- 0 Posts
- 21 Comments
But this isn’t the formula for all games. While we might agree that games from 2000 or even 2010 are “showing their age”, at this point 5 to 8-year-old games are less and less likely to be seen as ‘too old’ by comparison to hot releases.
As someone that grew up in the '80s and '90s, it’s wild how much different the pace of change in games was then compared to now.
In 1991 I was playing NES games and 256-color VGA MS-DOS games, in 1998 I was playing Half-Life. Every single thing about the experience of video games changed in that span.
In 2017 I was playing Breath of the Wild, in 2024 I’m playing more or less the same game in Tears of the Kingdom.
Someone played on the hardest difficulty (along with enabling the option to “pistol start” every level), and left a Steam review complaining that the expansion is too hard. That got a developer response.
I think Heretic crossed with Unreal is an accurate comparison.
Enemies may have been more plentiful than in Unreal, but movement is much closer to Unreal than Heretic’s DOOM engine movement. And it’s much closer to Unreal than anything in the Quake lineage.
Also, the weapon arsenal’s style is very Heretic, but the weapon behavior is very Unreal.
Same with the levels, honestly. Style is Heretic, but the level design itself reminded me of Unreal pretty frequently. (And nothing like the puzzle-heavy, hub-based Hexen)
Anytime I consider buying a Madden game, I watch a YouTube video of competitive play for the latest version. It always reveals how garbage the football sim part is. It’s all audibles and hot route spam and exploiting the useless AI in the same ways over and over again.
I’ll never buy a Madden game while all that crap is in there. They should make it so that spamming audibles and hot routes causes players to blow assignments and false start all the time, but the average “competitive” Madden player would probably die from nonstop crying and pants-soiling if EA did anything like that.
As someone that was a late teenager during the run of Infinity Engine games, and then witnessed the subsequent consolization and decline of CRPGs… seeing Baldur’s Gate as a CRPG again and having it be a marquee AAA-caliber release is kinda mind-blowing.
The 2000s were a mistake, and so much of modern indie development is about undoing those mistakes. “Boomer” shooters, immersive sims, CRPGs, point and click adventures? All back on the menu, baby.
Even if you fix Gollum, all you’re gonna get is a generic 3rd person action-adventure game. We got this game about a hundred times in the Xbox/PS2 era.
No Man’s Sky was worth salvaging because it did something mechanically different. Gollum is like if you took one of those PS2 Harry Potter games, dropped it into UE4, and changed which licensed property the game uses.
Don’t get me wrong, I understand people that like Fallout 4 on its own merits. If it had been released as a new IP, I wouldn’t have any animosity towards the game at all.
It’s just that, there’s a reason Bethesda started releasing games under the Fallout name instead of a new IP’s name, and it was to sell the game to the existing Fallout audience. And I feel like I met them halfway in embracing FO3 and NV, but FO4 was a bridge too far.
For me, the ideal Deck games are ones that don’t lose anything when scaling down to the small screen and APU.
I’ll never understand people playing high visual fidelity games at 30fps on Low settings on Deck, if that person has a more powerful PC to play the game on.
Meanwhile, something like Civilization VI basically loses nothing when played on Deck.
Hades and Tunic both make sense to me as Deck game picks.
That’s the problem when these things gain reputations. The reputation builds it up to be more than the piece of art can deliver.
Now imagine playing it when it was new and you weren’t “expecting” anything but a military shooter. It would still be just as blunt, but it landed back then far more effectively than when you go in knowing the reputation the game has built in the many years that followed.