"You're always copying, even if you try to sit in your basement and not play other games."

“It sounds weird but we try to keep our innovation as low as possible,” the director explained. “We’ll say ‘it’s this game but with that.’ It takes so much time to innovate. Sometimes you find the hidden holy Grail of game design, but often indie developers sit for five years trying out stuff. We’re a studio of 50 people with bills to pay. So we can’t do that.”

  • 🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 🇮 @pawb.socialEnglish
    4·
    1 month ago

    IMO, “it’s this game, but with X” is innovation. It’s certainly more innovative than “it’s this game, again, with absolutely nothing new” like Ubisoft basically does with every sequel to every IP they handle.

    • makyo@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      1 month ago

      Absolutely. I think most of us are excited for incremental evolution.

      And conversely a lack of that is the chief source of my frustration with games. Bethesda is another dev that comes to mind with the loading screen debacle that was Starfield.

      • 🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 🇮 @pawb.socialEnglish
        1·
        1 month ago

        Starfield was just weird. Like, I expected the load screens and all the other GameBryo/Creation jank. But that’s not what made it disappointing. It was just… Boring. I couldn’t get immersed in the world because nothing about it was interesting once you scratched deeper than the surface. Even the twist ending/NG+ system which is actually kind of a neat idea wasn’t done well (like you might have to go through the entire, boring-ass game up to 7 times before you even see a difference).

        • CarbonatedPastaSauce@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          1 month ago

          I don’t know anything about the NG+ system because I steered way clear of Starfield, but it sounds like somebody at Bethesda saw people playing Skyrim over and over and thought “How can we monetize that”, hence the grind you’re alluding to. They expected you to encounter it organically because of course the game was such hot shit everyone was gonna play it forever. Oops.

          Call me a cynic if you want but these are the guys who invented paid cosmetics.

      • 🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 🇮 @pawb.socialEnglish
        1·
        1 month ago

        I honestly don’t know why they don’t simply make those a subscription service at this point. They change nothing but the stats to try and reflect real life in most iterations. Sports games are the one type of game that because of how they already do them would be perfect for the live service bullshit, and yet, inexplicably, they are the one genre that has next to no live service games. I can literally only think of one of the FIFA games which is free 2 play and live service.