Comment by adamc
2 days ago
That last sentence is worth an essay of its own. Everyone else keeps pumping resources into being photo-realistic blah-blah-blah without nearly enough attention to "is this fun"?
2 days ago
That last sentence is worth an essay of its own. Everyone else keeps pumping resources into being photo-realistic blah-blah-blah without nearly enough attention to "is this fun"?
One of my favorite video essay's on this is "Nintendo - Putting Play First" by Game Makers Toolkit [1]. It goes into when making a game, Nintendo first determines the mechanic they want to focus on; jumping, throwing a hat, shooting paint, etc and finding out how to make it fun, then building and iterating on the idea.
It's how they can keep putting out essentially the same games but are completely different.
1. https://youtu.be/2u6HTG8LuXQ
I can't tell you how much respect I have for this mindset. Like them burning a heap of money on Metroid Prime 4, for years, and then coming out with an announcement along the lines of "sorry guys, this sucks, so we've chucked it out and started again because we only do things right, see you in another 3-4 years when it's ready."
It pays dividends, because they just don't ship junk, so everything they DO ship sells extremely well.
Some stuff they have sells well: Smash, Zelda, Pokemon. Metroid sells a lot less well.
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This is the right mindset. It makes your customers trust you.
GMTK is popular, but he's mostly talking out of his ass. He's got zero industry experience and most gamedevs I know personally clown on his takes constantly. Unless he references specific Nintendo interviews where they talk about their design process, I have doubts about this video containing an accurate description of how Nintendo does things.
At least in this video, all the interviews and documents that they base their claims/opinions on are listed in the description, so you can easily also peruse them if you doubt the interpretation.
I've seem some of his videos, but I'm not that familiar with GMTK. But they did release a game, and it was by all accounts "Very positive" /pretty good.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2685900/Mind_Over_Magnet/
You should have watched the video before you shat on it.
Yes, he references specific Nintendo interviews in the video. Frequently, in fact, and in detail.
Most games are pretty bad, so this tracks I guess.
Need more Larians in the world.
His videos are great!
This always made sense to me. Think of Super Mario Bros. No way you come up with something like that from a top-down design document. Probably slapped Mario on a screen, played with the physics a bunch, and threw a lot of different stuff at the wall to see what stuck before they came up with the final product.
Not sure about the original game but at least since the 3d age, Miyamoto is on record, saying that when making a new Mario game, one of the first steps is that is just fun to goof around with Mario alone in an empty flat void and mess with whatever new abilities they are thinking of giving him.
I saw an interesting analysis years ago about whether or not the most powerful console 'won' in each generation (i.e. whether or not being the most powerful console of your generation leads to success).
Generally speaking, no, it doesn't actually affect things, and in several cases (e.g. the Game Boy, the Wii, and the Switch come to mind) the objectively 'worse' console (from a tech perspective) was more successful by a country mile.
It's interesting how many people see the Switch as being in its own category rather than acknowledging it as the winner of this console generation (which I completely agree it is).
Most people think the “console” battle is between PlayStation and Xbox, and that PlayStation is the winner.
This is probably a big win for PlayStation’s marketing team.
I kinda think that way when buying. The Nintendo console is the Nintendo console. If you want what they do, you're buying it. The other two are where the competition is and where there's a decision of which one, not buy this single product or don't. They're much closer to being interchangeable than the Switch is with either of them.
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Personally I'd say both are true. They won the generation, but they did so by not bothering to fight directly with Playstation and Xbox. By basically ignoring them and having a distinct identity they won.
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Due to the switch's low processing power, it can't run many AAA titles (for example Red Dead Redemption 2, Cyberpunk 2077, Call of Duty games etc.)
That's why it's considered its own category.
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> This is probably a big win for PlayStation’s marketing team.
I don't have any current Gen console (nor have I played one) but as a long-time tech market "interested observer" my understanding is that XBox had a bit less raw power last Gen and tried correcting this Gen and succeeded in having a bit more raw power than PS5. However, it apparently didn't matter to the market. So it seems to be another example like Betamax vs VHS, where the product with somewhat better technology didn't win because consumers found other factors more important. In modern game consoles, I assume those factors would be some mix of exclusive titles, compatibility with existing previous gen game libraries, marketing+brand perception and, more recently, the console's subscription game service.
It's interesting that Microsoft apparently didn't internalize this lesson, since Nintendo has been remained competitive for ~20 years by combining significantly weaker hardware with high-quality franchise games plus a clever differentiating factor (novel interaction (Wii) or portability (Switch). Of course, it would be wrong to conclude "CPU/GPU power doesn't matter" because it's more complex than comparing mips, flops, rops, etc. It also depends on how much, and how well, developers and game engines optimize for a platform's hardware.
Microsoft definitely learned their lesson about high-quality franchise games with their recent (and very costly) acquisition spree including Call of Duty. Although, to get anti-trust approval it can't be platform exclusive for at least a decade. I'm wondering if MSFT's claims that they're happy to be a games software company selling on all platforms may actually be true. If so, it may not bode well for the future of the XBox hardware business - which would be sad because more competition is generally better for consumers.
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Software, it can't be compared because of a unique catalogue. How would switch sales be impacted if Zelda was on the ps or Xbox?
This is probably a big, major effort by PlayStation’s marketing team to get people to think that
Competition isn’t the secret sauce we pretend it is. There is power in non-competing and doing your own thing as well. You just have to know when to use either strategy.
Strongly agreed. When I think of the best Nintendo products the words “fun” and “play” spring to mind.
AAA gaming on the other hand, either resembles sports, shallow short-form media, or Oscar-bait melodrama. Very little fun to be had.
What ever happened to fun and play?
This is such a trite take. Whenever I hear it, what comes to my mind is: "bro, do you even play games?".
The gaming industry is huge and gamers are varied. What is fun and play to one person is boring and vapid to another. I think Nintendo's first party titles are generally excellent, but I recognize that they're not for everyone. It's not like the rest of the industry is shuffling around going "boy, if only we could figure out how to make fun games".
It seems that you want to exclude Nintendo from AAA gaming, which is also weird. Their first party titles are developed by large teams with big budgets. They're not some scrappy startup making indie titles.
FWIW, the game that won Game of the Year at the most recent game awards is Astro Bot - an amazingly fun and playful (some would say Nintendo-esque) game that is a PlayStation 5 exclusive.
I do think they got it right, but Game Awards is 90% weighted towards games professionals/critics, so it's not very populist.
(Their award that is 100% consumer/gamer vote based goes to mobile games, because they bribe their audience to vote for it.)
Money happened. The gaming industry produces more revenue than the movie industry and the music industry combined. Making a AAA is a $50-$100 million endeavor. At that scale, doing weird stuff because maybe it'll pay off is almost unconscionably risky. It's the same problem movies have, and it's the reason why indy films and indy games are so much more interesting.
Fun doesn't map 1:1 into a trailer or a screenshot. Graphics do, voice acting, cutscenes, and big set pieces do.
Singleplayer AAA gaming on top of all that feels like work, the older I got the less those games kept me playing because I don't want to spend 3 hours running errands to be rewarded with an item/spell/skill.
The melodramatic storylines are also pretty grating, there are a few games with good storytelling but most are some rehash of "this world has been destroyed/is in the process of being destroyed, in the aftermath a hero is about to rise and save it" so if the mechanics don't feel fun right from the get-go I lose interest completely.
The most fun I have with games are the ones with a very iterative game loop (roguelikes for example), or social/multiplayer games, anything with a lot of replayability, and the constant feeling of improvement is like crack to me.
A surprising example I re-discovered last year after only playing it for a while some 15 years ago is Trackmania, got even some friends hooked on it to play hot seating trying to beat each others time. The game loop is short and intense (about 1-2 minutes max), has a high skill ceiling, and you feel yourself getting better at a track each time you play it, nailing some very tricky part that felt impossible 30 min before is absurdly satisfying.
My biggest problem is I'll finally get a chance to sink enough hours in to start something AAA, do maybe 4-10 hours over two or three days, and then have life get in the way and not touch it for a month or more... and completely forget how to play and WTF I was doing.
Some of my favorite UX features in newer games are automatically and contextually reminding you how the controls work when you pick it back up after a while, and quick story recaps or quest reminders on loading screens. I like to label those games "parent-friendly".
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My biggest problem with AAA gaming is I waste a lot of time tuning graphics settings to keep games from crashing, and wait a lot for different sections of games to load. I miss the 90s era of snappy UIs.
I can't remember where I read this, but I came across someone talking about the fact that these AAA photo realistic games are hugely expensive to make, but if you look at what young people are spending their time playing, they're games like Fornite, Minecraft and Roblox. As soon as I read this, it clicked for me.
I have two teenagers (15 & 17) and this is exactly right. My son plays games all the time and although he's played Elden Ring and GTA and other games of that sort, over the years I would say 80% of his time has been Minecraft and this other 2D game with a platformer vibe whose name I forget that has procedurally generated maps. He's frequently calling me over to his computer to check out his latest architectural creation in Minecraft. I know it's not just him, because he plays multiplayer with his buddies as well, and again, a lot of it is these games with quite frankly primitive graphics. But they're fun!
> and this other 2D game with a platformer vibe whose name I forget that has procedurally generated maps.
Terraria?
> Terraria?
Yes!
Perhaps it was this, which I saw recently:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/26/arts/video-games-graphics...
I have a younger kid that's in Roblox a lot as well, and something I noticed the peer group do is have a facetime/voice call in the background so they can talk while they play. I like it better than watching them type chats.
I'm a huge Nintendo/Mario fan but I've recently been playing through Astro Bot on my PS5 and I must say, when you combine super fun mechanics with amazing graphics and performance, it's quite an experience! But there isn't nearly enough content like this on the non-Nintendo consoles, so point is definitely not lost on me.
I play one game at a time for about a month and then move to the next. When I first played Mario Odyssey on my switch I was over the moon with how much pure fun it was compared to all the good looking and serious RPGs I played in the decade before. I had forgotten games can be this enjoyable. Nowadays I try to do these super fun games in between my souls-like sessions.
Focusing on tech or unoriginal production values (that's photo real! You don't need a great art director, you need a photo..) is appealing to companies because it's predictable vs the creative uncertainty and subjectivity of "fun".
Astro Bot won game of the year because it had amazing graphics and physics and had Mario-tier fun. The team actually made a cryptic shout out to Nintendo at the award ceremony.
Nintendo has great games, but the resolution on TVs, even cheap ones, is outstanding now and it goes to waste using a Switch.
Playing a great game that also uses what the TV has on offer is really the best experience. If we get 4k and ray tracing on Switch I’ll be stoked.
The “is this fun” part is the reason why I bought a Switch in the first place. Still the only console I’ve ever owned
I love the “just start playing” ethos of most Nintendo games. Reminds me of the games I used to play as a kid. No long story or exposition - just a game load screen and a start button
Do they? I haven't seen a meaningful improvement in video game graphics for at least 5 years, maybe even 10.