Yoko Taro talking about weird shows a healthy deal of self awareness… +1 respect in my book
I know im late to the party but… I just started playing Death Stranding. Lets just say its more than just a walking simulator…
It is mental, but I also kind of wish he’d hire somebody else to write dialogue for him.
And maybe somebody to check all the women characters, and make sure he’s not coming across as being a little bit odd.
And maybe somebody to check all the women characters, and make sure he’s not coming across as being a little bit odd.
Yeah…
And Death Stranding is better about its female characters than most of the MGS games…
Not sure what you mean - “Mario and Princess Beach” is obviously peak cinema
I JUST started collecting chrysalis crystals. (so mabyt 4-5 delvilvery/walking sim missions in)
To quote an old meme, ‘I know nothing Jon Snow’ but one i saw the ::: spoiler Title Hand prints in the sand, :::
I knew this was more than a walking simulator
By the time you finish the game, whatever you’ve seen so far will seem like the most normal thing in the world.
Definitely a lot of standard Kojima gameplay in there, among the apocalyptic Deliveroo simulator and bonkers 4th wall breaking.
I mean, it’s being a mail carrier in a world that is maximum Kojima.
I mean it’s an Amazon delivery simulator so yeah
That’s the entire tech industry. I got in at the tail end of it being full of nerds who were interested in computers. Then jocks and the like found out it pays really well and now it isn’t fun anymore.
Yeah, it was nice as long as it lasted, now it’s all meetings and stupid “agility” (as agile as DPRK is democratic) and measurings of your percieved productivity.
I’m still looking, maybe some c/c++ old legacy system needs a geek somewhere?
The weird people are still there, but development teams are much larger now, so their input is not as prominent. Plus the budgets are so large that a flop can heavily damage a company or even ruin it, so they’re very risk-averse. We need more AA or A games instead of relying so much on heavy-hitters.
The weird people still make tons of indie games.
Capitalism at its finest.
I stopped playing AAA games years ago. They are all trash.
Indie games are where it’s at
They’re polished, but nearly all of them are too safe.
The ones that subvert things a little are always best for me, and these always get mixed reactions from people who went in with a set idea of what they wanted from it.
Red Dead Redemption 2 being a slow paced wild west simulator rather than Grand Theft Horse is a prime example. It didn’t play by safety and doing popular things. It did what they wanted it to be, and it’s all the better for it.
Not all, but yeah. 75% of my wishlists are weird and interesting indie stuff from the constant Steam demo fests.
I dunno I like elden ring and rdr2. Some are still good, just not most, anymore
Yeah I’m playing cyberpunk for the first time and really enjoying it. i don’t know how much it innovates, but I’d say it was certainly a good game.
Some are quite good tho
The good ones are solid tho and last a long time, I do prefer indie/smallteam for the most part now
vrs got some cool unique stuff, vtol vr is solid gaming still got some really cool stuff coming out, I wanna live in a world where vtol vr is as popular as cod
After Spec Ops The line, everything went to shit, the bar was too high
Dunno why you’re being downvoted, that game was insanely good. Mediocre shooter, but the story was amazingly good.
More than ‘story’, the way they made every part of the game about it.
It was mediocre/workmanlike when viewed entirely as a shooter. But most of the gameplay just used ‘shooter’ as framing.
Because there were still plenty of good games that came out after that?
That’s true. I was more commenting on how good a game it was though, but I do think it’s peak story for me. KCD series is second. There hasn’t been another game for me that had such a crazy twist in it than spec ops.
Meanwhile, Death Stranding 2 is just days from launch.
Makes sense. AAA games are finance projects more than creative projects. Yeah there’s a lot of art and writing and stuff, but it’s all calibrated to make the most money and anything that threatens it is jettisoned. This makes them formulaic to a fault.
Indie games are passion projects, so you see a lot of weird stuff out there. Most of them are utter failures, financially, but the ones that survive are truly something special.
20 years ago AAA games could still experiment, but that was because back then AAA games had about the same budget as big indie games now.
You just can’t gamble if you have 10k employees and hundreds of millions riding on it.
Being “safe” is also a gamble, if you aren’t bringing anything new or unique you’re gambling that the title or brand is sufficient for success.
Less so though.
Yes, being “safe” means you won’t make the next Minecraft, where a hobby budget turns into the best selling game of all time. But it also means that the people who buy every instalment of Fifa or Assassin’s Creed will also buy it.
These popular franchises almost always turn a calculable profit as long as they don’t experiment and do something new that bombs.
As sad as it is, it actually does work out.
That’s why we gamers shouldn’t trust on AAA titles bringing something great to the market. If you want to play a game like you watch linear TV (plonk down on the couch/in front of the PC and to whatever to relax and waste time), then AAA is great. If you want to play something new, something exciting, something that you haven’t played before, then go with lower-budget titles.
AAA is the McDonalds of games. You don’t go to McDonalds for the freaky hand-crafted vegan fusion kitchen bacon burger with crazy Korean curry mayo and caramelized lettuce.
“Do you think video games are silly little things?”
no.
That entire credit sequence is high water mark for games as a medium.
Every emotion.
Drunk ass man writing his characters, crying in a room alone. The thing we need more of lol. Will purchase any game his name is attached to.
I couldn’t agree more
That’s why bg3 felt so special. For us by us at that scale
No worries. There is plenty of weird to find with indie games.
This take sucks. There’s a clear cap on what indies can do because they have a limited budget. Whatever their output is, it’s not comparable to big studios output.
What the market lacks is quirky games on a medium budget, which’s not what indie scenes provide.
Yeah, but how survivable is making indie games? Unless you make it big, you aren’t paying rent that way.
That’s why you need public funding to support and nourish the industry. We’ve got that in our state where we can get grants to start up studios. This allowed for studios such as Massive Monster to be created.
VC funding isn’t great because they can pull out if the project or investment doesn’t suit them. See League of Geeks.
The indie scene is so much fun.
Weird people were forced out of the industry over the past decade or more, for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with making games.
Happens with any industry that gets big, I think. More profits=more suits/vampires coming in and replacing artists/scientists or whoever is more qualified to make key decisions.
This won’t stop unless infinite wealth hoarding is tackled by governments, if ever.
Happened even with Boeing. I think it should be illegal for anyone with an MBA to be CEO or CTO of any company. They can be CFO if they want to, but not any role with actual decision power over products.
You’re not wrong. I still remember the day I picked up a newspaper and saw the headline “video games earn more than movies for the first time ever,” and I immediately knew where the industry was headed. In retrospect, I was 100% correct.
But then you get those people opening studios like Sandfall and creating masterpieces like Clair Obscura…
Part of the issue is that AAA still hasn’t learned how to manage and produce passion projects, which most great games are. They keep wanting to use what’s working elsewhere with no regard for what makes sense in their own game.
