u/DeltaBurnt

"You'll go between fighting and puzzles, fighting and puzzles, until it just sort of...ends"

What does this even mean? Game developers and game company execs aren't tech bros. Maybe it's cathartic to know some bean counter who pushed for layoffs is having a bad day. But they're not the ones developing or funding the AI.

Except these exact companies were found to collude and fix memory prices in the past. Some of the people implicated are still working at these same companies. Maybe let's not hold water for companies that have literally broken the law to rip you off.

I think it’s similar to the saying “If I had more time I would have written a shorter letter”. BotW and Elden Ring are essentially modern pinnacles of open world game design (at least the low narrative, high gameplay agency kind). That takes a lot of planning and iteration to make an open experience thats guiding you without you realizing it. Making games “accessible” by dumbing them down is just an easy excuse for poor design.

This got me thinking… Is it the only Nintendo series with a traditional multi game story and where previous games’ plot directly influence later games? Zelda has a timeline but its not really relevant to any individual incarnation of Link. Each Mario game might as well be from a multiverse. Fire Emblem has occasional direct sequels like Zelda, but it spans a huge amount of time. Most other games are pretty light on story.

Honestly it’s probably for the best, it allows them the most freedom to do weird stuff. But this might be why I feel more drawn to Metroid than other Nintendo games. I know for a fact its the same character who has gone through all the same hardships I did in previous games.

The time mechanic never felt fully utilized. Like the rest of the game it seemed more like set dressing rather than something used to create interesting gameplay.

Largest in what way? Number of users or features? The former probably but I don't think it really affects their resourcing for ports. The latter I doubt GTA is so much more complicated than every other AAA game. Either way it's a pretty poor excuse when even Atlus can manage a simultaneous release when Rockstar can't.

Same with enrages. And track how much rage normal item use is generating.

Yeah likely frequency. A simple way to describe debouncing is that you must see a true signal X times or for X amount of time with no false in between before you signal true as the output. So if a signal ping pongs between true and false very often you wait until it stabilizes on one or the other.

Damn, well hopefully it’s at least more streamlined and less fluff than rebirth. Can still enjoy the combat i guess.

which in turn makes things playing out normally feel more fresh and exciting.

I do sort of agree with this, except for Aerith’s death scene which was so obscure and muddied that it was kind of the worst of both worlds. Either fully commit to this large story beat staying the same, or it drastically changing. Instead of having an emotional moment, I spent most of it just trying to follow what exactly had happened. I have a similar complaint with Zack’s story.

I’m open to changes, but it feels like in its current state it’s hard to recommend these games they just feel like a watered down version of the original’s story.

And honestly what makes it worse is how much longer the games are. I’m spending significantly more time in these versions waiting for these payoffs.

I think they really should have leaned into the ending of Remake harder. Just like Remake, the bulk of the truly consequential changes of Rebirth are shoved to the end of the game, and mostly serve to string us along for potential future changes. This is probably controversial, but I think Revelations needs to have a dramatically different story line for all this changing fate and multiple timeline stuff to be worth it.

No access to the source means that I’m always wondering in the back of my head if its a unity issue.

I think this isn't a very representative example. Dark Souls is probably the most influential game of the past 2 decades besides maybe BotW. To say the first one was received highly is an extreme understatement. Plus this ignores the fact that DS1 is already essentially a sequel to Demon Souls. There are also legitimate criticisms of DS2, especially at launch.

While I do believe there's a bias against sequels, I don't think in most cases it actually tanks the opinion of those games. Totk, Silksong, Ori 2, Slay the Spire, Persona 3-5, all games with beloved original games with very similar sequels. Those sequels suffer from having direct comparison points, but for the most part the general consensus is they're great sequels.

Honestly I think the skepticism of near direct sequels is warranted. The reason I loved the originals of all the above examples is because of their fresh new ideas paired with impeccable execution. With the sequel you inherently have less fresh new ideas because you're already working with the framework of the original. This isn't a bad thing, but for people who place value on novelty it's something that any sequel will have a hard time overcoming.

Steam Input is more than just configuring inputs. It's the entire translation layer that allows you to use PS3-5, Switch, etc. controllers on games made a decade before those consoles even existed. And it's seamless. I think people forget what a pain in the ass it was getting any controller other than the 360 to work.

Yeah people sleep on features like Steam Input, Family Sharing, and seamless Steam Deck support. I welcome more competition to Steam, but it's not like 5 different massive industry players have failed out of coincidental incompetence (though that plays some part). They failed because it's really hard to match Steam's feature set, and even then there's still network effects.

Seriously, I do genuinely enjoy most top gaming youtuber content out there. But way too many of them, even the ones who put in a good amount of effort, just amount to recapping the game they're talking about. I didn't really notice this trend until I was put into Matthewmatosis. Him and other's like him (SBH) really should be what more gaming critique and journalism should be like.

In addition to what others already pointed out, FF7 really shot itself in the foot breaking up the game into 3 looong parts. They would be better off doing one part, or making shorter hyper focused games that emphasize replayability and leverage asset reuse.

I really doubt a ground up OoT remake would suffer from that kind of misstep.

My comment wasn't really meant to say the graphics are comparable (though IMO the difference isn't that large, Mina is just more dense because of its gameplay). I was saying that Yacht Club has never strictly adhered to historical technical limits. They've adhered to the idea of those styles. Thus it being widescreen doesn't "defeat the purpose".

This is incredibly common in software development. It's been recognized for decades (Mythical Man Month). I'm guessing that games being oneshot and crunch focused means that game dev studios are finding this out much later than most.

This doesn't even account for new second order problems that more people introduces (redundancy, politics, egos, compartmentalization).

Doing a widescreen Game Boy Color-esque game kinda defeats the purpose anyway.

How so? The point was to call back to Link's Awakening and Oracle of Seasons/Ages, in the same way that Shovel Knight was a love letter to NES platformers. The art style is the point, not faithfully recreating perfect retro environments. As someone who played those games many times, they nailed the aesthetic. I think the only thing that's off is the music, which still sounds too shovel knighty.

There’s certainly room for nuance here. Anecdotally it seems like average experience with games, especially near release, has tended towards a “okay” state. The terrible cases have opportunities to be quickly fixed, but surely games that would have previously been delayed are now shipped.

You're just trading responsibility. The benefit of that outsourced code is that the other company is liable for that code. I'd rather not be woken up in the middle of the night to fix a bug with some vibe coded part of the codebase that now has my name on it.

Pretty sure you could have said this in response to VPN usage 10+ years ago (see China). It won't be a majority, but it will become more mainstream over time.

Haven't tried it yet, but it sounds like they fixed the issue I complained about in the last patch notes. Awesome stuff. These devs are really winning me over with their post launch support.