Yeah, for sure. Stuff like combat winds up dramatically improving because it’s additive—you can put a strike team of programmers and designers and UX people on it for the whole project so improvements to enemy flanking behaviour or whatever just add to the whole game without necessitating a thousand person content team to build out months of new content, but if you dramatically change mechanics around quest completion or add new game modes? Now you have bottlenecks that are going to hugely inflate your budget
Edit: honestly a reason I got out of programming was because in the first place I got into it to build games. Then my last couple projects were pretty much just chasing around designers and refactoring bad designer scripts into code. One of the huge efficiency improvements to AAA has, in my experience, been getting programmers out of as much of the game as possible (because their work is slow, risky and blocks everyone) and restructuring them into service teams to basically either build siloed systems or technically babysit people who can’t use a profiler or debug a GPU frame. This project organization doesn’t just make a lot of kind of average, samey-feeling games, it’s also made games programming feel a lot like working at SAP but for half the salary
Gotta delete Elden Ring today. I already beat it and was up until 1:30am on my second character for the 3rd night in a row. Have to take control of my life.
If I play old video games (Sega CD) I get sleepy and fall asleep by 10pm.
For a time everyone was trying to copy what BOTW did, now everyone is trying to copy what Elden Ring did. Its a bit exhausting to watch, because all anyone seemed to get out of BoTW was “the character should have a glider”.
Yes! Separating design and engineering has given engineers less ownership of the game and its precise elements, and pushed the designers farther away from the game itself, unable to do more than describe how something should work. So the incredibly important nuances in character control and AI and even random selection just become invisible in the production.
I don’t think this is exactly true, YET. Elden Ring only came out just basically two months ago. Besides, I don’t find the lip service open world developers pay to these games during interviews exhausting because, one, you just say whatever in those press things (i.e. director of the Batman calling his batmobile ‘lynchian’), and, two, none of the copy cats ever took anything actually identifiably essential to those better games. So it isn’t really like we have MGSV or BotW clones out there, we just have the same shitty plain open world games Ubisoft established more than a decade ago with a few tweaks. But maybe that’s my cynicism. I feel like I’m always seeing these new open world games and looking past the new ways the menus look or the inventory screens and just seeing map screens full of tower icons in various different shapes.
This is an odd question but I was looking at maybe giving Paper Mario a shot this year (I’ve decided to try and beat at least one game on every console I owned this year and need a N64 game) and… roughly how jrpg-y is it? I am generally fine with the Mario aesthetic and such but have grown to have a fairly low tolerance for non-handheld jrpgs so I’m having a hard time figuring how I’d respond to this game.
I mean it depends on what you’re hoping to avoid, i guess? i beat it in about 22 or 23 hours all told, with trying to explore and do as much as i could. so if you’re asking if its as long as a two-disc game then no. the systems are super simple, depending on your willingness and/or ability to essentially play a rhythm minigame or press a repeatedly in order to do attacks well. but no classes, no equipment (other than your badges, which essentially function as your ability list)
the dungeons all have very minimal puzzles and when they’re present they’re very simple (but just enough to make you feel clever for noticing things). The numbers are super small (the most health any enemy has is 99 i’m pretty sure), which makes the math a lot more approachable than in most games (and makes improvements a lot easier to think about - even 1 more damage is good)
at the end of the day it’s got a lot of simple / simplified mechanics, but it has all of what i would consider to be the core elements of a JRPG. you even get an airship (… technically)
I mean the thing about everyone copying a really good game is you can just… play the game they’re copying and be done with it, chasing a high is fiend behavior. I don’t think I’ve ever had an amazing experience with ANY GAME and had it EVER replicated in another, like, playing game a bunch of years apart changes the experience completely, playing a game in a different ROOM can change the experience
i never fucking understood this about games. copy the cool hanglider mechanic and then fuck off and do whatever! iterating to hell on an idea is good actually, trying to replicate whatever FEELING you got during a specific mechanic is nonsense.
Yeah I mean I don’t think it’s some kind of solution to try to literally do breath of the wild again—indie game devs are constantly making this mistake with games they like and it’s a terrible idea every time.
Stealing the glider is all well and good but if you’re just gonna put it through exactly the same meat grinder of a process that all big studio game dev goes through it’s still going to just wind up becoming an indistinguishable part of the same homogeneous slurry
Anyway I got 27 minutes into Stage 4 of Vampire Survivors with a surprisingly janky build and at the very low character level of 25. Granted I had some buffs applied from the persistent upgrade system but it was pretty impressive how well that build held up. It was mostly