Stopped reading at the part where he says obbies are bad. Obbies are a classic roblox genre that honestly isn’t even that popular these days. But the core platforming mechanics are actually fun and theres actually very difficult techniques.
Math difficulty chart obby is actually peak though, you have to do math problems after each platforming section, starting from grade 1 all the way up to highschool calculus with the jumps becoming increasingly hard.
“the core platforming mechanics are fun” is subjective, but I generally agree with Patrick that platforming in Roblox is awful. I feel like if you think that is fun, you haven’t played a real platformer.
I have played real platformers, many mario games. There not being momentum in roblox movement requires precision, harder obbies have smaller platforms to jump on.
A technique to get more precision in jump length is to take a curved path by moving the mouse, instead of going straight on. Its almost like surf.
I’ll give you that maybe it’s just “different”, but I also feel like no one would give obbies even a passing glance if they weren’t free-to-play. There may be depth there, but I think most would agree that it doesn’t feel good to play.
Fair point, but I disagree. I think the point of the article is to ponder what makes Roblox so appealing to kids, and the target audience is parents and older gamers that don’t “get it”. To that end, I think the article is fine to meander, because Patrick is partly explaining what Roblox is to an audience that mostly does not understand. He’s also trying to poke at what the popularity of Roblox means for traditional games that most of us put our time into. So yes, he’s kind of hitting three points in one article and that comes across as a bit unfocused. On the other hand, I think the article is more conversational and fun to read than it would be if he had laser-focused on his thesis.
Don’t tell me after 14 paragraphs in two scroll pages! They talk about manipulative monetization, and then do this. At least make it obvious at the top.
Thanks for including the rest of the content here.
I hate roblox since it collects a lot of user data and they do not care about pedophiles at all, just the people who exposes them. (Example: #FreeSchlepp )(i likely spelled that wrong but that’s not the point)
The idea of “meta-games” of user generated content is compelling. The game of the future is a platform for a thousand games. What if you allowed programming into the mix?
The insight of roblox et al. As a digital playground where the gaming aspect is secondary is interesting. It was kind of inevitable since it’s not like we’re giving them actual playgrounds or letting them go to them on their own, and with the way we build schools it’s unlikely they’re going to be able to walk from their house to the house of someone they met at school because it could be several miles away across a six Lane stroad.
I wonder if this suggests that somewhere in between a purely social focused computer program like a chat program and a game their sits stuff like this. I also wonder to what degree they will be interested in more traditional games. I’m sure that Niche still exists, but maybe a 5-year-old won’t be interested yet
From this we should figure out what they want and build an on exploitative fully open source self-hostible version of these meta games for them to use instead
I agree with the author’s assessment that Uncharted and the Last of Us use the right tool at the moment for their stories.
I don’t get the criticism about Call of Duty and Halo following Half-Life’s success of limited cutscenes and scripted events to tell their stories. In fact as soon as the article started these were the exact games I thought of to rebut his point. They are the best story based FPS games of their generation and they don’t need an open world that’s believable in absence of its own protagonist.
Far Cry/The Division/Ghost Recon are all Open World shooters with a believable world. They have terrible (IMO, feel free to disagree) stories though.
I thought his analysis was interesting just not sure what the point was and if it was what I thought it was that Half-Life negatively influenced stories in games then I disagree.
I’m not sure if the author’s point here is “A lot of games emulated Half Life’s scripted sequences but in a worse way and that is Half Life’s fault” or “Half Life’s style of immersion overshadowed immersive sims and sandbox games and that was bad”. I could maybe get on board with the second but you can’t then go praising Naughty Dog because they mixed cinematics with their scripted gameplay.
As the author says, scripted sequences are a tool alongside cinematics and anything else. In the case of COD (I haven’t played a new one in around 15 years, so I’m talking from the perspective of COD4 and its derivatives. I don’t know how anything recent is structured) the briefing screens during loading are literally cinematics delivering narrative in a stylistically appropriate way. They do take away agency via QTEs (which act as resets for the gameplay and limit dynamism) or extended ‘you can jiggle your camera’ cutscenes, but those aren’t inherently bad, and Half Life doesn’t do them anyway.
Outside of maybe two moments in Half Life you have all of your weapons and abilities available, so those scripted sequences are not a cutscene you are forced to jiggle your camera at, but environmental set dressing or one-off combat scenarios. A cutscene showing a tank smashing into the room through a wall would break the flow of the firefight, and having it there from the start would take away the player’s ability to set up an ambush with tripwire mines or one of their other tools. A good scripted event doesn’t reduce interactivity, it is a stimulus for the player to interact with.
These are some strange criticisms. Yes, there was a focus on games being “cinematic”. Yes, there was also a counter-culture to that, because there’s a counter-culture for every popular culture. No, Half-Life didn’t invent it; it iterated on existing ideas. Yes, others copied it, because iteration is far easier and more likely to be financially sustainable than outright invention. Likewise, others in the counter-culture didn’t copy it. There are pros and cons to that sort of design. If my friends and I both play through a game like that, we can reminisce and “hell yeah” and high five over our favorite moments. A more immersive sim “lite” design like Indiana Jones can easily lead to me getting the intended experience where Indy has to improvise his way out of a blunder by punching Nazis and my friend ending up in what he perceived to be automatic fail states (true story). The “detour” through Half-Life inspired games came coupled with those same years being littered with games that didn’t stick to its ethos.
The one thing I’ll agree with the author on is that we’re definitely currently living through the stark aftermath of this peak FPS era. It’s so rare now that a new FPS is made for me anymore. Maybe it’ll be Mouse: P.I. for Hire, but it won’t come with a split-screen deathmatch like the good old days.
Are we going to reach the same levels of player count and engagement again when there are so many other draws on their attention and time compared to 2020 or 2021? Not anytime soon, if we ever do.
As I see it, the video game market went from a growth market to mature practically overnight. Meaning, since Pong, the video game market has continued to grow as more and more people have discovered gaming over time. But in 2020-21, a huge influx of players and time found their way to the video game market and many of them liked it and stuck around. Others have again left gaming, having been pulled away by other things. So now, it’s more about optimization of the player base rather than pursuing more organic growth by finding new players.
This has been a painful transition in thinking for many in the industry, especially those who assumed that player growth would continue forever, especially after the boom seen in 2020-21.
It’s not just that gaming had an unusual growth period during COVID lockdown. It’s that gaming had its final big growth period ever during this period. Everyone left out there that ever thought they might give gaming a shot did so during the lockdown, and they either stuck with it, or they realized it wasn’t a forever hobby for them. From here on out, the gaming industry is more like the food industry or something. They won’t find new pockets of untapped consumers. They have found them all, and now developers and publishers need to be smarter about scale and burn rate.
Everyone left out there that ever thought they might give gaming a shot did so during the lockdown, and they either stuck with it, or they realized it wasn’t a forever hobby for them
looks dubious
That seems like an overly-strong statement.
There’s a point where the whole world has access to video games. And we’re getting closer to that time. There are certainly limits on growth approaching. But I don’t think that we’re to those limits yet.
unique mobile subscribers in 2023, indicating a 43% penetration rate
That’s not even smartphones. And even smartphones can only run certain types of video games. There’s a lot of the world that still is constrained by limited development.
That statement was my attempt to summarize a chunk of the article, and was not my own analysis. From my perspective, I will say that I understand that there are parts of the world that don’t have access to PS5 games or whatever. However, I don’t think that this market is going to massively shift at any time in the next decade, because that would mean a shift of the entire socio-economic balance of the world. As much as I would love to see the Global North take a backseat while other nations rise, I think it’s fair for an analyst to assume that this is not going to happen.
Finally someone in industry is saying it. Execs are doing layoffs because they thought covid driven revenue would last forever, and that was a moronic thought. Like people would ever be at home in those numbers again, all at once, desperate for things to do. They could have used that time better, and they didn’t. Of course the market was going to dip after covid.
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