Only game I’ve ever come back to this much. Unlocked everything, still fire it up every so often to have a run or two and it still somehow feels fresh each time
If you ask me, a game has to be tied or close when it comes to fun, story (if applicable), and music (if applicable) in order for me to even care about a game.
You could throw a text based terminal game using ASCII art at me and I’d love it just as much as a game such as Hitman Blood Money so long as it’s fun enough.
Minecraft is a strange one for me, because it has never caused me that reaction of “this game looks bad/ugly”. I think something like Infiniminer looks ugly, Unturned looks ugly, most Minecraft clones look ugly, a lot of more “realistic” games look ugly, but somehow not Minecraft. I can’t quite put my finger on why I see it as different somehow.
You’d think that everyone thinks that way, but the overwhelming majority of my “normie” friends won’t touch a game if it doesn’t have good photorealistic graphics and animations.
Notice how Sound Design isnt even mentioned on the meme. That’s how far down that is in everyone’s minds.
But it should because we’ve been suffering for over a decade of flat non surround or abysmal volume mixing. Dialog that is just too quiet while everything else is loud. But I guess as long as we have separate volume sliders in game that’ll fix it. If only every game came with em.
Also we’ve been pushing graphics all the time but Sound has basically tanked since the invention of the Sound Blaster AWE64 or something. What’s a sound blaster? Well kids we used to buy sound Cards for our computers much like you do GPU cards. That’s how much sound tech has stagnated. We had 5/7.1 setups in the late 90s had games with EAX support now everything is just whatever, play sound.wav. I guess Dolby Atmos is a thing but it’s a thing with a subscription fee.
There was a point I used to turn down SFX because I wanted to listen to the music. At some pointed I started to turn down the music so SFX was more punchy like it used to be.
Proper spatial / binaural audio in games is a game changer for me and it’s wild that I have to buy something like DTS Sound Unbound (and before that, X-Fi sound card with CMSS3D) just to kind of “emulate” it in games. This is tech they figured out in the 90s.
5.1 and 7.1 systems aren’t all that widespread, even in the music industry. Surround kinda sits in the same place vr does for me. It’s immensely cool, but it’ll never become standard due to hassle and lack of support.
Most of the recent innovation in sound has been trickled down from the music and film industries. Just a general increase in the capabilities of soft synths and a better understanding of foley, alongside dedicated in house recording studios have raised the bar of audio.
To be honest I agree with you that sound is overlooked, sound engineers truly are unsung heroes. I mean even when people point out the sound in a game, it’s usually directed at the composer.
As a professional generalist/gameplay programmer, imo sound isn’t far off from 3D graphics in terms of complexity, perfs issues and hardware fuckery. That is, if you want to do anything “fancy” with it, of course. As you said, the “play sound.wav” approach is way overused…
I do care about shipping the best SFX I can, and obviously so does our sound guy (who also deeply cares about mixing btw) but unfortunately, as opposed to graphics it doesn’t translate into better reviews/more sales in the execs’ mind so any substantial programming work in that area usually goes on the backlogged pile.
Ironically, I think that situation used to be better because there was a time where you basically had to have a dedicated sound programmer on the team since the software side was also a giant mess.
“It’s a technical wonder, never seen before in the industry. Completely unique dialog trees and interactions with NPCs. Elaborate upgrade system. Crafting mechanics. Full open world sandbox experience. Planned DLC for the next 2 years. BattlePass”
It’s just schlock that every AAA developer pads their ad campaigns with. You see those accolade trailers with cherry picked reviews toting it’s game of the year, claiming it “reimagines everything” or “sets a new standard” , when it’s a game built on a 12 year old engine that is showing its age.
Same. Love playing a beautiful game, like Kingdom Come: Deliverance, but I also love Rimworld. Like more hours in RW than any other title, by a wide margin. And it’s top down goofy 2D graphics and I wouldn’t want it any other way.
Graphics are like, one of the last things I give a shit about as long as they’re not hampering the game. I don’t care if I’m playing Wolfenstein 3D or the latest triple-A graphics splurgefest so long as it’s a fun game, but stuff like Cruelty Squad is an absolute no-go because of the dogshit HUD that serves only to distract the player and make it feel claustrophobic.
Graphics used to be the hallmark of a great game. Back in the early days, if your game didn’t come with improved graphics, it was trash (like, '90s era games I’m talking about). These days, good graphics can be achieved pretty easily, so it’s not nearly as important as it used to be when trying to stand out from the crowd. If I had to pick the tipping point for this trend, I would have to say Minecraft was the game that proved definitively that graphics < gameplay.
Fun is so extremely subjective that some people play DESTINY and CoD for fun, it’s difficult to quantify in the time frame that reviewers are held to for each video game
Japanese game magazines use a collaborative scoring system for game reviews. 4 editors provide individual ratings and personal opinion of the game, and a combined overall score which is simply a sum of the 4 scores.
The idea is to incorporate subjectivity into the reviews. Readers familiar with the editors would understand which score/opinion they can relate more to.
Personally I’ve stopped watching reviews for that reason. Too much of his review depend on whether he actually had fun with the game or not. If it’s a game he didn’t enjoy he’s going to review it much harshly while finding whatever positives to justify recommending a game he enjoyed.
For instance he didn’t enjoy the Outriders expansion and one of his big points of criticisms was that it’s too hard to play solo. Which is a pretty dumb criticism to have when the game has a world tier system with the sole purpose of letting you set the difficulty. It climbs with XP but you can always set it to a lower difficulty if something is too hard. He could’ve easily set it to world tier one and just shred through the game, he simply stubbornly chose to be on the highest difficulty that was unlocked for him. And he was at the difficulty level where builds start to matter, except from the video it’s pretty clear he doesn’t have an actual build in mind. His criticism was the equivalent of playing master difficulty (or beyond) in Diablo 3 as a monk without any consistent spirit generation, and then saying Diablo 3 is too hard. Anyone who has played Diablo 3 knows statement like that is complete BS but anyone trying to understand whether they’d actually want to play Diablo would instantly be dissuaded from giving it a shot.
And the flipside is Destiny’s Lightfall expansion review where he just decides to add everything “free” into the same expansion review pile because he loves Destiny. And of course then proceeds to downplay every glaring negative point about it such as “No new pvp maps. You shouldn’t expect it because Bungie isn’t focusing on PvP either” and “Nothing new about gambit, the players don’t care about gambit either.” or “One new strike and no real improvements to that core gameplay loop. Game development is hard you guys”. To give the expansion context, it’s the weakest expansion after Y1 (which was the lowest point of the entire series) and is complete filler in terms of the story. Yet Skillup still felt it was good enough to recommend it to people.
For me his reviews have become mostly worthless because I first have to intuit his experience with the game to understand which way his bias has swung, so that I could get context of his final verdict.
Yup. It’s been twenty years since they started the whole “player cannot fail and they must succeed at everything” gameplay ideal. Anyone still expecting better is playing themselves.
No, you don’t, because Fallout 4 was particularly trash on both counts. It’s explicitly why I haven’t even subbed to Gamepass or anything for Starfield after growing up obsessed with Oblivion, FO3, FONV, and Skyrim, as well as buying the Pip Boy Edition of FO4 because I was so excited for it.
Music has always been the part I’ve cared the least about. Out of the thousands of hours I’ve wasted on games, the only video game song I can think of out of the blue is the Mario theme song. (And Raphael’s battle song in bg3 because I just fought him; that shit was pretty cool.) It always surprises me when I see OSTs included in deluxe editions because I think, who’s going to listen to 2 hours of instrumentals from a game they played 5 years ago. To each their own I guess.
It’s kinda hard to talk about objective fun in reviews, it’s the most subjective thing about entertainment. Some people play brutally crushing, soul-destroying survival games for fun
Yeah, and e.g. I don't have much fun with racing game. Doesn't mean the games are bad and other people, who actually like the genre don't have fun. This is why you should know the reviewer and their tastes and biases to make a better judgement whether a game is for you or not from a review.
I like ACGs format for reviews along with the rating scale being a spectrum from Buy now, wait for a sale, never touch. He’s the only one I really go to nowadays to see if the new hot thing is worth my money. It usually isn’t haha
It is fine that it is subjective, but this is why reviews from a major corporation don’t make any sense. You want reviews from a large number of individuals so that you can get to know some of their taste to see if it is similar to your own. Then you can make a decent guess if you will also find the thing fun.
Not to mention these major review sites rate on a 7-10 scale which is kind of worthless. They are also effectively bribed by game studios so it is actually worse than worthless. It is actively harmful to finding out the truth.
You want reviews from a large number of individuals
This isn’t that helpful either. I end up getting lost because of all the different opinions. For example Starfield as a recent example, professional reviews are mostly positive but individual opinions are all over the place. I am left confused.
Also, the aesthethic is not just about how photorealistic the game looks or what cutting edge technologies it uses. That's why some games age differently than their peers, simply because their art style is not or less diminished by technological advances.
I don't care very much about the cutting edge graphics, I rather have something with a round aesthethic than dry looks with ray tracing.
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