The difference between Naughty Dog making the perfect AAA game with something like The Last of Us vs Yacht Club making Shovel Knight is that
TLoU
It’s not perfect
No one has really made shit that good ever
There’s still unique interesting characters that have motivations and can be understood (even if they’re not perfect)
SK
It is kind of perfectly executed
People have made shit that good before
I could care less about Shovel Knight or any of the other characters or the environments because none of them are interesting
In fact, Shovel Knight is the posterboy for why games are going hardleft away from mechanics. Mechanics are dead. Shovel Knight wasn’t the one who did it, but it sure as hell is an example of why mechanics are boring. They’re so boring that the fucking gorgeous art surrounding it isn’t enough.
That said, this is like complaining about the world’s best pizza. I mean, shit, it’s something we’ve had as kids and it’s cool that it’s done really well. But if you’re looking to be the best of the best you aren’t going to be making a fucking pizza for Pamda and Tommy C, you know?
Thanks CourierRice for showing off the absurdity that people have to go through to make mechanics mentally stimulating.
@BustedAstromech by “mechanics are dead” I mean that mechanics are solved. Almost anything can be gamified. With enough resources most games can be made. The thing that’s interesting now is wrapping that game around an interesting/important/valuable thing.
The majority of the best games of the past years haven’t played significantly better than the best games of years before, yet they all have attempted to say significantly more through their narrative. Mechanics are a relatively solved system, and now people are looking for experiences more than, like, fun. That second part is a generalization, so there are going to be a handful of people who disagree with me, but the first part is pretty much just fact. Name a scenario that Jesse Schell can’t game design around or a system that youtuber-with-a-masters-degree can’t break down and I’ll be really surprised.
I don’t agree! I think we have perspectives that limit where we think games live --certainly 2D platformers with 2 buttons have been well-trod, but I think you’re underserving slight, gradual improvement, and especially the stuff that is elegant enough to seem natural, for example, the evolution in wall-jump mechanics with western Indies.
I don’t think games normally or ever pitch themselves purely on mechanics. That works on an experiential level. Fly a spaceship, explore a field, run a farm; these all needed mechanics to support them but marketing and even player language doesn’t encompass the how nearly as much as the what.
As a small-scale dev you can think about what you need holistically. Art, mechanics, theme–you know it all has to grab people. I think it was always thus.
counterpoint: the collapse of videogames into a mechanically identical singularity, diffrentiated only by how well any of them can rip off film tropes, is a godawful shame
i just… i dont want to seem like im going to bat over this game because its the greatest thing ive ever played. sure, ok, i guess can conceive of it being a little… clinical? at times?? when i’m not smirking and going “this is a good-ass game”???
im just… im going a little crazy over this resulting discussion because of the sheer gulf between my thinking and you’ns i guess
i think we ultimately just disagree and that’s that but… i want… to understand
i certainly don’t agree that there’s anything wrong with the characters or settings, which hit that Mega Man aesthetic sweet spot for me between serving the mechanics(distant airhorns) and being fun cartoon archetypes
I agree with you whole heartedly that small, gradual improvements can be made in mechanics. I also think that if you look at it from a certain angle it looks like mechanics are thriving more than they’re dying. But I think they’re a dead end for exactly what we’re talking about. The work to get in the top 10% of 2D platformers is really high, and it’s just getting higher. The creative differences are more small gradual differences than real, exciting changes. The work to impact ratio, the efficiency for an indie dev, that’s hard and fruitful only to the (admitted large) niche who are interested. But even if you admit that the niche is large enough to support a dev, you have to acknowledge that the niche excludes outsiders, so… yeah to me it’s dead.
Back to SK - outside of the mechanics, the aesthetics and themes are just empty. It’s like if you hired designers from J Crew to make a pixel art game. Even relatively similar stuff like Adventure Time or Sponge Bob embark on more risque themes.
I mean I’d argue that mechanics are “dead” as much as people using the long take in film are “dead” – mechanics are a means to an experiential end that mean fuck all on their own but can be extremely profound when paired with the rest of the “experience”
I don’t think video games are good at talking about the unity of mechanics + audiovisual aesthetics tho, and when video games do mention audiovisual aesthetics, it’s mostly in reference to a pre-existing work because it’s hard to develop a framework for assessing aesthetics, which is why mechanics talk is so prevalent; it’s what games have that other media don’t (except it’s not just games it’s all interactivity everywhere)
i’m not the right person to tell you much about it, other than i started playing it expecting to really enjoy it (i love duck tales and mega man, after all).
i got a few levels in and found myself hating everything about the game.
every individual piece seems fine. every piece of spritework or music or level design seems inoffensive on its own. it’s hard to pick out what it is that causes disgust. but holistically, the game feels… bad. it just feels bad to me.
maybe i’ll try to play it more and give you a better answer someday
By mid-life NES we’ve got a library half-composed of Mario clones whose basic template was to insert a licensed character and sell on that. From the perspective of the time, it would have looked dead. Chris Crawford is the best (most outspoken) example of a designer who lived through the '70s and early '80s and spoke out against what he saw as the stultification of design.
But I think we’ve learned that there are depths to these things, and innovations usually are small built things put together in new ways. FPS’s are one of the most simple genres but anyone attuned to their movement and action can tell you the gun mechanics themselves have grown exponentially even since late-360-era. Going from Destiny to Halo: Reach is like taking a horse tranquilizer; everything is dead, far away, muted by comparison. Chris Crawford can’t see the difference but it’s real.
Every time you put new things together you’re creating new mechanics. You’ve got new ways to break things but you might also find an elegant solution no one has discovered yet. You’re dealing with weapon comparisons, selection, how to balance them against each other – heck, how did you implement the flail? Isn’t there new within that? If it’s great, is that a piece that could be focused on, elaborated, placed within levels to exploit its traits? Is Flail Knight cool?
Heck if I know! But nobody’s yet made Flail Knight!
I dunno, one solid mechanic + aesthetic + thin veneer of premise is often enough to let a game take residence in my mind.
And I say this as someone who has, over the past few years, increasingly played more IF/Visual Novel type stuff because further refinements of other genres has been yielding diminishing returns. There’s so many games that I probably wouldn’t keep playing if it weren’t for the desire to go look at more cool stuff or see how the story turns out. Those exceptions that exist seem to be really doing something special even if their innovations are minor when taken in as part of the larger fabric of games.
Hmmm. You and i have talked a bit about Dark Souls 2, iirc. What you’re describing sounds a lot to me like my feelings about that game: i can pick apart individual elements of it and point to what works and what doesn’t; i can snap it back together and squint at it and go “well, i guess i can see why people like this?” Ultimately though it just makes me feel disappointed and uncomfortable – the latter because i just can’t seize on a conclusive opinion about it, no matter how much i want to like it or dislike it. The former because it’s the sequel to one of my favorite games ever, and i went into it with high hopes.
Maybe we just fell into the gulf between our expectations and the actual final project? Shovel Knight doesn’t feel the same as Mega Man or as Ducktales – if you went into it with those experiences in mind (or in muscle memory), it might have just felt nebulously wrong to you. Don’t take this as me saying you were wrong to have those expectations, or that you should give it another try – it might just be, like, the game equivalent of having all the furniture in your house be moved slightly left. Or when you get one of those boxes of Cheez-its that tastes weird and stale and it permanently kills your craving for them.
Sorry for pontificating at you. Maybe i still don’t get where you’re coming from, but i think i do, a little more, now??
I’m in the “shovel knight is way too well observed but gets much better as it gets weirder” camp (I actually didn’t even finish the first level when I first tried it because I got bored halfway through). The discussion around it is really good though! I’m glad @anothergod went so far in trying to make an interesting point that he wound up in hyperbolic indefensible territory, reminds me of the old days.
Expectations were very important for shaping my feelings around Dark Souls 1 and 2 – very disappointed by Dark Souls because it dropped elements I liked from Demon’s, the pacing was different, the tone was different, etc. Dark Souls 2 I went into with low hopes and had a much better time than expected; I enjoyed myself playing it more than Dark Souls 1.
