FromSoft had been making those games for the better part of 15 years, building and iterating on what came before.
Longer, if we really want to get pedantic. King’s Field, the game and series that is now the spiritual predecessor to the Souls genre, is from 1994, so we could probably say they have been refining their own flavor of action RPG for over 30 years now.
The freedom that Morrowind gives you has never been matched by other Bethesda titles. I think the only path that’s blocked to the player is joining the Sixth House, but at least you can kill Vivec before confronting Dagoth Ur
I can’t speak for Daggerfall’s freedom as I haven’t really delved into it, but I know it has 6 different endings depending on which faction you ally with.
What those leaps do result in, however, is major performance gains.
Which many devs will make sure you never feel them by “optimizing” the game for only the most bleeding edge hardware
Then there’s efficiency. What if you could run Monster Hunter Wilds at max graphics, on battery, for hours? The first gen M1 Max MacBook Pro can comfortably run Baldur’s Gate III. Reducing power draw would have immense benefits on top of graphical improvements.
See, if the games were made with a performance first mindset, that’d be possible already. Not to dunk on performance gains, but there’s a saying that every time hardware gets faster, programmers make their code slower. I mean, you can totally play emulated SNES games with minimal impact compared to leaving the computer idling.
Saying “diminishing returns” is like saying that fire burns you when you touch it.
Unless chip fabrication can figure a way to make transistors “stack” on top of one another, effectively making 3D chips, they’ll continue to be “flat” sheets that can only increase core count horizontally. Single core frequency peaked in early 2000s, from then on it’s been about adding more cores. Even the gains from a RTX 5090 vs a RTX 4090 aren’t that big. Now compare with the gains from a GTX 980 vs a GTX 1080
The generational leap from PS3 -> PS4 wasn’t that significant already, and that happened more than 10 years ago. The biggest difference seem to be lights/shadows and texture size, the latter of which balloons game size and can tank performance
Is there any minecraft clone that uses non-blocky character models? Or how would one go to mod Luanti to use different meshes for some of the characters?
I remember reading a review, i think from Ars Technica, that said that the dad was by far the worst parent and, as a character, someone who didn’t evolve or learn anything. Is that right?
I thought the first gamergate was about gatekeeping women away from games games journalism. Imagine getting mad at trans people existing in a game where shapeshifting monsters and magic exist.
Please point out where I implied that corporations got greedy “only now”. Hint: i said “since forever”, the implication is that they were always shit. Then again, can’t expect much from you.