I think this is an important and distinctive point to be made, and I think it needs some background.
Who else remembers when EA won The Consumerists “Worst Company in America” two years running?
Well, I remember, but I also remember that EA actually placed the blame for winning Worst Company on something else entirely, and we have to be honest with ourselves and question whether this sentiment was real and we ignored it to our detriment.
This is part of what EA CEO Peter Moore had to say when EA won “Worst Company” a second year in a row:
In the past year, we have received thousands of emails and postcards protesting against EA for allowing players to create LGBT characters in our games. This week, we’re seeing posts on conservative web sites urging people to protest our LGBT policy by voting EA the Worst Company in America.
I remember at the time thinking this was pure deflection. Now I’m not so sure.
I mean, they won the awards in 2012 and 2013 and then Gamergate happened in 2014/2015. Seems pretty tied together, to me.
Seriously this sentiment is old as hell. This comic is old as hell.
The BioWare of today is not the one that made the original Baldur’s Gate. Shit, it’s not even the BioWare that made the original Dragon Age.
They’ve been a hollowed out shell chasing whatever “AAA” style sells the most for a long time now. If Baldur’s Gate 3 had come out before Witcher 3, you can bet your ass Veilguard would look and play a hell of a lot more like BG3, because it’s painfully clear they did everything they could to crib the speed of the combat in Witcher 3, which was the hot shit when they started development. Similar to how Inquisition was chasing the Open World fad. If Baldurs Gate 3 had been the hot shit when they began development? Veilguard would have played like that instead.
It is what it is, and this has been this way since at least Dragon Age 2/Mass Effect 2.
Maybe it’s just me, but I like the style it’s presented in, and I have major adblockers in service so I’m not sure how it’s a drug fueled hellscape. It basically becomes a normal NYT article after a half-page of scrolling. Not all their readers are familiar with these games, so the NYT is doing its diligence by trying to show what they’re talking about, so their readers have a frame of reference. (Remember the NYT is actually aimed at an investor class who owns a second house in the Hamptons and may not be gamers at all. Go look at their Lifestyle section sometime.)
I think it’s fine but I guess I’m in the minority, but also maybe it’s less worse for me because of uBlock/Pihole/Bypass Paywalls Clean.
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.