I never played Remake, but when a YouTuber recently did a comparison video between some of their major scenes, I ended up respecting the original so much more.

A great one was when the plate falls. The original made directorial choices that emphasized the brutality of it all so much better, especially by choosing to cut the music. It just seems like Remake’s director was adding so many things simply because he could, making short and direct scenes so much worse by excess creation.

Of note, another JRPG from that general time period, Trails in the Sky, is being remade soon, and that one seemed quite a bit more faithful to me. Still taking liberties to change dialog, but only where it makes sense - they also greatly retooled the battle system with full respect for classic turntaking style.

That’s not always true when members of the team feel really motivated and inspired by a concept.

I’ve been in that zone a few times before. “Well, I’ve been working for a few hours. I guess I should take a break and play a game. …Or, I could just keep at it…?”

Of course, with such large teams now, you’re unlikely to see that happen to many of them. They’ll be working late, but usually zombies.

Playing an indie mystery game called Dragon Detective. I’m on case 4 so far, it’s definitely held my attention with the story. It manages to do a good job with its worldbuilding.

I’ve still been using it lately to animate a video. It’s nice that so many tools have been refined in that time.

This makes me realize the last time I interacted with Digimon was the age-old TV show that began with an Isekai.

I’m curious how the series has changed. Apparently some of the newer stories lean a bit darker?

When listening to the dev commentary of Valve games, they talk about how much work goes into level design planning even just for the sake of optimization, like clearly delineating barriers between major regions (doorways) so the engine can unload objects from other areas.

I get the impression the “First step easy” setup from UE5 may have made it so that more people can give us unoptimized messes, but still only a few rare devs understand proper optimization at all levels of development.

When I run a social media site, it will be a rule to use uncensored terms, and any use of asterisks or alt-words like “unalive” will result in a warning or suspension.

I mean, you changed the topic onto the subject of pricing, which is the main thing driving sentiment that Microsoft is anti-consumer. There are other smaller gaming subscriptions out there, and I don’t call many of them anti-consumer.

It sounds plausible Sony and Microsoft don’t have very fair algorithms to decide what a dev earns for their subscription. That’s an internal element, and we don’t get to see that calculation.

Imagine a guy hears about Game Pass, and sees he can play Spiritfarer on it. “Spiritfarer!? That awesome emotional experience that everyone says they cried at? I’m definitely playing that!” 5-ish hours later, they’ve finished the game, and thoroughly enjoyed it, but the subscription is still going.

At this point, the subscriber decides they may as well play State of Decay 2 mindlessly the rest of the month, often without much interest, but trusts another excellent singleplayer indie darling will arrive next month.

I’d bet the algorithm may pay the SOD2 devs far more in that case because numbers show that’s what “kept them engaged”, not to mention live service games like SOD2 have DLC to entice people into.

Theres absolutely a danger in that thinking, since most people bought a PS5 after seeing Sony’s incredible singleplayer games, and I believe that’s primarily what gets people into Game Pass too.

So this is basically an observation about raising prices. But I think there’s a misconception on social media that you have to be reading the news and on your soapbox to alert people to those things.

Pricing has always very readily affected people’s spending behavior. Not just people that follow gaming news, but people browsing GameStop for whatever’s new. We’ve even seen that - stats are showing people spent much less on games this year. Some people are even spending less through the option of going for a subscription rather than buying 8 games through the year. The publisher plan is certainly to tune up that cost with time, but personally, I don’t think that plan has a high chance of success.

And there’s a very worrying reality on the publisher side that gamers have many alternatives, especially as quality falls in these AAA products. You can imagine someone starved for a Soulslike might’ve spent $70 on generic copycat “Folly of the Dodgeroll 7”, if not for seeing Hollow Knight Silksong for $20 one shelf over.

So basically, I never hated the subscription model itself as a “weapon of capitalism”; just the constant attempts to shrinkflate as has been happening to most else.

I have different reasons I hate MS and Game Pass specifically, but I was never convinced by this argument.

It works on the argument of “We would like to stop offering direct purchase models, and require consumers to play by subscription.” But no one has done that. No one has really come close to doing that.

People argue the price will steadily go up; and that’s one of the reasons I don’t play Game Pass anymore. I knew that I wouldn’t maintain access to the games on there, which is why I bought the ones I wanted to keep playing - not very many.

That might not quite be true. You can’t have 1000 people make Hollow Knight overnight. It’s like the old adage of 9 mothers making a baby in one month.

The closest thing would be to split the studio internally into 10 small teams, and have them each make a game over a long period of time; maybe that’s what you were implying.

If nothing else, to sustain themselves. The more they profit off one game, the longer they can develop their next project without worrying.

Say one of them has an idea for an awesome 3D Soulslike, but they’d have to triple their team size to make it in a reasonable time frame. They could afford that with more money.

Much as I’d predict support for that conclusion, I feel like there’s room to doubt the survey process used - as has often been the case for studies on gamer behavior.

This excuse stopped working the day I opened a tough-as-nails game like Furi, saw it had a difficulty menu, said “That’s nice”, and went back to challenging myself against the bosses on default settings.

It’s such a huge cop-out of self control, and especially falls to acknowledge that the forms of difficulty in a game are often varied - and someone might suck at only one of them.

Many FromSoft games don’t strike that balance right. The ones I’ve tried, even the ones I successfully beat, gave me a groan of “Fucking FINALLY, now what mediocre reward and fresh hell do I get for that!? In fact, why am I playing this…?”

Another example, Stellar Blade. I enjoyed the difficulty, and got pretty good at the parries against bosses; but usually only hit about 60% of them. That wasn’t good enough for the very final boss, which takes off about half your health for each one you miss. Only for that fight, I ended up turning down the difficulty - and it was still tough! And, I still felt rewarded at the end.

One final example, Another Crab’s Treasure. It has some hard fights, and many difficulty options. I’m glad those were there…but I also just never used them. Also, it now has a NG+ that gets even harder.

I never actually liked FromSoft’s themselves, but several Soulslikes I really enjoyed did away with runbacks, or always had checkpoints right before bosses.

I really just want people to start evaluating each design decision Dark Souls made on its own - stop worshipping the whole as being perfect, because it most definitely is not. So many of the knowledge checks (poise, anyone?) are just there for experienced players to lord over confused shrubs.

I certainly remember getting some meaningful and surprising twists in the Telltale game, at least.

One game that nailed PS2 aesthetic while also having its own identity is Homebody. It’s mostly puzzles, but has a very creepy mansion aesthetic and always has you worried about the monster. It’s a “Groundhog Day” game where the protagonist remembers dying, and is caught in a loop.

Another one I enjoyed with a bit more combat is Tormented Souls. The sequel is coming soon, too.

This could very much represent troubles not just in video game development, but project development in an investor-driven market entirely.

Everyone is focused on short-term wins and profits - so they can demonstrate they’re a fantastic manager making incredible things. They hire 1000 people, then show the grandiose things they made with those people in 2 years so they can take more investment. But the way creative work goes, there are far better ways to play that lottery - they just don’t involve as much active management, and are far less showy.

As a publisher, you could just start 50 small studios of only 10 employees each, with occasional external support as needed to each one, and give all of them 5 years to develop. That would equate to the same or much lesser cost as some of these gigantic multi-outsourced projects, but it means investments are left for longer. And of course, few of them would be a “Hollow Knight” or “Minecraft”, but just enough of them would likely succeed to pay for all the others.

You can see similar concerns in R&D and other similar fields across industries, that give randomized and unpredictable benefit when every manager is watching every quarter’s earnings.