N64/Gamecube era: I'm going to hype you up with a cinamatic intro and also I'm going to render a whole interactive 3D space with a catchy theme song for my title screen and save select screens.

Modern era games: Lol heres a .png of our promotional art and a piano tinkling. No intro.

I'm getting old.

  • Infamousblt [any]
    ·
    1 year ago

    So I was chatting with someone about this the other day and it's a double edged sword. I was talking specifically about marketing and labelling but it applies here too. The trend in all design right now is simple and clear. This is boring as fuck. It's not fun. It just...is. And that sucks.

    However the big reason design is going that way is ease of access. The simper something is the easier it is for more people to use and understand. If your product is just a picture of a bowl of macaroni and nothing else, everyone should know what's in there even from a distance. If your menu is simple and clean anyone should be able to figure out how to use it. Etc etc

    So it sucks and it's not fun at all but it does make the product easier to access which is good too.

    • WhatDoYouMeanPodcast [comrade/them]
      ·
      1 year ago

      I have seen people who paralyze and defeat themselves by saying video games are too complicated for them. The girl who rates videogames for her boyfriend cried after defeating an Elden Ring boss because she thought video games weren't for her (can't find the clip). It corroborated what I saw in a video essay about a person talking about his girlfriend struggling because her lack of interaction with 3D spaces meant that some of the language of gaming was lost on her.[1]

      I can get higher than anticipated and interference with a non-linear dungeon in TOTK where I have to build my own solutions. Having absorbed the metaphor, it felt like I was having a conversation with the devs. If you don't have that understanding of how a videogame operates and what it wants from you, then it's much harder to grasp and you might find yourself getting nervous about being watched and get lost in a linear corridor.

      At some level I think they need a new player to, more seamlessly than you'd think necessary, be shunted into a tutorial so they see that the controls are intuitive and the objectives are clear.

      [1] https://youtu.be/ax7f3JZJHSw