I count Dark Souls as a Metroidvania in my head, honestly.
But I think the actual defining feature is unlocking new abilities to reach new locations.
DS1 has you unlocking new areas that are interconnected with ones previously explored, but you don’t really unlock new moves to get to a new place, it usually just happens after you beat a boss or buy an item.
It’s a good point, they all have item or ability gated progression with backtracking and alternate routes. The more I think about the question, the less of an answer I have…
The line I personally draw between Metroidvania and Zelda like is the ability to sequence break without glitches and a focus on platforming as the core of movement.
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.
GSC in my opinion ruined stalker 2 in the chase for “next gen” graphics. And modern graphics are now so dependent on upscaling and frame gen, sad to see but trailers sell.
Wise actually worked with OC Remix on the DKC album!
It’s fantastic to see an article like this in the Times. His work continues to be incredible, with more recent works like Yooka Laylee and the Impossible Lair and Gimmick 2.
Getting lost is definitely a love it or hate it kind of thing. I love getting lost in games. I wish more games had it as a feature. It’s extremely rare these days. Most games hold your hand like a toddler at Disneyland.
It’s okay to hate getting lost. There are loads and loads of games out there for you. I just cross my fingers for a few more games for me!
Does it have an auto-map feature? That’s the biggest difference for me. I enjoy the newer MVs but the auto-map feature makes it impossible (for me) to get lost. I’m used to games without any kind of auto-map.
Edit: I checked it out on steam. Looks really cool!
I think I’d put it this way - I like adventuring, exploring, and finding my way through an immersive world. I don’t like when I can’t seem to stumble into the exact right clue or secret passage or interactable and waste up to possibly hours scouring the same locations over and over.
That said, metroidvanias are my favorite videogame genre. I just had to accept that it’s okay to look up a guide or wiki before I get fully tilted.
Yeah I don’t like banging my head into a wall either. What I mean by enjoying getting lost is being in a dangerous area where I don’t know how to get back to safety. It’s a mini adventure within an adventure to figure out how to escape without dying.
One game I play, Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, has a built in mechanism to create situations like that: shafts you can fall down that put you into an unexplored level that’s deeper and more difficult than the one you were on. It’s pretty effective at creating these mini adventures though fans of the game complain about them all the time.
Alexey Pajitnov, who created the ubiquitous game in 1984, opens up about his failed projects and his desire to design another hit.
He prefers conversations about his canceled and ignored games, the past designs that now make him cringe, and the reality that his life’s signature achievement probably came decades ago.
The problem is that that guy created what is probably the biggest, most timeless simple video game in history. Your chances of repeating that are really low.
It’s like you discover fire at 21. The chances of doing it again? Not high. You could maybe do other successful things, but it’d be nearly impossible to do something as big again.
Star Wars has been described as "science-fantasy" for decades. I wasn't aware that there was any controversy on this point. At least the author of the article admitted to the fact that it is blatant click-bait.
That said, some Star Wars novels could easily fit into the traditional science fiction framework. That's one of the things I love most about the franchise: It accommodates all genres!
I thought this was already well established? Star Wars has the aesthetic trappings of sci-fi (spaceships, lasers, aliens, robots, etc), but the stories themselves are all fantasy. Other than some stuff in The Clone Wars series, the movies themselves don’t really ponder the same things that sci-fi movies would ponder, they’re more about classical good vs evil stories, fantastical magic powers, and the hero’s journey.
nytimes.com
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