I am literally playing minecraft without any of those shader texturepacks because I kind of prefer games not being ultra realistic. If being realistic was more fun than we would not need games to have fun because we have real life which is as real as you can get.
Texture packs or not, IMHO the key point is they’re optional, not a requirement for the game to be playable. Games that depend on photorealism, are bound to end up in deep trouble.
I would argue fancy graphics help sell it. It’s the easiest way to grab attention, be it in a trailer or while watching a streamer. Depending on the game it also helps immersion, but not all games need that. All AAA games need to be sold though (at least that’s the aim of any AAA publisher). And people have bought them. And they still do. But they’re starting to learn that attention grabbing graphics doesn’t equal good game.
They’re simply drawing all the wrong co conclusions here:
even though Spider-Man 2 sold more than 11 million copies, several members of Insomniac lost their jobs when Sony announced 900 layoffs in February.
The layoffs don’t mean the game or company were unsuccessful, it means they found other ways to eliminate those jobs.
Warner Bros. Discovery took a $200 million loss on Suicide Squad
That’s nothing to do with graphical fidelity, it was a shit game that followed up a shit movie.
Sony closed the studio behind Concord
Lots of potential reasons for this. If you ask me, they released a $30 game into a genre chock full of “free to play” games.
Personally I appreciate “cinematic” games but titles like Balatro and Stardew Valley (neither of which I own) are proof of the simple fact that making games that are actually fun to play is far far more important, and far more profitable.
Kinda seems misleading considering they said they need 7 mil copies sold to break even and 6 months after release it had sold 11 million. Blaming the layoffs on this seems like a transparent misdirection to make people think they lost money here. They want to spend less money, and I get that from a business standpoint, but it seems like they’re looking for reasons to make people accept worse looking games. I don’t really play high graphics games, but if they start decreasing the graphics budget I expect to see a decrease in cost. Don’t pay the same for less.
I agree with the other comments saying it’s about fun and not graphics, but this seems to have been published to get people to expect worse graphics regardless of fun.
Guess I’m alone, I really do love good graphics, I love getting lost in the digital world… I’m just not going to pay $100 per game for that experience. It’s the endlessly growing list of shit they want you to buy on top of buying the game itself that’s destroying the video game market. Every new game that comes out has DLCs and expansions and season passes and skins and bullshit bullshit bullshit. Piracy is back in the rise because all the corporations forgot and got too greedy again.
The problem isn't detailed graphics, the problem is shit performance. The new generation of UE games look average, and require ridiculous hardware + upscaling to run smoothly
Most executives at large publishers aren’t gamers. Pretty pictures are more likely to entice them than deep mechanics. They could assign 5 people to make a game like Balatro or Stardew Valley, but they never would because they don’t work like that, they came up through the MBA route and think in terms of enterprise software development lifecycles. Also, “making money” isn’t good enough for them, they want to make so much money that they can pay themselves millions of dollars despite never actually contributing to the game.
It feels like very few progress was made graphically in the last eight years. We’ve reached a plateau. I mean, STAR WARS: Battlefront (2015) to me is as good as it gets and that was almost ten years ago. We used to have massive leaps in graphics all the time, but that’s no longer the case.
The big difference is that, that game ran at 60 fps on the Xbox One and the PS4. Games barely look better or as good as this, but are atrociously harder to run. That’s the big difference. The death of optimization and the “just throw more hardware at it” era.
The game gained controversy when it was discovered that the homosexual designer Jacques Servin inserted an Easter egg that generated shirtless men in Speedo trunks who hugged and kissed each other and appear in great numbers on certain dates, such as Friday the 13th. The egg was caught shortly after release and removed from future copies of the game. He cited his actions as a response to the intolerable working conditions he allegedly suffered at Maxis, particularly working 60-hour weeks and being denied time off. He also reported that he added the “studs”, as he called them, after a heterosexual programmer programmed “bimbo” female characters into the game, and that he wanted to highlight the “implicit heterosexuality” of many games. Although he had initially planned for the characters to appear only occasionally, the random number generator he had created malfunctioned, leading them to appear frequently. Servin was fired as a result, with Maxis reporting that his dismissal was due only to his addition of unauthorized content. This caused a member of AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), a gay AIDS organization, to call for a boycott of all of Maxis’ products, a measure which Servin rejected. Some months later, a group named RTMark announced its existence and claimed responsibility for the Easter egg being inserted into the game, along with 16 other acts of “creative subversion.” Servin stated that he had received a money order of $5,000 from RTMark for the prank. It was revealed later on that Servin was a cofounder of RTMark.
Servin would go on to be one of the founders of The Yes Men.
I fundamentally dissagree with the term “metroidvania” because Metroid and Castlevania are different. Both are what I call a “side-scrolling action platformer,” but Metroid gives the player powerups to encourage them to explore their environment, while Castlevanias powerups focus almost entirely on combat. Therefore Metroid includes “adventure” in its genre, but Castlevania does not.
I never got lost in a Metroid game, but I also have a pretty good ability to remember how I got somewhere. Metroid does a generally pretty good job making nearly every room memorable and unique to help players not get lost, and Metroid has mostly included a map to help players as well. If players are still getting lost, IMO that’s just a skill issue.
But I understand what the author is trying to say, and they are right. Actually getting lost is not what they mean, they mean level and game design that lends itself to encouraging exploration by trial and error. Level design and game design that shows the player some impassable wall early and then when they get the ability to pass it later on, leaving it entirely up to the player to remember. Backtracking is a mandatory staple, if a Metroid game has no backtracking, especially for item expansions, then it is not a real Metroid game. Making the player be the one to do the exploring and not holding their hand is crucial to a good Metroid experience. This is why I consider Metroid Fusion, Other M, and Dread to be among the weaker Metroid titles. All three have an obvious, forced always on hand-holding mechanic that you don’t find in other Metroid games. Like the developers don’t trust the player to actually be smart enough to figure the game out.
The “metroids” and the “vanias” do definitely feel different, but the cross section in that Venn diagram is pretty obvious, and that’s what the genre is named for. I prefer the “metroids” to the “vanias”, but even the “vanias” have tons of non-combat upgrades.
while Castlevanias powerups focus almost entirely on combat.
Castlevania has always (edit: I mean since SotN) had a pretty heavy emphasis on movement abilities to access new areas. Looking at SotN, we have double jump, high jump, swimming, mist form, bat form, wolf form, as well as good ol' keys to literally unlock the environment.
This is why I consider Metroid Fusion, Other M, and Dread to be among the weaker Metroid titles. All three have an obvious, forced always on hand-holding mechanic that you don't find in other Metroid games.
I'll give you Fusion and Other M, but I'm going to have to disagree on Dread here. The game does sort of guide you along an intended first playthrough route, but so does Super! It's a delicate balance to give the player room for exploration while still ensuring they don't get stuck not knowing where to go. That balancing act should not be seen as disqualifying, or else we're throwing out the genre's foundational text too. If anything, the biggest difference between Dread and Super here is that Dread actually has more developer-intended sequence breaks. If you play Super as intended without utilizing any speedrunning tech, you almost always follow the same route in the end.
Castlevania has always had a pretty heavy emphasis on movement abilities to access new areas
The -vania part always seemed a bit odd to me as well because of the history of the games, but it makes sense based on when the term became popularized. If someone had tried to coin a term for the genre earlier I think it would’ve been Metroid-like alone, specifically because the early entries of Castlevania didn’t really have any movement-based mechanics upgrades until SotN. Even things being locked behind item progression was only in Simon’s Quest before that (although it looks like Vampire Killer had some more open levels where you had to find keys). I’m not familiar with Rondo of Blood, which looks like it had some exploration of levels with the secondary character, but again without upgrading movement mechanics.
So you basically had Metroid ('86) and Super Metroid ('94) being quintessential examples of the modern metroidvania genre, whereas there were almost a dozen Castlevanias before SotN ('97) that were mostly linear.
But that’s exactly why we have the word metroidvania.
The term Metroidvania initially referred to entries in Konami’s gothic 2-D action Castlevania series whose mazey maps closely evoked the Metroid games
It was sometimes used derisively in forums, but it was to tell apart the likes of Symphony of the Night from the likes of the linear ones. And then as we got more Castlevanias like Symphony of the Night in the GBA era, it became part of the definition of what this genre is.
I suppose I should've been clearer there, I really just meant the Koji Igarashi-era games, not Classicvania. As the other comment mentions, the term Metroidvania was actually originally coined to separate the two eras of Castlevania, before the genre exploded in popularity and it became repurposed.
I’ve seen video essays about metroidvanias that talk about “getting lost”. The real point is to follow clues, feel immersed in a world, learn to find your way, and make interesting decisions.
In Hollow Knight, it’s no problem to use the compass if you find that aspect too burdensome. I really enjoyed my time with Axiom Verge, and I seem to recall it came with a compass as standard? Perhaps that’s wrong, it’s been a few years since I picked that one up.
More to the point, which metroidvanias did you like and what did they do differently?
Axiom Verge had a lot of hidden passages through walls and otherwise same-y environments that just made getting back to where I wanted to go a chore. I don’t remember a compass, but if it had one, it didn’t help.
With Hollow Knight and Symphony of the Night, the maps are so large and contiguous, and they give you so little information as to why you didn’t fully explore a corner of the map, that you end up either easily missing a thing that you needed in order to progress or you get there and say to yourself, “oh, that’s right, that’s why I was stuck”, wasting a lot of time traveling there to come to that realization. In most Metroid games, the map is broken up into chunks with lots of entrances and exits connecting to the other chunks, which can keep the map screen small and easier to read. Plus, if there’s an ability that the game wants to make sure you get before you leave, they make sure you’re trapped in there with no option except to find it and make sure you know how it works first.
EDIT: Some of my favorites in the genre would be Batman: Arkham Asylum, most of the Metroid series, Ori and the Blind Forest, and the roguelike A Robot Named Fight.
I’ve never heard of B: AA described as a metroidvania… How do you figure that one?
It is a metroidvania. It fits the definition exactly. You backtrack over a space as you get more and more upgrades to unlock parts of it that were gated. The sequels weren’t really that so much, because they were open world games that gave you access to the entire map, give or take a few interior areas.
A Robot Named Fight is a fairly obscure indie game, but if you wish you could get that experience of playing Super Metroid for the first time over and over again, this is as close as you’ll get.
Will of the Wisps fell through the cracks for me. It came out at a time after I had switched to Linux and before Proton was a thing. I ought to make time to get around to it someday.
I just got pop_os up and running to replace windows 11 on my alienware aurora. Still working on a sound issue in Helldivers 2 but overall has been a smooth transition.
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