I like Twilight Princess. After Wind Waker, which was a breath of fresh air for the series, it felt like Twilight Princess was leaning too much on old tropes, even in a series which generally plays it very close to its roots. Given that it's so familiar, you'd think that the game might be shorter than it is, but it's a lot longer than it needs to be, and consequently feels like it exhausts its bag of tricks long before the credits. But it's still a very reliable bag of tricks, and it managed to be a late 00s game with a rougher, hardier look, that didn't lose its character and vibrance in an attempt to go darker. The melee combat feels impactful, Epona once again provides a great sense of forward momentum, and the structure opens up the world in a fascinating way as you go.
@humanity: I agree that Faro didn't set up Zero Dawn because he thought it would make him any more money. I'm only claiming that he got into that position because he'd profited so much up to that point. Even if the workers of Zero Dawn weren't making a salary, Faro's control over material resources allowed him to set up and head Zero Dawn which gave him a lot of power over the project.
@cyrribrae: I thought it was fairly unlikely this is the way someone would first discover the contents of Horizon. That's pretty amazing. I'm not saying that the developers behind Zero Dawn were actively advocating the positions I talked about in this article. None the less, the game itself says what it says.
@sparky_buzzsaw: No worries. I tried to see if I could copy the "Edit" link from a post and paste it back in, but I can confirm that does not work. I'll mention something in the correct channels.
I could really go for a modern one of these. I suspect that it's not top priority for most big game devs right now because, if you're making a racing game, you're going to appeal to more people by filling it with realistic brand name cars, letting people drive their Ferraris and Porches. If you're making a sci-fi game, however, it's probably more lucrative to make it a shooter title. So, sci-fi racing occupies this odd middle space.
Then again, you could have said there wasn't enough interest in sci-fi sports games and Rocket League did gangbusters. Plus, even if Sony don't seem as interested in smaller games as they once did, Nintendo have taken punts on weirder experiments more recently. I wouldn't expect to see one of these games done with blisteringly high-fidelity graphics in the near future, but there's probably space out there for a new, mid-tier Wipeout, F-Zero, or indie lookalike.
"Matchmaking" is dynamic difficulty in a nutshell for competitive/online setting... We don't question it when it comes to multiplayer, but for single-player or narrative games, we have to come up with all these other reasons why it's a bad idea (other than the obvious challenge of implementing it right).
I think we do end up questioning matchmaking a lot though. While I've been very impressed by systems like TrueSkill 2, players still frequently have the experience of being mismatched against opponents in online multiplayer games, so I think there's room for criticism there. Dynamic difficulty working in a competitive or cooperative environment also wouldn't neccessarily mean it works in a single-player environment because it's not like you can port a matchmaking system into single-player. Those systems are built around the idea that they're operating in a space where a lot of the difficulty is determined by the players.
A lot of the criticisms I have here do also apply to multiplayer games with matchmaking systems. Matchmaking doesn't make level design simpler or reduce the number and complexity of the systems the player has to learn, or even provide the player a lot of learning aids. It could exist within gameplay that does that, but frequently doesn't. Also, I think the implementation matters here. It's not just a case of "We know it works and we just need to get the implementation right". If you can't get the implementation right, for the time being, it doesn't work.
Again, I'm not saying dynamic difficulty could never work. I'm not trying to make predictions about how video games might work a couple of hundred years from now. But for the time being, I think we can make some serious criticisms.
@sparky_buzzsaw: Yeah, I guess that would have been the other way to go. If you don't have that much to show, just cut back on time. I still hoped for a little more.
Log in to comment