I feel there’s this trend where movie directors must and shall make their own story in whatever world is in front of them, instead of trying to make a movie that would fit in the game, or simply take the game’s story and make a movie out of that.
It’s why Lord of The Ring was so fucking good (Christopher Lee/Saruman read the books every year of his life, and corrected Peter Jackson whenever necessary), whereas Rings of Power is shit (I mean, a loving Orc family? What the FUCK have they been snorting!?). It’s also why I’m hopeful to get something good out of Henry Cavill directing any 40k movie (that, or we’re getting nothing, at best. At worst someone else takes over and we’re getting female custodes for no good reason).
You are Quote, an amnesiac robot. The world appear to have gone to shit and you don’t know why.
It’s a 2D sidescroller, which if I told myself, I would find immediately boring, but the animation, controls and story combined as just so good. It’s so good.
You are Twinsen, a little tank-like controlled character that’s about to go on an adventure to save his planet!
The tank controls may be getting a bit used to, but you can jump, roll to the side, hop backwards, etc, so you can apply some creativity to your movement. Shout out to the Magicball Network for staying alive all those years!
Downside: It’s up to Shadowlands, not Dragonflight; Also, the few little circles pulled more left are mentioned multiple times in the same Credits, just under different roles.
The thick green circle is Customer Support (though this was before the mass-layoff by MS).
Live version here, but it’s SUPER janky - changing selections will generate a new graph lower down the page.
Raw JSON data here - I had to install Retail WoW (F2P is good enough), dig into the game files to find the .html files that contained the credits and then convert that whole pile of doodoo into JSON.
But back in the day (2003-ish) we still had amazing things to look forward to:
translucency (windows were not see-through)
realtime lighting and shadows (shadows were blobs below a model)
metallic reflection, and reflections in general (though working mirrors existed since at least Duke Nukem 3D, but those were a hack; copy the room and player model and flip them around to create the effect of a mirror)
further viewing distances (though this isn’t a positive, IMO)
physics (everything was static - models moved, but did not rotate (much))
inverse kinematics
It’s crazy how far we’ve gotten, but view distances spoil everything (IMO), and graphical improvements have slowed down (not stalled, but definitely slowed down) with Ray Tracing becoming wide-spread being the last big graphical improvement (since 2018).