I'm not saying story is a bad thing. It's not, but it seems like a lot of devs focus so heavily on coming up with an engaging story and good visuals that they forget to actually make the game fun to play.
I think about some of the games I've played over the years, and a lot of my favorites either had fairly limited or even downright absurd plots that basically boil down to an excuse to make the gameplay loop happen.
Just a random musing.
When wow came out the devs working on the game wanted to got home to play wow. Today you have diablo 4 devs that have no idea how to play the game while someone thought a lets play video is a good idea because she was a fat lesbian.
You can't make a fun game if the ones that are making it don't have passion and have no idea what makes a game fun.
You only have templates and checkboxes. Make good graphics, make sure is inclusive, long cinematics, add an Ubisoft tower, lockpicking minigame, card minigame, fast travel, block or/and dodge mechanics, crafting etc.
Want to know what is worse? Before, in the 90s and early 2000s, we had innocence, optimism and passion. There is no optimism or innocence anymore, everyone is terminally online, everyone is deep in to politics. You can't make fun games anymore, even if I was to lead a game I'm way to blackpilled to make a fun one.
Shigeru Miyamoto liked to explore the countryside and nearby caves as a child.
Satoshi Tajiri, the creator of Pokemon, loved to collect bugs.
What hobbies or experiences do nu-devs have that isn't just school and consume slop?
Their hobbies include:
Grooming kids
Dilate and seethe
I agree with your other points, but this part is simply wrong. 2024 has had some great releases this year: Unicorn Overlord, Balatro, Black Myth Wukong, Rise of the Ronin for starters. Palworld and Helldivers 2 dominated the first quarter of this year, and despite the current day complaining, gamers certainly got their $40's worth of fun on release.
Asians are doing a lot of heavy lifting.
They always had.
Bakuro got an American release.
Here's hoping -Guy who uses AI to speed creative process up
What a product manager does can easily be replaced by AI but they are also there to put pressure on devs. AI can't do that.
Complete opposite here. I used to think stories were important in video games, and now all of my most played games are 99% gameplay. I think essentially all video game writing is trash and extended cinematics are the death of the medium.
I think this is more a product of an individual's stage of life. In my youth I wanted stories because I had boundless free time to pour into subpar gameplay. Now that I'm older and have less free time, the minute to minute gameplay needs to be super tight or I won't bother to slog through it regardless of how grand your story is.
That said, the best of video game writing is still very much worthwhile, but there are precious few titles that can claim to achieve such lofty heights. I can probably count the number of titles on one hand after thirty years of play.
I think games just need a comprehensive story and that's all. Think of the original MW trilogy. While the first game is actually pretty reasonable and realistic with it's plot, the second and third games go off the rails with any realism in the events, but it's fine because it's explained well enough in universe and the game is fun. Most games don't need a masterpiece of writing unless they are story based games like a visual novel or something with significantly branching story results based on choices made.
No arguments there. I like a good story in a game. I just want the game to be fun enough that I don't have to force myself to keep playing to see that story play out, because the controls/gameplay loop is a greater enemy than whatever Big Bad the devs dreamed up.
Blood Omen: The Legacy of Kain is a prime example of this. (I said the last few decades for a reason, lmao). Fascinatingly dark, twisted story.
...aaaabbsolutely dogshit controls and repetitive gameplay. Took me five tries to actually get through the game without getting bored/tired of the nonsense.
Holy shit I love blood omen. Awesome character and interesting setting.
Agreed, Legacy of Kain has a fantastic story, I just wish the game was a little more fun, lol
It's fun enough! I've finished it 4 times now. Every so often just crave that game.
eh, maybe it's just me, then. blood omen seemed like you basically sat there trading hits with enemies and hoped you got in more than they did. Soul Reaver was a lot better, but it got tedious after a while.
loved the concept of both, though, and the story was intense as hell...
technically, I "own" all five games between steam and gog, so I could go back and try to play them again, I suppose.
Heck, look at STALKER for example. The story in of itself is... well, kind of interesting in a lore kind of way, but not especially engaging most of the time.
What is engaging however is the kind of shit you run into wherever you go. And it's not like a haunted house carnival ride, with linear jumpscares along a linear track either.
All of which makes up the basic setting and overall gameplay experience. The story in actuality only ends up serving as some kind of context for what's going on.
See also any Fromsoft game for examples of this.
Enough people do care to where they actually did start writing stories and making spin-offs, but to be honest, LoL is just a waifu skin simulator at this point, the last time I opened League was to get all of the K/DA ALL OUT skins
It's a problem tied to the rise of game budgets and investor demand for more guaranteed returns. You can pretty reliably get better visuals just by pumping more money into a game studio, and that translates fairly reliably into better review scores and more purchases. Good writing is harder to get via more money, but you can at least hire big name writers from previously successful games; if they write trash this time then you can still justify your decision to hire them based on their previous success. A good gameplay loop requires capturing lightning in a bottle, and you can't do that by just pumping more money into the game. You're far more likely to find a good gameplay loop by digging through the piles of cheap indie games on Steam and looking for someone's personal passion project.
Also, and I've been deliberately ignoring the elephant in the room until now, woke devs don't actually play games and don't know what good gameplay is.
Only if you require it to be new/unique. There's plenty of gameplay loops that are proven successes, and most of these are nowhere near market saturation. But studios/publishers aren't interested in established gameplay loops (unless they're the ones that established it) they're trying to figure out how to maximize the amount of money they can milk out of their customers.
Yeah, playing Halls of Torment right now... And it's Vampire Survivors. Straight-up. Still sold a million copies, and still is a great game.
I played a half-dozen Slay The Spire clones, called that because they just ape the deckbuilder system of STS. Because that system, too, works. Maybe a dozen "Metroidvania" titles, too, named so because they copy the gameplay loop of Metroid, and Castlevania.
I've probably played two dozen "souls-like" games, 3rd-person hack-and-slashers with dodge-rolling-and-stamina elements. Because that one also works.
And don't get me started on turn based party based "Attack, Magic, Item, Flee" menu combat systems and gameplay loops! I've probably a thousand JRPGs in my library.
It's easy to get a good gameplay loop. Just take a successful game's loop. Everyone does it. No one gets sued over it.
absolutely true
Also true, lol.
or at the very least trial and error, lol. you don't have to be groundbreaking, just don't have me mashing the button like I'm playing track and field and praying I land more hits than I take, lol.
For graphics chasing, yes. A lot of studios want their games to look real, rather than look lived in and stylized, like they used to. And it starts to make them look the same, even if it looks nice.
As for story, I think it was John Carmack who said that plot in a video game is nice, and it has to be there, but it's sort of like the plot in porn. Sure it's there, but it's not the main reason to be playing the game. Some RPGs, especially Bioware titles got a bunch of writers to make a compelling story, but a lot of that felt entirely unnecessary as it was basically window dressing in the game. It was there, and it was interesting, but if it wasn't there, I'd probably still have played through the game anyway.
Aside from the rot killing gaming, a few other things happened organically that is helping, too. Like the bloat.
In the corporate/AAA space, the workload got shifted to many, instead of few. Dev teams used to be 3-8 people depending on complexity of the title back in the SNES/Genesis era.
Then to 12-15 for the ps1/saturn/N64 era , then they hit 50, then 75, now there's hundreds working on a title, and in a few extremely rare cases, almost 500 people working on a single game. (If you add in all the foreign please do the needful dev support) That's a lot of outgoing money that has to be recouped by the game sales, as well as everyone else taking their cut.
So, game budgets have ballooned to movie size budgets to pay for all that. Ironic that they can pay up to 500 people to make a game, but expect QA to be done by one or two, if at all. But I digress. Even Borderlands 2's Dr Ned took a jab at that "If it compiles, ship it!"
Which means games now have had to cater to everyone in order to sell enough for the company to still exist. Which makes them all start to feel the same due to giving you what works, rather than a fun experimental and niche title like it used to be.
Innovation is also a double edged sword. When something innovative does happen, especially when it becomes a genre changing addition, other games will copy that innovation, sometimes in a game where it doesn't need to be, and then they all start feeling the same again.
As an example, In the mid 2010s people were tired of climbing towers to get the map revealed. It's something FarCry 3 did in 2012 that they repeated from FarCry 2, back when that felt new and exciting to do in that game. Then everyone did it. If you were playing an open world style of game, you were just expected to do a climbing puzzle just to see get the fog off a section of the map, in games that had many other options they could have used instead, and no business making you do that. But all of a sudden, they all did. Ubisoft specifically had a fetish for copying their other titles into their other open world games. So your Tom Clancy open world game felt like your FarCry open world game felt like your Assassin's Creed open world game felt like your The Division open world game.
Non ubisoft titles did it too. If you played Dying Light, there were towers to climb to reveal the map there too.
As well as shooters in general started to look and feel identical in the xbox360/ps3 era. There was an infamous screenshot collage where either 6 or 9 screenshots from 6 or 9 different games held the same gun and the caption at the top was "Name the game" and the only big difference was whether they had the green screen tint or the brown screen tint that companies loved to use. For a good five years it was green and bloom, or brown and bloom.
Or the blood on the screen during damage taken. Vestiges of that could be felt as far back as Goldeneye on N64, when you were hit you'd sharp gasp inhale and the edges of the screen would flash white as your armor/health got drained. That persists right up to today in Mad Max, FarCry 6, The Division 2, etc with damage being indicated as more and more blood splats on the screen edges. I'm sure Call of Duty and Battlefield probably still do it too. I just haven't played those in a decade.
So even if the rot hadn't touched gaming (as unlikely as that is) there would still be homogenization and samey feeling with very little innovation in terms of gameplay just due to needing to cater to everyone and make the same game as everyone else. The mentality of "It worked for them it'll work for us too" isn't helping anyone.
I also don't remember anyone saying "You know, I will just not buy this game at all unless it costs millions and millions to make" Most people were usually taken aback at the amount of people working on "Wow, 100 people worked on this?" without much else thought to it.
even beyond innovation, it seems like a lot of games have clunky controls. I can deal with a little sameness, I just don't want to fight the keyboard/mouse/gamepad constantly, lol.
I definitely agree with regards to the bloat. Like on paper, it seems like it makes sense. Get more people doing a wide range of legwork, should provide results very quickly. The reality though is that structure, communication, delays, logistics, etc etc. bog the entire thing down, all while ramping up the costs over a longass period of time for a company.
Also, if I remember right, I think there is a slightly less organic reason for why some companies have been overbloating their employee counts. I don't remember if it had to do with investors and stock value or laws governing requiring a minimum x number of employees to be considered a y-type of company.
Not something that's specific to game companies, but a lot of tech companies in particular.
Story faggotry happened because of two things. One, women flooded the dev industry and they hate gameplay. Women prefer passive entertainment. 2, some of the highest selling games are story based games. Sony built a brand on cinematic gameplay that really appeals to normies.
I think another thing too is that story faggotry meshed well with how big studios tried to present trailers and footage for upcoming games at things like E3. It's a bit easier to convey than trying to show off satisfying gameplay loops.
I blame Bioshock Infinite.
It was the first game I ever stumbled across where the actual story got in the way of gameplay, and quickly revealed just how much of an on-the-rails shooter it was compared to it's previous incarnations.
eh, it goes further back than that. The series that keeps coming to mind for me is Legacy of Kain. Rich world. Dark, twisted characters. incredible story.
...aaannnddd shitty controls/boring gameplay.
...seems like it would be pretty easy to troll them on that...just act super patronizing about how they totally didnt mean to make such a monumentally hideous UI, it just sort of came out that way, lmao.
I couldn't get more than an hour or so into that game. This was definitely part of the reason why.
The problem with stories in games nowadays is that game devs are now by and large retarded, political hacks who don't understand the most basic fundamentals of games or stories. Gameplay is itself a form of communication, and gameplay progression is a story. Walls of text and unskipable cutscenes interrupt that gameplay story, and more often than not detract from the gameplay more than serving it.
I am. A lot of current writers are completely shit which leads to reusing old ideas in the hope nobody notices, a reminder that regardless of how shit the ending to ME3 was the 3 choices at the end were literally the same 3 choices from Deus Ex in 2000, or some incompetent tumblr tier fanfic writer who throws new OCs into year old franchises and fucks things up so badly there is no going back. See all the criticism the BFA and SL expansions from WoW get for an example of this. To make matters worse a lot of players suddenly think Blizz brining back Chris Metzan is going to solve these problems when he's already shown to be suffering from "Death of the author" and virtue signalling his own fuckups as if they were a good idea on any level. See his comments about letting his daughter comment and influence game design changes when she's 5 years below the age rating for the game.
Not what I mean, lol.
I'm saying it's okay to have a decent story, it can add to the game if it's properly done, but it ought to be a lower tier priority than making an enjoyable gameplay experience.
Part of it is Woke, but part of it is just fashion as well.
There were rumblings of "elevating design" and "integration of narrative approaches and luddite mechanical approaches" all the way back into 2009 when I was studying it.
Back then it was legitmate though, earnest developers with competing philosophy on how to do things and what was possible to achieve.
The divide was whether games were a innately storytelling medium or if games were sets of systems that could be used to tell stories. The divide was cordial though. And legitimate knowledgeable designers existed on both sides
There was a lot of talk about games being recognized as art and legitimate entertainment.
At the time the big example was GTA: San Andreas as a better example of society/freedom/accountability themselves than some more famous mainstream works.
The "Games as Art" movement started out of nerds' pathological desire to not be treated like pig slop for caring about something less sexy. It was an attempt to legitimize the medium and the hobby by people who never got over all the swirlies they got in middle school. Don't get me wrong, that was more bearable than the rent seekrs we have now, but it was still pathetic.
It being hijacked later on allows more talentless hacks to hide in the gears, and just like HR departments that grows over time.
The ''Games as Art'' and ''Games need to grow-up'' fart-huffing pretentious cunts and censors did extensive damage to gaming when they got their foot in the door of games studios.
I'm assuming we're talking big corporate gaming.
Games are becoming more story heavy, because they are hiring (heavy hehe) non gamers to create games. At bare minimum you're getting devs and team members who are just normies. Most often you're getting communications and business degree grads, of whom most are indoctrinated.
Gone are those gamers who wanted to make games for other gamers. They don't get hired. It used to be a requirement that you were passionate about games, that you could impress that in your interview. Now that's a detriment. Like how they don't hire cops or FBI bros with high IQ. They want compliant drones who can pad their demographics numbers.
Who IS designing the games? The suits and product managers. Are they creative? No. They just copy popular and effective trends. They hire female writers for the most part, because that's another easy in to pad demographics. The code devs are a few white dudes, and 85% H-1B Asians. Sometimes a couple Canadians.
So, we're getting story heavy games. With a feature focus on pain points that can be alleviated by MTX. Game mechanics are difficult to fake and require more QA, so they reuse, copy, and stretch engines past their shelf life.
The smart talent is gone, because they realized that AAA gaming companies would all be making mobile gachas or sports betting if they could, but the C-suite paid big money for these IP's that need milking.
Makes sense.
yeah, the independent games are where it's at these days, and even that can be a craps shoot sometimes.
You aren't alone. The overemphasis on graphics and story is part of the overarching attempt to perfect a specific game development formula.
I've hypothesised that the desire for "moar grafikz!1!" came from Crysis. Everything since has been greater budgets for diminishing returns. Plus pure graphical fidelity is easy to market to people.
"Story" is a bit more complex. It's not that gameplay is being sacrificed for story, it's that gameplay is being sacrificed for one particular type of storytelling. This is due to the greater mainstream acceptance of games. Because of this, failed TV and movie writers see gaming as an easy mark and can be paid large sums of cash to write C- or D-level scripts. The other side of this coin is many in the gaming sphere don't like that TVs and movies still treat them with disdain. In response, they try and make a TV show/ movie in a game so they'll pretty please be allowed at the adult's table.
Graphical emphasis goes back to the early days of gaming. The Sega Master System was at least partially advertised for its hardware and rendering capabilities compared to the NES.
Yet at the same time it not only had a much much smaller lineup of games to offer, it didn't have the kind of punch of big, enjoyable, audience pleasing hits like the NES did.
What really changed was probably that the limits for graphical fidelity has slowly moved from being a hardware hurdle, to how much time and work must be invested in producing the assets and art itself.
Plus, because of how much more modern hardware's capable of, you have greater complexities when it comes to applying that art. IE, more and more objects and decor that can be included in a scene, to try to bring it closer in line with what we might see in reality. Which then requires tools (or a fuckton of time) to streamline the process of actually placing all of those objects and decor throughout every scene/map/space in an entire game. It just really adds up.
I don't hate story, but I want the gameplay to at least be fun.
I'd say 'kind of' as with graphics the front load it for trailers and demos with how great they look but when you see the game streamed (as I never buy day 1 and forget pre ordering nowadays) they turn out average or even worse with quite a few Western games. The Asian ones are better because they need the graphics to be good throughout as how else are we seeing the female butt jiggle the entire game.
Story is a different thing altogether. A lot of studios try the 'subversive, interesting take/ direction' but they forget we've had Bioshock, Stanley Parable, even the first (and only good one) Last of Us so we've HAD interesting stories before so that won't immediately make us drop money anymore. This is made worse with ideology injection which is like suddenly hitting a wall since it removes you from the setting with the injection of current day politics.
Both of these though are the focus over gameplay as many of these devs don't play games OUTSIDE their work so aren't experienced with different mechanics to know what's fun and what can get dull and/or annoying used too much.
TLDR; they focus on graphics/story because they're not gamer enough to do gameplay but shit at both.
I've only ever preordered two games, and somehow got lucky with both; Ghostbusters: The video game in 2009 (basically a third-person shooter but with the proton pack), and Deadpool in 2013 (Think arkham asylum-style fighting sequences, but with a more forgiving combo system, also killing, lots of killing).
generally speaking though, yeah. preordering always seemed like rolling the dice even before the woke garbage got forced into gaming without gamers' consent...
Story is the most important part of a game, because fuck multiplayer. Story driven is vital, however no one has gone to school to learn how-to spin a proper narrative. Hell I bet all the devs who write stories for game ahead days don't even fucking know what a diegesis is. these are not stories being written and told, they are fucking YouTuber fanfics with the writing talent of an illiterate moron.
eh, even if you leave out multiplayer, the game needs to actually be enjoyable to play, and the controls don't need to be perfect, but you shouldn't be constantly fighting with them, either.
It’s a nonsense opinion. I play a bunch of single player games with little or no narrative content.
okay, fair enough. just seemed like a trend in gaming is all.
oh god, don't get me started on QTEs... If I wanna play ddr, I'll get the fucking mats out and play ddr...
Retro games barely had a story. It was just sort of expected to be there.
If anything, there was a period of time where screaming idiots felt the story was supposed to be le epic deep lore where everything has to fit together like some kind of fantasy novel series of books with 5000 pages. Sonic Universe. Zelda Timeline. It was nonsense. During the era I was halfway expecting the Tony Hawk Canonical History.
That being said, I don't mind a good story, just don't make it the main focus of the game. Hell, windwaker had a pretty decent story (even though it was for kids), but it was fun to actually play, in spite of the grindy bits.
...and I know I'm gonna get flak for this, but ocarina of time is overrated... if I have to go back and forth over hyrule field one more goddamn time...
I think it depends on how that exposition is handled in the game too. The old adage of "show don't tell" is probably truer in games than for almost any other medium.
The things you see and observe within the game world can do far more to deliver a story than the vast majority of dialogue in a game. The game world is the number 1 key to immersion. And things that try to force you out of that game world like cut-scenes can be some of the most immersion and experience breaking elements in a game.
agreed. I don't have a problem with story in games (beyond the obvious), I just hate it when a dev focuses so hard on story that they forget to make the game actually playable, lol.
Wind Waker is superior in my opinion. EVEN though I have much more nostalgia for OoT, simply because of the 2D > 3D leap blowing my kid mind. But, in hindsite, now I go back to Wind Waker every time. The cel shading also helps it hold up visually.
I concur that WW is the best Zelda game. I wish Nintendo would get off their asses and port it to the Switch already. They already have for a lot of their other Wii-U games.
i'll give skintendo credit, they've always tried to make their games fun, even though they've had their missteps, and they've always been at the forefront of innovating controls
...a game series that would have been better off if it had stayed 2D if ever there was one...
Yes, this. Zeldas and Sonics exist as a series because they "hey you liked Zelda 1, how about Zelda 2" for marketing and name recognition. It was never intended to be anything more than that then some crazy people had to act like it mattered. Want deep lore? Go read Tolkien books.
stay away from (most) AAA games, particularly Sony, and all "live service" games
Horizon and Days Gone is this. More recently First Descendant has utterly vapid destiny-style looter-shooter gameplay but looks really pretty and the chicks in it aren't ugly. I got in maybe 40 hours before I hit a grinding wall.
How brutal is that wall? I keep seeing that game pop up in my Steam recommendations.
I didn't understand the progression system and did a "reset" that unlocked higher toon progression but it meant I had to grind XP to continue the story progression.
It is fun enough for f2p and looks gorgeous. If you liked destiny it's similar enough. I hit 40 hours before I got bored.
Wokesters have an easier time writing scripts than developing tech skills. It's easier to write a woke script and browbeat tech bros into accepting their ideology than it is to develop the technical prowess themselves. Thus we have more narrative driven shit to push The Message.
That and crafting good gameplay is extremely difficult and doesn't have thousands of years of tradecraft to back it.
even before the woke mind virus things were trending that way, though. I don't hate story in a game, I just feel like sometimes the story takes a back seat to actually fun gameplay, which turns what should be an enjoyable experience into a slog...
Big studios are definetly too focussed on graphics, woke characters and woke storytelling. ( Along with shit optimisation. )
But there are green pastures outside of big studios, with recent games that are very focussed on gameplay.
Currently having alot of fun on The Last Spell ( the DLC is not worth it though ). With a handful of heroes, defend a town center from hordes of abominations drawn to what you are defending at the center of it. Tons of equipment and abilities. Tons of fun.
It's extremely focussed on gameplay, the story just exists to not get in the way of a fun time.
If you don't want non-White heroes, you can costumize the character in 3 clicks.
Advice : tick boundless mode unless you want to have a very high challenge after the first 2 maps. You earned those progression bonuses, use them.
Tweak the key binding to your liking, then the game is so much fun. The metaprogresion is very well done. It runs on almost any computer.
If you want a colony building / survival game... with beavers, how about Timberborn.
The ''story'' is basically non-existent. It's gameplay. It's just cute enough to look at.
Quickly set-up wood harvesting, food picking, then crops. Some houses are a bonus at start, but quickly necessary if you want the beavers to make babies for the future. Don't spread-out too much at first, or walking times will drag early progression down. Increase work hours too ; they have no well-being stations to visit at first and will just get bored before sleep.
Use your brain to find where to dam the river so your crops and beavers don't die of thirst during the drought. For a challenge, you can pick hard mode, or put costum setting for something even more challenging. ( It is possible to survive 100+ days droughts if you curve the cycles difficulty progression reasonably. )
Bewave, the water dosen't just flow, it passively evaporates. And sometimes there is a Badtide season. How will you manage to keep the flow of toxic waste from getting into your reservoir?
Your colony will collapse if you don't secure enough water on normal ( you can usually recover ) or hard ( you're unlikely to recover ) modes.
Since it's on GoG, you get the full install file. Once you have the game you don't need Internet again to install it from, say, a USB key. It runs on anything if you put the graphics on low.
I highly recomment you get the 0.6 experimental mode version since it introduces new water physics allowing for acqueducts, overhang platforms, impermeable tiles, and sluices, thus adressing the biggest limitations of the game. ( On GoG you access experimental mode through GoG Galaxy launcher. If you don't want the launcher, the 0.6 version should soon come out of experimental and be on GoG for the usual install download. )
Both games are also easy to find on the High Seas. If you like them and can afford it, buying a copy rewards the devs and tell the market that there is money to make with these types of games.
thanks, I'll certainly look into those.
I've asserted this multiple times, it's not even so much that there's too much emphasis on graphics, it's feature creep and gameplay bloat that is more often the problem with a lot of these games.
Where complexity becomes stacked to the brim with so much extra fluff that it quickly becomes more like a job than a game for the player. Especially when that stack comes packed with rather tedious mechanics that really suck out a lot of the fun from the whole experience.
A lot of studios and publishers assume this is what players want, especially if they're aiming to pump up those player numbers to appeal to investors. And admittedly quite a few players players assume this is what they always want too. More features can make a game look more "meaty" and complete, and worth their coin. And in some cases it's a totally fair expectation. But it's not always a fun and practical one in the end.
I mostly agree, but it's not complexity, it's tedium. The actual game mechanics are getting more and more simplified, but it's locked behind superfluous skill trees that artificially extend the game by forcing you to grind for what's mostly just incremental stat buffs.
Ah, took me a moment, but I see what you mean. And yeah you're right. They throw in mechanics that are dressed up to look like they achieve depth and complexity, even though functionally, it's anything but.
...If I understand what you're saying, it's like action games (for example) become psuedo RPGs?
square, square, triangle. square, square, triangle! square, square, triangle!
That's one example that can be an issue. For some games such combinations manage to be quite fun, but then for others it can be rather detrimental. Also depends to some degree on how far they go.
Darksiders 2 for example I feel went way too far on implementing loot and itemization, to the point where it became a chore I really didn't want to keep dealing with all the way throughout the game.
Shadow Warrior 2's another example that comes to mind. It was maybe a little overly ambitious with its implementation of dynamic/procedurally generated map elements, and might've gone a little over the top with some of its weapon customization/crafting (which was almost good in a lot of ways).
Now I will also point out, that I actually did enjoy both of these games a fair bit. Shadow Warrior 2 in particular I might almost praise. But both games end up dragging on a bit, with a lot of clunk and repetition dragging them down, becoming nearly a slog to try and finish.
Part of it I think is when the amount of time that you devote to side mechanics (like crafting) drastically exceeds the amount of time and effort you invest into playing through the actual game. Which is even more annoying when the payoff for that side-investment is rather meager and ends up only adding a tiny bit of additional fun to the primary gameplay.
outside of open world survival (is there any kind of standard name for minecraft clones yet!?!), crafting can definitely become a chore.
Its alot easier/cheaper to make a game look better than it should by limiting player freedom. The ultimate result of that is all of these barely interactable cinematic games.
In the AAA realm, yes to both. Exclusions to the story part for the GTAs and CoD of the world that exist to separate idiots from every dollar they have. Everything else in AAA, they demand some intense story that makes them cry with writing that combines a B movie with a little kids TV show and graphics that give them "immersion" (a stupid term).
Sub-AAA gets a bit of a pass on both, depending on what the game is targeting. There are way too many that are put together by artists that go all in on a shit story and have shit graphics and gameplay.
I'd argue immersion includes the gameplay loop/controls, but I see your point.
very true. i'll give graphics a pass as long as the game is fun to play, though. Look at katamary damacy. sub-par graphics (limitation imposed by the game mechanics), absolutely retarded story, but I can play that game for hours, rolling up nonsense into a bigger and bigger ball.
Yeah, I could agree with that, I could get immersed (still hate using that term) in a game with totally zero story, like Tetris. Meaning that I'm losing track of time.
I just always saw the normies use that term, "oh I feel so immersed play <generic Sony 3rd party game> because I just felt so lesbian while I was playing it and it made me cry"
I really couldn't care less about graphical fidelity myself. It can be part of what I like about the game that adds to the fun, but so many games focus on photorealism and forget everything else.
omg, thank you, i didn't even think of tetris, but that's a fantastic example...
...to this day, whenever I'm packing something and I'm having trouble getting everything to fit, I just hum tetris music, and before I know it, I'm done, lmao.
Yeah I often forget Tetris when someone asks me something like "what's your all time favorite game." It's Tetris, and very little is even close. There's no other game I've played since my age was in the single digits and can pick up today and be interested. Doom is about the only other thing like that although I was a bit older when it came out. It doesn't have much story either.
prolly need an emulator at this point, but try out Katamari Damaci or one of the sequels if you haven't already. story's retarded, but the game's fun. just try to make a bigger and bigger ball of stuff.
heads up; you're gonna want a playstation style controller for best results, xbox/switch style controls have the sticks in the wrong position.
Have you tried the remake by chance? I almost bought it for my Switch a couple years ago.
I may just download a ROM of the original and see, PS2 emulator is not a problem.
I think I might have? I'd have to check, but If I have, it would be on the shelf, most likely ps4.
If I'm remembering correctly, it's basically just a graphical update. controls were always fairly solid, so no worries there.
very true.