You know how in tv shows or movies in the 90s, there were always a pair of villains or goons that worked for the main villain and were comic relief? Like the Jessie & James pair in Pokemon or the two guys in power rangers or whatever I’m thinking of.
Remember how occasionally, like if it were two guys, they’d fight between the two of them, on-screen?
Assassin’s Creed’s shift to open-world RPGs would never have happened at many companies, Alex Hutchinson says
Literally everyone and their mother could have expected this change. It’s literally the one single way AAA studios have been padding gameplay and time for a decade and a half now.
Ubisoft codified a certain style of open world design that many other AAA releases were using as a template. He’s right, you can’t deny the impact the franchise had.
It WAS a good idea when first used. And, when imported across to Far Cry, they also tried to come up with new forms of climbing and even puzzles to get you up. Then, simply because the internet made memes about it through repeat emphasis (repeating an old mechanic alone isn’t necessarily a bad thing) they responded, took the system out, and even lampshaded it in Far Cry 5 - WHILE other devs as far as Nintendo/Zelda were copying it.
Theres a lot to condemn Ubisoft for, but the towers thing always irked me. Call open worlds as a whole boring, but it suggests it’s not the sort of game to keep your interest anyway.
You say that and I can kinda agree with it, and I can see them agreeing with it... but I recently got FC5 on a discount and despite it all - it still felt like the exact same game as every previous one. So artificially gamey and forced in some interactions, so predictable in its plot and map exploration structure...
I don't think it ends up feeling that different at all. Maybe you zipline up the towers today and they just discover POIs instead of removing map fog, but it's still the same crap, just served differently
I feel like Nintendo 64 was the real OG adapter of open world RPGs. The success of Mario 64 and legend of Zelda had already proven the genre wildly profitable
Oh yeah, these terrible execs from other companies who veto female protagonists on principle, insist on implementing the same list of a thousand terrible features in all games regardless of genre, and harass their employees while being protected by HR and the CEO.
Wait, no, those are not the bad ones. You know the bad ones because they’ve worked for toothpaste companies.
Surely he knows that Fortnite is itself the clone. He has to know that they didn’t start the battle royale genre they just cutesy it up and monetize the hell out of it.
It was actually a good game when it was in beta and the building mechanics actually had some sort of point. Then they pivoted and went in the battle of royale genre and it became a microtransaction lootbox nightmare.
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes people want the same kind of game with a different flavor. Maybe they don’t like the PUBG art style and would rather play Fortnite instead, or perhaps they don’t like Overwatch because of Blizzard and are okay with Marvel Rivals from NetEase instead.
I don’t believe that games should exist with no real competitors. That’s how you end up with games like Dead by Daylight, where community sentiment plummets but the developers have no real reason to do anything about it because where are the players going to go?
It’s hilarious that we live in different worlds. I have no idea what are those Fortnite or Overwatch copies. I have no interest in hero-shooters or battle-royale genres too.
I think the studios have been forcing it a lot in hopes of hitting the jackpot of the next big major game.
Rather I preferred when they made cornucopia of “risky” me ideas and lower budgets.
There are too many cooks in the kitchen as for example over 3,000 people work on call of duty. (From Google did not fact check further) I don’t understand how you could get that many people to work without deviation from the directors initial idea.
That’s pretty much been the landscape of major commercial gaming since I’ve been alive. Just replace Fortnite and Overwatch with the current popular game. Doom, Diablo, Minecraft, etc.
Nearly everything is a derivative of something from before. Occasionally something new comes up though. I don’t remember anything like Getting Over It seems to have created the Foddian game genre for example. And while Balatro uses relatively normal cards for its base, the gameplay itself is unique.
The MOBA genre as we know it today simply took Warcraft 3 and tweaked the gameplay a bit with the original DOTA mod. But then stuff started ripping it off and we got League of Legends which, from what I could tell when these were rerelatively new, was the same thing as Dota but with different characters.
Palworld gets a lot of attention for duplicating some elements of Pokemon, but the whole game is basically a reskinned Ark, which itself is just Rust with more gimmicks.
The BR genre started as an Arma mod, then became a stand alone game, which Fortnite shifted gears from some kind of PvE game to add the BR that is dominating now, and everyone is trying to copy that. As a 40 year old gamer, it really is starting to feel like there is nothing new under the sun.
Depends on how you define new. Battle Royale could be viewed as just an evolution of the arena shooter genre where you expand the map and the player count to the maximum with the “arena pickups” being randomized. Or it could be viewed as something new because it fundamentally plays differently. IMO taking things that have been done before and combining them into something that hasn’t been done before is still creating something new.
And if you want really fresh ideas, there’s always the indie scene. I will always point my finger at Noita and the absolutely insane wand/spellcrafting system which is probably the most wizarding experience you can have. You can literally create a wand that (and I’m significantly simplifying the process because honestly I have no idea how that actually works) summons a deer into a parallel world and then swaps your location with the deer making you teleport into a parallel world. And no, that is most likely not the intended use of any of the spells that go into that wand. The devs themselves were probably trying to figure out if that’s a feature or a bug.
Even DotA itself was inspired by Aeon of Strife which was a StarCraft map. There were a few AOS-like maps at the time but DotA became the most popular. Then Riot came along and approached an ex DotA designer to help them make a successor. They also approached the owner of dota-allstars.com which at the time was the main site for DotA. Discussions, hero suggestions, fan art, pretty much anything dota related was there. Then, the owner, Fuck Pendragon, took the entire site down and replaced it with a LoL ad. Ofc all those hero suggestions were taken and implemented into LoL without crediting the creators. A few years later he also tried to use blizzard to sue valve for the dota rights but blizz and valve settled it out of court without him.
to be fair there are many games that are like Getting Over it or Balatro or even Vampire Survivors it’s just many of them aren’t as successful or known as those games.
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