Idk. Breath of the Wild felt more like a tech demo than a full game. Tears of the Kingdom felt more fleshed out, but even then… the wideness of the world belied its shallowness in a lot of places. Ocarina of Time had a smaller overall map, but ever region had this very bespokely crafted setting and culture and strategy. By the time you got to Twilight Princess, you had this history to the setting and this weight to this iteration of the Zelda setting.
What could you really do in BotW that you couldn’t do in Twilight? The graphics got a tweak. The amount of running around you did went way up. But the game itself? Zelda really peaked with Majorem’s Mask. So much of this new stuff is more fluff than substance.
The dream of the '10s/20s game industry was VR. Hyper-realistic settings were supposed to supplant the real world. Ready Player One was what big development studios genuinely thought they were aiming for.
They lost sight of video games as an abstraction and drank too much of their own cyberpunk kool-aid. So we had this fixation on Ray Tracing and AI-driven NPC interactions that gradually lost sight of the gameplay loop and the broader iterative social dynamics of online play.
That hasn’t eliminated development in these spheres, but it has bifricated the space between game novelty and game immersion. If you want the next Starcraft or Earthbound or Counterstrike, you need to look towards the indie studios and their low-graphics / highly experimental dev studios (where games like Stardew Valley and Undertale and Balatro live). The AAA studios are just turning out 100 hour long movies with a few obnoxious gameplay elements sprinkled in.
I’d say it’s less about imagination than gameplay. I’m reminded of old action figures. Some of them were articulated at the knees, elbows, feet, wrists, and head. Very posable, but you could see all the joints. Then you had the bigger and more detailed figures, but they were barely more than statues. Looked great but you couldn’t really do anything with them.
And then you had themed Lego sets. Only a vague passing resemblance to the IP, but your imagination is the limit on what you do with them.
When I first got WC2, I discovered that my 1x CD couldn’t read from the disc fast enough for me to play it. The game would run for about five or ten minutes, then crash. I made it about half way through first campaign - 5 to 10 minutes at a time - before I was able to afford a 4x CD and play it normally.
I’ve heard a lot of mixed opinions on the WC3 Leaders mechanic, as it focuses gameplay around farming and single points of failure (losing a leader at the wrong moment often meant losing the game)
In that light, Starcraft was the pinnacle of PC RTS gaming and WC3 was an experimental variation that branched off into an RTS variant that would eventually congeal into DOTA, the pinnacle of PC MOBA gaming.
That’s like saying “A hamburger is good, but I just can’t into bacon double cheeseburgers.”
I mean, I would say this unironically.
I’ll add that WC1 had fewer variances between factions. Orcs and Humans were almost identical. That made the game more akin to a real time digital chess than WC2, which made Orcs marginally more aggressive and Humans more defensive. I think WC2 is more fun because of the asymmetry, but that’s purely a question of taste. I’m not going to begrudge someone who has a fondness for the original.
It only really makes sense when the remaster is trash
I gotta disagree. Even when the remaster is (arguably) better than the original, there’s a lot of value in the original art assets and the more rudimentary gameplay as a historical guidestone. For the same reason you wouldn’t tear up the original Mona Lisa because we’ve got a high resolution digital copy, you don’t just scrub copies of the original version of Pong from the internet because we have Wii Tennis.