It’s because in older games, you could clearly differentiate between the background and the gameplay relevant sprites or models drawn over it. It was a technical necessity but it doubled as communicating to the player what’s important. When technology advanced past that being technically necessary, something needed to take its place. The pulse is just one of many ways to do that and the easiest one to integrate into a realistic artstyle. When you get more stylized, your options open up considerably.
In other words, emulators are crucial for game preservation? This shows that Nintendo knows that, and when they say it’s not the case, they’re not simply wrong, they’re lying.
This is why I’m looking forward to the first few seasons of PoE2. It sounds like they’re starting out focused on making the moment to moment gameplay more interesting. They’ll cave to the zoom zoom crowd soon enough and ruin the game with power creep within a year, so I’m very much planning on treating it as a temporary game, but it’ll be fun while it lasts.
Fun fact: that’s one of the easiest levels in the game. It barely cracks the top 10 hardest levels in a game with 12 levels, and only because the first 2 are trivial to lull you into a false sense of security.
Exactly. I give it 50/50 odds that this video is something people will look back on and laugh about how much effort went into bosses that were functionally removed from the game, much like PoE1 boss mechanic guides. I genuinely want to be wrong here, but the game I want PoE2 to be, and the game GGG wants to make, is something the community is viciously opposed to. The PoE community absolutely despises anything resembling gameplay.
I really hope they keep the power creep in check. Everything they’ve shown looks great, but if player power is even a fraction of what it is in PoE1, it’ll just be a neat bit of trivia that if you intentionally hold DPS and let bosses live they all do unique things.
While there’s nothing wrong with a game being declared complete and stopping updates, the way this went down doesn’t sit right. Evil Empire (the studio that split off from Motion Twin specifically to maintain Dead Cells) had longer-term plans and the resources to make them happen, but Motion Twin then ordered Evil Empire to stop development because they thought an actively developed Dead Cells would be a competitor to Windblown that they could preemptively kill off.
There’s also a recurring theme in all the interviews after release, they were very open about their biggest regret being how much content had to be cut from the original plans for the first game due to budget constraints. Some things were restored in the content packs afterward, but other things were too foundational to the game’s overarching structure to make sense to be patched in after the fact. The Dreamer sanctums were going to be full fledged dungeons with a big climactic boss fight with each Dreamer, the Abyss was going to be an entire zone with multiple bosses rather than a plot only area, the Coliseum was going to be part of a much more involved sidequest, and there were several major zones that just didn’t end up in the game at all. The result was still a great game, but a shadow of the absurdly ambitious project they envisioned starting out. I assume they’re making Silksong with the intention of not leaving any “what might have been” things.
I’m cautiously optimistic. It looks like a solid core for combat, they need to keep the power creep in check. Most of PoE1’s issues stem from the fact that an optimized build just one-shots everything, and the bandaid fixes that try to fit a source of challenge into that meta.