(Credit: Sony/Insomniac)
If the PlayStation State of Play made one thing clear, it's that the AAA video game industry has lost its nerve. The broadcast should have been a triumphant celebration of gameplay: the pinnacle of the medium's mechanics. Instead, the two high-profile titles I was most excited about—Marvel's Wolverine and God of War: Laufey—were the show's biggest letdowns, serving as an agonizing case study in the decline of modern action titles.
From Artistry to Automation
State of Play for June 2026 began with Marvel's Wolverine, which was the ultimate heartbreak. Given Logan's legendary berserker rage, developer Insomniac was given the perfect canvas for a visceral, high-speed action game in the vein of classic Ninja Gaiden titles. Instead, I was bummed to see what looked like generic, automated Uncharted-style convoy setpieces and canned combat animations lifted straight from the Arkham and Marvel's Spider-Man games—now merely painted over with a superficial layer of bloodspray.
The stream was bookended by God of War: Laufey, cementing the rot. To maintain the awkward, movie-like presentation established in the 2018 God of War reboot, this new game stubbornly retains the claustrophobic, over-the-shoulder camera angles that completely ruin peripheral vision. And to inject some semblance of speed, developer Santa Monica Studio introduces jarringly floaty, weightless aerial combat that looks like an awkward imitation of the infamous DmC: Devil May Cry reboot. SMS appears to have butchered the frantic, 360-degree crowd control of the original Greek trilogy, sacrificing mechanical momentum on the altar of self-important, over-produced gaming "cinema."
This is the tragedy of modern, prestige gaming. This decline is not a failure of developer imagination, but a symptom of ballooning AAA budgets. When a project requires sales of over 7 million copies just to break even, creative risk is a financial liability. This risk aversion causes modern studios to systematically hollow out gameplay mechanics into low-skill, over-the-shoulder slop.
The expressive, high-skill combat freedom of iconic action games like Bayonetta and Devil May Cry 3 has been dumbed down to passive, automated interactions that prioritize mocapped visuals over player agency. I'm no longer asked to master an action game; I’m told to politely spectate with a controller in hand. Just look at that God of War: Laufey reveal. How much of those "20 minutes of uncut gameplay" was actual gameplay that required user input? I would guess maybe three or four minutes, tops.
The Myth of the Niche Ceiling
Corporations will point to history to defend this regression, arguing that pure action games hit a strict financial ceiling. But history proves that trying to fix this "problem" through dilution is a commercial death sentence. When Team Ninja panicked in 2012 and engineered Ninja Gaiden 3 to be a casual-friendly, highly cinematic title, it alienated its core fanbase and saw sales crash to a dismal 630,000 units. The lesson publishers refuse to learn is that a highly dedicated, mid-sized audience buying a properly budgeted game is infinitely more sustainable than a $200 million cinematic behemoth that has to strip away its own soul just to break even.
(Credit: Sony/Santa Monica Studio)The State of Play actually highlights this very point. Phantom Blade Zero had a mere minute of teased footage, but promises a much more robust and engaging action experience. Likewise, Kemuri looked like a fantastic, stylish multiplayer action game about yokai-hunting. And 2024's Stellar Blade shattered this myth entirely, making the most of its lean budget to expose the whale-sized bloat of Western AAA studios. Developed by South Korea’s Shift Up for a modest, estimated budget of $30 to $50 million, Stellar Blade proved to be a financial titan, comfortably surpassing 3 million copies sold and claiming the title of the best-selling PlayStation-exclusive launch IP on PC.
I don't need pre-baked set pieces, like the canned convoy platforming and combat in Marvel's Wolverine, to make me feel like a badass in an action game. Likewise, I don't need 15 minutes of unskippable, barely interactive, and awkwardly written story scenes to feel connected to a game, as seen in the God of War: Laufey reveal. In Stellar Blade, I can perfectly parry a boss' combo and hit them with a super that knocks them flat on their duffs. That’s badass. AAA developers have left these satisfying mechanics on the wayside, and it's a real shame.
(Credit: Sony/Santa Monica Studio)Here's Hoping I'm Wrong
The AAA industry is currently trapped in a financial prison of its own making, spending hundreds of millions of dollars to build beautiful, lifeless interactive movies. But video games are not movies. They do not exist to be passively observed through the safe lens of a director's over-the-shoulder camera; they exist to be played and mastered. If modern studios want to save the action genre, they need to strip away the Simon Says-style gameplay and look to the financial success of Stellar Blade as a blueprint. I genuinely hope my gut feeling is wrong about Marvel's Wolverine and God of War: Laufey, and both titles turn out great. But as it stands, I'm not impressed.