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To me there’s a difference between using assets that were generated by AI and a game using generative AI to create assets.
A person hired as an artist to make dialogue portraits could have shoveled some slop to meet a deadline. That’s a production issue.
But if the games are being integrated with a generative AI model to cover minor assets, that’s a fundamental development issue and I can cannot possibly see how that’s good for anything.
Super Metroid is the first game I really explored breaking the mechanics and routing of progress. Perfectly timed bomb jumps, wall jumps, etc to access areas early and such. I always found that to be neat.
More recently though, Super Metroid was one of the first randomizers and an early popular speedrunning game.
I think that’d why it’s maintained a level of popularity not easily seen from the game itself.
An MMO i played from 1999-2007 shut down in I think 2017. I still remember the landscapes and landmarks and it is really strange knowing the shared experiences in those places are just flat gone. Inscribed items with messages to other players: deleted.
I have emulated the game world but only fragments were saved by collective efforts in the community before shutdown. Regardless there’s simply no people or things to interact with so it feels even more soullessly dead and empty.
Appearance, story, setting, and style are all mostly secondary to the mechanics and design of the game.
Strip away the appearance of metroidvanias and you have a platforming maze with gated areas unlocked through progression.
The overall maze of the game should ideally be enough to get lost in. Whether the world is going to be procedurally generated or predesigned, or some combination should be figured out early on. Even if progression is linear the access to and pathway through the maze should likely not be a straight line. It is very common to see or view inaccessible late game areas in the early game, for example.
The gates of the game traditionally come in the form of new movement options. The reliables are usually: (double) jumping, running, slide/rolling, climbing, swimming/sinking, flying/gliding and so on. Choosing how and where the player may access these is important. This is to say: player movement is the game.
Another common ‘key’ to gates is something that allows the player to defeat an enemy or boss they could not previously defeat, or otherwise access a new area. A notable example being metroid’s ice beam. Freezing enemies gives the player new platforming options: and new movement in the game.
Good new metroidvanias are aware of what has been done before and try to innovate on those tropes.
“Modern”? I don’t know.
Final Fantasy 10 was the last game that fit the ‘traditional’ turn based (active or not) gameplay. Since then there’s been less consistency between iterations.
Final Fantasy 11 and 14 are MMORPGs and are just fundamentally different games as a result. The latest is essentially Devil May Cry gameplay.
A lot of people enjoyed DMC and DMC is not inherently bad, but it may not be what people expect.
But the spinoffs using the Final Fantasy name have always been pretty damn hit or miss. (Compare Mystic Quest to Tactics.) This just now applies to the whole series.
I have a screenshot from a time in an MMORPG where a member died before they could do a global event quest they’d always wanted to do. There was a player-driven server-wide memorial event where her character was run through the quest by friends so that her name could be honored by a global broadcast message.
The game and the servers are now gone, but that screenshot of everyone holding torches for her character on that day still means a lot to me 20 years on.
So yeah, I think a steam account can fit that billing as a memorial.
The necktie needs a line of horizontal stitching along the chest as it puts a lot of vertical focus on the duck. The bowtie balances out the vertical stitching with its horizontal orientation.
Also/alternatively a vertical seam up the neckline might help with the neck being noisy with the stitch and tie.
Diablo is like stacking blocks. Stacking blocks is fun. Diablo 1 gave you some mixed blocks to play with and you could make some fun towers. Sometimes you’d get the Butcher, sometimes Skeleton King, and so on. Some of the uniques items you’d find really defined a playthrough.
Diablo 2 gave you more blocks and more stackable shapes. You got skill trees, more clasdes, more item parameters, and just plain stuff to wedge on a more intricate tower.
Diablo 3 and 4 appear to have attempted to bedazzle the existing shapes and allow players to buy stickers. There was little, if any, innovation beyond revenue.
Like, Blizzaed saw Grinding Gear Games acquire money through cosmetics and thought that was what people were over there for. (And they mostly just implemented Final Fantasy 10 sphere grid… and solved the ‘gold/currency’ problem.) But I have to admit I was so lacking in interest I never bought 3 and 4–only watched someone play a bit is all.
I get why people love Sekiro, though it is a game I have played off and on for years now and just never finished. By the time I get myself resituated I start to lose energy for it again.
The biggest thing for me are the controls. The time and focus on committing everything to muscle memory is the barrier to Sekiro. As the years go on I find I just plain don’t have the brainspace for such a specialized game.
Both Frostpunk 1 and 2 had fans requesting a sandbox mode and endless modes without victory conditions. They finally did it for 1 and made it a part of 2… but it was clear the drive of the fans (open ended sandboxing) was at odds with the devs wanting to using narrative and story to govern game mechanics.
I remember Flayra from Natural Selection, a half-life mod twenty years ago. I remember him making appeals for investors/donations to keep Unknown Worlds afloat (or maybe just launch it as a company. I recall a video he posted where he showed us his tiny apartment and the milk in his fridge.)
Then Subnautica came out years later and I thought ‘Well I’ll be damned.’