It might be nostalgia speaking, but I think the real issue is that a 20 year old game can actually be this good and popular. How can it be that it is more enjoyable than anything else I’ve bought over the last year (at least)? Doesn’t that say that game companies in general have dropped the ball on game design, focusing on graphics and money over content and gameplay? As I said, it might just be me stuck in my wonderfully comforting blanket of nostalgia…
I think it's almost definitely nostalgia speaking.
Granted, by the point Oblivion was made I was the nostalgia guy talking about how Bethesda games kept getting smaller and less ambitious. Most people saying that then did so because they were coming from Morrowind. Not me, I am a proper dinosaur and I was just pissed that after Morrowind dropped everything interesting about Daggerfall to make a console game they just kept moving further in that direction.
Was also not a fan of Fallout getting turned into Oblivion 40K instead of a proper turn-based CRPG.
Which goes to show this conversation isn't new and gaming is old enoung now that it has gone in cycles.
I mean, seriously, Daggerfall was continent-sized and was using procedural generation to make dungeons and build dialogue and quests and essentially reimagining how games could be made in ways that wouldn't resurface until what? No Man's Sky? Oblivion is bad Lord of the Rings. If anything it's the awkward middle child now, because man, the Imperial City in Oblivion feels hilariously tiny and basically deserted against modern RPGs. There are five people running loops and having canned conversations. Coming from Baldur's Gate 3 or Cyberpunk to this is... a bit of a shock.
"Why is an old game good?" feels like an odd question. It would be silly to ask that of any other medium, wouldn't it? The most beloved classics being beloved isn't an indictment of modern stuff, especially when cherry-picking the greatest hits and ignoring how many flops existed back then too.
Clair Obscur came out the same time and it’s probably the best RPG I’ve ever played, and I’ve played every noteworthy one in the last 40 years at least. GOTY at the LEAST.
I hear this rhetoric a lot, which shows me that a ton of people have a much harder time than me finding the good stuff, even though there’s so much of it out there.
I mean I am all for criticising creatively bankrupt mush like Ubisoft et al pushes out and Call of Duty 420: Black Ops 69 or FIFA or whatever but we can’t pretend there are literally no good games being released nowadays either. Just now we had a month with both Blue Prince and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 being released within weeks of each other. BG3 and Alan Wake 2 releasing in the same year was just two years ago.
There are plenty of not just good but great recent games.
How can it be that it is more enjoyable than anything else I’ve bought over the last year (at least)?
Possibly because you’re buying the wrong games? Don’t get me wrong, I’ve got a massive nostalgia-on for Oblivion, and I picked up the Remaster, and it’s cool…
But there have been a lot of great games so far this year. Just this month alone, Blue Prince and Expedition 33 have both been fantastic. Both better than the Oblivion remaster imo.
The Indiana Jones game is cool. I haven’t played Split Fiction yet, but it looks really good as well. Just to name a few.
Edit: More that I remembered: Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2. Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii. Wanderstop is pretty chill. Xenoblade Chronicles X was finally released on Switch (game map is like 5x the size of Skryim or something…). Atomfall. Lost Records: Bloom & Rage is pretty cool if you’re into that kind of thing.
I think the remaster looks awful. Not only did they take out the soul, they decided to copy the aesthetic of ESO from the washed-out colors down to the shitty combat animations.
I really wish the people behind ESO would get fired, but they keep getting rewarded.
I still don’t understand the sentiment that turn-based doesn’t sell. We just got Clair Obscur breaking expectations.
Part of it is, you have to make the combat interesting visually, tactically, and sometimes even tactilely. Some games get that right: Persona 5, Like a Dragon, etc.
I would also go on a limb and say that 99.9% of strategy in turn taking games is terribly designed. Buff attack, use strongest attack. The one that I really wanted to see more of is a system like Cosmic Star Heroine’s.
Hey, just wanted to say I appreciate your posts. They give me the vibes of cracking open an old EGM. It’s nice to have a nice curated newsletter that doesn’t read like the SEO garbage that’s all over the web.
Exactly what I am going for, since I wasn’t alive for the old blogs and newsletters and old gaming sites. I’m tired of sites begging for Patreon members, and using ads, and its all such a drain.
Thanks for saying so, it makes me so happy seeing anyone read these damn things!
I read all of these too and I love them so much!!! I don’t have to close 2 separate video players playing ads, one taking up the top half of the screen and the other taking up almost the entire bottom left or right…which pop back up after like 2 minutes.
There’s also no agenda or weird outrage- just pure gaming news and neat little oddities that I enjoy reading about.
You should definitely look into starting a website as well as a career in journalism because you are amazing at creating this here little ‘zine and I’d love to see it flourish into a career if it’s something you enjoy doing :)
Personally I would like to see the whole remaster/remake trend end as soon as possible. Let’s stop selling the same games multiple times, with considerably increased price tag every time.
While some remakes are decent and make sense (e.g. Resident Evil remakes, though even they aren’t perfect), most are just plain money grabs. Remade into a third-person action adventure with RPG elements, if they weren’t already. With generic Unreal graphics, poor optimization, worse or no modding support.
Old games are great, easy to run, and can be bough for pennies. What exactly makes a remake so appealing? Better graphics? No offence to anyone, but I feel like people who care so much about graphics don’t even play games.
I think I’ll continue to ignore the new rereleases, with very rare exceptions, and keep having a blast with the originals. If game companies can’t be bothered to put in the effort and make some new, interesting titles, then I guess they’ll be making zero money from me.
I don’t know how it has become so fucking easy for large corporate content creators to push the narrative that coming up with ideas for new stories or new games is actually difficult.
There are so many games that have yet to even be thought of.
There are so many storylines that have never touched pen to paper that we could experience, And I know that it is a little risky to offer something to people that they have not personally experienced before, but holy shit, why do we have to remake everything 650,000 fucking times?
Okay, how about a game where you are a voodoo priest, and you move a doll through a board full of traps and whatnot, and then the person who you have possessed with your voodoo doll then follows the path that you navigated with the voodoo doll.
Spice it up by having extra events happen while the person is moving through the real life version of the board that you then have to use your voodoo powers to compensate for while you now no longer have any more control over the person who you’ve taken over.
I guess that’s more of like a puzzle thing, so sure, for an RPG, How about an Isekai game where you plop down into a magical world and you’ve got all the pop-up screens and everything like you would see an anime and manga, but there is no Demon King, there is no great evil to defeat. It’s just you exploring the world and having fun with your kind of cheat OP powers while meeting people and learning about the history of this world you’ve been plopped into.
You can have actual events happen by like being involved in small-scale battles between kingdoms and uncovering lost relics and dungeons that have never been explored even by the locals and building a party of people to establish your own kingdom in a neglected land.
The latter would give you an opportunity to go like City Builder Sim-style for a bit of the game.
Or if you think that’s stupid, How about a role-playing game where you and a bunch of your other magician, wizard, witch, whatever friends, have built the first fantasy spaceship, and now you’re flying through the celestial realms, visiting all of the other planets in the solar system, and encountering new people, and helping them to solve their problems that have nothing to do with your planet but rather with the goal of establishing diplomatic relationships with other nearby planets.
This shit is easy. Coming up with an idea for a game, a new one that sounds fun and interesting to play that covers a different storyline and gives opportunities for dozens of different authors and creators to put a piece of themselves into it and come up with interesting fun things to do, that shit is fucking easy, and I don’t know why they’re not fucking doing it.
That said, I think SQEX is one of the better large publishers out there about giving ideas some leeway. Hell, they let Yoko Taro make really fucking weird shit for far longer than was reasonable until it finally paid off with NieR: Automata.
I don’t think anyone’s claiming it’s difficult, it’s just more of a risk. If you’re the investor calling the shots with your big bag of money do you choose a new idea which might be great but people might not like, or to rehash an existing idea that already has fans who will buy more of the same? The decision is entirely financial.
Nah. I'd rather they make something with the size, scale, mechanics (referring for combat and such but not same abilities, etc.), and storytelling of FFVI. Optionally some fancier graphics and preferably no grinding anywhere.
If Square decides to do another FF remake, they’ll either skip over 8 and do 9 instead, or they’ll go back and do 6. That’s what I think. But if they did 8, they better overhaul that stupid Draw system.
Only if they DON'T drop the classic turn-based combat. I actually hate the idea of a 'remake' that changes genre entirely.
1-6 recently got the Pixel Remasters, and before that 3 and 4 had the DS remakes. I'd like to see proper remakes of 5 and 6 myself, but that's unlikely to happen since the Pixel Remasters exist.
7, personally I'd play a faithful remake, but it'd be silly to make one since they already have the non-faithful 'remake'.
8 is the one game that could benefit the most from a non-faithful remake. It's a game that's worth remaking because the original was such a mess. But I feel like a bit of a hypocrite for saying that right after complaining about FF7. What I'd do is still keep it turn-based, but completely overhaul Draw and level scaling.
9 would be the most likely candidate as a fan-favorite that could be kept faithful and still hold up well. And rumors have been swirling around for a while that one may be coming.
10 and 12 already have the HD Remasters, and those are excellent. So no need.
11 is the most in need of some way to preserve it for future generations, but I don't know how that would even work. Could it perhaps be adapted in some way like they did with Dragon Quest 10 Offline?
13 onward, too new to need remakes. (And also I have no interest in the direction the series has gone since then anyway)
You leave 8 alone! It’s not turn based (in a strict sense) and Draw/Junction is the foundation of the entire game, mechanical and narrative. The scaling is a little weird because there’s two main experience bars and only one of them makes enemies tougher and it’s not explained, but so be it. All I want is the Japan exclusive Chocobo World and updated graphics without changing the visual style and maybe a soundtrack that doesn’t sound so MIDI.
UE 5 sucks major dick though. Like oblivion is a cool AI generated remake and gold use of that engine. But it’s far from optimized. My frames go from 120-45 in a matter of 2 seconds in the same area.
So…dev stumbles, fans harass, and the project is dead.
Goodbye Winlator…for now?
Ugh, another amazing one-person project killed by harassment. The internet makes it so trivial to bombard someone with hate-mail, and I doubt many of us have been through the “media training” necessary to deal with it. I only have the tiniest of projects going and if the people I thought I was making a nice thing for suddenly turned on me then I think I’d be saying “fuck it then” too.
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Aktywne