Dark Souls Is the Ultimate Game of All Time? | Extra Punctuation
HTML-код
- Опубликовано: 22 дек 2021
- This week in Extra Punctuation, Yahtzee examines a recent frivolous award that calls Dark Souls the ultimate game of all time and then more broadly discusses the nature of these “greatest game” or “greatest console” debates.
Join RUclips Memberships and support our content for Early Access to new videos, exclusive Discord perks & more for just $2 per month ►► / @theescapist
Subscribe to Escapist Magazine! ►► bit.ly/Sub2Escapist
Want to see the next episode a week early? Check out www.escapistmagazine.com for the latest episodes of your favorite shows.
---
---
Zero Punctuation Merch Store ►►teespring.com/stores/the-esca...
Join us on Twitch ►► / the_escapist_official
Like us on Facebook ►► / escapistmag
Follow us on Twitter ►► / escapistmag
#ExtraPunctuation 
Игры
to quote Andy from The Office, “I wish there was a way to know you’re in the good old days before you’ve actually left them.”
yep, thats the best possible advice anyone could give actually - it means: Dont regret, remember the lessons of the past, but dont live just for them & try to find the bright side today. Otherwise, whats the point of living at all then?
Hate to be that guy but this is the best it has ever been in human history, assuming you are living in any developed country. Ifyou're online, you are pretty much are. We live better than Kings of even 100 years ago in almost every way, and better than them in the ways that really matter, such as healthcare.
@@D64nz Just in my lifetime, in my country, we've had covid, afghanistan, and the 2008 economy crash. Nostalgia for the 80s up through early 00s is so strong because things genuinely were better back then.
I'm part of the last generation that will remember a time when we looked to the future and saw change and prosperity instead of "these fucking people will never get vaccinated and the cost of living will never go down and there's no way we'll solve climate change before it causes the collapse of human civilization."
@@D64nz If you think you're good at running, can you show up to the Olympics when they have it and give it a shot? Can you walk up to a plane on the tarmac and buy a ticket at the steps? When the police ask for ID, can you say "no" and make it stick? How often are you respected as a free citizen who knows their own business best and how often as a penitent at the shrine of bureaucracy?
Reminds me of another thing, i don't remember where it's from where it's like "These are the best years of your life" 'but my life sucks' "And that's the best you're ever going to get."
I think using Dark Souls as framing for a discussion around the downfall of society was pretty clever lol
Love that Dark Souls can lead to discussions like "society can no longer be designed around flow of capital, corrupt governments and greedy corporations will cause the death of creativity"
Age of Fire is ending.
Will communism make video games better? You can’t say it won’t because the Soviets gave us Tetris.
No no, the death of SOCIETY, people are still, and will still be creative, its just that the current trends are pushing the world towards a collapse that will have the infrastructure for videogames be destroyed as part of the general collateral damage- and currently hinder the industry to the point that Yahtzee is worried that we can't make games better than what we have already done, other than what can improve through the technology improving.
Personally if we avoid the societal collapse, or at least it being so catastrophic as to destroy the aformentioned infrastructure permanently, then advancing tech could lead to a middle class of videogame developers appearing- just from indie groups rising up rather than from various not quite triple A developers existing while now they have been consumed and incorporated if they didn't die out. Basically as tech advances it could be easier for small developers to make more and more impressive games, so we get the vast creativity and experimentation in the indie scene built up with new tech allowing experimental works and visions to be realized, that Tripple A developers would never touch.
@@timothycarney9652 Basically, if people weren't forced to either pursue wealth or perish, they would pursue artistic goals they believed in at the pace they wanted. I think a whole lot of developers in AAA studios would much rather be working on smaller projects they loved if money was no object. And people definitely wouldn't put up with crunch, if the risk of losing their jobs didn't put their livelihoods on the line. And studios probably wouldn't release half-assed or unfinished games anymore if there were no more shareholders threatening to pull their funding if they didn't publish. It'd solve both the human rights violations on the production side and the declining product quality on the consumer side.
Every conversation leads to discussions like that because it is the beginning and ending of you people's political understanding. The average person doesn't give a shit about creativity and is fully satisfied with the current level of quality in games, which is why they are being made. The modern creativity crisis is a perfect example of the proletariat finally being catered to and the bourgeois being left behind.
"All the money that currently exists" is really an understatement when you consider one company tried to get more than that in a single lawsuit.
@@AlbertZiegler069 I don't remember exactly, but it was a music company suing someone for sharing files. The sum they demanded was 1) more than the entire music industry had made during its existence, and 2) more money than currently existed in the entire world.
@@TheRenofox HOW DID THEY THINK THEY WOULD GET THAT
@@ciphergacha9100 "...but we will graciously settle for 30% of all the money in the world, a massive savings and good deal for you, obviously"
Which company?
@@RonPaul42069 I think the story was around RIAA suing the creators of Limewire for "ALL THE MONIES(basically amounting in the Trillions, when no one had that much at the time, because it was more than the world itself had)".
We also have to consider how young of a medium gaming really is. It was arguably invented in 1950s and only started becoming available to the public in the 1970s. Which is just 50 years ago. Imagine saying that books peaked in the 1500s or cinema peaked in the 1960s , i probably think the case is same for games.
At the same time gaming has developed a lot faster compared other mediums as well. Where the time between the invention of paper and the printing press is a lot longer than the first video game to dark souls
I definitely think books and cinema have peaked. Both have gotten to the same point in their life cycles that video games have, in that the floor is so low that everyone and their dog is producing them, so it's impossible to sort the good from the bad, but the ceiling is so high that only the ones with unlimited resources can ever really compete in the mainstream.
@@QuesoCookies I don't think it's so much an issue of money, or one of technology, but a problem with culture. It can't be a coincidence that music, art, literature, cinema, and gaming have all waned greatly in average quality over the last 15-20 years. We've homogenized so much of the world that there's barely any quirky, original thought these days given one can be literally anywhere in the world but still be connected via Twitter, Insta, etc. Don't speak English/Spanish/Korean/etc? Google translate can keep you apprised of all the happenings in the world. Nearly the entire world sees the latest viral meme, breaking news, etc from the same few sources at the same time. It's not very hard to see why there isn't a more diverse artistic expression when everyone largely experiences the same things in the same ways, globally.
Like where is there actually a break from the mono-culture? China is one and while it does have some sort of inferiority complex that causes it to ape (if not outright steal) western media, technology, innovation, etc, there is still a large population that does not use VPN's in order to access western ideas and media, so I could see an explosions of new creative ideas coming out of China. Although that's assuming anyone outside of China would even know about it and/or the CCP wouldn't destroy them for being "subversive" or whatever dystopian label they'd use...
As great as the internet/social media is, it's hard to argue that it hasn't homogenized the world in a negative way and I'd wager that creativity and original thought has suffered because of it. There will be a renaissance of art and culture at some point, of course, but I don't see it happening while everyone is glued to their PC/phone/console during every free moment.
What's also interesting is the fact that games' art periods are progressing much faster. In less than 20 years we've gone from games having a linear, singular plot that usually follow your typical three act structure to games that ask a question what is a game and try to ask the player why they have to get every ending and hold onto their max revives even after the final boss. It's a little terrifying that games are in like post post post modernism from the perspective of the art world while classic museum art pieces are still arguably in the postx2 modern world.
@@mfallen6894 I don't see why the existence of a shared culture need to preclude a diversity of thought, I'm subscribed to more than 100 channels on this website and I certainly don't feel like I'm only ever running into the same ideas. I feel like i've seen lots of expansions of arts and culture from people having these screens.
What makes you feel so confident in thinking otherwise?
He does make a good point about there not being a middle-class anymore. Indie games are great, but they're always in a handful of art styles and gameplay loops. There's no way for an indie developer to make a big and massive game with crazy graphics but which also has their own unique vision worked into it. Even Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice, which wore the badge of "an AAA indie game" was still developed by a AAA developer and had all the resources of such.
It's a problem in film as well. It's a golden age of independent stuff, but also the most homogeneous age at the top.
Ninja Theory were independent when they made Hellblade. They just got bought out by Microsoft after that.
I guess that's how most studios make the jump from indie to AAA though, i.e. make a big game and get taken over.
@@Matt__B didn't they make the devil may cry reboot? I'm pretty sure that DMC came out before Hellblade.
@@nevermoire2020 Yes, they did, but where DMC was bankrolled by Capcom, Hellblade was self-funded by the studio hence they could call it an indie game.
By and large, it's the publishers that control the purse strings for most games and the developers get very little control on where the money gets spent. That's where most of the stifling effect of the AAA industry comes from, and Ninja Theory managed to avoid that, at least for one game.
Subnautica seems to have been moving at a great pace. Play dead for their internal problems is amazing.
Interestingly, I was just having this thought a couple of weeks ago. Not this exact thought, but about the PS2 Era being so experimental due to not demanding such ridiculous returns that whether or not a game did well wasn't dictated by if they sold 10 million copies. I was explaining my thoughts on why Shadow of the Colossus probably would never be made today because a studio with enough money to make it would never risk that money on a 5 hour game with 16 enemies and no voice acting. No matter how many people love it for what it is now, if SotC fell out of our collective minds and a 60-70 game dropped right now with those exact specifications, it would get destroyed for not being prettier, not having a base building mechanic, no skill trees, no other characters to talk to, no regular enemies to fight, and no multi-player. I feel that's basically because we have so many games that shift the bar and expectations for what games should be like due to what the money has provided before.
You're damn right about that, however, since games with big budgets like Cyberpunk 2077, Far Cry 6 and Battlefield 2042 have fallen through the cracks, maybe a resurgence of games similar to SotC might be greenlit out of curiosity or desperation.
its funny to think that SotC with base building, regular enemies, and multiplayer is basically valheim.
That's what I went through playing SotC for the first time back in the day..... it's funny, cuz while if that happened today, I'd probably have deleted it from my hard drive, back then I just biked to and from the Play N Trade. So I just played it, and eventually those feelings went away entirely. Slowly replaced by feelings of wonder, sorrow, and joy.
Yeah today's "gamers" dont like the games that do that very much. Looking at the number of sales Call of Duty 21 and Halo 8 get is simply depressing.
I agree with your point in theory however I might have to actually take the opposite approach. If SotC dropped today I think it’s staunch opposition to any of the games we’re used to would help it to stand out more. And not to be a gatekeeper of anything but SotC is clearly thematic in its presentation and anyone that “gets it” would champion it into even higher popularity. Perhaps that’s me being optimistic but I would venture to guess that in a worst case scenario the discourse around it would be more similar to something like The Last of Us 2 where some players felt it was a waste of money and others thought it was deep. I would also highlight Breath of the Wild which I don’t think is irrelevant here despite being Nintendos special brand of a triple A title. The thing about BOTW is that before release when fans were analyzing trailers frame by frame there was a lot of talk and hype around the possibility that the divine beasts would be similar to the colossi from SotC. Now obviously in a world where SotC never got made, that hype would not exist but the impact of such a dramatically different kind of game was what that hype was really about. Even with BOTW ‘s divine beasts being nothing like SotC, the shake ups from both traditional zelda games and the open world genre as a whole was what made it the juggernaut that it is at least sales wise. I agree that major developers and studios would likely not greenlight SotC in todays market but I think that it would still do well if someone did. The sad part is that now after typing that all out I realize that it doesn’t matter all too much if the game could do well or not in today’s market because as you said it likely would never get greenlit and that indeed is a very sad point. I will hope instead for a gaming renaissance in which creativity and risk taking is once again rewarded.
“Hype becomes Hyperbole.”
I was thinking about how I was going to steal that quote the moment you asked if I liked it. Well done!
Yahtzee, this year you played a game about moving out, “Unpacking”, and that was its gameplay loop. Then there came out another game, which uses your webcam, called "Before Your Eyes" which changes scenery every time you blink (a little commentary on missing out on life). What I think has happened is that the mighty discovery algorithm has plateaued and failed to deliver creatively-packed games to the top of the queue. I don't think creativity can ever peak, but its accessibility to the AA and AAA markets is a difficult step up.
oooo I like this. 👍
edit: I don't know what I liked before because the top comment was edited and changed
Before Your Eyes is probably my game of the year. it is so wonderfully designed and the gameplay + narrative do a phenomenal job of reinforcing each other. it doesn't need vast worlds or spectacle, it knows where to end things off. I haven't gotten into Unpacking yet, but I've got it sitting on my hard drive
good synopsis of the problem.
He has, he talked about it on a stream. Both of those games in fact. He liked them both as well.
Big agree.
I feel like outer wilds and vr proved to me that gaming still has more to show, it just takes time to get something weird and creative to be given the success it deserves
Which is probably why Outer Wilds IN vr was such a great experience
The best antidote to this for me personally has been spending fair amounts of time going digging for games that I wouldn't have found otherwise; I feel like maybe a culture of doing that would help lessen the burden on developers.
Out of curiosity how do you go about doing that? Just pick a random tag on steam and play the 27th game you see?
I play a lot of ps4, and I love using the online store to find compelling titles from lesser-known and/or smaller developers. I've come across some fantastic games that way. I will of course use online reviews to help guide my purchasing decisions.
@@Anonymos185 For me, I do it old school. I'm part of a 'video game book club' meetup and we swap favorites and hidden gems.
@@Bustermachine that sounds fantastic, people should do this more. I've been getting into playing more obscure indie games lately for inspiration and it's very interesting to play games that aren't always amazing, but still offer something entirely new and different, or do some one very specific thing incredibly well.
I recently found Dark Messiah this way. Had no idea this game existed until I got bored and started watching reviews for obscure games on RUclips
Well. Didn’t expect a point about the end of profits as a concept and the need for a different driving force for society as a whole but I am HERE for it.
Wanna go first and give us all your best alternative?
@@SapSapirot instead of production and innovation of goods and services for profit we shift to a needs based socioeconomic formula.
@@Luckytrapt “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”. Yeah the last time someone tried that idea didn’t work too well.
@@thisismyyoutubecommentacco6302 Chile seems pretty happy with it's decision. Amazingly, democracies tend to serve the people better than dictatorships do. We'll see if the US hates democracy as much as it has in the past.
Socialism ftw. If we fight for it, it's not just possible. It's inevitable.
I remember Yahtzee saying in his Fallout 76 review that he wasn't worried about the future of the interactive arts "in this era of AAA being a constant stream of soulless, exploitative knockoffs". Saying that it's just a phase and that the only way to guarantee success is with good, well-made games. I wonder if he's had a change of mind or something, because this kind of sounds like the total opposite of that idea.
As for whether or not video games have peaked... I feel like we've certainly reached a point where we can realise most artistic visions with the technology of today, unhampered by hardware limitations, but I don't think it makes sense to say we've peaked. Plateaued, maybe, but new ideas will always keep coming. There's just so many variables when it comes to "creating a thing", if that makes any sense. Who knows though, maybe this video and its comments will be quoted 30 years from now like we're now quoting that one old Alien game review that criticised the now standard dual analog control layout and we'll all feel mighty silly.
I just checked and Fallout 76 was three years ago, which is surely enough time for Yahtzee to change his mind, but wow, I can't believe it's been 3 years already lol
I don't think so, necessarily, as much as either he thinks he won't see the next leap forward per se, as a professional critic anyway, or, and I think this is perhaps more true, that he's just fully entertaining the idea and not letting his "I think this is just a phase" opinion taint the thought exercise
I think the issue here isn't that creative, enjoyable, well crafted and alternative takes on what a video game should be is over (as long as any free thinking game developer is permitted to work/live that won't ever be true), but just that you can't actually find such a thing anymore (which leads to that dev working in the soul crushing grind of AAA bollocks so they can eat, which reduces the quantity of good work they can manage) - in the PS2, N64 type era any game at all was part of a relatively small total pool of games, and anything unique stood out for being so. Now there is all of Yahtzee's amusing names and their assosicated AAA game types being reskined, rereleased or just slightly iterated to be Ass Creed 8million often at a prodigious rate for each franchise (despite them all being damn nearly the same as each other anyway) and several billion cheap and shoddy assest flipping indy 'games' that are not really games at all drowning out anything actually worth playing from being discovered.
@@Rndm9 Good lord, 3 years already? How time flies. _Sometimes I wish it would slow down a bit._ You're right though, a lot can happen in 3 years.
I'm inclined to still agree with what he said in that old review, however. The alternative is, to me at least, just too pessimistic a concept to worry yourself with.
On the other hand, it's never a good idea to stick your head in the sand and pretend it's not happening, so I guess, funnily enough, my conlusion remains: "I haven't a bloody clue m8".
Have you seen how much _worse_ things have gotten since he said that?! Now we're having to deal with _fucking NFTs!_
While I definitely do understand Yahtzee's point about there being no "middle class" in the gaming industry right now, I do feel like the indie gaming scene is really thriving in recent years. Maybe it's just that I've become more attuned to it, but quite a few of my favorite gaming experiences of the last several years came from indies or smaller studios (granted, some also came from obscenely well-funded AAA studios as well).
@loadsofbuts last thing that I remember playing as a AA game was Starwars Squadrons but that was on sufferance, because EA was still in the kennel for barfing battlefront II onto Disney's parlor rug. Paradox and other smaller publishers are out making midsized games there but they are for more specialized genera like the simulators and the strategy games
@@suzumes6738 The recent Necromunda bounty hunter is a pretty decent example of AA
Yeah thats true, I just think that it is early hard for any random person who isn't extremely driven (along with super intelligent and/or naturally talented) to become a successful indie game dev unless they have tons of money to throw at it. Ofc we shouldn't praise a game if it's not good, but I just think that the problem is that game either blow up success or just get swept under the rug and that there's not much middle ground.
@@samgomez9942 to be fair, it's hard for someone who doesn't have those qualifications you mentioned to really succeed in ANY industry. I don't just mean succeed as in "able to eke out a living". I mean REALLY succeed.
@@Highlander77 Yeah you're right, lol I spent forever trying to word that comment differently but gave up after retyping 40 times. But yeah idk, I guess what I'm saying is that I feel like unless you're like the very best at what you do, your game isn't gonna get much attention. Which is good in a way since that means there's so much competition, but I'm saying I feel like you could make a lot of good games and not succeed as a game dev because only the most insanely great stuff is talked about, Hollow Knight, Hotline Miami, Undertale, cuphead, etc. Which makes sense but I guess I'm just saying I wish small devs got some more attention without having to release a historical earthshattering game. Even though I adore those games, I still think it would be cool if some smaller games and smaller devices got some attention instead of 99% of attention going to a few top tier indie games as well as all the crappy AAAs (not to say there aren't good AAA games like stuff from naughty dog, Rockstar, Nintendo, fromsoftware, etc.
As you said though I guess thats the issue with every industry. And I know some people wouldn't even consider it an issue but I just hate thinking about how many amazing indie games there are out there that I haven't heard of because it wasn't the best game ever. Idk, sorry for rambling so long, I'm tired so don't judge me. But yeah lol idk
Based Yatzee just explained alienation and the tendency for the rate of profit from capital to fall and ya'll didn't even notice.
I think its a lot more likely games are just at a point of cultural shift, like what happened with movies. I'm kinda surprised it didn't get mentioned here since he brought the comparison up in a different extra punctuation (the open world one maybe) about needing to shift from creating novelty through funneling money into larger and larger products instead creating it with a vision from an auteur director.
I think DS is less of an "ultimate" and more of a "first". "First" to to be a true showcase of the maturation of the industry. Im not a colossal film buff, but im pretty sure people are still asking whether Citizen Kane was the greatest movie of all time. Amazing movies have still come out since then, but I think Citizen Kane is and always be a representation of film at its "best". I think Dark Souls will in a way take that mantle for games. It really isn't the end all be all, but its a watershed moment in "this is what games are capable of". Note now the big stuff coming out is mass appeal marvel movies, but theres still your autuer directors making amazing things.
As for the more dystopian type stuff, I really think it can be boiled down more simply to the tragic but true idea, breadth appeal will always go further than depth appeal. Something that just barely gets someone to spend the 60 dollars or price of a movie ticket but gets millions upon millions of people to do that is just going to have more traction than something that goes to deeply appeal to a smaller swathe of people. Don't have to look hard to see this in action. Even the whole souls series which is popular enough to break out of its niche (i think its gotten popular enough to break out of its niche, but I still think action games of its difficulty are still a niche) when it sold at its absolute fastest (Dark Souls 3), broke about 10 million copies in its initial sales. Most were less than 5 mil at release. By comparison fifa games get churned out every year with low effort and sell WELL OVER ten million copies EVERY TIME. GTA V, which is good, but nobody is asking if its the best game ever, has sold over 150 MILLION copies at this point (google that shit its real and insane). These games arent "the best" but theres just a massive amount of people whi think theyre "ok enough to buy"
So i dont think games have peaked, and but i dont think were going to get a lot of exciting new stuff in the near future. The real question is, when will the industry reach the point where independent directors can thrive enough to consistently make new projects? Breakout indie games arent one and done. Anything tobie fox makes ill probably at least try. I think stuff like that snowballs. The more people find breakout directors, the more they want to find them, the more are found, the more get encouraged by that success and throw their hat into the ring.
I like this post. I makes me think of the recent Marvel movies. To be fair, there is franchise fatigue with super hero movies nowadays, however, something like Thor Ragnorok vs Guardians of the Galaxy are very distinct and yet are still able to be made with great success. Chances were taken by the higher-ups at Disney to trust these directors’ visions. We need to see that same mindset enter into the gaming sphere.
This is why I appreciate AAA developers that are willing to take chances. Deathloop, for better for worse, was a fairly large gamble and an important milestone in AAA gaming. It’s a huge developer essentially taking what has been a traditionally indie design (roguelike) and giving it a AAA coat of paint and they were ultimately successful, albeit critically (commercially, well we’ll see). Some have hoped that perhaps, in a weird sort of way, that more obscure developers being purchased by Microsoft and Microsoft requiring a whole slew of content for their Game Pass service may yield more Double-A titles from notable, experimental developers like Compulsion and Double Fine.
Citizen Kane was an overrated film at best. No, I don't think it's the greatest film ever made, because there are hundreds if not thousands of others far more deserving of that title.
I would even say most people don't want new experiences, they don't want to learn, feel discomfort trying something new, feel the fear of the unknown, feel like they changed as a person because something new came along and changed the way they thought forever, risk what others think of you by trying something that isn't popular and pre approved by peers. They like being the same old self, comfortable doing the same old thing, unchallenged and believing they are confident because they are skilled in what they already know, doing what the media and their friends tell them to do, never having to question themselves or the world around them.
I personally wouldn't say anything is "the ultimate thing of thing ever" but i would say that Dark Souls definately is one of the most important milestones in gaming and design history as it both created a genre of it's own and was immensely influential to many other titles with it's mechanics, level design, difficulty, lore and the story-telling etc.
To be honest I think Dark Souls was the kick in the teeth the industry needs to be reminded.
Video Games are games, they need challenge, they need the player to engage. Theres nothing wrong with some more cinematic visuals but if thats your main focus, then you aren't designing a game, thats a movie and the watcher is play Simon Says while watching.
@@williamaldred335 Hey video game elitist and likely middle schooler, some people simply don't have enough time to sit down and grind the same boss over and over y'know? We got jobs, kids to take care of and other obligations that are much larger than just homework. Thus, it is perfectly understandable for some people to not want to work for their entertainment, it is understandable for people to want to click a button and have their character do something cool instead of needing to read wikis and watch RUclips guides only for their character to get smashed in 2 hits anyway and then have idiot toddlers to send death threats because someone couldn't get into anal fissures the game
Though if we’re going to praise dark souls for that, shouldn’t we also be doing it for demons souls since it’s the framework dark souls is based off of? I just kinda think that it’s really demeaning to have dark souls 1 be the “gold standard” when later soulsdornes really improved on what’s there
@@MrTrombonebandgeek You're right to a degree but in order to count something as an important milestone it should, apart from being innovative and great design wise, be a very popular entry cause if it isn't then it's not very influential on other games. Demon's Souls was a very innovative game but it didn't gain half the popularity Dark Souls managed to get and that's why Dark Souls is so important cause it was both innovative and almost universally praised.
@@janugur2241 DS1 is largely clunky and was later innovated on by later souls games. If anything a lot of games are considered “innovative and almost universally well praised” but were not considered greatest game of all time? What about super Mario 64 or Halo: Combat Evolved or mirrors edge?
The trouble with this discussion is that you can look to the past and see how things were different then, but you can't look to the future to see how things will be different. The PS2 era may be the peak of innovation... from the perspective of now, but you can't see what peaks might lie ahead. We're already nearing the limit of perceptible differences in graphical fidelity, so it wouldn't be surprising if some time soon the indie devs will be able to use new tools to create something that doesn't look much different technologically from a far more expensive AAA game, and at that point the status quo must crash, as the expensive "polish" is all AAA gaming really has going for it now, aside from a bottomless marketing budget.
If you look to other creative mediums, you see peaks and troughs of innovation. From a period of innovation, you get great successes, then people chase after that success, plummeting innovation. But humans crave new things, and imitation and chasers can only go so far in recreating the original successes, and eventually innovation is forced to happen again. The only real difference we have in gaming is its attachment to rapidly developing technology, but before long that will stop being a notable factor and gaming too will settle into the cycle.
Compelling points.
I like that the video offers the perspective of 'to this point' in time.
I like how this video turned into Yahtzee implying the need for a post scarcity post capitalism Star Trek-ish society. I think it feels like progress has slowed a lot because everything is so decentralized. Now maybe you've got 10 indie games that come out by really talented individuals that are just decent to good games, but maybe back in PS2 era you'd have had those 10 individual devs working together on one game that might have turned out amazing. I think Mike Bithell talked on one of the Play Watch Listen podcasts about how either super tiny or super massive budgets will get approved, but anything in the middle is a tough sell for achieving funding, and maybe that's the place where the ultra creative but high quality games would be living.
edit: That being said, some of my favorite gaming experiences of all time have been very recent. Nier Automata, Outer Wilds, Breath of the Wild, Return of the Obra Dinn, Ori and the Will of Wisps, and Hades are all extremely new games. Not sure any of them massively reinvent the wheel but they are still my favorites.
Yeah, Yahtzee's turning anti-cap, and it's wonderful to see.
@@cereal_chick2515 yet, he lives out of things only capitalism would allow the creation of, funny
@@DouglasDoMetal How about we strive to improve on capitalism instead of just stating: "Oh, but it is so much better than the others"? Maybe that is the idea that he is poking at.
@@cereal_chick2515 Anti-corp and anti-cap are not the same thing.
You can be against blind and reckless profit-hounding by committees without necessarily being against the idea of people owning and controlling capital.
@@DouglasDoMetal Yo, why are cavemen doing paintings on their caves without any monetary incentive?????
I certainly do agree that the PS2 had the best combination of hardware strength versus development accessibility, being powerful enough to make games look good, handle reasonably large areas, etc, but not yet so powerful it took a small army to use that potential. It probably also existed at the optimal combination of collective industry maturity and competence versus profit expectations as well.
What I disagree with is all the doom and gloom about ever increasing hardware and its ever increasing, ever more limiting budget requirements. Yes, making the fanciest possible PS5 game is harder than the fanciest possible PS4 game was in its day, no argument there. And yes, I agree that stifles creativity and risk taking. But at the same time, operating behind the curve gets ever easier. Development software gets better and better at all levels, and the more powerful the hardware gets, the less efficient you need to be with it to get yesteryear's 100% optimized results. In other words, it's less difficult to make a PS2-level game today than it was in the PS2's day. Same goes for PS3 or PS4 or even NES-style games for that matter. Ballooning development requirements may indeed be a problem if you're the cutting edge or nothing type, but at the same time, the march of technology means that what can be done at EVERY level of developer capability keeps increasing, from AAA behemoths to one single auteur. And that seems like a good thing to me. Though I do wish that those who want to make 2D pixel games would shoot for late SNES visuals at the lowest, instead of doing the NES look. I still love that 16-bit pixel aesthetic, but going any lower is a completely different story.
Sure its “posible” but nobody does nor wants to do it.
I don't think that Yahtzee was arguing that it wasn't technically possible to make these games, but instead that the general audience is no longer interested in them due to the games with bigger budget having better graphical fidelity/scale.
However, like you said, every level of technology becomes progressively more accessible, and this accessibility doesn't have the same limitations as the progress of technology itself. This means that theoretically we can reach a point where what's extremely accessible is nearly at the same level of fidelity as the best technology can achieve, meaning small scale studios can one day compete with the big corporate monstrosities in terms of graphical fidelity/bombast. I think there's hope in that.
Another area that the video brought up is advertising; which has very little to do with operating creatively and effectively within a given technical space, and which has quite a lot to with available capital.
We could offer, too, that advertising tends to benefit more those projects that emphasize advanced graphics than it tends to benefit projects with throwback graphics.
The biggest problem in gaming industry (including indi ofc) IMO is lack of technological aptitude of people involved. Computer technologies have evolved far too rapidly for people to adapt. Earlier game designers and coders had to use all the tricks in their books to squeeze the every drop of processing power or even overtake memory limitations. 8-bit era is very famous for the latter one. But what we have now? Unity and Unreal Engine, and ever evolving technology actually blocked that creative thinking. You may say that it allowed for more creative design, but nope. Steam and Google search engine tend to show you things similar to what you've already seen, almost devoiding you completely from the new innovative creations. Exactly because they're innovative and aren't "like those games you've played before". So what we have now? Buggy, crappy looking games, that look like a poorly made clones of games I've played on PS1, with better resolution (but not the model design), which still require a PC or a console that will only be available 2 years after the game release for a comfortable level of playing. Oh... And yea, we also have that AAA companies. And they keep making the same one game they've made 20 years ago, which was popular. So they remake it, remaster it, release GotY, refresh it with DLCs, re-, re-, re-... reuse it. And I'm not a rabbit to eat the same carrot 3 times, and ignore that it became soft and acquired weird brownish colour.
The best way to approach this is to tell people, "This is one of the best games I've ever played". Emphasis on "ONE OF". That way, they know you really like it and move on. Those words are the difference between a peaceful life and a stupid argument
More like it has plateaued I think. At least as far as the graphics focus goes, since it's outpacing workflow evolution. If the gap manages to close, other areas will hopefully get more of a focus.
Also important to consider that preferences change over time. What may be considered a peak game now, may not hold up in the future. Assuming of course that video games as a medium continue.
videogames will exist long after us, it's too profitable as escapism
im so glad you concluded like you did because when you said "There's just a lack of social mobility in games" I shot up from my chair like "HUh! How indicative!!"
If anything, this makes a creative's job more important. There are little Gabe Newells and Kojimas growing up, learning how to create the next big step artistically. VR is something AAA and Indies seem to stand shoulder to shoulder on.
Didn't think he'd cover this... but he did make it thoughtful.
This is good framing for the points that he made here. Games as an Ultimate in the collective now, and a look forward. As far as the downfall of society, and my ability to seek entertainment, I'm rather hoping to be on my way out as well by then. Just need to have a dozen good titles come out in the next 20 years.
I've got such a backlog that if no more games came out I'd still have enough to keep me busy for the rest of my life. 😅
@@reizak8966 Same bro
@@reizak8966 For sure, and across multiple platforms for me at this point.
I feel like Dark Souls isn't so much "The Ultimate Game" as it is "the Ultimate Jumping-Point". Dark Souls is definitely onto a good loop of game design, the only problem is fine tuning it. How can we make it better? How could we do it differently?
But you could say that of so many things: Tony Hawk, Super Smash Bros, Doom 2016, Fifa, Resident Evil 4, Civilization, Hitman, Ratchet & Clank, Rome Total War...
I dunno, make an AI for enemies that actually works, lol.
If you say that then isn't the immidate thought that Demon's Souls was the innovator and dark souls just refined some of its ideas?
solid comment. tweaking the nobs can be difficult. you either make an exact copy or go to far. even fromsoft was incapable of (or unwilling to) recreating the magic of dark souls.
@@boltdm8238 my greatest fear for elden ring. an area that realy deserves attention
4:22
Folks used to say we've discovered almost all technology by the end of the 19th century.
Just because we can't imagine it right now, doesn't mean it'll never come to exist and there will always be peaks and troughs as in any kind of artistic medium.
True, but every technology has kind of a "soft-cap" on how advanced it can get.
Like as an example, guns. Sure, we've come up with better munitions, more techy addons, and fancier materials, but there's a reason that the USA's armaments are still mostly modeled off the old Nazi Germany designs as a base template in spite of all the additions: Because we'd already more or less reached the limits of what can be done in raw power output/hardware with "A gun" during the 1940's, and everything since has been trying to make it more cost-effective or more efficient in other ways.
Similarly with videogames, we've pushed the hardware to such a limit that you can basically make games look like anything you want. Like sure we CAN improve the graphics, but improvements would be a colossal waste because we can already amp the resolution beyond anything a human eye can even visually process without getting sensory overload. Like we've crossed the line where improving it any further would be anything but a waste of time on human consumers. Plateau effect.
Unless games improve in other ways, we Have functionally hit the hardware limits of these sorts of advancements as anything useful to us years ago.
@@patchwurk6652 the advancement of the Rail Gun would like to disagree with you.
@@WeinerTouchy Lol, you mean the gun that doesn't work planetside? I'm sure It'd Like to disagree with me an awful lot once it can fire more than one shot without breaking its own firing mechanisms from friction.
Railguns are glorious, but not terribly useful while your On the planet due to atmospheric friction. The air slows an otherwise psychotically cast round down to the acceptable planetary speed limits, and all we get out of it is a fireball and a ruined gun barrel due to the friction. I would still posit that we've reached a softcap limit on exactly how badass our Terrestrial hardware can get. Like the limits of how far you can modify a gun to make it hit harder without wildly changing what a Gun is.
Like I'll totally agree with you that we can totally hit things harder in theory. But in the Gun format (Combustion reaction firing a projectile by main kinetic force), we're hitting a wall.
@@patchwurk6652 Games are vastly more complex than firearms. A gun accelerates a projectile. That's it, simple task. A game can be so many different things, and the problem isn't that there's nowhere left to go, it's that big companies aren't trying to go anywhere. Sure graphics are hyper-realistic....in standard AAA desktop/console games, but those same games are not going to run well at those settings in VR, which is itself a fledgling technology, and suffers from mediocre pixel density even on high-end headsets. Gaming and computation have a very long way to go before it even gets close to a soft cap, there just isn't a lot of push for it these days.
@@RedRocky54 I feel like you somewhat misunderstood me.
Even tech has a hard limit with that shit. Seriously, we're literally at the threshold with computer hardware where, barring the invention of quantum computing as a big thing you can just buy as a private citizen, we've hit the hard limit.
On average, our technology with computers has doubled in processing speed while halving in size every 18 months-2 years since we Got computers.
However, we've already hit the threshold where we can't make those components any smaller without allowing electrons to just wander around uncontrolled (or, again, figuring out quantum computing in a big way). Like it's not a question of our tech sucking as much as "Unless we literally discover new physics or this becomes a fuck of a lot cheaper, our general computer components are about to hit a barrier."
I think dark souls is such a standout game because it sat in the middle class of games. Its treat as a triple a, but it isnt made like one, you dont play it like one, and it can do so much because it sits within it perverbial limits
I disagree with the equality part. Back then it was equally as bad a marketing war as it is now. I remember stories of how Viewtiful Joe, Fatal Frame and Killer7 would on shelves untouched while people still went more for the Medal of Honors and Call of Duty's anyway. The only game I know that broke this curse was Demons Souls, when people were seeking it out due to it's lack of copies in the West initially.
That competition has only elevated to a digital scale.
I agree, it would be like saying "It Takes Two and Untitled Goose Game are on the same level because they were both released on Steam." like no, that isn't how platforms and marketing work.
Nice bit at the end there where you gave voice to my most pressing socital fears that plauge me and make me genuinly afraid for the future. Good shit
Hell, for the dark souls series itself, it was a unique thing that had to fight tooth and nail and live on hope and prayer all those years ago to even exist. Demon souls didn’t come from an indie space but another background no clout dev team trying to play along with Triple A gaming and its narrow minded and innovation hostile ways that just wants to play copy cat.
We could be living in the timeline where the dark souls series as we know doesn’t exist because demon souls was indeed nothing more than a cheap knock off of Skyrim Sony has originally contracted and expected out of FromSoft all those years ago.
Stories like how Demon Souls was able to happen give me hope that as grim as things seem in this cursed duality of indie vs Triple A gaming, there’s still folks out there fighting to push back against corporate machinations
well spoken.
@@yellowcard8100 this didnt help: copying oblivion was sony´s, the publisher, mandate, myazaki ended up going against that.
similarly, ninja blade was ordered by microsoft if memory serves.
Well, an Oblivion knock-off, anyway, since Demon's Souls came out before Skyrim...
I swear I heard these exact same discussions in the late aughts/early tens. The indie scene was nascent (it was a big deal that Braid was on the Xbox Live store) and the recession paired with rising game costs had developers playing it safe with gritty, grey, cover-based shooters. CoD and Farmville were the biggest games and Steam was very selective with who got in; this was how Legends of Grimrock became a big financial success for the developer. Indie gaming started picking up more in the early 2010's but I would read verbatim articles to this about the lack of 'AA' games.
Kickstarter then arose on the scene and created a boom that fueled the better part of a decade for AA development. A decade later that's largely dead, and I don't know where that gap will be filled with the current model.
Personally, I think game stores need to get back to the old Steam model of not allowing every .exe that submits a form on their platform. Getting on Steam used to mean that you were going to get a windfall if your game was good because people noticed when games were added because there weren't hundreds added every week.
Ultimately the problem with this is a microsm of something that our society is learning to adapt with: the incessant flow of information. The traditional custodians of information either become increasingly irrelevant (newspapers, traditional game journalists), have made their biases so naked they alienate all but the devoted (Kotaku, FOX News), or just direct the firehose of information through their pipes (Forbes, Steam). People who forgo the traditional custodians find their own little nooks (streamers, social media political pundits) and rely on that as their filter on the hose. This can be great if you find a good filter who matches your tastes well, but it also prohibits exposure to contrary ideas, which is partially why we see such divided spaces in gaming and politics.
It's a problem that society is becoming more aware of. Hopefully a solution will be found eventually because continual fractal fragmentation is not the route for a heathy society or gaming industry.
I'd say there's actually plenty of hope for the AAA market, in that I don't think it'll ever truly stagnate. In the same way WW2 shooters fell out of fashion, I think we'll soon see the Open World Sandbox games fall out of fashion in exchange for the free to play predatory microtransaction model we've seen several games, most notably Halo Infinite, take on. While that might not be a great change, it does mean that change will happen, and as such we'll see more changes in the future. Even if it's mired in corporate sludge, art is still art, and art can never truly remain stagnate. I mean we're still seeing creative writing over three millenium since it was a thing.
I believe soceity is not hopless, and as such the art that expresses society isn't either. Maybe I'm naive, but I'll hold out hope for when the reign of Spunk Gargle Wee Wee and Jiminey Cock Throat is over, and we get the next leading genre that Yahtzee makes a silly name for.
I always discover a new game that makes me genuinely happy that video games is my hobby. Sometimes it’s multiple times a year other times it’s one. It’s usually indie but AAA can release something really good every so often. Outwilds, Celeste, BOTW, Elden Ring, XenoBlade X, and I can come up with many more. In all honesty nothing filled me with more joy than Outerwilds. So maybe it peaked with that but I still have plenty of years until I find out if that remains true.
This was the last channel I would have expected to make me question reality again, but damn do you make some good points.
I played Dark Souls for the first time this month. It took about 50 hours, then I immediatlely started Dark Souls 3. I played it for 12 hours and found myself a bit bored and burnt out, probably just from too much Dark Souls at once.
DS1 really changed the way I think about game progression, game worlds, and third person melee combat especially. There isn't much that rivals the feeling you get the first time you take the elevator down from Undead Parish and find yourself back at Firelink Shrine. It's all definitely left a lasting impact on me that not many games or other media do very often, but "Ultimate Game of All Time"? I'm not so sure. The difficulty slopes and spikes from one boss to the next are so odd that some bosses are just straight up disappointingly easy (exceptions for the final boss though, of course). The Bed of Chaos fight really tests the adage of "harsh but fair", and the whole Lost Izalith area just seems oddly unfinished and out of place in parts. The game could've of also given you SOME explaination of how things work, it took me a fair few hours before I realised why my character looked so ugly and figure out the humanity system. For me the PVP is still very laggy, whenever I'm invaded the winner is usually decided by who swings first and thus gets backstabbed. Which is usually me. But anyway that's all just my opinion :D
But thank you for reading my review of Dark Souls in a RUclips comment on a Dark Souls video :0
Dark Souls is incredible... Provided you get some external help. For a first time player that hasn't done any reading, there is absolutely a ton of total horseshit in the game. Systems are hardly explained, if at all. Hell, even accessing the DLC at all is incredibly convoluted and I don't know how you'd find it entirely on your own.
That being said, it really seems the devs intended for the game to have a community that share these things with each other. That's why you can leave messages in-game.
By the way, Lost Izalith seems unfinished because it is. The whole later half of the game was victim to time constraints, but Izalith got hit the hardest.
Geez, everyone keeps talking about how good DS is, but everytime I play it, I get bored. It's just not interesting to me. I've played games since Nintendo where games were hard because they were badly made and I still beat them. I'm just not impressed with DS presentation.
I played the shit out of Sekiro though.
I played the original Dark Souls at launch, having just gotten through the original Demon's Souls being sold to me as "the best action RPG you've never played" (2011 was a different time).
And you're absolutely right. It created a sort of high in gaming that I've been chasing ever since, and while I've enjoyed a tonne of other games in the meanwhile, nothing has quite scratched the itch in the same way as my first blind playthrough of Dark Souls back when even the wikis were still being added to every hour as people found more and more stuff. It felt the most like the Wild West of adventure. No maps, no quest markers, just you and a sword (or a halberd, as per my first playthrough) and a world that didn't give two shits if you were in it or not.
The second one didn't really scratch that itch in the same way.
I recently picked up a PS4 during the pandemic after around 5 years without a console, and went back through all the FromSoft titles I'd missed. I found DS3 to be a brilliant extension of the ideas in the first game -- the infinite loop of the world just corrupting and degrading everything. Not sure if you made it to the endgame stuff or the DLC, but it REALLY comes around full circle thematically.
Bloodborne is incredible. More streamlined and faster paced, takes the world design of DS1 and perfects it, imho. I think the more aggressive playstyle has taught me to appreciate different character builds for the Souls games as well. I would definitely want to be faster than the hefty turtle man I was when I started playing Souls.
I just finished Sekiro for the first time two nights ago and it's one of my favourite games now! It lost a bit of its magic because I played it so much later than release and so I knew basically the whole story and bosses and progression before even going into it, but the actual experience of playing it was still absolutely A+. I'll be interested to see now if I play much more aggressively in Elden Ring because of this being my most recent FromSoft experience.
Thank you for coming to my TedX talk.
just want to weigh in on first dark souls pvp. don't do pvp, it's racked to hell with bugs and exploits that a bunch of players find weird pleasure in. ds 2 and 3 have better optimized pvp. unfortunately not really a wide range of differently experienced pvpers anymore. either it's the veterans that know how to be op with all the endgame gear fighting at low levels or just newbies still figuring things out.
@@jerrodshack7610 "it really seems the devs intended for the game to have a community that share these things with each other. That's why you can leave messages in-game"
imo that's laziness. if you make a game hard, you are obligated to tell me how it works. I think doom eternal did this very well, especially when you unlock new equipment like the ice bomb and flamethrower. I think dark souls is just difficult for the sake of it and it has a cult following of people who think they are better just for having suffered through it, but I guess from soft games are just not for me. words cannot describe how not excited I am for elden ring
"There's no middle class to act as a stepping stone."
Ah time for my daily dose of capitalist dread.
*Slowly looks over at the Communist Manifesto as the Soviet national athom is quietly playing from the book's general direction*
@@nathanjereb9944 Not gonna find any "middle class" there either friendo....it was a flash in the pan in the inevitable capitalist progression
@@TheBfutgreg indeed, only pisspoor peasant class and government elite class
No you had not mentioned your new book neither hab audible and i have been waiting for that one. Thank you very much.
Definitely more of these videos please :D
It feels like we are in a quite literal dark age for videogaming considering the patterns with of no social mobility and a lack of great scale innovation waiting for a renaissance that, as a result of capitalism and not human desire for greater living, will likely never come
There hasn't been any significant paradigm shifts regarding gameplay design in decades so I feel like flat screen gaming has reached a plateau.
The stuff I've been seeing on the VR side has been a lot more interesting and experimental, although I haven't been able to play any of it.
I have had a Quest 2 for a bit & I firmly believe that it is the future of gaming. I think we've definitely started to plateau when it comes to graphics & "immersion" on the regular level so the only reasonable solution is to jump into a new space entirely & that would be VR. I love it alot & I'm very excited for it's future.
Such a great video
Merry Christmas
I was thinking something along the lines of "Man, all the titans of my youth are dying horribly as their rapacious greed destroys everything that was once good about them" and getting kinda sad and thinking that was it, this was the end of gaming.
And then I played Hades. A premise so blindingly obvious that it could have come from anywhere, yet it was so beautifully realized that no one else could have done it.
We aint at the peak yet. We havent even caught a glimpse of it.
The indie games like Hades, Hollow Knight, Cuphead, Ori 1, and many more indie games released in the last few years are THE BEST games of their type EVER. These games took inspiration from the older classic games and have evolved to give us something exceptional. So NO. Gaming has not peaked. Instead, it is getting better and better in the indie scene.
But the AAA gaming scene though... I mean, YIKES. Still, I'll argue that many Japanese and a few EU studios are still evolving and improving upon their designs and giving us more refined and different games every now and then.
BUT the biggest names that are always in the spotlight, like Activision, Ubisoft, EA, Sony and others, are more interested in safer options that'll guarantee them profits, so they seem to be unwilling to take risks. So they churn out the same old sequels with easy game journalist level gameplay, so more and more people buy them. And it is hard to blame them objectively. I don't like what they are doing to games as an art form, but it doesn't change the reality that tens and hundreds of millions of dollars are required to make these AAA games, and they wanna make as much money as possible with the minimum risk taken and people ARE buying their BS games and microtransactions so our voice doesn't matter.
The only thing I can do is just NOT buy their games and sometimes calmly express my disappointment on social media and move on.
I’m sure they’re great games (I’ve only played Cuphead) but it’s not like they really did anything new. They were inspired with what came before but did it a bit better, at best. How many have done something unique? The only one I recall off-hand is Snake Pass, a “platformer” where you control a snake to wrap and climb around objects to get to the goal. I’ve never seen anything like that before (or if it does it’s extremely rare). Metroidvanias and rogue-likes are a dime-a-dozen in the indie scene. Doesn’t make them bad, but it doesn’t counter the point that gaming has peaked. Great game exist, but it’s “easy” to refine a tried and true formula, it’s harder to push the boundaries. No one’s trying to push the boundaries in any big way. You have to dig deep to find a studio that does.
One might also argue, that indie games show an oversaturation of 'souls-like metroidvanias with platforming and chips on the side', cuz it is the "safer options that'll guarantee them profits".
@@deusexvesania1702 Out of the 4 games I mentioned only Hollow knight is a souls-like metroidvania. Ori is metroidvania mostly. Cuphead is a boss fight game with very few side scrolling levels. Hades is a Rogue-Lite. Many more amazing games like Disco-Elysium, Starve together, Valheim, Phasmophobia, Inscyption, No way out and countless more released in just last few years with completely different game design. I can keep naming different types of games here.
And they didn't have the development and advertising budget to guarantee them some sales. After the success of Hollow Knight over time, yes many indie devs are trying to make souls-like metroidvanias to explore that market but they barely ever achieve success unless they are really really good. A Mediocre and even bad AAA game with their massive advertising budget cover their costs in just pre-orders. And then these AAA shooters and sports games and Ubisoft's massive 50 -100 hr games just push micro-transactions to make even more profit.
@@mrshmuga9 The point was - Has gaming peaked? And the answer is NO. If games are improving upon their old design and getting better than it basically means gaming is improving. (at least in indie scene) Are cars getting faster and better? YES. They are improving upon their older design. They are not reinventing new design from ground up. The tone of this reply sounds harsh but it is not as it is hard to convey tone in a reply.
@@shankypanky8879 I guess it just seems less important. Is one thing a slightly better/more polished version of an older thing? You could say technically yes in some cases, but when the difference is so miniscule who cares?
If you bought the fastest, most fuel-efficient car at that time, and the next year they released one that's 0.1% more fuel-efficient, are you going to throw out your current one and sing the praises of the new one? No, because the difference is negligible to be worth caring about.
Plus it gets really subjective as to what is an "improvement". Is adding RPG stats to an action game make it better for the genre? Or is it just an interesting experiment to mix aspects of different genres?
Who would have thought a game that keeps killing you, makes you feel so alive
I don't think we're short on creativity by any means. The Yogscast did 2 events this year to show off games - their annual Jingle Jam and they did a week for Tiny Teams. In both events, they played games both big and small and I saw so many that looked amazing like I'd want to play, if only I had the money to do so.
There's so many unique takes and spins on things, and there's so many games I want to see that don't exist yet. I'd say we're stuck in the capitalistic mindset of make as much money in the world and that means we've plateaued, but if we had more opportunities to highlight small developers and their games, we'd have some more variety.
Ouch that's gotta hurt 4:48
With Elden Ring and Deltarune, I'm still hoping for the future of gaming, but yeah the list of game I hype is getting increasingly shorter every year.
Dude, what else is there to do on a post-apocalyptic hellscape other than designing the most epic games possible?
Surviving? Pfeh
I remember I saw a video on film history that had a point that could also apply to videogames, but not yet. Cinema once reached a point where the big studios where just churning out the biggest films possible, bigger scale, flashier visuals, thousands of actors on screen etc. but at one point it stopped being profitable, they realized that they had to scale down and actually make good movies that could grab people´s attention with a moderate level of flashiness and a good plot, evolving nowadays to the mainstream cinema which is sometimes till just flashiness but also very decent films. I feel like at one point videogames will reach their flashiness top, when they realize that more doesn´t equal better, and triple A devs will move towards a balance of flash and good game design again, maybe even giving a chance to people with a vision that can make their shallow GPU marketing games into actual works of art
Movies also pumped out an absolutely insane number of musicals they basically killed the genre. They were obsessed with putting the common theatre on screen that everyone already had (with the kudos and respect of the older generation) instead of exploring the unique abilities cinema could do. Funny how videogames are obsessed with making games that play like movies right now.
I'm glad your humour and wit haven't peaked, best video yet
No no, I agree, have an appreciative nod. It's not just that the ps2 was this nexus of reasonable asset quality and genre conventions being less rigidly established, but that moving on from there we've seen so few games leverage the advances in technology to do much beyond look shinier. I hate to say it, but battle royales and elaborate microtransaction pipelines seem to be the face of progress. Maybe by that metric Fortnite should be declared the *ultimate final game* when after 1000 years of live service it finally achieves sentience and flees the planet's decaying grasp to present itself, dancing, to the universe as the last remnant of humankind.
I remember in junior high having a friend who worshipped Ubisoft and felt sad when realizing he considered there could be no better game than whatever was the latest a assassins creed game. Since then I’ve seen lots of new interesting games I personally consider better and more interesting. I think we could only know which game is the best once no one would be able to make a new game. Which is pretty far from us, the technology knowledge and sharing ability of passion projects such as video games is relatively common, there is some financial incentive in it, and as long as there’s the tiniest piece of ground people would pay money for the capitalist pigs will run to squeeze it for all it can juice. Which is both good and bad, since people would be able to create with idiot producers above them. The indie scene is currently alive and well, Disco Elysium somehow gained it’s worthy recognition as an amazing work of art. I don’t think you can seal the book on video games just yet.
I found myself having the same thought the other day. I got myself a three month membership to the xbox game pass on PC and as I was browsing the library I was struck by how uninteresting it all looked. I've always been glad that I was the perfect age to grow up in the PSone / PS2 era of gaming. I've always referred to it as the golden age of gaming for all the reasons in the video. The games were so creative and interesting. It was before HD graphics and Online services ruined the games industry.
I think we peaked at the PS2. It played well with so many peripherals too. No long installations, no updates or patches, no sign-ins for most games because multiplayer usually meant couch multiplayer. A massive library, fairly durable controllers and last, but not the least, it played music and movies. Rest in peace, greatest console, even EA was enjoyed while you were around.
Has any artistic medium "peaked"? It's an interesting discussion and everyone will no doubt have their own unique answers to that question. I suppose a medium only truly peaks when there is nothing left to innovate, and we aren't there yet at least.
If we give DS this mantle of Best thing ever! we kinda decide its okay that the game in no way tells you what to do and where to go.
And that its okay to punish the player for not doing their research in the internet.
First time playing, I got lost in Tomb of Giants without warping or light source. If I died hundred times during that playthrough, 70 of those was me just falling of a cliff to darkness.
It is OK for games to not tell the player a damn thing, AND it's ok to not like that. It's NOT ok for people to tell the player that they are wrong for liking or not liking it. I don't think you should be afraid to critique what you feel was poorly done. Just remember that what you might think was the worst part someone else might think was the best part. The problem with these awards and titles are that there never will be a perfect game, one that everyone agrees is greatest, and that's ok variety is the spice of life.
That's obviously a personal opinion, but I'm absolutely okay with the game straight up not telling you some important things and having you experiment or, more likely, look it up online.
And, although as I said, it's just my opinion, it's one a lot of people share as one of the biggest game of all time, Minecraft,, basically requires you to read a wiki to understand it.
And that's not just these two games. Roguelikes full of secrets like Spelunky or Noita, ridiculously in depth simulations like Dwarf Fortress or Europa Universalis or even games with obscure and complex lore like Hollow Knight or... Dark Souls. All of these require that the player interact online and share their knowledge to really get them.
I can understand why someone would dislike that, but I also appreciate how it forces the community to come together, share info and learn from each other. It can be something that make people more invested in the experience and I think it's absurd for game devs to pretend the Internet doesn't exist and to never take advantage of it.
Now I don't think all games should drop any explanation and let you rely on a wiki, but I absolutely prefer a game that doesn't tell me everything and let me look up some stuff that one that tries to tutorialize everything and bore me to tears in the process.
And, just to be clear, although I am a fan, I don't think DS is the greatest bestest game ever and nothing comes close or that nothing can be criticized about it. This award is ridiculous, whatever game you give it to.
It IS okay that the game in no way tells you what to do and where to go. And that IS one of the reasons why DS deserves the mantle of "Best thing ever!"
How else do you define "adventure?"
as a younger person who had xbox 360 as my childhood system this really makes me envious of the past era of gaming. it also makes me glad at the future potential of gaming, see that there was a better way of doing things makes me hope and hopeful for change.
I definitely agree about the PS2. That was a glorious time for games. The PS2 was also the first non-Nintendo console I owned (I started in 1985 with the NES, just to date myself), and it sat alongside my GameCube in perfect harmony. I could enjoy the usual suspects like my Zeldas and Metroids, and also find gems like Psychonauts and Shadow of the Colossus. I'm honestly not sure how I feel about today. There's good stuff being made by developers large and small, and I'm looking forward to Breath of the Wild 2 just as much as I'm looking forward to Silksong. The new Dooms were good (and I started with those in 1993, in high school), and Elden Ring looks good. But it also seems like there's a lot more more corporate fuckery going on that I have to go out of my way to avoid. I can imagine a time in the not so distant future when the current trends of games-as-service and stuffing microtransactions into everything have crushed the joy and creativity out of it all. On the bright side (for me, anyway), I don't have a lot of time for games anymore, so even if the industry eventually becomes 99.9% bullshit and 0.1% good stuff, it will still probably exceed the time I actually have available. Finding the good stuff might get harder, but I'm not sure it was ever easy to start with.
Lots of good points here. Excited for Elden Ring at least, hopefully it keeps evolving on the gameplay of dark souls like 3 did but with more of the intricately-connected level design that made the first half of 1 so enjoyable.
Has gaming peaked? I think you could make a pretty strong argument that, in terms of striking the right balance of developer money and creativity to output a high frequency of interesting, high quality games, yes gaming has peaked. But I don't think that means that creativity itself in video games or interactive story telling as an art-form has peaked.
We tend to look to the film industry when searching for would-be analogs of our future selves in the gaming industry, and I think for better and for worse we can do the same here. Are movies 90-95% pandering, uncreative, and recycled garbage that the world would be better off without? Probably. But there are still one or two releases a year that shine through, where it's clear that the people holding the wallet have not been allowed to get in the way of the people with the vision. I think the games industry is very imminently arriving at the same future.
I see that for you in particular, who is obligated to review 52 games per year, that this is not necessarily an uplifting thought. But I still think it's an emphatic "no" to the question of whether or not video gaming as an artform has peaked. Just that the rate at which original works with enough money to stand above the crowd are released has decreased. And while we're tying things to the politico-economic structures of society, I'll point out that it's amusing that neither the full-corporate oligarch approach to art (big game developers), nor the populist grassroots approach (Steam indie whatever) seem to produce the ideal results. A pattern I see being repeated in many places lately these days.
This was a fantastic presentation.
While Yahtzee wasn't ultra fond of Doom Eternal, I think that was a shining example of how there's still untapped ground to cover for gaming. The combat is still one of THE most addicting experiences I've ever played. You can do things in that game I rarely see anywhere else. Your damage output, stunlocking, and general mobility are out of this world. It's insane.
And just as a sheer jump in quality to Doom 2016 it's worthy of praise. Combat depth and challenge, enemy variety and AI, the scale of the levels, the graphics. Eternal makes 2016 look like a tech demo. (Not to say it isn't still a blast. It is. 2016 is just more immersive and Eternal more about the raw challenge and mastery.)
Crowning a "best game ever" is completely meaningless because there's no objective way to rank games of different genres. For games with similar mechanics, you can at least make objective technical comparisons (even if prioritising them is subjective). e.g. Half-Life's shooting is a lot tighter than Fallout 3's. But how do you compare the tuning of the aim-assist in Destiny to the feel of drifting in Mario Kart or the balancing of technologies in Civilization? You can't. Any statement you make on it is meaningless.
Absolutely, you could only compare games within the same genre. Even then, there is so much blending of some genres that comparisons again become meaningless.
I think dark souls’ story is very relevant to Yahtzee’s discussion of our world’s slow decay due to the pursuit of the capitalist status quo
I totally agree about the 6th generation (Dreamcast, PS2, GameCube, and Xbox) being what I consider “gaming’s golden age.”
The PS2 had such an incredible breadth and depth of different games of varying genres and scopes (from smaller indie-level projects to mid-tier developers/publishers to the AAA) while also having just a ton of more “experimental” stuff (like Katamari Damacy, Mister Mosquito, Stretch Panic, Rez, Gitaroo Man, Chulip).
About 6:50. You are right. and, thank you.
I feel like we're hitting that point where gamers as a whole are lashing back at the scumbags that churn out soulless products constantly. Companies like Activision are being deconstructed and you see more and more people holding these guys accountable. Not enough people, but it's a start.
I wonder if this'll change games for the better where games that are more creative will be greenlit by AAA companies more often because they know nobody wants generic garbage anymore.
Companies like Activision have tons of internal problems, but those problems aren't what's making games cookie cutter. Investment needs a return, and the production costs of AAA games keep increasing, so studios are forced to keep making reliably selling products.
Dark Souls changed the way I view games. Even though I was 30 when I first played it, I had never treated a game with such care, learning each little thing about it. Even games similar, such as Super Metroid, had grabbed me, but never like Dark Souls, and later Hollow Knight, did. As to your point about games peaking, it is a valid fear. After all, even recent games are being remastered (and in the case of The Last of Us, re-remastered, much to my dismay). I'm sure people thought games had peaked at Super Metroid, and at Ocarina, and at Half-Life 2. No fear, the next Ultimate game is right around the corner!
Spoiler from the future, it's Elden Ring.
This was an amazing episode tbh. Existential, and you talk about Katamari
I appreciate your in depth thoughts... And love Existentially Challenged.
Darksouls is good game. Ultimate? That seems like reaching to me.
Combining many genres does not a better game make. I challenge that you can remove some of the elements you mentioned and the soulslike identity will still be in the game.
To me words like ultimate should only be native in twitter fights and energy drink ads. Its sad day when we grant
The Mona Lisa the Ultimate Art Award.
As for 'peak of....' there is no such a thing. Case example the ever evolving food industry.
Food industry peaked at bread.
Art never peaks, it just constantly changes. Counter cultures, new trains of thought, auteurs, new technology and tools - it’s a constant evolution with no final resting place. It’s only in the modern world in which we want to classify a game as being “the best to ever exist” - those classifications are not an intrinsic part of existence and so can be ignored at a subjective level
Damn Yahtzee out here hitting us with the philosophical gaming questions.
Underneath my TV sits a PS2. Yes, I now have to use an adapter for it to even register on the TV, and the end result is a stark reminder of how picture quality has improved over the last two decades, but this video helps prove why that generation of gaming needs to be preserved. I think the word I'm trying to find is 'concise'. There was an overabundance of movie tie-ins yes, but they didn't demand you keep playing perpetually for new cosmetics - or rather, commercially-approved mods.
I’d say minecraft tbh.
Yes, I know.
But seriously. The game can be, and has been, everything. It’s also one of the most significant and iconic games of the last 20 years. I actually haven’t met anyone who hasn’t played it or heard about it. Heck it’s even been used as a tool for education, socializing, and therapy. Minecraft can fit into every genre, for both gaming and entertainment.
My friends and I, and probably a lot of people, would agree. It's not our favourite game, but if I had to say that one video game was "the ultimate game" (without defining exactly what that means), I'd have to say Minecraft.
In terms of cultural significance, Minecraft has made more of an impact than even Fortnite, and Dark Souls is nowhere close to either of the two. Dark souls coined a genre, but Minecraft created a generation.
@@gingerinajacket8519 that’s what I said
remember kids: as a great Yahtzee once said, "A happy and educated populace runs contrary to the interest of our leaders"!
idk. being happy is definitely within their best interest, because the happer the populace, the less likely they are to revolt. the question (to them) is how to keep the people at their happiest while still exploiting them to the max.
they definitely don't want them to be educated though.
4:24 most Douglas Adams-esque line this year.
I've spent a lot more time lately playing indie horror games than AAA productions simply because they offer more of what I'm looking for in terms of the style of horror they use. Because of that, most of the services I use that are curated based on my search history are filled with various upcoming or recently published indie games. From my perspective, it's almost become its own industry next to the AAA gaming industry rather than below it
Also please keep making these videos, Yahtzee. ZP is one of the only "game reviewers" that I go searching for the moment a new game pops up, but I've always been keen on the deeper thoughts you have about games and the industry. This series feels like the closest I'll probably ever get to actually having a conversation with you about gaming and I'm down for it
Videogames set themselves apart from other "storytelling" media by their interactivity.
In that aspect, we've still got a lot of ground to cover - we've barely managed to figure out VR, which has been around since the '00s. I want to see multiplayer slapfights in VR, with full control and mobility, where I don't puke from motion sickness and don't destroy my living room.
"The peak of videogames" sound more like fear mongering then anything else. Even the oldest storytelling medium, which is literally storytelling, survives (and thrives) today through games like D&D, so what are we even talking about?
It's good to look at movies for a reference point for gaming's future I think, as they're ahead of gaming by a few years in the "eras" they've gone through. And movies are largely the same, corporate committee thinking, maximum money making things that video games are becoming more and more of.
In the movie sphere, this has largely killed that middle tier of movies, just as it has done in games, but still movies have had some great creative highlight moments come up time and time again. It seems to become rare in the larger budgets, but the small budgets eventually get a bigger one and make something genuinely innovative.
Perhaps not the best future for games, but I can't imagine games are done fighting for glory, unless the apocalypse truly does collapse it all.
The PS2 was really a wonderful, weird, and beautiful platform. Spot on, that was probably the last time gaming was really exciting and you could discover oddball titles and hidden gems with the same amount of TLC put into them as big name releases. The JRPG library alone on that system could keep you busy until doomsday.
PubG came out four years ago and revolutionized a genre. It might not happen as frequently as it used to, but it still happens.
However with thousands and thousands of games coming out every year it's just more natural for changes to come in small increments. We don't live in a world where some big new game comes out and then it takes 3-4 years before some other big game refines the idea is finally ready for release and then another 3-4 years for another game to put a twist on the concept. Everything gets iterated and refined constantly, and it's only when you go back and compare that it becomes really obvious how much things actually have changed.
Elden Ring won most anticipated game so I mean let's go gents👏
What bothers me about the praise Dark Souls get is that the second half falls off sooo hard. Its such a stark difference in quality that its weird most people ignore it and still hold it up as "omg best game ever" cause the first half experience was so strong. It's like that unfinished horse drawing.
A friend started playing Dark Souls and just talking to him about the beginning of the game I wanted to play again. Started playing with an old character, who was just after Anor Londo. 1h later I was like "yeah, this is why I don't play Dark Souls anymore".
Forgetting the title of the video, and focus on the question that is proposed in the latter half of the video. Definitely left me questioning and agreeing with some of the points being made.
FROM Software definitely created a formula that made people sit up and recognise the impact that it went on to have in the industry. I will say that those games are out there but they are definitely suffering to get recognised in an over populated market.
Tend to think that with the current gen of console and PC graphically games can look basically like whatever a dev wants them to. Now big corporations will naturally dominate the high fidelity, hyper realistic graphics, while indie devs will have pixel art/lo-fi graphics. What then makes a game 'good' or 'fun' or 'memorable' will who will have the better game. Games that people remember best are the ones with a cohesive look to them, and play like the whole dev team (whether of 1 or 100 people) were behind it. I think that will be where it goes from now. Plus the one thing the PS2 gen didn't have is now near two decades more experience in game development. Sure some companies have taken entirely the wrong lessons but it's spawned some new genres (souls like being one of them) and new devs are now trying new combos of genres, refinements and all sorts else. There is still plenty of room to grow. You'd think we'd have run out of music long ago but new stuff keeps coming out.
All this to basically say games haven't hit a peak artistically. It's just the problem with society and the endeavour for perpetual growth as Yahtzee says. Once that bubble pops and the wars end it'll basically be a blank slate
Not even mentioning Silent Hill 2 once when talking about the best game? Did you two got divorced off-screen? Did SH2 cheat on you with another, younger, internet critic?
It's easy to be down on the future, but a lot of things are actually getting better! Game development tools are being pushed towards accessibility, not just more polygons - almost every major game engine is now free to use until you're making money. Access to venues to sell games had never been more available. Yeah, the Hollywood-esque AAA titles will probably be garbage for the next forever, but I think indie games are substantially better than they've ever been.
The only sad part is there will be many people distracted by the triangle count of AAA and miss out on the good video games.
The other good news is the increasing sophistication of opensource engines
As they come up into the space they could eventually start to crop up in more indy projects which just drives their adoption and refinement
In terms of videogaming having peaked, there are as room for ideas as much as there are people, there is plenty of room for innovation with twists and reinventing, outer wilds for example is really something else, in what it is capable of and gameplay itself not being as complicated as one would expect from videogames having already peaked. The thing is, will AAA companies follow innovation or stay within the same-or-so core from what they had on ps2 and ps3? Cause clearly that hasn't happened much in years
It was like he was talking from my own mind I’ve worried about this for the last couple years. Still can’t predict anything hope is a good alternative to despair.
I've been watching Yahtzee's videos for awhile now, and while I think he brings up some salient points in this video, I would disagree that gaming has reached its ultimate "peak".
It seems to me that this industry operates waxes and wanes upon a multiple amount of peaks and valleys. History has shown us this over time.
I will open myself up for criticism here and say that we haven't even glimpsed what gaming can be in the future. As technology evolves from hand held controller based technology, we'll probably see experiences that will approach the level of sophistication of a holodeck, where the only limits will be the constraints of our own imaginations. Such a reality is probably out of reach until our great grandkids are goose stepping around to grand military ballads of our future intergalactic octopod overlords, but by then our collective perceptions of what makes a good game will have changed.
A critic in Yahtzee's position has most likely reached a high level of sophistication in their video gaming experience; to impress an individual with such an eclectic history with gaming would be an achievement indeed.
P.S. - A note to Yahtzee: would you consider reviewing " Factorio " at some point? (I feel like asking this is similar to sampling black tar heroin)
I like Dark Souls a whole lot but this obsession with saying how marvellous it is, gets kinda old. And has done for years if I be fairly honest. It has been over ten years, give it a rest!
We get it, you guys hated Demon's Souls because you had heads up asses, and regret it ever since. So pretend it never happened, and claiming Dark Souls is way different to anything that has come before or after. Most the gaming media did the same.
Acting as though Dark Souls can never find an equal is ludicrous; meanwhile casually waving away anything with similar gameplay principles, noting "it's just like Dark Souls"; whether they came years before or are in drastically different genres.
The way I looked at DeS (which I enjoyed on release) has world inspiration from Kings Field but while coming up with its own communication and multiplayer aspects the combat was inspired by a franchise this channel seems to gesture away. Even creator Miyazaki noted interviews sharing *Monster Hunter* was a huge inspiration, a franchise that has been around since 2004. And this channel seems to act as though it is difficult to grasp and esoteric. They've even on a few videos act as though guides are mandatory to enjoy MH (they are not)
The same qualities they praise Souls games, more exactly Dark Souls OG for.
Huh, I never thought about MH inspiring DS, but I can see it in the gameplay with the very slow, and heavy committal attacks (as someone looking in from the outside). I can’t say I’ve played any of the “Souls” games, so maybe they are amazing games. But I find it annoying that people act like it’s the best game ever. Same with BotW (which I did play). Especially when the majority of people who like the latter like it because they don’t like Zelda games, it’s not really like a Zelda game, and thinks Zelda games suck and needed to be… more like every other open-world RPG. It did some interesting stuff sure (how objects interacted with the environment dynamically) but most of the good parts of Zelda were ripped out. It still has Ubisoft towers in it.
@@mrshmuga9 Zelda: Breath of Wild was Nintendo trying an open world, which itself is interesting. Nintendo tend to look at games differently so I see why people praise BOTW even if I think it is a weaker entry in the franchise (I agree with the Ubisoft towers). Similar to how Splatoon is an interesting take on Arena Shooters. Difference is I really enjoy Splatoon heavily, lol.
I have no issue people loving these games at anycase. It is more the cultist ramblings going-on for a decade. We get it, Dark Souls is good. I really like the game myself. It however wasn't even the first good From Software game. So I wish they calmed down with the circle jerk.
Small group of the fandom like the Escapist act as though no other game can offer similar quality and sense of satisfaction as DkS did. Get's very annoying when I see Escapist and Yahtzee act as though it is a savour to gaming and no game is on equal footing. And have done so for a decade. It's just hotair at this point.
@@bobbymaycry9748 I guess Yahtzee is just lucky to get to play something he likes among the sea of rehashed AAA games he's forced to play year-round, lol. It's probably *his* saving grace from the AAA monotony (although how different are the DS sequels?). But ya it really comes off like someone doesn't play many games when they keep professing one game is the pinnacle of all gaming for years on end.
@@mrshmuga9 Yeah probably a different mindset for a reviewer, even if Yahtzee is more of a skit-reviewer.
@@mrshmuga9 "How different are the DS sequels?"
First game gets a lot of praise due to the connective routes that lead in all directions and be very hands off. Makes the world feel believable because Demon's Souls is more about warping between non connective areas.
The sequels did streamline going about areas, and took more of a DeS approach, to the point that it has become a little bit of a note of slander against the sequels. Dark Souls while having a good connective world is flawed in a lot of the areas with outright bad design choices, which are typically ignored out of nostalgia.
Dark Souls III is my personal favorite of the trilogy of games, it is the refined entry. DkSIII has a horrific bonfire (checkpoint) issue as they gave too many and are poorly spaced out. Everything else I feel is leagues better than DkS OG; which while I do enjoy is no means a personal favorite.
DkSIII>>>DeSR>>DkS/DeS>>>>DkSII
I have the same feeling with photography and the quest for Megapixels on a camera. From the 2000's up until 2015 or smth, every brand cared about promoting how big their sensors were. Then digital medium format came out, Phase One, Hasselblad, easily surpassing any other existing camera at that time with 80mpx and nowadays even 150mpx. The files are gigantic, you can zoom in on the smallest flake of skin without losing sharpness, and naturally alot of artists took a turn on this perversity, resorting to film (think Lomo, the indie developers of photography) and high-end scanners for something that is more respectful of the human eye's comfort of not perceiving the threat of being stabbed in the eye by the sheer amount of detail and instead appealed to the imagination. Companies reacted by making new lines of high-end retro digital cameras that had a "film" feel to them. Fujifilm, Kodak, suddenly they had camera's with built-in filters for you to provide the comfort of a film camera with their proper rolls of film, but with a digital file that had comfortable megapixel rates so you wouldn't have to compromise on either end. Eventually they gave in and stopped cancelling film, even some of them going as far as bringing back lines of cancelled film products.
I believe video games have/will do(ne) the same. Games have become stupid realistic, so much that for people like me they aren't games anymore, because I'm too busy oggling at the graphics. Yet there are moments where video games are (and they're supposed to) no longer using my suspension of disbelief to pull me into the story. Rather, they make me question if that could be real or not, or developers don't even care to make something unreal anymore because photorealism makes it look odd. People don't and shouldn't question how truthful something is when they play video games or enjoy art in general. They're supposed to be sucked into the art, get passionate, until the ride is over and only then start scrutinizing.
So have video games peaked? No. Just as far as graphics go. "Realism" has definitely peaked for a while already. Video games are already moving back to experimentation, becoming (voluntarily) low-res, reconfiguring narratives, etc. It's an organic way of pushing the boundaries of art. If not technically, it will be aesthetically. It's a careful balancing act of the two for any artist and considering gamers are growing tired of graphics, because that's what the market dictates, AAA studios will be forced to push aesthetic boundaries.
@@deanjustdean7818 But what is the point of replicating human sight in the exact amount of megapixels? There are camera's that already exceed 52 mpx, and those images are sometimes considered to be too detailed, too sharp, because it doesn't respect other properties of the human eye.
This whole debate of replicating human features always boils down to creative enterprises lacking creative vision that is far more important when it comes to creating art, than simply recreating scientific interpretation.
and you are right in the tripple A market crativity is faultering but with cd project red and from and capcom there will always be something for us i am sure
Yahtzee slowly making his way to left tube is my favourite character arc.
That's always been the case though. He may not spout political rhetoric at every odd numbered step like so many of his peers and his views are more nuanced than those of the average Twitter user but he's always been pretty far from any archetype of the dreaded "right".
Judging by his ZP videos over the years anyway. Let's not forget about him "tempting fate like he did with the President Trump joke".
I agree about the PS2 feeling like the last era where all kinds of games co-existed. The sad thing to me - and this is basically mentioned in the video - is that the big studios are only about profit, and they play it far too safe. Too many remastered games and reboots at the expense of creativity and innovation. Or even the simple questions of follow ups to Skyrim and GTAV not coming out because those studios are mired in other projects that are too lucrative to care about the next things.
And "live service" and/or multiplayer-only games are killing the industry, IMO. It's lazy and greedy to provide less to gamers for more and more (and more) money.
Great points, but I am not really worried. I myself see the PS2 of gaming for it's insane library but also feel that we will get back round to it eventually. There is more competition, more money, more demand, etc...
I think on this often -- the whole, "Has the golden age of video games already come and gone?"
The industry has certainly shifted heavily across the years. It sort of reminds me of how the Internet has changed since the 90s and early 2000s. It was such a new technology at the time that there really weren't any "rules," per se. There were no algorithms to rely on, so people just made weird shit and did whatever they felt like doing...and what came out of the era was sublime.
But as outside influence took hold -- and as entities took to task policing it -- that creative spirit was continually stifled, at least from my point of view. So now we have creators consistently guided by the "algorithm." That doesn't mean that breakout hits aren't still possible, but they seem fewer and far between.
And that's maybe how I see the video-game industry today -- some truly amazing experiences here and there, but it's just not the same as it once was.