But it IS a crazy conspiracy... theory. "Skate testing its MTX during an alpha means that they will be a scam at launch and/or impact gameplay because Multiversus also had MTX and that had a bad relaunch" is a complete non-sequitur. This is cavemen sacrificing goats to make it rain levels of random event association.
So I have to conclude the emotional layer is what matters here. Being mad loudly online at a frequent punching bag with a bad reputation is sheer mob-induced dopamine and that's why that headline exists and why this conversation happens. And why social media exists and is killing liberal democracy, but that's probably beyond the scope of this thread.
You just made all that up. None of that is even tangentially related to the thing that actually happened.
I mean, now we're arguing that this weird ploy to extract more money for cosmetics is probably going to harm gameplay (even though it's unrelated to gameplay) because a different game from a different company also had MTX which were also not related to the bad gameplay changes they made.
I don't know what to argue there. It's entirely irrational.
To be clear, it's not irrational that F2P games often push monetization in intrusive ways that are annoying. It's not irrational that Multiversus had a very weird history and a poor relaunch. But the way you're connecting those pieces along with a healthy dose of entirely disconnected preconceptions based on branding is completely off the rails.
This is why this is so frustrating to me. People just want to be mad at things because some other things that are unrelated made them mad once and they want to just smear the anger a bit. It's pure mob mentality and I fully admit that it pisses me off in games as a proxy for how much of it informs modern society and politics in general. Which I guess I'm doing, too, a little bit. But still.
The implicit perception of value in this comment is making my head spin. We all realize that in-game cosmetics aren't real, right?
Also, yes, they are doing the free to play version of preordering. It's called Early Access and it's supposed to happen later this year. See also Path of Exile 2 and Baldur's Gate 3.
People are working overtime to get their knee-jerk reaction to be retroactively justified here. The thing is, I would get being mad at this being a F2P game in the first place. I would get being mad at it being funded through microtransactions. Those are meaningful changes from the previous trilogy that I don't particularly care for.
It's the being mad on the spot at a haf-misunderstood headline depicting something entirely unremarkable that rubs me the wrong way.
Man, that's a fair point. If you want to be mad at something be mad at the five year dev cycle into an early access launch. I'm not even saying it's the devs or EA's fault. Making games is hard. And expensive. But definitely hard.
I guess it depends a lot on your background. I thought it felt simple compared to the old X-Wing series but not necessarily dumbed down, they did a decent job streamlining it for a modern take.
I guess that means some people can find it too slow and intricate and others too arcadey. I imagine the Skate guys are having to make a lot of those same decisions for a lot of those same reasons.
I have to say, I was pretty neutral on this coming in, but reading all the people posturing anger while clearly not having any awareness of what the game is supposed to be or even reading the article is getting kind of annoying.
As per the article, they're refunding all purchases at launch.
It's a free to play game, there is absolutely nothing newsworthy about this. Path of Exile 2 just launched on early access with a bunch of microtransactions AND a paywall and people were absolutely delighted with it.
Those quotes are all asides or insubstantial to the point being made. I have nothing to add beyond pointing you back to my previous post. Except perhaps that the points about Detroit and architecture are both directly responding to statements on the video you linked (he mentions Detroit defenders and gets super stuck on using the Bilbao Guggenheim as a proxy for samey architecture as a proxy for game visuals).
Oh, and that I'm not confusing setting and style, I'm saying that you can take the idea of leaning towards a photoreal treatment of light transfer to go along with leaning into performance capture and still have style around that choice. The statement that the retrofuturistic aesthetic of Horizon is somehow "almost identical" to the 80s movie homage of Indiana Jones is baffling. I will keep repeating this until it lands: nobody would argue that Raiders of the Lost Ark looks "almost identical" to... I don't even know anything that looks like Horizon... let's go Conan the Barbarian just because they both point cameras at people. Technique does not dictate style (or what in movies you'd call production design). That is a purely videogame-y hangup from the historical misunderstanding that technology is the main driver for aesthetics. If that ever made sense, it certainly stopped fifteen years ago.
I suppose that's at the core of the meme in the OP. Growing up in an era where going from beautiful pixel art to ugly lo-fi 3D was seen as the natural evolution of game aesthetics and never having figured out to distinguish the tech from the art as separate concepts.
Well, then don't be hyperbolic, let's see where that takes us.
That video is still nonsensical, just eloquently nonsensical. Makes me think he hasn't been to Bilbao, for one thing, but talking about games, not architecture, he caveats the crap out of a tautology just to end up in a tautology: AAA games look like this because a AAA game is a game that looks like this, whatever "like this" means.
For one thing, man, do I wish Detroit had never existed. It's amazing that for a while there we had this little cottage industry of doomsters that used Detroit to show how bad anything ranging from David Cage's games to Sony to graphics, apparently turn out to be. To such a degree that I have very rarely seen a defense of Detroit, I've never played Detroit, the game seems to not have done that well and Cage has never published another game. It's a consensus entirely predicated on opposing a fanbase of defenders that seemingly never existed.
All the while this guy argues that AAA games have a look (then caveats that some don't) while showing clips from, if you're keeping track, a game about robot dinosaurs set in a lush jungle full of red plants (which is shocking imagery pulling inspiration from super nerdy, niche illustration work), a bleak but beautiful zombie apocalypse made out of grungy rural clothing, a superhero game and a gorgeousely unique take on norse mythology. None of those games look alike in any way that makes sense. Not more than Spider-Man 2, Transformers, A Quiet Place and The Northman look alike. Photographing people as a technique is not an aesthetic, and it certainly isn't an aesthetic limitation. That's like saying that only animation is creative while photography isn't. It's such a disservice to creativity.
But even from a 2020 video, things have moved in the direction he wants, if only because the games industry is unraveling, I suppose. If you peek at game awards in the interim, the games that got most attention in those five years include The Last of Us II, but also Hades, Elden Ring, Balatro, Astro Bot, Animal Crossing, It Takes Two, Baldur's Gate III, Alan Wake 2 and Tears of the Kingdom. In the recent batch of first party events there was a genuine splash of discourse about which rendition of fake stop motion looked better between the Louisiana fantasy Wizard of Oz reimagining and the creepy claymation... horror FPS thing? What are we talking about again?
Let me drop the pretense for a moment and make a case for what I think we're talking about: this narrative is part of the problem, if there is a problem. These contrarian takes are being tautological for the sake of affecting elevated taste and elitist insight others lack. The truth is games look all sorts of ways and explore wildly different art styles, scopes and concepts. But the discourse is antagonistic and narrow. People latch on to games not to praise them and explore them but to complain and wear them down, and so gaming gets reduced to whatever we don't like, with whatever we do like being passed as a secret hidden gem or an outlier even when it's wildly popular. It's why there's more discourse about Concord, which is a game that looked bad, wasn't great and nobody played, than about Marvel Rivals, which is a game that is just as expensive but looks bright and colorful and cartoony and is extremely popular. In the games industry people sometimes refer to that look as a "mainstream look", because so many popular games look like that. It's the look of Fortnite and The Sims and World of Warcraft and Team Fortress, and it's gradually going more anime as mainstream games pivot to Asia, becoming the look of Genshin Impact, and Zenless Zone Zero and Marvel Rivals.
This is a talking point people like to drop to feel fancy and elevated that implies that we're somehow still living in an industry circa 2008 when home console single player action adventure games dominated the sales charts and smaller games were a dying breed barely kept alive by a group of plucky indies. For better and worse, we haven't lived in that world for a while. If anything, I miss the mid 2000s AAA approach to gaming. Nobody is doing it outside of Sony and a couple weirdos like Sam Lake, and it was a comforting, creative, interesting approach that has unfortunately run out of runway while presumptuous commentators keep beating a dead horse because either they didn't get the memo or because it's perhaps too depressing to look at the real state of the industry.
Did I drop the Socratic pretense too hard? Got too real? We can go back to pretending we don't know what we're talking about if that makes everybody feel better.
I don't understand what you're saying. Or, I do, but if I do, then you don't.
I think you're mixing up technique with style, in fact. And really confusing a rendering technique with an aesthetic. But beyond that, you're ignoring so many games. So many. Just last year, how do you look at Balatro and Penny's Big Breakaway and Indiana Jones and go "ah, yes, games all look the same now". The list of GOTY nominees in the TGAs was Astro Bot, Balatro, Wukong, Metaphor, Elden Ring and Final Fantasy VII R. How do you look at that list of games and go "ah, yes, same old, same old".
Whenever I see takes like these I can't help but think that people who like to talk about games don't play enough games, or just think of a handful of high profile releases as all of gaming. Because man, there's so much stuff and it goes from grungy, chunky pixel art to lofi PS1-era jank to pitch-perfect anime cel shading to naturalistic light simulation. If you're out there thinking games look samey you have more of a need to switch genres than devs to switch approach, I think.