I mean…I think yes, at some point a marketing department made that claim, which is unfortunate because that’s ultimately far from reality and most people know it. The claims made of the Series X and PS5 are also usually exaggerated, because most salespeople can get away with prefixing any claim with the words “up to”.
What I want out of romance in games is to have it take you by surprise, which often means it’s not a “romance option”. Some of the best character scenes I’ve seen wrapped some other major plot point into the fact that one person cares a bit too deeply about another, and processes it all very suddenly.
So I’m fine with this removal. All those romance choices in RPGs like Fallout and Skyrim felt ultra shallow to me. Even BG3 just seems like raw wish fulfillment from a horny cast.
Similar to how the PS5 had “8K” on the box; it’s only technically capable of that for the sake of videos, but most games tend to go a bit smaller resolution for practical rendering.
Xbox has a packaged release system designed for that. Since the Series S isn’t really meant to go over 1080p, developers are encouraged to only include smaller versions of textures since anything too detailed would be wasted.
PS5, by contrast, tends to have simplified video settings panels so gamers can prioritize what they want - be that raytracing, 4K, or 60fps. Often, just having the extra power doesn’t necessarily matter if the game is coded against taking advantage of it. (I think Bloodborne is infamous for this - it hasn’t gotten an update, so even on PS5, everyone must play it locked at 30fps).
The thing is, if a game releases on Series X without any bonus bells and whistles like (pick one) 4K, 60fps, or ray tracing, it’s kind of failed the move to next gen. If it then cannot scale any of those things back for the Series S, then it’s failed at designing scalability.
The new consoles do not exist to serve programmer inefficiency.
There’s a game with pre-rendered backgrounds called Alisa. I always really enjoyed the pre-render look. The excitement of reaching a “cinematic FMV” that moves the story in a PS1 game is very different from standard cutscenes.
I hate to say this, but I doubt that will ever happen.
It’s the ‘Kingdom Hearts’ issue. When you build on a plot thread across multiple games, you devalue a number of entries as a result. People want the modern convenience and superior design of recent releases, but also don’t want to be left out of central information. It’s why it’s hard to get people into the Trails series. To Ace Attorney’s credit, something they’ve done right in their games is avoid spoiling the central culprit of past games in future ones, even going so far as to only reference vague turnouts of past cases.
It really, really doesn’t help that a large number of people consider AJ:AA to be one of the least satisfying games in the series (in part only because they almost all hit a high bar). So if anyone were to skip a game, that might be it.
There’s going to be a bunch of confusion abound in fan discussions, as each of the characters appearing in this game get different names from the fan translation.
I’ll admit I’ve been in that crowd that believed they saw early efforts like horse armor and Bioware’s infamous pay-to-continue Dragon Age quests, and backed off - resolving they need to shift monetization elsewhere like skins. Seems I was wrong.
You could argue given Starfield’s overall failures, it’s still in the sector of terribly-designed monetization that just gets forgotten by history, much like most mobile games. But, we’re still in the process of writing that history.
Trails in the Sky definitely comes to mind. But if you browse Square Enix’s catalogue, there’s probably plenty that fulfill it. Final Fantasy stands out because it’s a little less tropey.