“I can’t stress enough how often I’d hear a retail rep declare a genre/style/look was dead with zero supporting data.”
I mean… yeah, retailer gut checks were a major driver for the industry for ages. The entire myth of the videogame crash in the early eighties, blown out of proportion as it is, comes down to retailers having a bad feeling about gaming after Atari. I’m big on preservation and physical media, but don’t downplay the schadenfreude caused by the absolutely toxic videogame retail industry entirely collapsing after digital distribution became a thing. I’ll buy direct to consumer from boutique retailers all day before I go back to buckets of games stolen from little kids and retailers keeping shelf space hostage based on how some rep’s E3’s afterparties went.
That said, those guys really did flood the market with cookie cutter games in a very short time there for a while. There were a LOT of these.
Weirdly, Neverwinter Nights must have done extremely well for how much credit Bioware gives it for redefining the genre, but at the time I remember being frustrated by it. It looked worse than the 2D stuff, the user generated content stuff was fun to mess with it didn’t create the huge endless content mill you’d expect from something like that today.
I should go look up if there’s any data about how commercially successful it really was somewhere. Any pointers?
Wikipedia?
Agreed about Neverwinter Nights, BG2 was (and remains) one of my favourite games and I remember being super hyped for NWN. Being an earlyish transition to 3D really did hurt it visually, much the same as how Final Fantasy VI has aged much better than VII graphically.
The big letdown for me though was the cut down party size. BG2 was defined by the companions and party banter and I recall NWN feeling extremely lacking in comparison.
The post BG2 hype combined with the move to 3D and the very heavily advertised campaign builder probably built very intense hype though, so it wouldn’t surprise me at all if NWN sold extremely well despite not having as lasting of a legacy as BG2 for example.
#fuckingcapitalists
For me, the problem is “isometric”. There have been very few games like that I’ve finished compared to others. It feels artificially constrained, especially in a 3D environment, when visibility is limited to like <10 meters away from your character. It’s worse if the camera rotates because then I find it quite hard to make a mental map.
I don’t have this issue with a top-down perspective generally. Maybe those tend to be more 2D (even if rendered they can’t really include environmental verticality) so it’s easier to navigate.
Dragon Age: Origins had the perfect camera that let you look around like an action game and then switch to the tactical camera. It’s astounding that modern rpgs cannot match how good the camera was in a game from 2009.
IMO there’s very few instances where an isometric camera makes sense these days unless you’re explicitly trying to capture the nostalgia of old isometric games.
I do find it’s a barrier for some fairly modern games I want to play like Divinity Original Sin 1+2 and Disco Elysium. I wish that wasn’t the case…
Fair enough on Divinity: Original Sin, but it won’t really be a factor in Disco Elysium due to how it plays (or reads, rather). If you’re interested in DE just give it a shot and treat it as an interactive novel (which is what it is, really). The camera won’t be a factor in that game, trust me.
Ok, thanks. I’ve played maybe an hour of DE so far and maybe it was the controls moreso than the perspective that felt awkward. I might just need to tinker or get acclimated. Since it’s all story I want to play it on my TV or Steam Deck, so gamepad input rather than M+KB.
I’m not sure I’d call D:OS isometric, definitely birds eye view camera. I believe there are mods for divinity as well as BG3 that allow more dynamic cameras. I have one for bg3 and it’s definitely a different experience but if that’s one you’re after, you should try it out.
Cool I’ll take a look at mods, good suggestion. Yeah I’d like to be able to get more of an over-shoulder view sometimes during combat or exploration. Or at least lower to the ground.
That’s definitely possible! Nexus mods has several camera mods
I’m no fan of sports games. I dont play sports games. Also the kind of people I hang with also dislike sports games. And the last sport games I read about, a decade ago, had horrible reviews and awful graphics. So therefor I declare the Sports game genre for dead! /s
The /s is not needed. I was quite impressed to hear that EA Sports is one of the main money makers of EA despite having each new game as a buggier version of a previous one, only with an updated roster. I had no idea they were so popular and the last FIFA I played properly was in 2003.
So we are out there and we do think like that.madden should be dead but the people who buy it are literally like heroin addicts
all year they swear they wont buy it, its going to garbage like the last game, and then it comes out and they spend thousands on it. rinse repeat. i wish somebody else could use the nfl liscence just so EA or the other devs have to actually try making a good game
