There are plenty of weird people making weird games if you know where to look. itch io and DLSite, for instance.
That was literally his point…that the weird people make indie games and not AAA games.
Read the article, you say? What a radical notion.
I didn’t even read the article that information is right in the title LOL
It’s pretty short too!
“Do you think video games are silly little things?”
No worries. There is plenty of weird to find with indie games.
Yeah, but how survivable is making indie games? Unless you make it big, you aren’t paying rent that way.
That’s why bg3 felt so special. For us by us at that scale
I don’t think you need to be weird to make weird games. I mean, it wouldn’t hurt but it’s not necessary. Just do what Fromsoft does: make the game first using the rule of cool, then write the story around it instead of the other way around.
i mean if he just wants weird, i’m available for hire. got experience in storytelling and turning food into poop.
Nepotism is ruining entertainment.
The thing I miss most about handhelds is all the mid-budget experimental spinoffs made for them. That was where weird truly flourished, and I’m sad that there’s not really a place for that in today’s market. Hideo Kojima’s Boktai trilogy is one of my favorite games of all time, and there will never ever ever be another game remotely as weird as that.
I suppose it happened because from a mainstream perspective handhelds like the DS and PSP were far behind dedicated systems in terms of graphics, and so the expectation was never there to have “triple A” visuals - neither from consumers nor industry.
Made for very fertile ground in terms of games that had budget, but still had a long leash to go and get wacky.
Makes sense. AAA games are finance projects more than creative projects. Yeah there’s a lot of art and writing and stuff, but it’s all calibrated to make the most money and anything that threatens it is jettisoned. This makes them formulaic to a fault.
Indie games are passion projects, so you see a lot of weird stuff out there. Most of them are utter failures, financially, but the ones that survive are truly something special.
20 years ago AAA games could still experiment, but that was because back then AAA games had about the same budget as big indie games now.
You just can’t gamble if you have 10k employees and hundreds of millions riding on it.
Being “safe” is also a gamble, if you aren’t bringing anything new or unique you’re gambling that the title or brand is sufficient for success.
Fear of failure becomes self fulfilling, yeah. You get so worried about making the wrong move and losing money that you can have your spotlight stolen by a challenger doing it fresher for 1/10th the budget.
Not dissimilar to what happens with big studio films
There’s definitely weird people making games on itch and sometimes in the depths of Steam.
By its very definition weird isn’t going to sell to mass market. That being said I do agree that we need more weird AAA or AA games.
Weird still exists, true, but the combination of weird + budget is what’s really missing.
Looking from another angle from Yoko Taro’s point, I’d say that, in fear of failing due to being too big, companies would rather play it safe, but that causes creations to grow sterile.
And as consequence, people allegedly “weird”, which I wouldn’t think are necessarily people with curious antiques as Yoko Taro himself, but simply people whose game ideas are far from a safe ground, go for making indie titles instead as then they can be free to do whatever they want.
There’s definitely weird people making games on itch and sometimes in the depths of Steam.
Oh yes. Ever heard of Beautycopter?
I have. Watched two beings play it. I sincerely hope the person(s) who made that game make more games.
Weird people were forced out of the industry over the past decade or more, for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with making games.
But then you get those people opening studios like Sandfall and creating masterpieces like Clair Obscura…
Happens with any industry that gets big, I think. More profits=more suits/vampires coming in and replacing artists/scientists or whoever is more qualified to make key decisions.
This won’t stop unless infinite wealth hoarding is tackled by governments, if ever.
Happened even with Boeing. I think it should be illegal for anyone with an MBA to be CEO or CTO of any company. They can be CFO if they want to, but not any role with actual decision power over products.
Spicy, but I love that take
You’re not wrong. I still remember the day I picked up a newspaper and saw the headline “video games earn more than movies for the first time ever,” and I immediately knew where the industry was headed. In retrospect, I was 100% correct.
Part of the issue is that AAA still hasn’t learned how to manage and produce passion projects, which most great games are. They keep wanting to use what’s working elsewhere with no regard for what makes sense in their own game.
Yeah really. They should be more like campuses funding a hundred small teams each trying to make something they’re individually passionate about. Hell, even give them the IPs to play with and see what they come up with.
The indie scene is so much fun.
Next you’ll tell me mainstream is not niche
Can you blame them for not taking risks when these games get punished time and time again for doing so?
TLOU Part II had a mildly unlikeable character who gasp was a woman and it killed the entire franchise and sparked mass controversy so hard Naughty Dog now is making some bland and generic soulslike (but in space) GOTG ripoff slop with product placement in it.
Killed the franchise so much that the original game has been remastered twice, the second game once, and a TV series has been made out of it…?
Killed so much that the game will never get a sequel it’s clearly meant to have, yes.
The remaster of the first game came out before Part 2. The subsequent remake of the first game is made using Part 2’s assets and mechanics as well as assets from the original and had much smaller production costs, it was clearly made to recoup the loss of IP value perceived by Sony, same with the relatively low budget HBO show, compared to making a game the caliber of TLOU it costs peanuts and if at all - that will be the only way the saga will see a conclusion sadly.
So yes absolutely TLOU was killed off by the controversy and they’re now working on a new IP that looks significantly more safe and uncontroversial in every way sans maybe featuring a black lady in it.
I imagine most game IPs wish they could be as killed off as TLOU.
Yeah, doesn’t change the fact though - it was Sony’s flagship from their oldest most well known first party studio and it effectively got cancelled and pawned off to HBO to be milked on a budget.
Most movie franchises wish they could be Star Wars but it doesn’t change the fact the sequel trilogy did immense and obvious damage to the brand due (primarily) to the controversy, though in that case those movies actually also sucked which I’m sure didn’t help things. TLOU Part 2 on the other hand was by no means as awful as any of the sequel trilogy SW flicks.
TLOU2 controversy wasn’t because the unlikable character was a woman, it was because the writing was garbage. If the unlikable character was a man the reception would have been exactly the same.
Also, woman characters in games hasn’t been a risk since Metroid came out in 1986. It seems nowadays that the tables have turned and the vast majority of main characters in more than half of games from the past 5 years are women.
Whether the writing was garbage or not isn’t relevant to be honest - because controversy was spun by people who only knew the game’s story through hearsay of the leaks before the game even came out, and majorly it was to do with accusations of “wokeness” and other brainrot - so yes clearly it was an issue, of course it was an issue.
It wasn’t really the substance of the game that the usual outrage grifters latched onto so it’s not relevant to the discussion of the controversy.
As for more women being protagonists - sure, idk how you can say that so confidently, I suppose you have a convenient framing for what counts as “big games” to support your point, but I think the quantity was never really an issue.
Honestly more men being protags in games is okay, what I take issue with is that whenever something interesting happens, like oh I dunno, a game makes a woman kinda buff and mean looking, people bitch about it like no tomorrow.
So of course it’s an issue. It always has been.
In 2013-ish, Anita Sarkessian made some exceedingly light feminist critiques of video games in and it was an issue. In 2014-ish, A woman made an indie game that’s honestly really good even to this day (Depression Quest) and it was an issue. In 2020, a game came out where a fictional character (Abby) had muscles and it was an issue.
Nowadays I guess the most famous example would be the “FUCKING GENDER AMBIGUITY” screaming guy who didn’t like Starfield’s pronoun selection screen or some such.
Then people went truly psychotic in a deranged hate campaign against some random inclusivity consultancy Sweet Baby Inc. over games they were reportedly never involved with because there was women, or something, somewhere.
Hopefully you get the idea.
It was precisely the issue that a woman was the main character in a video game but was not in fact “Metroid from Metroid 1986” but a buff, angry, unattractive, hateful and morally grey character who does shitty things, sorta like Joel - in other words - she was something a lot more like a real person in a mature story, not a single digit frame twist from 40 years ago that amounts to an Easter egg turned geek culture cringe factoid parroted by the kinds of people who wouldn’t understand RLM’s “Nerd Crew” show is satire.
You can see some of the worst examples here, cherry-picked as they are, juxtaposed with what actual critique is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVQcZa4O01A
You can also visit the steam store page and look at the negative reviews, or peruse the cesspit subreddit /r/TheLastOfUs2 posts the time of the game’s leaks and release to see people bitching about everything from pride flags in Seattle(!) to Abby being made too likeable to accusations of this or that character being le ebil transgender or whatever else that sounds like it came out of a /pol/-themed magic 8 ball.
Hell, there are utterly deranged people in the steam reviews for this game now bitching about the show - about the actress that plays Ellie and one guy even implies she is “down syndrome representation”.
Like, what the actual fuck?
As for the game, the game is ok, I’m playing it right now, it’s less boring than the first so I like it a lot more, the AI actually lives up to the bullshit promised in the first game’s trailer, but it’s too long and yeah the writing is too on the nose sometimes, though I do like the characters and the atmosphere a lot. Idk if I “love” it, but I do find it way more fun as a game and far more interesting from a story perspective.
What it definitely is though is controversial as fuck and that’s just reality. People made a whole subreddit just to hate on the game that’s active to this day and most of their issues aren’t even to do with the game - they even pretend to hate the TV show they haven’t seen too.
This is spot on.
In 2013 I was much younger and believed ahit I read, so I was swept up in the “Sarkessian wants to destroy games” crap (as if she could and/or mattered enough to actually affect change in any way).
A few years ago I looked up her videos (cudos to her that she still kept them online) and I was honestly almost disappointed in how bland and obviously true her points were. Sure, her research wasn’t perfect and she could have presented them a bit better, but what these videos deserved would have been mostly bored acknowledgement. Similar to TLOU2. It wasn’t a super exciting game. The story wasn’t great but also not terrible. The characters were adequately interesting for the most part. The gameplay was again not great but ok, and certainly not worse than part 1.
Could it have been better? Sure, no question. But it also didn’t nearly deserve the hate it got.
Same with many other similar media, like e.g. the Ghostbusters remake or Twilight.
But what happened there was that people got seriously offended by these games/shows/movies and then made it their mission to destroy it. And that’s ridiculous and pathetic, but it happens all the time.
False, Tlou part 2 was peak normie writing
Care to elaborate? You play as the person who killed a beloved iconic video game character and last game’s protagonist for 13 straight hours - I don’t know if it’s good but I’d hardly call it anything resembling “normie writing”.
To me - normie writing is something like those new switch Zelda games or Yakuza games or those Jedi Fallen Order/Survivor dark souls clone games or something like Watch_Dogs 1 or hell insert any ubisoft game apart from FC2, WD2 here
To me - normie writing is something like those new switch Zelda games or Yakuza games or those Jedi Fallen Order/Survivor dark souls clone games or something like Watch_Dogs 1 or hell insert any ubisoft game apart from FC2, WD2 here
This. And none of these games with their totally predictable normie plots get any shit for that, let alone anything major.
And Watch dogs 1 was such a terrible game, it would deserve getting major shit.
