I get what you're saying. No indie developer could ever in a million years make Red Dead Redemption 2, because there is so much detail packed into that game's world by the hundreds of artists that contributed to it that it would be impossible to replicate with a smaller team.
But with respects to gameplay - does the addition of mantling really invalidate the older Halo games? The grapple hook is a lot of fun, but 90% of what makes Halo Infinite tick is stuff that's been present from game 1, like the diverse AI behaviors and the beefy weapon feel. Hell, a lot of those ideas are present in good shooters going back to fucking Doom. I was too young to appreciate that game when it came out, but I remember playing it a few years ago for the first time and being absolutely blown away.
Skimming through the "indie" category in Steam or itch.io will give you the impression that literally every single indie game is a pixelart platformer, but frankly that's just the chaff you have to sort through to get to the wheat. Praey for the Gods is a game I played recently that was made by like three people, it's Shadow of the Colossus meets Breath of the Wild, and it turns out those two flavors go really well together. Just like how no indie studio could make RDR2, no AAA studio could make that game. No AAA studio would have ever made Hyperbolica, or Subliminal, or even fucking The Stanley Parable.
I guess what I'm saying is that you're right about video game writing, it's all crap. The number of games with good writing can be counted on one hand, for the rest the most you can hope for is competently done capeshit. That's why many of the games with the best stories tell those stories exclusively through atmosphere and letting the player's imagination fill in the gaps, and why many of the best games of all time completely skip having a story.
I get what you're saying. No indie developer could ever in a million years make Red Dead Redemption 2, because there is so much detail packed into that game's world by the hundreds of artists that contributed to it that it would be impossible to replicate with a smaller team.
But with respects to gameplay - does the addition of mantling really invalidate the older Halo games? The grapple hook is a lot of fun, but 90% of what makes Halo Infinite tick is stuff that's been present from game 1, like the diverse AI behaviors and the beefy weapon feel. Hell, a lot of those ideas are present in good shooters going back to fucking Doom. I was too young to appreciate that game when it came out, but I remember playing it a few years ago for the first time and being absolutely blown away.
Skimming through the "indie" category in Steam or itch.io will give you the impression that literally every single indie game is a pixelart platformer, but frankly that's just the chaff you have to sort through to get to the wheat. Praey for the Gods is a game I played recently that was made by like three people, it's Shadow of the Colossus meets Breath of the Wild, and it turns out those two flavors go really well together. Just like how no indie studio could make RDR2, no AAA studio could make that game. No AAA studio would have ever made Hyperbolica, or Subliminal, or even fucking The Stanley Parable.
I guess what I'm saying is that you're right about video game writing, it's all crap. The number of games with good writing can be counted on one hand, for the rest the most you can hope for is competently done capeshit. That's why many of the games with the best stories tell those stories exclusively through atmosphere and letting the player's imagination fill in the gaps, and why many of the best games of all time completely skip having a story.
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