https://nitter.ca/Marc_Normandin/status/1558080676120895488#m

I wonder if he was thinking specifically of Metal Gear Solid or something similar.

  • Awoo [she/her]
    ·
    2 years ago

    I don't think this is about Metal Gear. It can't be about Metal Gear.

    MGS is pretty much the epitome of a game that completely allows a player to find their own way to enjoy the game. You can roll through an area blasting, you can be a literal troll fucking with the guards, you can play peekaboo, you can find 500 different ways to use your equipment, you can shoot out radios and watch the chaos, you can hold up the guards and point your gun at their crotch to make them squirm. You want to figure out how to make up your own way to enjoy the game? You can do that.

    You can rush to the next cutscene if you want, it's objectively faster to do the sneaking in the most boring way possible. But the amount of stuff you can do is so much more than that.

    The cutscene treadmills are the fps titles. Shoot these enemies while walking down a linear path, have a cutscene, do it again.

      • Awoo [she/her]
        ·
        2 years ago

        Why not Final Fantasy and other RPG titles?

        FF8 came out in 1999 on the back of FF7's success. It produced spectacular cutscenes as reward for the same formula of menu driven turnbased jRPG combat that had existed for over a decade.

        It was also the second most successful game in Japan that year. Beaten only by Pokemon Gold.

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_in_video_games#Japan

        Time Crisis also dominated arcades at the time which is basically all the same thing and entirely "reward cutscene for successful progress". It is arguably even worse than an fps title for its complete lack of player control.

        • doublepepperoni [none/use name]
          ·
          2 years ago

          Hadn't Nintendo made Super Mario RPG with Square just a few years prior though? It didn't have FMV but a lot of scenes with characters talking to each other

          It does sound very much like what FF13 ended up being though

          Wasn't Time Crisis an arcade style rail shooter though? Those had been around a while

          • Awoo [she/her]
            ·
            2 years ago

            Yeah but what I'm getting at is that the trend of games towards this was just beginning. It was the point at which people were realising "these sequels have the same gameplay as all the other games, they are changing nothing except the cutscenes". It was the point at which they were recognising that games were becoming a factory line for profit instead of art.

            Nintendo is guilty of the opposite thing. Instead of selling their games on cutscenes/story they sold their games on gameplay while reusing the same characters and story over and over again. Reusing the same characters over and over is interesting though I suppose because it forces your entire focus to be on "So what gameplay are we making?" as your characters and their background already exist.

            Obviously this didn't stop things like Pokemon doing the same gameplay over and over again though. But Pokemon made 150+ new characters each game generation so I suppose they felt like that was different enough to what anyone else was doing.

        • UlyssesT
          ·
          16 days ago

          deleted by creator

          • alcoholicorn [comrade/them, doe/deer]
            ·
            2 years ago

            Is it really bad?

            I've only ever heard praise for how groundbreaking it was from games journalist types, which is convenient when hardly anyone in NA had a dreamcast.

            The game's budget exceeded the sale price multiplied by the number of consoles.

            Surely with a budget like that, the game did things no other game of the time could do?

            • UlyssesT
              ·
              16 days ago

              deleted by creator