The worst thing is that some brilliant sound design is held back by some folks who will buy a top of the line video card but some cheap shitty headphones.
I’ve seen a lot of cool indie games pop up out of heavily modified classic idTech engines like the DOOM and Quake engines. They’re definitely not high fidelity, but a lot of them scratch an itch that slower paced modern games can’t seem to scratch.
Shout out to Borderlands 1, one of the last game to have some of the best comedy delivered by text, instead of audio.
I actually am in the minority of preferring 1 over 2 because 2 is just so fucking loud. Handsome Jack in my fucking ear for hours on end, refusing to shut the fuck up and let me play the game.
I much much much preferred the quiet reading of Borderlands 1.
Look, I’m gonna be real with you, the pool of writers who are exceptionally good at specifically writing for games is really damn small.
Everyone is trained on novels and movies, and so many games try to hamfist in a three-act arc because they haven’t figured out that this is an entirely different medium and needs its own set of rules for how art plays out.
Traditional filmmaking ideas includes stuff like the direction a character is moving on the screen impacting what the scene “means.” Stuff like that is basically impossible to cultivate in, say, a first or third-person game where you can’t be sure what direction characters will be seen moving. Thus, games need their own narrative rules.
I think the first person to really crack those rules was Yoko Taro, that guy knows how to write for a game specifically.
There are a number of theories why gamers have turned their backs on realism. One hypothesis is that players got tired of seeing the same artistic style in major releases.
Whoosh.
We learned all the way back in the Team Fortress 2 and Psychonauts days that hyper-realistic graphics will always age poorly, whereas stylized art always ages well. (Psychonauts aged so well that its 16-year-later sequel kept and refined the style, which went from limitations of hardware to straight up muppets)
There’s a reason Overwatch followed the stylized art path that TF2 had already tread, because the art style will age well as technology progresses.
Anyway, I thought this phenomena was well known. Working within the limitations of the technology you have available can be pushed towards brilliant design. It’s like when Twitter first appeared, I had comedy-writing friends who used the limitation of 140 characters as a tool for writing tighter comedy, forcing them to work within a 140 character limitation for a joke.
Working within your limitations can actually make your art better, which just complements the fact that stylized art lasts longer before it looks ugly.
Others speculate that cinematic graphics require so much time and money to develop that gameplay suffers, leaving customers with a hollow experience.
Also, as others have pointed out, it’s capitalism and the desire for endless shareholder value increase year after year.
Cyberpunk 2077 is a perfect example. A technical achievement that is stunningly beautiful where they had to cut tons of planned content (like wall-running) because they simply couldn’t get it working before investors were demanding that the game be put out. As people saw with the Phantom Liberty, given enough time, Cyberpunk 2077 could have been a masterpiece on release, but the investors simply didn’t give CD Project Red enough time before they cut the purse strings and said “we want our money back… now.” It’s a choice to release too early.
…but on the other hand it’s also a choice to release too late after languishing in development hell a la Duke Nukem Forever.
If they don’t actually film it on the Olympic Peninsula they’re doing it wrong.
It’s just such a god damned beautiful area, and with how far apart the small towns are, great fodder for any post-apocalyptic stories.
Further, there’s several large Reservations in the area, I think any post-apocalyptic story set in the area that doesn’t have Native American folklore becoming resurgent due to the local native population is missing a real opportunity for kickass storytelling. Quinalt, Quileute, Maka, Hoh, and Skokomish all surround the Olympic mountains. Ignoring the large local native populations would be foolish, imho.
Right, their DRM is minimally invasive, which is right in line with their argument that piracy is a service problem. If they offer a service where you can pay for games, have them licensed to a user account, and make the experience flow without interruption, people will accept it.
I was really mostly joking and what you’re saying is accurate.
The good thing is that thanks to how GOG works, as long as some pirate purchases a copy, they will always be able to keep a current update available to the pirate community.