why are these emotes so dang big on desktop lol
and he wept, for there were no more worlds to conquer.
games reaching an âend of the frontierâ moment with graphics was inevitable from the moment it started, but it does make me wonder what replaces it in the long term as a consumer fixation. seems lately to be a lot of nostalgia-based stuff and remasters/remakes. dunno how long that will last though, especially as the nostalgia audience ages out of gaming as much as they used to.
obviously at a certain point with AAA itâs all just about how much money you pump into things for bigger and bigger worlds with smaller and smaller gains to what they can be vs. older iterations, and if something becomes so costly that it just isnât worth it then there really is no point in that. not to mention your average gamer is finally becoming more vocally fed up with the sort of tropes of AAA open world games that havenât changed much since the mid to late 00âs. so now we have big companies basically being land owners of a perpetual game/community which are just backdoor Child Casinos. and a lot of indie games that are popular right now are also basically just containers of Content that are pretty indistinguishable from one another. Steam having a huge userbase now outside of the west as well probably has way more to do with what genres are big and what arenât than many people think, which might affect things in ways that are hard to predict. and obviously the Unity situation is leaving a lot of people scrambling.
it is a weird time in the landscape of gameing. a gameing crisis.
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CUZ THEYRâE THE CORRECT SIZE
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The technological promise rhetoric has reached the endgame
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Iâve said this for years now but the next graphical/presentation frontier for me is âphysicsâ or âkinematicsâ (?? I have no idea if Iâm using that word right). The first fantasy game I play where the sword on my hip realistically interacts with my cloak instead of clipping through it Iâm gonna cum
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thats kinda the thing with the new Zeldas right? Breath is a graphically impressive game though largely thru smart aesthetic choices > crazy high specs; what is really cool about it (and to my understanding is even better in Tears) is the robust physics combined with the imsim-like simple interlocking systems & object interactions, inside an open-ended game progression. Iâd hope to see more aping those elements and not just concluding âour open world games need to have a hang glider and a Banjo-Kazooie NutsânâBolts vehicle building system and purty colorsâ
Baldurs Gate 3 while a very different game seems to be a hit of the year for a lot of the same reasons. the gamers are gettin hungry for big freeform experiences with previously unfathomable degrees of player agency
i guess im saying the future is AAA immersive sims which, jeez, i can only dream and wish and pray
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i guess what i hate about the new Zelda is a) it so aggressively does not value your time and depends on being a Nintendo flagship game to keep people coming back and b) most companies at that scale are not built to make games like Nintendo is so the industry would have to basically have a complete re-orienting of power structures to do anything like that. what feels more likely is we get a lot of lesser Nintendo clones of newer games, which is what a lot of indie studios have been doing since 2017. and Baldurâs Gate is a franchise with still a lot of nostalgia appeal and name recognition, so that helps it a lot.
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ok uhhh maybe i misunderstood your post i was more pondering what the Average Gamer seems to be responding to in those games and how developers could chase that trend. i dont actually have any faith that they can or will
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yeah like iâm definitely sure there will be more gamer demands for those types of games given their popularity, but most studios that are big arenât built to do that, and most indies donât have the experience or the budget for that. which makes it difficult. i could see some kind of other fixation around open world design or specific types of highly technical mechanics replacing it though, but itâs hard to imagine it will be as coherent and all-encompassing as the push for graphical fidelity has been.
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i keep seeing the sentiment âi love how this game is just a list of levelsâ about armored core 6 in mainstream gaming discussion spaces which makes me a little hopeful that audiences are tiring of filling out their map?
iâm admittedly a sucker for that kind of design if thereâs a nice enough feeling world to poke around in but slogging through so many generic quests in diablo 4 seasonal (where you canât even access the workmanlike but functional main quest) and every quest is about miserable people in the eternal gray toilet world while being asked Yet Again to fill out the fucking map was a real âwhy do i even enjoy this?â moment for me
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MTG joke card
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The play time of pretty much every big game now is primarily traversal.
Apparently everyone just likes walking around most of all.
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I remember when Gone Home was attacked by the gamers for ofering that up irst and foremost.
Dunno about walking but riding around on BotW/TotK is a wonderfully chill activity.
Also I do think systemic games are very good fit for small devs (as demonstrated by roguelikes) and even that open worlds could be, given my admiration for the whole crop of british 80s-90s procedural open worlds.
Completely unrelated to this, but related to haunted games: the other day I had a conversation about how Dungeon Master was the true immersive sim grandfather, but an objection cropped up that it canât be an immersive sim if youâre playing a group of characters. But it turns out youâre technically not playing the group, youâre playing the fifth guy giving orders to the group (and indeed recruiting them in the beginning). He has a name and backstory!
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more road trip games imo
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although the chinese tom and jerry dead by daylight gacha game will never get an international release, i bet an english language artbook for it would sell like crazy
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I wasnât referring to simulationism in design really, though I am the #1 SB Simulationism Champion now that @BustedAstromech seems to have gone on sabbatical; rather, as an extension of the graphics arms race, I was referring to purely visual physicality. Cloth and The End of Clipping.
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yeah i think the nostalgia thing is the response to âwhat happens when gfx become Too Goodâ. i think itâs compounded by a lot of problems you see across all cultural spheres, like a combination of formal innovations becoming more and more sparse due to the increasing technical knowledge required to either synthesise a new thing out of nothing & also it being harder and harder to use technology âincorrectlyâ to get novel effects the more complex and black box-y they become, and also just the nature of the internet being the ground of creativity now, in that it sort of swamps you and the landscape with the weight of the past, making it incredibly easy to access, so it becomes more and more a thing to make curation & moodboarding (top 50 lists, ppl charting out âinfluencesâ, popularity of sites like rym, goodreads, letterboxd, aesthetic/past media novelty twitter accounts) the locus of creativity the more and more things surround us (also just like general precarity of life rn preventing unbroken time for the introspection and productive idling required for creativity proper, unless ur lucky/rich etc) like thereâs simply So Much Stuff to the point it becomes a viable creative avenue to curate the expanse of past media and format it into sincere postmodern assemblages, almost everyone can find their own niche island to squat in and claim dominion over without stepping on each otherâs territory.
with games i think this will probs get even more exacerbated than how music has been cause games (as software) are just innately way more obscure and hard to grasp materially compared to almost any other form of media, like ie itâs hard to both formally restructure games without both incredible technical knowledge AND a robust sense of artistry, and also hard to eg use unity incorrectly in the same way you could misuse a sampler or tape machine to create novel effects, cause of how vacuum sealed and materially inscrutable most tools ppl use to make games are.
i think maybe one way forward from this could be a sort of mass re-emphasis on low level coding that manages to synthesise the actual material structure of the software w some kind of artistry, like i think a key refocusing should be on their materiality / centring the physical nature of computation and the digital, rather than on this lost cause of games formalism welded to bits and bobs of film, talked abt as if games are these immaterial rulesets floating above an irrelevant layer of electrical hardware.
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We got in trouble at school once during pc lab because we all loaded this game up at the same time and put the speakers on full volume.
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