the author is 100% correct about everything they said. Everything from the headline through the end of the article is a perfect description of the game. It sucks but it's great but it's ugh but it's good but yeah it's a 7/10. It's really got that sense of "I don't know if it's good...I don't even really know if I like it...but I might as well keep playing it because I want to see what's coming next and I want to play every quest in the game."
Perhaps, but it's like they reach the wrong conclusion. Yeah it looks good and enticing, but it's really just a shitcake covered in pretty fondant. Ultimately their conclusion misses the mark that...
Perhaps, but it's like they reach the wrong conclusion. Yeah it looks good and enticing, but it's really just a shitcake covered in pretty fondant. Ultimately their conclusion misses the mark that at its core this is a bad game.
Also, that sounds awful. If a game makes me think I'm not sure I want to continue I'll just quit. Nobody needs to self flagellate over mediocrity, or in this case, outright subpar content. Play anything else, there's enough other stuff. Things that aren't $130 buggy messes.
Just as a note, I'm not saying you shouldn't enjoy it. People are allowed to enjoy whatever they want. You bought it and you enjoy it? Great! Don't feel like I'm going after anyone's choice personally. In these posts I'm questioning the validity of the journalist's reviews.
I didn't say it makes me question if I want to. I said I do want to keep playing. The problems honestly don't ruin the game. It's more just ugh this again. The combat is actually pretty decent....
I didn't say it makes me question if I want to. I said I do want to keep playing. The problems honestly don't ruin the game. It's more just ugh this again. The combat is actually pretty decent. Enemies flank you, they don't shoot you when you're meleeing their buddy, and I've never had the actual specific issue the author brought up, and I've never felt the need to reload just because I was detected.
It's really not a bad game. Having played it, a lot of the complaints, clips of bad AI, etc, really feel like nitpicking and cherry picking in a way that probably reveals how "bad" AAA games are getting better over time (e.g. showing off the AI's bad accuracy...on the easiest difficulty setting). It's a bit like how our standards of living are constantly getting better but we find more and more things to complain about because it's no longer acceptable to still have these problems given all the advances we've made in [current year]. It's a competent game, if nothing more.
I'm sorry, but these things are insufficient when it comes to a behemoth like Ubisoft. We can compare it to their previous games and see it deteriorate while their prices go up. Proudly stating...
I'm sorry, but these things are insufficient when it comes to a behemoth like Ubisoft. We can compare it to their previous games and see it deteriorate while their prices go up. Proudly stating that no, this is not AAA but AAAA and delivering something so aggressively mediocre that it feels they're mocking their customers on purpose.
You can nitpick when it's more than a 100 dollars for the full game from a developer that we should expect to bring their A-game.
I can’t help but feel that sandbox games trying to let you do everything just makes them worse games. Chrono Trigger is considered to be one of the best RPGs ever made, and that is especially...
I can’t help but feel that sandbox games trying to let you do everything just makes them worse games.
Chrono Trigger is considered to be one of the best RPGs ever made, and that is especially amazing considering its age. But if you look at it in terms of length, it’s probably the shortest RPG Square Enix has ever made.
When I think about the most engaging and enjoyable games I have ever played, it was never because I could do everything. It’s because the game was able to constantly provide me with high quality interactions that involved a considerable amount of design in them, either in terms of story or gameplay mechanics. Games like Celeste and Undertale come to mind, as do several metroidvanias.
I think that the problem with AAA game studios is that they put too many eggs in one basket. Every game becomes a giant production because it needs to be everything to everyone, but that just results in bland games.
Did you read the article? Much of it is about how much time and energy was essentially wasted on making thoughtful and perfect environments that you're intended to not even notice. All that...
Is it cheaper hand paint beautiful and thoughtful landscapes or is it cheaper to give the computer a list of objects and let it randomly populate everything in the game?
Did you read the article? Much of it is about how much time and energy was essentially wasted on making thoughtful and perfect environments that you're intended to not even notice. All that "wasted" perfect art direction stuff is the author's favorite part of the game.
This was the biggest takeaway from the article, for me. I really wish I lived in the world where I could download the assets and world for some arbitrary game released five years ago and use it as...
It has always struck me as the most horrendous waste that a game like Assassin’s Creed Odyssey can recreate ancient Greece in such wonderful detail, and then gets thrown away, that entire digital space never used again for anything else. It could be given to the world, offered as a setting for a thousand indie games, reused and recycled as such an achievement deserves. Instead, it’s there for that single game ...
This was the biggest takeaway from the article, for me. I really wish I lived in the world where I could download the assets and world for some arbitrary game released five years ago and use it as a foundation for some vision I had. Not that I have the skills to do any of that, but I imagine lots of folks out there do! And it would be really cool to see things be re-used in this manner.
There is actually a sizeable crowd who is interested in ripping the assets from games. You can get a program like MEXCom that allows you to extract the data from game- or dev- specific formats, or...
There is actually a sizeable crowd who is interested in ripping the assets from games. You can get a program like MEXCom that allows you to extract the data from game- or dev- specific formats, or Noesis that allows you to view and convert 3D models. I haven't checked in on them in years but I'm sure there are much better tools in use these days.
That being said, you can't really do anything with them once you've extracted them because of legal restrictions. The best you could do is to use them in a fangame or something and hope that the company who owns it doesn't sue.
I’m having an absolute blast with Star Wars Outlaws. It’s the most fun I’ve had with this type of game in years. It may not be innovative in the gameplay department, but it is an excellently...
I’m having an absolute blast with Star Wars Outlaws. It’s the most fun I’ve had with this type of game in years. It may not be innovative in the gameplay department, but it is an excellently executed love letter to the original Star Wars trilogy. I’ve run into about 20 minutes of frustration in my 15+ hours of gameplay.
The dissonance here, for me, is between the professional reviews and the response by gamers playing. Have a look at the StarWarsOutlaws subreddit if you want to see what I mean.
This is why I don’t play AAA anymore. They’re so big on the elements that are easy to market like graphics and size of the areas, but the general mechanics and especially the AI are overlooked entirely. It’s my belief that the average gamer doesn’t give a crap about challenging AI and deep mechanics, hence why Cyberpunk and Starfield sold so well.
To be fair to cyberpunk, it actually turned into quite a great game after the 2.0 update, and that was only possible because there was a really well designed foundation. The weapons and level design were excellent out of the gate, and the AI was decent. What wasn't was just about everything else (including the stats, which made all your unique weapons play the same or not work at all).
That said though, it didn't need to wind up that way, and it still certainly sold well. Somewhat worse, is that this is AFTER they launched in a trash condition and devs scrambled to make the game they intended to. I feel bad for the wonderful product that never saw the light of day that could have been if they'd been given 2 or 3 years of development time, not hobbled by previous gen consoles or a rushed release.
Agreed overall. For clarity, I don’t think the final form of CP is a bad game, though I contest that CP has decent AI and I think that conflating those two items makes my original point.
They’re decent in the sense that enemies react to being shot, sure. However I found so many times where they got stuck behind a door, lost interest in a firefight halfway through, tried to shoot through a wall etc. with the end result being the average encounter is more of a shooting gallery than anything strategic.
Whenever I see clips of the gameplay it’s always npcs being wasted by the dozen as they haplessly stand around, ineffectually shooting at the player.
I think part of it is that open world games necessitate the AI’s capabilities to be quite broad, but what would satisfy me is if these type of games were tagged as empowerment simulator or god mode sandbox. Something to say that this game will only be challenging if you restrict your abilities and that’s not really the focus of this product.
I still hate that abbreviation for Cyberpunk...
2077 is right there!
I was being lazy, but I’m going to take this as a teachable moment…
Well this is where we get into an interesting issue.
I'm really not sure how much better it can be. You cite plenty of examples of disappointing things, but I can't think of many games, especially in any sort of open world setting, that don't have those issues.
The problem of video game AI is extremely complicated, and anything people reference as "good" is often "very good at faking it" (FEAR being a really interesting example).
It's easy to say "well they obviously shouldn't lose interest in a firefight", but at the same time you've got a couple of issues with fixing that:
When should they lose interest? Realism and gameplay balance do not often mix. Realistically everyone would be on a network and the moment someone doesn't check in the whole place would lock down and go into alert for weeks. There's a suspension of disbelief point, but it overlaps heavily with the "casual players are not having fun anymore" point.
What the hell is causing it? You could have 100 cases of this behavior and each is caused by a different issue or interaction.
It's really not as simple as people make it out to be, so when it's not outright atrocious, you're probably looking at something that took considerable time and effort to get there.
Because that's arguably what it's doing. They used a different pattern for the AI than is standard, but a LOT of the glory of the FEAR AI is because of level and sound design. It sounds like they're coordinating to flank you. They are in fact not.
There's a paper written by the guy who designed it, and it's quite clever, but it's also not a viable solution for something like an open world game(well depending on what performance you expect. I forgot but the FEAR style AI was used in Just Cause 2, and it's not like that game gets constant accolades for it's brilliant AI)
This is a good video of what the FEAR AI does, and has in general good breakdowns of AI in all sorts of games, what i'm talking about with "faking it" is around the 12 minute mark ,but it's really a more complex subject:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaOLBOuyswI
I think this is down to humanity’s struggles in organizational structure. We’re able to collaborate on simple divide-and-conquer tasks like modeling a city in a video game. But we don’t know how to take the hundreds of people responsible for the logic, gameplay, and AI (which interact with multiplicative complexity) and get them to produce a coherent product.
Eh plenty of great games manage this. Hell even cyberpunk got there once they had time to actually finish the game.
It’s just simply not a product made with the intent to produce quality and that’s common for any big name product that can be shoved out the door and still sell.
Worse you wind up with death by committee. Can’t have something like Jedi academies saber dismemberment cheat or unique combat. That’s going outside the “box” of things that they know works.
It’s why every ubisoft game feels like paint by numbers and it’s all over just about any industry
I disagree - clearly, given some of humanity's greatest accomplishments, we are capable of bringing many different abilities and efforts together into a cohesive whole. The problem is that we need to be absolutely certain that the foundation and bedrock we are building upon is solid, and so often that gets overlooked in tech because it isn't flashy.
I think it would be more accurate to say "it's much harder to..." rather than "we don't know how to...". Obviously there are games that do it all well, but it seems to get lost for a lot of these AAA games.
I guess I'm confused, the author doesn't even address the #1 issue causing this dissonance, profits. It's not as profitable to ship a triple-a game anymore, like gamers these companies executive branches are min/maxing, but they're focusing on making money. Is it cheaper to pay testers for a few hundred hours more or is it cheaper to ship the game and make players test it? Is it cheaper hand paint beautiful and thoughtful landscapes or is it cheaper to give the computer a list of objects and let it randomly populate everything in the game? Is it cheaper to have the requested staff of people to ship a good game or is it better to cut the project to shreds and move the timeline up to a better fiscal quarter?
Indie developers are a prime example that, no, games don't have to be shit. Indie devs are making AAA quality games now, they have the tools and the tools make one person's work output like 20x that of a dev 20 years ago. Games of AAA quality still ship in great shape and thoughtful creation, because they don't have a shareholder or board member breathing down their neck.
I don't think this is the dicothomy the author is lamenting. It's extremely expensive to create all those beautiful walls, lovely faces and huge cities; you could actually save money by focusing on originality and gameplay - just like an indie dev would. You might argue the opposite, that they're attempting to maximize profits by attracting more players with all that glamour, but that still feels irrational to me. If their huge, hollow worlds are wasting my time with their repeated failed stealth missions, I have less time and less desire to buy their next game, and I'll definitely not recommend it to my friends.
This article resonates closely with what I've been thinking as I've been playing a AAA game lately (looking forward to ranting a bit about it when I finish it, I think in a week or two).
The author misses a lot of things. It's a stupid piece, but I've come to expect that from Kotaku, and games journalism at large at that.
They almost had it, when they started waffling about how scope doesn't really matter because the game is jank, but then go on to say a 7 was a deserved rating.
In the current "what have you been playing" thread here on Tildes, one of the responses with the most replies has talked about Journey. A two hour masterpiece from start to finish.
Scope? What scope? Two hours is incredibly short yet nobody feels like they wasted their time and money playing a game like Journey because the actual game is good. And I feel like the priorities are off for these AAA studios.
You mention profits, and that's probably the largest contributor, but profits would mean reducing costs and therefore reducing scale. But we're not seeing that, it's larger and bigger and huger every time as if gamers just want that really tiny specific mostly irrelevant thing. When in reality people want a game that's fun to play first, and one that stays fun second.
The moment a game, in this case Outlaw, repeatedly messes up encounters to the point of frustration you can definitively say: This is a bad game. The scope then becomes irrelevant. How good it looks is not important. What voice actors they hired becomes moot.
With games journalism tiptoeing around games like Outlaw and weaseling themselves out of outright saying what they think you'll never see this change.
Just say it's bad. Ubisoft won't send hitmen. I promise. Because they'd probably bungle that too.
Except the author is 100% correct about everything they said. Everything from the headline through the end of the article is a perfect description of the game. It sucks but it's great but it's ugh but it's good but yeah it's a 7/10. It's really got that sense of "I don't know if it's good...I don't even really know if I like it...but I might as well keep playing it because I want to see what's coming next and I want to play every quest in the game."
Perhaps, but it's like they reach the wrong conclusion. Yeah it looks good and enticing, but it's really just a shitcake covered in pretty fondant. Ultimately their conclusion misses the mark that at its core this is a bad game.
Also, that sounds awful. If a game makes me think I'm not sure I want to continue I'll just quit. Nobody needs to self flagellate over mediocrity, or in this case, outright subpar content. Play anything else, there's enough other stuff. Things that aren't $130 buggy messes.
Just as a note, I'm not saying you shouldn't enjoy it. People are allowed to enjoy whatever they want. You bought it and you enjoy it? Great! Don't feel like I'm going after anyone's choice personally. In these posts I'm questioning the validity of the journalist's reviews.
I didn't say it makes me question if I want to. I said I do want to keep playing. The problems honestly don't ruin the game. It's more just ugh this again. The combat is actually pretty decent. Enemies flank you, they don't shoot you when you're meleeing their buddy, and I've never had the actual specific issue the author brought up, and I've never felt the need to reload just because I was detected.
It's really not a bad game. Having played it, a lot of the complaints, clips of bad AI, etc, really feel like nitpicking and cherry picking in a way that probably reveals how "bad" AAA games are getting better over time (e.g. showing off the AI's bad accuracy...on the easiest difficulty setting). It's a bit like how our standards of living are constantly getting better but we find more and more things to complain about because it's no longer acceptable to still have these problems given all the advances we've made in [current year]. It's a competent game, if nothing more.
I'm sorry, but these things are insufficient when it comes to a behemoth like Ubisoft. We can compare it to their previous games and see it deteriorate while their prices go up. Proudly stating that no, this is not AAA but AAAA and delivering something so aggressively mediocre that it feels they're mocking their customers on purpose.
You can nitpick when it's more than a 100 dollars for the full game from a developer that we should expect to bring their A-game.
edit: spelling
I can’t help but feel that sandbox games trying to let you do everything just makes them worse games.
Chrono Trigger is considered to be one of the best RPGs ever made, and that is especially amazing considering its age. But if you look at it in terms of length, it’s probably the shortest RPG Square Enix has ever made.
When I think about the most engaging and enjoyable games I have ever played, it was never because I could do everything. It’s because the game was able to constantly provide me with high quality interactions that involved a considerable amount of design in them, either in terms of story or gameplay mechanics. Games like Celeste and Undertale come to mind, as do several metroidvanias.
I think that the problem with AAA game studios is that they put too many eggs in one basket. Every game becomes a giant production because it needs to be everything to everyone, but that just results in bland games.
Did you read the article? Much of it is about how much time and energy was essentially wasted on making thoughtful and perfect environments that you're intended to not even notice. All that "wasted" perfect art direction stuff is the author's favorite part of the game.
This was the biggest takeaway from the article, for me. I really wish I lived in the world where I could download the assets and world for some arbitrary game released five years ago and use it as a foundation for some vision I had. Not that I have the skills to do any of that, but I imagine lots of folks out there do! And it would be really cool to see things be re-used in this manner.
There is actually a sizeable crowd who is interested in ripping the assets from games. You can get a program like MEXCom that allows you to extract the data from game- or dev- specific formats, or Noesis that allows you to view and convert 3D models. I haven't checked in on them in years but I'm sure there are much better tools in use these days.
That being said, you can't really do anything with them once you've extracted them because of legal restrictions. The best you could do is to use them in a fangame or something and hope that the company who owns it doesn't sue.
I’m having an absolute blast with Star Wars Outlaws. It’s the most fun I’ve had with this type of game in years. It may not be innovative in the gameplay department, but it is an excellently executed love letter to the original Star Wars trilogy. I’ve run into about 20 minutes of frustration in my 15+ hours of gameplay.
The dissonance here, for me, is between the professional reviews and the response by gamers playing. Have a look at the StarWarsOutlaws subreddit if you want to see what I mean.