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.
You know the budget is spent almost entirely on the art when you actually pay attention to the credits and you see names for like 250 artists, but only 3-5 programmers.
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.
Gifted my kids, both of them already young adults, one of those retro gaming sticks. An absolute bang/for/buck wonder, full of retro emulators and ROMs. Christmas Day, at grandmas was a retro fest, with even grandma playing. Pac man, frogger, space invaders, galaga, donkey Kong, early console games…. Retro gaming has amazing games, where gameplay and concepts had to make do with the limited resources.
My son has a Steam deck, but he had a blast with the rest.
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.
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.
I have a computer from 2017. It’s also a Mac. I can’t play recent games and I think I’ve just gotten more and more turned off by the whole emphasis on better graphics and the need to spend ridiculous amounts of money on either a console or a really good graphics card for a PC has just turned me off of mainstream gaming completely.
Mostly I just go play games I played when I was a kid these days. 1980s graphics and yet I have yet to get tired of many of them…
I can think of many older games in dire need of facelifts, but the thing is they don’t need a facelift into photo-realistic territory. Just enough to bring the vision out from developers reaching just a little further than their old tech could support. I’m thinking of a lot of early 3D games. Many of the older sprite based games still hold up great.
The AAA gaming industry has gone off the rails trying to wow us with graphics and the novelty has long worn off.
I would argue they don’t even need to be updated. They were fun already in their time. I wish people would just come up with totally new ideas. I don’t need the same characters in every game I play. Same with movies now too Everything is a remake or a sequel.
Hmm… title is a little bit clickbaity—author seems to be mainly going after live service games, not necessarily every video game.
Also, novels and movies don't always end 😂 Not sure why they threw that into the title. Freaking Fast and Furious will surely outlast planet Earth at this point 😂 What about Star Wars? It'll never end.
I agree with the general sentiment though: I think players are flexible and will be inclined to give your new IP a shot, but capitalism is risk averse, and will obviously disagree.
Nah, Fast and Furious’ days are numbered. They already broke the glass on the storyboard card that says, “Go to space”, and the only one left to break is, “Time Machine”.
Oh, fair enough. But it’s still only going to have so much gas in the tank, and a cliff-hanger or sequel potential is very different than some continual expectation, either by consumers or the developers that the game can or should be updated forever.
Yes, but it's also devoid of creativity and takes up space that could be occupied by more creative endeavors, so it's a similar path at the end of the day.
My point is pointing a finger at Fortnite and Epic Games is fair, but same finger should also be pointed at Universal, Disney, NBC… etc.
And the biggest finger should be pointed at capitalism itself.
I enjoy the Fast & Furious movies. The advantage to them releasing one movie at a time, or in games, one game at a time, is you can more accurately gauge the appetite for the next one, and they don’t have ongoing costs to keep the last one going. The ten F&F movies out there now are not in danger of disappearing if F&F11 bombs. The people who worked on those movies don’t have an expectation for or reliance on employment any longer than the time it takes to make one movie. And outside of Fast X, despite being pulpy and constantly recontextualizing and retconning old events, they all have their own endings with closure. Fast X does have a cliffhanger, and that is a bet that they made with their audience that they’ll be back, but the most likely scenario is that the next one offers closure. In some ways, cliffhangers can be closure themselves, too; I think more highly of Arcane season 1’s ending as closure for the series than I do of season 2, for instance. Meanwhile, the most likely scenario for a live service game is that it doesn’t have an ending or even exist anymore, only a few years in the future.
And all that said, it also doesn’t mean that I don’t understand your perspective, but I do see eye to eye with the author.
Hmm… but isn't it an "ongoing series"? Like, you can have short or long arcs, but if the continuity is the same, the story technically hasn't ended.
I agree gaming takes it a step further, but this is like comparing a worse example to a bad one… yeah, one is worse, but they both suck at the end of the day.
I'm glad you like Fast and Furious, but it's only one example of many. It's not the only movie franchise being milked to death, and won't be the last.
It can be an ongoing series, but you can get a sense of closure each time. Star Wars had closure in 1983 and 2005 and 2019 as they kept adding on to it, each time seeming like it was done; and each spin-off had closure by the time credits rolled.
Hmm… I suppose I can just put this down to my disagreeing with the article's headline: I say a lot of movies and novels don't offer enough closure and are bad examples to follow—games can and should do better, IMO.
I'd rather get Project G.G. or Scalebound than the 15th Assassin's Creed game in as many years or even Bayonetta 3, TBH.
I only watched the first 2 movies back in the day. They were OK, but I never felt the need to watch them again (or the desire to watch the later ones).
They briefly got a Fierro into space so they could mess with a satellite. Somewhere around the fifth movie, they became very tongue in cheek action movies, with one character whose entire job is to break the fourth wall.
Wanting closure is a preference and does not apply to all games. Counter Strike 2 doesn’t have a story and there is zero closure for example.
The industry trying to force games into a live service model when they shouldn’t be is a problem, sure. There are a few games where the model actually is a benefit though, like Helldivers 2. Other than wrapping up things somehow while winding down the game there isn’t an opportunity for closure while an endless war is going on. The setting itself is why closure isn’t on the table.
So I agree with the overall idea as it applies to games in general, but it isn’t some universal truth.
The closure the article speaks to is also just not turning the game into a perpetual expectation that more is coming. Multiplayer games have always been built around being “endless”, but there was never the expectation that this Halo would be the last Halo and just keep getting updates when you bought it 20 years ago. That expectation has led to sustainability problems we’ve all seen and that the article calls out.
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.
I love Gooseman’s work, especially Tactical Intervention. Talk about “ahead of it’s time,” there isn’t a game today that can match the vehicle “optional” extraction maps in that game. Stupid fun community too.
I’m bookmarking this link so I can read it when I have the time. Having said that, it should be clear that I haven’t read the article, yet.
For me personally, 80’s and 90’s 2D Metroid and Castlevania games were fun, but for me, something transcendental happened with the release of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. I’m 100% certain that I am incapable of truly putting it into words, but I’m sure a myriad of people have done it, and done it far better than I ever could. I bought the game on a whim because I enjoyed Castlevania 3 on the NES so much. Other than fighting games, 2D games were basically blasé for 90’s 32-bit systems like the original PlayStation. Truthfully, I’m having a hard time recalling at the moment why I decided to buy the game. But I’m absolutely 10010% sure it was a good idea and I’m honestly thankful to my teenage self for that decision.
Modern Metroidvanias are fun, too. Truth be told, I gave up on Hollow Knight. I’m a patient, older gamer, so maybe that comes into play. But it eventually got to a point where it simply wasn’t fun anymore. I was confused about what I needed to do next and I wasn’t making any progress in the game. And then I had to set it aside for almost a year. When I tried to return, my memory had faded to the point where I really struggled to play it and make progress. That made me immensely sad. Once I realized that, I simply set it aside.
On the other hand, I played all the Nintendo DS Castlevania Metroidvania games back in the day and even still own the original cartridges. Via Steam, I also played the Gameboy Advanced Castlevanias. They are so much fun for me. So much fun that I purchased the Dominus collection on Steam, which is essentially all the DS games that I already own.
I also played Bloodstained: ROTN. I know there’s a lot of criticism about the game, but I’ll be honest, I loved every freakin’ minute of it. I wasn’t a huge fan of the graphics, but the game play was exactly what I needed at the time and I don’t regret that purchase one bit.
And to finalize things, nice to meet other Metroidvania lovers. We might not all agree on the nitty-gritty details, but it’s still neat to hear from others. Back in the 90s when I was absolutely in love with SOTN despite the fact that everybody else was hating on it entirely because it’s a “2D platformer”, it was hard to imagine that ~30 years later there would be entire communities of people who love these types of games.
Man…I had the same experiences as you with Castlevania games and loved the hell outta Bloodstained. Wish I had more to add but wanted to at least high five lol
The big problem for these AAA studios is that this is their unique selling point. Hyper-realistic graphics and sprawling game worlds. If they stop doing these, they’re hardly different to the games from five years ago (which you can still buy and cheaply at that). And they’re hardly different from indie titles. They would enter quite the competitive market.
I do agree that we’re at somewhat of a breaking point. The production costs grow to absurd levels. The graphical advances are marginal. And not many gamers can afford the newest hardware to play these titles. But I don’t think, there’s an easy exit strategy for these AAA studios…
nytimes.com
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