For me one of the most striking things about the environment was how uniform it is. The game spent 9 years in development but none of that time was devoted to adding variety. It’s all likely hewing to Ueda’s original few pieces of concept art – I’m imagining a staff in terror of polluting his vision long after he left. Just compare to the incredible maximalist explosion of art concepts in the Souls games which had normal <=2 year dev cycles.
I think it speaks to a difference in auteurial approach: Miyazaki always emphasizes empowering his team’s imagination and letting their vision exceed his, whereas Ueda is the kind of guy to solo render a vertical-slice trailer and show it to the team at the very beginning of development. It leads to a much more precise and formally coherent experience, albeit I think also one that would’ve been better suited to a shorter game.
Whenever I hear that it makes me wonder if those sorts of discussions are more business related rather than authorial intent. I tend to think most games are far too long and it’s due to videogame industry history and expectation making them that way.
In general, games probably should be $20 because I don’t think the current $60 concept is sustainable. It’s too difficult to deal with the popularity of the time vs. content conceptualization and simply re-envisioning the pricing is probably a better solution to that. Though figuring out how to make that sustainable is, I’m sure, equally problematic to all the large industries involved in that discussion. No Man’s Sky, for all its problems, is certainly a victim to this.
I think two pieces work against shorter, cheaper games:
The fidelity and depth of systems asked of modern games requires a long, large development team. Achieving broad, fleshed-out content is already so expensive next to adding more levels that it balances the workload to add a long campaign to explore the systems.
Expansive games sell. Even when they can’t deliver, when Elder Scrolls’ most dynamic elements are cheese wheels and gravity, when No Man’s Sky really is just a continuation of an Elite-like, the promise of go-anywhere-do-anything (and for as long as you like) is what mass audiences want. Steam is a harbinger of this: mini-MMOs like DayZ, production games like Stardew Valley and Factorio. People want long systems play, not shorter story content. And if it’s story content, they want it warped to resemble the long systemic games.
I think you can sidestep this if you shrink your team and budget and concentrate on what really matters. Plenty of indie narrative adventure games work perfectly well on their merits with sub-10m budgets. Of course, my understanding is that Team Ico was always pretty small; I bet their sophisticated Trico systems pushed them into a higher-scoped game than they had production capacity to handle, and with infinite money from Sony behind them, they lacked a backstop to make hard choices.
Last Guardian is expansive, as Shadow of the Colossus was in its day. It’s pretty inherent to AAA, too – what was remarkable in Zelda, the full toolkit, is now the expected vocabulary of a standard 3D character-based game. So everything needs to be Zelda-expensive+++, yeah? (I think this is also what killed Zelda – past Ocarina, they couldn’t claim that label. And Link to the Past suffers from this as well – it’s paltry next to much of the SFC library, whereas original Zelda, Link’s Awakening, and Ocarina all set the outer bounds of massive amounts of stuff on their platform)
I just finished this last night. I think the length is just about right, although I guess the lack of variety in environments means that most of the game sort of blurs together in my mind now. The most memorable parts are the big action set pieces, although the final stretch of the game seems to change up the architecture a bit.
One particular puzzle right near the very end had me stuck for over an hour and I couldn’t see any possible way out. I gave up and came back the following night and almost instantly realised that the solution was as simple as just climbing a wall. It was even more hilarious when I realised Trico had vanished, and found that he just hadn’t bothered to climb up when I opened up the way for him, so I had to go back and do it again.
Overall I guess I would say “flawed masterpiece” sums up this game pretty well. Doesn’t hit quite the same level of emotional resonance as the two previous games for me, but I can definitely see myself coming back to it again
I don’t really hate expensive games so much as I dislike how they’ve warped expectations.
It’s weird to say but I think past a certain price point ($20 by my reckoning), people look at videogames in a weird value equation (is thing X valuable enough to justify price Y?) up until things get absurdly expensive at which point the affordability once again no longer becomes an issue because you can basically afford anything (I buy old game IPs and sell them because I’m a rich asshole). Basically a confidence interval for videogames, but the 95% represents how likely you are to make a dumb argument about whether you “got your money’s worth”.
Given that there are button prompts, I wish it at least showed them in every place where they’re needed instead of letting you get stuck for minutes because it doesn’t cross your mind that pressing R1 would do anything in those spots. It’s a very early-3d-zelda game design in that it overtutorializes in some places and randomly lets you get stuck in others.
it’s more that most of the people who self-identify as gamers truly believe the video game is a solved form. The Video Game is an open world game somewhere on the spectrum of action to action rpg. it features quests and collectables, you get to have choices about whether or not you’re an asshole, it has to control a certain way and look a certain way. dialog boxes pop up with character heads when someone important calls you to tell you what to do or ruminate on how cool you are. quality is dictated by size, performance, and the believablity of the environment. that’s it. that’s the video game. you can enjoy other stuff on occasion, but only with the understanding that it doesn’t really count, that it’s just something to play until the next Real Video Game is released.
I expected to want to refute that on the grounds of it being too cynical but I do think it’s a pretty accurate assessment of mainstream perceptions. I don’t think it’s really gotten in the way of good game design in recent years, though; it mostly just captures the experience of trying to get out of a conversation about Skyrim or Batman.
This is spot on for AAA single player but I think the “gamer” identity is moving on to competitive multiplayer as its bread and butter in the last couple of years. The top games on twitch and neogaf gaming community are always some combination of League, CS:GO, Dota, and Overwatch. These aren’t necessarily any better but they don’t have the same problems as Ubisoft-style open world games.
maybe interesting aspect for those who have finished the game (i didn’t yet, so no spoilerz plz kthxbye)
[spoiler]re zelda being brought up here:
I love how the butterflies act as the most subdued “hey, you might wanna look here”-guide, totally contrarian to HEY LISTEN in-your-face navi.
Like, I still do not notice them appearing, and suddenly they are there, and I go a-haaaa~aaa[/spoiler]
They’ve both been true for more than a decade – online games are huge, successful single-player games fit in a small bucket. Interestingly the bucket of acceptable high-budget online game designs has been getting bigger recently (free to play has been almost entirely positive for this genre, I think), while single-player has been shrinking as budgets have increased and the margin for profit has tightened.
Still, with the release valve of indies I have more interesting things to play than ever (even if scrappier (and boy I miss Japan)), and open world has been a nice template for certain genre trys – I’d consider Forza Horizon and Witcher 3 to be grandly successful. Forza Horizon (like Burnout Paradise) enlivens a strongly repetitive activity (racing cars) with choice in which repetitive activity, and pacing breaks for exploration. Witcher benefits from a world large and textured enough to ground the quests and characters and give the player a sense of impacts.
I tried playing the demo of forza horizon and even that immediately repulsed me with its microsoftian “yeah, enjoy this focus-tested power fantasy!” production. it says something that my sensibilities around this stuff could be so goddamn delicate yet there are still at least two or three big budget games every year I don’t fail to enjoy.
it also says something about how much better sega is at this than microsoft
I think of Horizon as the inheritor of SSX3 - it’s an activity I could (theoretically) do with unlimited resources with arcade absurdity ladled onto top. I don’t really see how it’s much of a power fantasy beyond the framing of “running” the festival, which boils down to “you can pick which kind of cars you want to drive on each event.”
I play it just to chill and drive a virtual representation of my car around locations more interesting than central Texas and more dangerously than I can responsibly IRL. Are Outrun and Burnout power fantasies?
it’s actually just the tone of microsoft’s opening cinematic and voiceover that gives me conniptions. I don’t have any of the same complaints about eg just cause 3