4 ms·

I call this Product Manager driven game design. The Soulsbourne series I hold as the shining beacon of game design that decided to go their own way. As games g

I call this Product Manager driven game design. The Soulsbourne series I hold as the shining beacon of game design that decided to go their own way. As games got more and more "accessible" and shipped more and more quality of life features added, here was a game that decided to add friction to everything. You can't pause. You can lose EXP/money when you die. There are cheesy gimmick deaths just to screw with you. You can't replay dialogue. There is no quest log and there are missable quest steps all over. NPCs will disappear and travel to unknown locations. Demon Souls and to some extent Dark Souls 1 were positively niche but the games went on to be genre defining giving birth to "soulslike" games and Elden Ring waz justly rewarded with mass appeal and awards. I don't have a problem with games being accessible but I relish a story of someone going all-in on taste/vision driven-design and succeeding. I am also a little bitter of many AAA games becoming busywork simulators because games must deliver engaging experiences x times per hour which then just leads to bloated fetch quests and checklists and busy screens full of quest markers

Cumpiler69 2y ago
>I call this Product Manager driven game design. I call it game design by HR. Everything today by big western games studios is designed to be so super safe and sterile just in case to not be offensive to absolutely anyone, so you end up with a limp-dick experience that's not fun to anyone, encased in the carcass of a once famous IP to build up hype. Or worse, modern game devs insert their own social and political ideologies into the games, like for example in Star Wars Outlaws you play as an outlaw who is only allowed to rob the police (we see what you did there) but not the civilians, and you can't kill animals, only pet them. Games studios keep pretending like they don't know their target market. They keep making games for the market they want it to be, not the market that is. People got into video games for the escapism from reality, to do shit they aren't allowed to do in the real world, not to be lectured or have even more constrains than in reality placed upon then just so the game studio can tick all the $CURRENT_DAY social and political messages and safety boxes. Nobody wants to spend money on that. So they'll be loosing money and their jobs till it sinks in. That's the free market at work.

Cumpiler69 2y ago

>I call this Product Manager driven game design. I call it game design by HR. Everything today by big western games studios is designed to be so super safe and sterile just in case to not be offensive to absolutely anyone, so you end up with a limp-dick experience that's not fun to anyone, encased in the carcass of a once famous IP to build up hype. Or worse, modern game devs insert their own social and political ideologies into the games, like for example in Star Wars Outlaws you play as an outlaw who is only allowed to rob the police (we see what you did there) but not the civilians, and you can't kill animals, only pet them. Games studios keep pretending like they don't know their target market. They keep making games for the market they want it to be, not the market that is. People got into video games for the escapism from reality, to do shit they aren't allowed to do in the real world, not to be lectured or have even more constrains than in reality placed upon then just so the game studio can tick all the $CURRENT_DAY social and political messages and safety boxes. Nobody wants to spend money on that. So they'll be loosing money and their jobs till it sinks in. That's the free market at work.