I think The Last of Us is the only truly new, groundbreaking achievement the article lists. And by groundbreaking, I mean it managed to both carve out a space artistically in the “prestige TV” category, while also breaking into the pop-culture zeitgeist, as the article notes.
You’re right that Arcane was amazing, but it mainly caught the attention of game and animation fans. The Last of Us may be the property that finally convinced studios to take video game adaptations seriously and stop giving them out to commercially promising but artistically bereft filmmakers like Paul Anderson.
When Brandon Sanderson has talked about possible screen adaptations of his books, he’s started to hear people talking about an Arcane-style animated adaptation as an option they’d like. He’s mentioned that the unfortunate reality of it is that Arcane’s budget ($10 million an episode) does not match its audience - the large majority of Arcane viewers are existing League fans, and it doesn’t get the new/outside-viewer audience that a lot of producers would want to see.
Sure, but it’s really weird that we are relying and want to rely on disks to be the license basically, because the data storage part is quite useless, at least when your connection is faster than your blue-ray drive. (plus you can directly download the patched game)
When physical media dies, I no longer have a good reason to buy consoles… that’s literally the whole reason I bother with them - I like browsing through the cases to pick games to play.
I have through ps5, and plan to get a series s or whatever the newest with-optical Xbox is (because I can skip the one, nicely backward compatible), but that’s likely where I end the console journey. As it is now it’s getting harder to find physical copies because so many people only have them digitally. The used game market is already ruined for modern consoles, and I’m not paying full price to rent a game.
I don’t support that user-hostile model. I’ll just pirate all that shit on pc.
It looks interesting, but I don’t like that they’re saying it’s going to be a new game. I don’t want to spend another $40 on what amounts to a new game mode. Fundamentally different new game mode, but new game mode.
I love that, but more importantly, someone finally realized having a touchpad is not a “convenience”, it’s core to making the steamdeck-lite platform work beyond just playing console-like games
I wish it had 2, but wow that's a lot of extra buttons to make up for losing the left trackpad. I suppose there's nothing I currently use the second trackpad for that can't be substituted by more buttons and a scroll wheel. This thing has a scroll wheel? Very cool.
No idea. I just love all the sequence-breaking going on in that video. I lost count of the times the guy quickly quits and resumes the game, just so he can make a long trek out-of-bounds.
Writers these days just seem to not know how to write an enjoyable story period. So much bad writing in the entertainment sector now, its not like back in the 80s and 90s where movie theaters were showing slapper after slapper, you’ll be lucky to find maybe one or two that match up to the likes of Jurassic Park, Ghostbusters, Star Wars, or Titanic.
Its similar with games, but shifted forward a decade to the 90s and 00s. Games these days have a very hard time matching up to games like Ocarina of Time, Chrono Trigger, Silent Hill, or Metal Gear Solid. While games like Silent Hill 1 have laughably poor quality voice acting by todays standards in terms of sound quality, the story was well written and kept the player’s interest. Of games from my recent memory, the only one that matches up is Elden Ring, which has gone the direction of basically removing all the writing from the game.
I can think of plenty of games with writing I’ve really enjoyed in recent years, not the least of which is Baldur’s Gate 3 just last year, but FPSes in particular are in one of only a few genres where I haven’t been well served lately.
BG3 is another good example but surely you can agree that was like a drop of water in an ocean of sand. Games that well done are incredibly rare, and it mostly comes down to just writing. The actual game mechanics and graphics quality of games now are better than they have ever been for the most part. But the games are bad, not because of those things, but because the writing fails to capture the players interest.
I would not agree with that, no. First because I’d say mechanics are almost always the most important part anyway, and also because I’ve probably come across more stories that have held my interest in recent years than I did 25 years ago. Stories were pretty basic back then, more often than not. In fact, these days, I’ve been carried through mediocre gameplay by well-told stories more than a few times, and I don’t think that ever happened 25 years ago.
As someone with an avatar of the Q from Quake 1, I can avidly say that writing was not better in the past.
Just off the top of my head from the last decade:
-Baldurs gate 3 -Firewatch -Return of the Obra Dinn -Disco Elysium -Tyranny -Shadowrun Dragonfall -Red Dead Redemption 2 -Witcher 3 -Hellblade Senuas Sacrifice -Life is Strange -Prey (2017) -The Red Strings Club
Seriously, go check the story to Perfect Dark. Hilarious? Yes. A “good story”? No.
There are myriad issues in gaming now that weren’t there in the past, but good writing is (thankfully) still around.
The writing in Disco Elysium is so good that it wouldn’t matter if the gameplay between dialogue was just some match 4 bejewelled ripoff, it’d be worth it.
Anyway, I agree we’ve got so much better in the last decade+ at fitting fiction and gameplay together in a satisfying and complimentary manner.
I remember finding games like Chrono Trigger being as stumbling upon an overflowing oasis, compared to the paltry and usually badly translated heroes journeys that we typically got.
But now I can think of dozens of games, many of them indie, that have stories on par (and if I set aside my nostalgia goggles, even surpassing) that of old classics like CT.
It’s easy to remember just the successes of the past and ignore the fact that the vast majority of media then was shit too… we’ve simply forgotten about the things that ended up being mediocre. Survivorship bias is really really strong.
Nah fam – go look at the movies that came out in 92 or 94. They were all absolute masterpieces we still about. There’s definitely a filter of time but there’s a reason for the precedent. We went from having a good bell-curve of quality to just 95% shit, 5% sufficient.
An example a lot of people here can relate to is thinking about game consoles and handhelds they played growing up like the GBA.
There were likely some great games produced for it but there was also a lot of shovelware movie tie-ins and horrendous ports that were misrepresented in advertisements.
Idk, my favourite writer is Brandon Sanderson and he still keeps writing with the supersonic speed. Maybe that’s just you. Unless you mean writing in games and movies specifically, for which I am not qualified enough to say
I was specifically talking about writing for video games and movies, I haven’t read very many books or comics lately so I couldn’t know if it applies there as well or not.
A company focusing on f2p and mobile. Haven’t we already been through this like around 10 years ago? I don’t recall that working out too well the last time.
As a Calgarian, it was a joy to watch the Last of Us. After years of stumbling across the sets throughout the city, the anticipation was something else (plus I really love the game). It somehow exceeded all expectations. Bummer about it going to Vancouver for season 2 though #vancouversoft
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