4 ms·

For all the completely deserving bad rep Bobby Kotick has accrued over the years, the MechWarrior 2-era of Activision was fucking magical. Bobby clearly squeeze

For all the completely deserving bad rep Bobby Kotick has accrued over the years, the MechWarrior 2-era of Activision was fucking magical. Bobby clearly squeezed the fruit beyond recognition but boy was the juice magnificent. The fertile lands that bore the Interstate games, I fear, are no longer. I can't imagine a name stay like Activision experimenting like this today. Though, the odd one leaks out, like Hi Fi Rush. In many ways, the gaming industry (and the tech industry along with it) have already had their 60s-70s auto industry moment that Interstate monopolized so well. Now so much of what we see is boilerplate, repeating year after year because it works, rather than because it is good. (We have indies and they're great, I love them dearly, but the net dilution effect can be tiring. If only companies could take a successful game like Baldur's Gate 3, and be somehow forced to spin out new fresh IP in short order, reusing as much tech as possible. Sadly the constraints simply aren't there. Engines are too powerful and flexible, perhaps. The genericism we experience appears to be a direct decedent of the genericism of the elements involved in their creation.) ((Don't get me wrong, I would not willingly travel back to this era and give up the modern comforts of gaming -- it's the best it's ever been in so many ways -- but boy does thinking about MW2 and I76 evoke a nostalgic, unscratchable itch in me that is simply infuriating.))

Cthulhu_ 3y ago
Some indies are great, but they suffer from the same problem; there's a lot of copying happening. One developer may put out an early version onto Kickstarter hoping they can go full-time on it, an established game studio picks up on the idea, copies the concept and beats them to the punch. ConcernedApe makes an hommage to the old Harvest Moon games, runs circles around an established franchise by making a game 10x as large and good, and suddenly dozens of farm games pop up left right and center, all cute, some 3d, some with waifus, idk. Pixel art has a revival. Suddenly pixel art everywhere. Some really good and stylish, mind you.
- bombcar 3y ago
  ConcernedApe was willing to take the "risk" if it can be called such, of Harvest Moon on PC. He was lucky in that he "won" but many indy games, even relatively well done ones, don't get anywhere near the reception. It's often a bit of a safer gamble to copy something else.
  - Cthulhu_ 3y ago
    This is true, and for every success story like Stardew Valley, there's a hundred failed attempts of equally passionate developers - a bit like startups.
    - bombcar 3y ago
      Thought to be even more fair, there's also a thousand failed attempts that are absolute crap, too. Being "indie" doesn't make it good, but being "big commercial" at least usually ends up in something playable (though there have been exceptions to this!).
    - gorgoiler 3y ago
      Failure because they were bad or just not popular? Are there games out there which are amazing but didn’t sell well? It doesn’t feel like it. It feels like there are lots of games, all of which are known about by enough people to ensure they get globally discovered, and most of which just aren’t very good. We’d have so many more good games if we had some sort of state level funding for projects. Games are art, art and craft go hand in hand, and craft is hard work. A game isn’t a simple painting, and painting is difficult and time consuming enough as it is. It’s more like an artwork on the scale of an office block, and for that you need a capital injection of time, labor, and money.

Cthulhu_ 3y ago

Some indies are great, but they suffer from the same problem; there's a lot of copying happening. One developer may put out an early version onto Kickstarter hoping they can go full-time on it, an established game studio picks up on the idea, copies the concept and beats them to the punch. ConcernedApe makes an hommage to the old Harvest Moon games, runs circles around an established franchise by making a game 10x as large and good, and suddenly dozens of farm games pop up left right and center, all cute, some 3d, some with waifus, idk. Pixel art has a revival. Suddenly pixel art everywhere. Some really good and stylish, mind you.

bombcar 3y ago
ConcernedApe was willing to take the "risk" if it can be called such, of Harvest Moon on PC. He was lucky in that he "won" but many indy games, even relatively well done ones, don't get anywhere near the reception. It's often a bit of a safer gamble to copy something else.
- Cthulhu_ 3y ago
  This is true, and for every success story like Stardew Valley, there's a hundred failed attempts of equally passionate developers - a bit like startups.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    Thought to be even more fair, there's also a thousand failed attempts that are absolute crap, too. Being "indie" doesn't make it good, but being "big commercial" at least usually ends up in something playable (though there have been exceptions to this!).
  - gorgoiler 3y ago
    Failure because they were bad or just not popular? Are there games out there which are amazing but didn’t sell well? It doesn’t feel like it. It feels like there are lots of games, all of which are known about by enough people to ensure they get globally discovered, and most of which just aren’t very good. We’d have so many more good games if we had some sort of state level funding for projects. Games are art, art and craft go hand in hand, and craft is hard work. A game isn’t a simple painting, and painting is difficult and time consuming enough as it is. It’s more like an artwork on the scale of an office block, and for that you need a capital injection of time, labor, and money.