boloros
varishangout.com
This comes about because of the Resident Evil 4 remake (of course.) Who knew a shitty remake everyone with discernment knew was going to suck in some way could wring so much commentary outside of its censorship and laughable voice performances.
The Electric Underground guy sent me on this train of thought with the concept 'arcade presence' as a measuring stick to keep the home console and PC efforts accountable for wasting your time from a design standpoint. When you have viable arcades available, coming back home to a title with lackluster feedback and 'are we there yet' pacing is not going to be forgiven easily.
This remake and many modern games are the dark side of Style Over Substance: they are never dubbed as such because they don't live up to the positive connotations of the term.
This ailment seems prevalent in third person, as first person tends to go closer to whatever is popular. Nevermind being capable of past glories, I have an example that really shows devs who can't help themselves probably save time by not designing a good base: Max Payne 3. Long story short, level design was anemic with constant cutscene loading and story so unpalatable it had to be pointed out to me that the gunplay was actually very good in order to notice, it was merely stuck in between sessions of rockstar wanking itself silly over abusing the character of Max. They could have honestly made it play like Spec-ops the line (unimpressively) or any twinstick shooter + bullet time and I would not have noticed. Leaving the gunplay as sluggish and immersive as the movement might have cut a bit of dev time as well.
Modern design isn't a complete package, it's style without substance, wobbly aiming and drunken movement not in service to the rest of the game but its stylistically imposed principle. Not about how you game but how you 'feel' you game.
I would personally compare it with Doom gameplay mods, specifically GZDoom. Outside those offering complete rebalancing like Demonsteele, it's about the feel and the style and not much beyond -just throw ColorfulHell at it for enemy variety; when you grow out of it and start picking at how level designers originally balanced their maps, the behemoth sourceport for famous mods goes basically untouched while there are still gameplay demos being uploaded of new wads, in vanilla or Boom compatible format.
top: GZDoom, Project Brutality. bottom: DSDADoom
A modern mantra pointed out in the electric underground video is to have twinstick control. This allows for obfuscated feedback and dish out a 'feel'. Nothing can be built on top of this, so we a are left with visuals. Hold no candles for character design in AAA 3D, as for environment? Texturing magic is gone, advancements have gone the way of chugging VRAM and letting the engine lighting drag it along.
Makes sense why tactical strategy got massively downsized, thinking about this makes me want to check out XCOM2 after getting my fill of UFO Defense and see if the complaints about the sequel can be explained along this chase of 'style'.
I singled out 3rd person games and twinstick controls but yet another prominent KMB example is the SWAT spinoff games and their succesor. SWAT 3 as a laudable base, SWAT4 then downgrades certain aspects like squad AI but making it much more readable and aesthetically adapted to its time (which didn't have glaring vices like brown filters or camera shake). Now Ready Or Not AI has received quite the complaints, gives you aim down sights and obfuscates NPC animations in order to appear more intense.
side by side: SWAT 3 gameplay, SWAT4 gameplay without HUD, screenshot of immersive Ready or Not gameplay while aiming down sights.
Games went from vertical design to do their gameplay loops well to a horizontal 'experience' in order to realize a 'vision' that increasingly converges to a single form of gameplay per genre (or rather, just perspective from which you play). Developers are people, and like you see in the warm reception of capcom remakes that do away with the entire gameplay of the original titles, people often have pretty bad taste and it will show in their creative work when lacking dedication, expertise or vision... or an arcade scene to point at and say "Can't you do something like that?"
If you got any examples of gameplay out of modern paradigms that you would recommend, do not hesitate to post it.
Hurts, realizing these things while sucking majorly at STGs.
The Electric Underground guy sent me on this train of thought with the concept 'arcade presence' as a measuring stick to keep the home console and PC efforts accountable for wasting your time from a design standpoint. When you have viable arcades available, coming back home to a title with lackluster feedback and 'are we there yet' pacing is not going to be forgiven easily.
This remake and many modern games are the dark side of Style Over Substance: they are never dubbed as such because they don't live up to the positive connotations of the term.
This ailment seems prevalent in third person, as first person tends to go closer to whatever is popular. Nevermind being capable of past glories, I have an example that really shows devs who can't help themselves probably save time by not designing a good base: Max Payne 3. Long story short, level design was anemic with constant cutscene loading and story so unpalatable it had to be pointed out to me that the gunplay was actually very good in order to notice, it was merely stuck in between sessions of rockstar wanking itself silly over abusing the character of Max. They could have honestly made it play like Spec-ops the line (unimpressively) or any twinstick shooter + bullet time and I would not have noticed. Leaving the gunplay as sluggish and immersive as the movement might have cut a bit of dev time as well.
Modern design isn't a complete package, it's style without substance, wobbly aiming and drunken movement not in service to the rest of the game but its stylistically imposed principle. Not about how you game but how you 'feel' you game.
I would personally compare it with Doom gameplay mods, specifically GZDoom. Outside those offering complete rebalancing like Demonsteele, it's about the feel and the style and not much beyond -just throw ColorfulHell at it for enemy variety; when you grow out of it and start picking at how level designers originally balanced their maps, the behemoth sourceport for famous mods goes basically untouched while there are still gameplay demos being uploaded of new wads, in vanilla or Boom compatible format.
top: GZDoom, Project Brutality. bottom: DSDADoom
A modern mantra pointed out in the electric underground video is to have twinstick control. This allows for obfuscated feedback and dish out a 'feel'. Nothing can be built on top of this, so we a are left with visuals. Hold no candles for character design in AAA 3D, as for environment? Texturing magic is gone, advancements have gone the way of chugging VRAM and letting the engine lighting drag it along.
Makes sense why tactical strategy got massively downsized, thinking about this makes me want to check out XCOM2 after getting my fill of UFO Defense and see if the complaints about the sequel can be explained along this chase of 'style'.
I singled out 3rd person games and twinstick controls but yet another prominent KMB example is the SWAT spinoff games and their succesor. SWAT 3 as a laudable base, SWAT4 then downgrades certain aspects like squad AI but making it much more readable and aesthetically adapted to its time (which didn't have glaring vices like brown filters or camera shake). Now Ready Or Not AI has received quite the complaints, gives you aim down sights and obfuscates NPC animations in order to appear more intense.
side by side: SWAT 3 gameplay, SWAT4 gameplay without HUD, screenshot of immersive Ready or Not gameplay while aiming down sights.
Games went from vertical design to do their gameplay loops well to a horizontal 'experience' in order to realize a 'vision' that increasingly converges to a single form of gameplay per genre (or rather, just perspective from which you play). Developers are people, and like you see in the warm reception of capcom remakes that do away with the entire gameplay of the original titles, people often have pretty bad taste and it will show in their creative work when lacking dedication, expertise or vision... or an arcade scene to point at and say "Can't you do something like that?"
If you got any examples of gameplay out of modern paradigms that you would recommend, do not hesitate to post it.
Hurts, realizing these things while sucking majorly at STGs.
