New update: I’m like 4 hours in and so far loving this game. It is clearly early elder scrolls inspired but it stands on its own. Very happy to be playing it
I mean your whole argument still stands though because iirc correctly the first real quest he gives is the “go into the bandit filled murder robot dungeon and find a tiny ass Rubik’s cube”
I’m in the game industry. This is entirely person observation I have not studied this topic so can’t source anything
The people I saw going to early mobile market were a lot of handheld console and flash game devs and companies. They were adapting the closest existing game designs and brought with them a “small game small cost” philosophy. It also wasn’t really known yet how impulsive people are on phones. So it was an unproven market with smaller teams and people making yester era design choices. There also used to be a few bigger games with bigger price tags but people didn’t buy into those because anyone willing to spend that on a game at the time would have had a console or PC and could buy a better experience there for the same price.
The only mobile game experience I have was back in like 2012, smart phones were really taking off, and the market for mobile games was proven. The company I worked for we built a release ready game but it never got released. We couldn’t sell it to investors because the monetization was never aggressive enough for them (the investor money at that point was less about making the game and more to fund marketing and stabilizing the studio as a long term business). I quit when my job stopped being dev work and started being round tables about how to psychologically trick players into paying more. Anyway with so much focus on heavy monetization it stopped being economically worth it for a lot of startups to actually make good games when thinly veiled skinner boxes pleased the investors all the same
I’ve never played so I’m not sure what the systems are. Is that video not showing someone complete the level? Is it the level creator having to prove it is solvable to submit it?
As someone currently working in QA, they might have a bunch of high priority tasks related to monetization or partnerships with legal obligations. QA for things the consumer sees only needs to be prioritized enough to keep the profits vs. outrage ratio in the green
Oblivion suffers from middle child syndrome. It is the transition from the weird and fantastic of Morrowind to the mass appeal of Skyrim and it doesn’t really do either of those things well. I liked a lot of aspects of it. Like the changes they made with vampirism were interesting, dimension hopping was a blast, the addition of skills providing special bonuses like running on water helped liven up the skills. There was a lot of garbage though like how the level design was a clunky mix of simplified vs. capturing what Morrowind did, UI switch to prioritize consoles but didn’t even work well for console, the overall distancing of mechanics and the world. I remember it feeling like they put a lot of work into streamlining while keeping things unique which I appreciate but they didn’t hit the mark and ended up with a lot of hollow concepts.
Skyrim never even attempted to be weird so I think it’s a lot more cohesive comparatively. Like there’s no pretending anywhere in that game about what it is and in that way they did a reasonably good job. Probably the biggest differences though is Morrowind is clearly a game made with incredible amounts of passion. Oblivion also has passion in it but there are a lot of areas you could see that were rushed or they kept the devs leashed. Skyrim’s rare flicker of care makes me feel sad mostly knowing the devs had the capacity to go hog wild with it but didn’t for probably a variety of reasons.
It’s been a good while since I played oblivion though I’d probably have to run through it again to give you a proper answer (and might change what I’ve said here as I reevaluate it fresh). What’s your belated revelation on Oblivion?