Hot take
I don't like the animation and new art style.
Shrek was built on realism with a touch of fantasy, which contrasted with Disney. It lended itself to the satirical fairytale world they built. Making Shrek bouncy and cartoony feels like the antithesis of what Shrek is.
@WaterShuriken_ Sitting through BW while it was airing was absolutely painful. Every series has its issues, but they just straight up didn't care during BW.
@GloryboundStory Priam's gotten bold around Hurdan with the way he's been hounding him. So, the slave subplot from Tyranny turned out to be important after all. At the time, I thought it was a pretty odd detour so late in the book. Looks like they've found an unlikely ally in Petris.
Sandy Petersen, the designer of Doom, Quake, Call of Cthulhu, and Age of Empires, responding on social media to fans asking how to save Blizzard:
"We don't need to save Blizzard. We didn't need to save Microsoft or id Software or Ensemble Studios or Atari. We don't need to save ANY game company. If they die, they die. They will be replaced with new, likely superior game companies. Gaming continues."
The man who helped build the foundations of modern gaming says let the industry's legacy studios die. Is he right?
I have said this many times, but Gaming was better in every single way when it was a hobby made by and for nerdy/weird dudes and asians.
As soon as it became a hobby for "everyone" the decline truly started and video games are now in their "victory has defeated us" era.
crazy to think how many of these are bots because there’s simply no possible way 1/16 of the worlds population is subscribed to mr beast. like this has GOT to be dead internet theory
Whoever here said "the way Souls fans act makes perfect sense when you realize they treat these games as boss fight simulators" was 100% correct. They see exploration and world design as tertiary set dressing to letting you fight 30 Malenias in a row
There are still exploration-focused soulslikes being made, but they get less attention than the boss-focused ones.
Wuchang had good level design, AI Limit is great, Bleak Faith Forsaken focuses entirely on vibe & exploration.
But the community prefers to jack off over bosses.
You see whining about "clunky" old games because old games lack the player assists found in newgen games, which are literally designed for actual idiots on the assumption that the average player won't be able to learn how the game works for themselves.
Almost every action game now has:
>strong autotracking on attacks
>tons of i-frames
>no "checkmate" situations that are unrecoverable; endless mulligans so the player sees "you died/game over" as little as possible
>no lives, timers, scoring, or any other hard constraints on the player; failure doesn't cost anything
>multi-step actions triggered by single button presses like sliding/dashing to go faster, instant takedowns, etc; no need to combine multiple actions or learn any techniques like crouchjumping, bhopping, rocket/grenade jumping
>"cinematic" boss fights where the core gameplay may be totally absent and the "fight" is relegated to QTEs
>strong enemy leashing that keeps enemies in tiny areas, allowing you to whittle them down with no risk
They are deliberately designing games to place as few expectations on the player as possible and when someone who has only experienced these new games is shown an old game without these "quality of life" features, they call it "clunky" because the game is designed to actually be played by the player.
I grew up hating white people, and the scary part is that millions of young Black men are being brainwashed into that exact same mindset today.
The education system feeds Black kids a steady diet of historical resentment until their undeveloped brains start picturing every single white person as the enemy.
Blaming the white man for modern community struggles is a trap that keeps people broke and angry.
Every other game announcement is a remake. Nothing new is being built anymore. We're living in a culture so exhausted it can only cannibalize its own past
Nostalgia isn't a celebration of greatness it's a symptom of decay. An industry that lives in the past has no future