Modern monetization is basically the Dark Side of game design. You take all the psychological tricks and tactics used in game design, and instead of using them to make games more fun, you use them to manipulate people out of their money.
@@PotatoPatatoVonSpudsworth It was nice being in the golden age of games: Nestled between the scammy monetization of quarter guzzling arcade games of old, and the scammy monetization of macro-transaction hell we live in today.
I'm usually skeptical of simple emotional arguments, but for someone with a decent moral compass and an understanding of the relevant game design principles, "don't do things that feel icky" is a good first step towards using monetization ethically.
Modern monitization is essentially the logical extension of marketing, except it's easier to collect data and faster to change tactics based on results. The same sort of soulless "It's okay if I do this, because if I didn't, somebody else would in my place" types fill the ranks. Some of them may even delude themselves into thinking they're benefiting the players. Maybe they decided against implementing some particularly vile monitization strategy and now believe that they're unsung heroes.
@@Mick0Mania As someone who grew up during the quarter-guzzling arcade years, for a while, it worked. It created a system where designers wanted to make games that people wanted to play, because everyone downstream depended on it if they were going to make a profit. But I can also remember how the games went from "you can get a good twenty minutes from a quarter, if you're good", to "seven minutes" to, "two-and-a-half, and no way you're making it any further without another credit." The fun was leeched out of playing arcade games along with the skill and sense of accomplishment. When consoles ate arcades' business, if almost felt like arcades' customers were being rescued.
The naked financialisation of most AAA games, regardless of genre, has had me give up on basically all of them. The trend of removing older games when remakes come out is just disgusting. If your remake is threatened by the availability of the original, it's a bad remake.
Yep even the highly lauded games by the community (Eg Space Marine 2, a good game that is rather light on content unless you like skins) are loaded to the gills with monetization schemes, and schemes to drive engagement (login bonuses, endless grinding, twitch drops, etc). I just want a good fun game where I don't feel like the developer/publisher doesn't constantly have their hand down my pants trying to find my wallet, or trying to normalize 10-20-30-40$ skins as being ok.
@@MrJekken I completely agree. Perhaps the most egregious example in that regard is the recent Dragon Quest 3 remake. The original is an NES game; it would have taken almost no effort to include it in the remake. Moreover, before the remake released, I was trying to find a port of the original while looking for NES games, and all I could find was a port of the 16-bit remaster, so now the game has two remakes that are more widely available than the original.
I'd go a step further and say "if your new game is threatened by the existence of any older game it's a bad game" especially considering how much processing power is available, modern tools and past lessons learned should make new titles better by default.
"They burned away their future to fuel the hype train, ran out of steam and started burning their past." This line not only goes hard, but accurately sums up a large part of my grudge against the mainstream game industry; they keep saying "The next one will be the most amazing experience, you can pre-order today for only a hundred dollars!" And it's never worth it. Bland slop narratives, repetitive gameplay, lackluster scenery full of invisible walls. No thanks, I'd rather go indie.
@@zachweyrauch2988 Exactly! * Skins? * XP boost? * 7 days early access (so you would see even MORE bugs! xD) Game on the first/second sale is less buggy and less expensive! So it's a win-win! ;-)
"Do the players like you for you, or do they just like you while you’re changing." This is brilliant. I’m all for games getting updates and becoming a better, more full version of themselves, but they need to have a self to be.
I think something that’s really caught me off guard gaming since the 90s is how often corporations are victims of their own success. Like the deluge of remasters comes in part from a resistance to invest in modern game development unless they know the formula works already. We expected big publishers with a bunch of studios to take more risks and subsidize less successful studios to cultivate them, instead they close unsuccessful studios and acquire/create new ones. We expect developers to have steady jobs with long-running studios but they cut costs by hiring cheaper contractors instead. Corporations find something that works and they keep pushing it over and over again until people hate it. Then there are the executives that get massive compensation packages (so it isn’t taxable income) while they lay off the developers that actually make games. Any developer that actually makes a breakout success risks being acquired and gutted, the big publishers feel like more of a looming threat to game development than a boon to it.
this is everywhere. There's a lot of 80s/90s/early-2000s economic theory, particularly globalism/Chicago-school/Reaganomics based, that suggested large economic actors will be more innovative because they can afford to invest in relatively "small" risks. If Visceral develops Dead Space and it flops, goodbye Visceral, goodbye Dead Space. But if EA BACKS Dead Space and it flops, that's pennies in the pocket of the publisher compared to their overall output. Like Coke testing out new drink flavors, the thought was "they can afford it, and innovation rewards the innovators, so they'll do it." Ignoring, willfully or otherwise, the plentiful counterexamples to this behavior, presumably in large part because the entire school of thought was founded and funded BY large businesses looking to statistically justify their own deregulation.
Why do you think people are playing so much DnD? Plenty of us could probably spend mild effort and make great indie games. Almost none of us have the time resources or willpower after selling ourselves to do that work, and even if we did, what's the end goal? Having your work bought out and warped into a profit machine. The good people aren't trying just the recklessly passionate.
The thing about that which grosses me out is when they functionally resurrect a studio name just to sell you something. Like, the new Metroid Prime that'll be released at some point. "Whoa! Cool! They've got Retro Studio developing it!" Is the desired response. Never mind that the key people who developed the original Prime series are long gone. Never mind that Retro have mostly worked on Donkey Kong in the intervening time. Yeah, things aren't that cut and dried and developers tend to bounce around. But the point is that the name is being sold on a false pretense. The Retro that made the Prime trilogy hasn't existed for a decade. The people don't matter. Only the brand.
It's the terrible irony: the more successful and well-moneyed a game studio becomes, the lower it sets its sights. Rather than acting with more creativity, more humanity, more scope for art and quality, they all suddenly become consumed by a drive for cut-throat competition at all costs. Money money money, growth growth growth, and do whatever shitty deed is needed to kill off rivals. It's almost like we have a culture that cannot understand noblesse oblige - especially in the context of art, leisure, human joy, and I suppose culture itself.
Listening to you keep a coherent train of thought and leading your audience to your point of view for 20 whole minutes is awe inspiring. Truly a masterclass in writing and communication
I like that nostalgia isn't disparaged as a dirty word in this. I've gotten sick of it being used as a thought-terminating clichè that more or less just means "There cannot ever exist a genuine reason to enjoy anything that is old."
If we loved something way back when, there's probably a reason. Often a valid one. Often, it still holds up today. There will be cases where we look back, cringe, and think "what did I ever see in that?" ...But also times when we go, "Yeah, the Jazz Jackrabbit soundtrack is still a parade of absolute bangers, as evidenced by the fact that people are making remixes from it to this day (or at least, not too long ago)." As long as we're aware that not everything back then was great, it's okay to say some things were.
I had recently reread a series of books that I had nostalgia for. And at least for me, I fortunately did recall the flaws I saw in it back then, and noticed new ones. But even so, I still enjoyed myself, and found a few more things to enjoy. Razbuten recently made a video talking about nostalgia. I'm someone who on average does not have nostalgia for things, I am eager for the future and wish to see things be better than what has come before. Don't get me wrong, I do have certain things that of course I am nostalgic for, but usually, unless it is something I can determinedly say I'll enjoy again, I don't tarnish those memories by re-experiencing them, I don't go for that lightning in the bottle effect. I think that this approach isn't very popular, people go at the objects of their nostalgia forgetting that whatever their object is still undoubtedly has flaws, and that their overall opinion of those flaws may have changed without their realization, and it leaves them with a messy taste in their mouth for that feeling of nostalgia that drove them to try to relive that time again. So at least for me, I don't put much stock in others nostalgia because they usually haven't considered it too much in reality.
Most of the people who say you can't enjoy something old are the types of people usually trying to sell you on something new. That's the feeling in general with gaming today. Everything is a PRODUCT now, except no one can tell you why YOU need it. And so all that's left is to repackage the stuff you did like and hopefully sell it back to you, or tell you the new thing is better than your old thing and you just don't get it.
Nostalgia isn't about enjoying old things. It's about longing. The danger is in the risk of that longing blinding you to the flaws of the object of your longing and dismissing new things which do not conform to the impossible standard set by the desire. People aren't misconstruing it when they say that it is bad. It is. But so is consuming alcohol. Turns out, harmful things can be fun. You should always be aware of the danger they present and indulge in alcohol and nostalgia responsibly.
I never realised how valuable employee retention could be for games development until you mentioned it here. You might have discussed this on a stream in detail but I might have missed it. On the top of my head I can think of many benefits: 1. You don't have to waste time and money training new devs on the game engine and tools you use 2. Even if the new devs already know about the engine and the tools, you still have to align them to your vision and practices. 3. A stable team of devs means faster turnaround times and consistently meeting deadlines, that's critical in games development. No wonder Warframe is so successful!
On the whole, the industry (and to an extent, the whole of software engineering, not just games) massively undervalues employee retention, but Bethesda Game Studios (the bit of Bethesda that made The Elder Scrolls, (non-Interplay, non-Obsidian) Fallout and Starfield) is a notable example of getting things wrong in the other direction. If you don't have *any* churn, then you don't have the experience to onboard new employees, so if you ever hire any, they're left underutilised because they don't have all the studio-specific experience, like knowledge of how to work around limitations of your internal tooling or the design principles behind the software they're tasked with improving. When people eventually retire, knowledge that only they know (because until then, it's always been faster to ask them to deal with their area of expertise than to teach someone else to do it) ends up leaving the company, too. There's also a risk that if the tenured employees used up all their good ideas on the last game, there won't be anything to make the next game innovative unless someone has new ideas, or new employees bring ideas with them. A little bit of turnover is good, but you should always be worth more to the company you're already working at than any other, as that's the company where you've got recent experience with all their internal stuff.
Ahhhhhh, but you see, there is a big, *BIG* advantage to high employee turnover: 1) Drive wages down and keep anyone from becoming an indispensably wise and experienced insider And don't let anyone tell you that's really two advantages! It's all the same thing: keep the workers fucked over so you, an extremely well-connected corporate squidperson, can keep bankrolled. Right?
19:17 Sonic the Hedgehog. With the renaissance is experiencing right now is easy to forget just how close it was to burning itself out before the Sonic movies and Sonic Frontiers relit the flame. That and the extremely relaxed relation that Sega has with fan projects. Kept the series afloat through stuff that would have and did kill many other franchises over the years.
For me it was the IDW comics that got me in. Saw a video covering the Metal Virus arc, thought "Oh wow, this looks sick", and promptly got more interested in the franchise than I had ever been before.
Tbf they did burn themselves out. Through most of the 2010s Sonic was a joke. It was only after they realized that that they loosened up a bit and started making things like Mania and Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog.
Sonic's turnaround is more than anything showing that chasing a larger audience at the expense of a core fanbase doesn't work. Throughout the 2010s we saw Sega always trying to appeal to some combination of Mario fans, people who liked the Genesis games but refused to believe anyone actually liked the 3D titles, children so young they didn't really know what quality was, game journalists who wrote obnoxious thinkpieces on how Sonic "should" work, and internet memesters who thought "your name the hedgehog" was the epitome of comedy, and it always felt like it was at the expense of their core fanbase.
I think one differentiating factor between games that do and do not have that "strict presence" is often whether they have someone in charge who has a clear vision. While this can still backfire (as in the case of Helldivers 2), it often mitigates that "uncontrolled growth" issue. Masahiro Sakurai had a video that mentions this: Game development is not a democratic process. While it's important to listen to those around you, if you don't have someone to steer the ship you find yourself going around in circles.
When I first started in sales / customer service, my first manager told me something that stuck with me. "The customer will always tell you what they need, but it won't be the same thing they say that they want. It is up to you to ask the right questions to make the sale that will make them happy."
@@benhobson3084 This is very true! I've observed this phenomenon in the game's industry myself as a developer. Players are very perceptive: they can easily recognize that something isn't fun. However, sometimes they might not use the right words or they may offer a suggestion that, if implemented, may not fit within the overall design goals. It's the game designers' jobs to take that feedback and distill it down to get to the root problem.
Nostaligia is big right now for two main reasons: reusing old ideas is cheaper than making new ideas, and as a society our present sucks so hard that we're all pining for the days when we had hope for the future. There's zero surprise that the millennial generation is being baited hard with nostalgia as they're the generation that the majority have woken up to the fact that hope for the future is a lie, or a luxury that only the born-wealthy can afford.
I wish volition had become almost a parody game company, making other "clones" of other franchises and pushing them to the absolute max insanity within the confines of the genre. Imagine an Assassin's creed trilogy clone made by volition where Adam Sandler lives long enough to fight Adam and Eve in that weird garden of Eden.
It's why I resisted using Steam for years. I still hate the fact that I can't buy physical copies of most games anymore. And it's why I always check GoG to see if a game's available there before getting it on Steam.
Here to wave the Terraria flag! Over a decade and counting of, low costs, free content updates, mod support, and positive community interaction with the industry and players. Among the best selling, highest rated games ever made and has gotten next to no awards or recognition. Relogic dosen't seem to care about anything but making thier game the best they can for everyone.
I think Old-school Runescape may be a good example of a game going downhill, becoming hated, then getting a sorta new team and a reset to earlier days where it finally shines again and becomes beloved all over again.
I feel a big part of that is that it had it’s own niche, and new-school RuneScape tried to take a filled nische instead of improving the one they already had
It's the terrible irony: the more successful and well-moneyed a game studio becomes, the lower it sets its sights. Rather than acting with more creativity, more humanity, more scope for art and quality, they all suddenly become consumed by a drive for cut-throat competition at all costs. Money money money, growth growth growth, and do whatever shitty deed is needed to kill off rivals. It's almost like we have a culture that cannot understand noblesse oblige - especially in the context of art, leisure, human joy, and I suppose culture itself.
There's something so charming about the graphics in this video. Especially with the "basicness" of the pure images versus the complexity of how they're put together to build a narrative, alongside the clear experience in the script and its delivery. It feels cosy, and such a clear marker of going fully independent! It might not be as fancy as before, but gosh darn it, it's fully _yours_ now to do with as you wish! Here's to your continued development as a fully independent video creator and a wonderful analysis-filled 2025🍻
One game always comes to mind when the topic of a game staying true to itself and not destroying itself and it's player base: Deep Rock Galactic. Rock and stone.
I kept hearing about this game whenever someone wanted to bring up a good example of an online game with battle passes. I finally managed to convince my friends to jump into it with me. Not only did they like it, they keep playing it even when I'm not available. I tried getting them into Sea of Thieves and Deadlock, and had to basically drag them in. So it was a breath of fresh air to finally land on a game that is so good that I no longer have to try and sell my friends on it. Thanks Deep Rock Galactic fans. Rock and Stone!
I've put my fair share of hours into Deep Rock Galactic, many of them playing with random people. Only once have I encountered someone engaging in trollish behavior. Feels refreshing in a multiplayer game to have such a positive community.
60% of playtime spent on games over 6 years old is a pretty wild statistic. I can guess at a number of factors that cause this, but a big one I feel is just that AAA gaming has simply gotten WORSE on almost every objective metric. The number of big-budget flops this year alone is a testament to that.
I think Live service games are the biggest reason though. Heck, it wouldn't surprise me if Fortnite *alone* was like, 10%. Especially since Steam's numbers for 2024 says 15% new releases, 47% 1-7 years old, and 37% 8+ years old. And this is going off original base game release dates, so things with big updates or DLC releases in 2024 are going to be in the other categories. Also interestingly, in 2023, it was 9% new, 52% 1-7, and 38% 8+, and in 2022 it was 17% new, 19% 1-7, and 64% 8+. Data beyond this isn't too readily available, since steam's recap feature only started in 2022.
Age of Empires 2 team has been very responsive to the community. After some great innovations/new civilizations, a sect of the community began to decree the civs were becoming overwhelming at 45 options to choose from. So the developers focused on single player campaigns, and unique scenarios for their next two DLCs, and consolidated 2 years of DLCs into the base purchase of the game. This is in addition to focusing on more patches/bug fixes for a game released over two decades ago.
You can say it. Publishers pushing for live service and monetisation is why the industry is in such a parlous state. No originality, no continuity, high staff turnover and constant mergers/demergers/acquisitions purely to push the numbers on the spreadsheet.
I have always loved your videos, your intelligence, insight into the industry, and humor go so well with your voice that is like butter. I don't know how I feel about this new visual style though. That gray is oppressive and the clipart feels like a costco brand yahtzee attempt. Still love you doing what you do, keep at it!
"Why do some live services end up succeeding? Because they make *_enough money_* to comfortably grow and sustain themselves, and that's all they could ever ask for." -Frost
Always happy to hear Warframe getting recognized for the things it does right, especially in an industry where so many studios refuse to recognize the lessons that could be learned. Looking forward to your assessment as a long-time Warframe vet.
It is a shame that while it's a game many people know about, it rarely gets actively noticed or talked about by the gaming industry at large. It's been ongoing for over a decade now, has a sizeable enough player base that on any mission worth doing you can usually get a full team quickly, and has been constantly trying to improve over the years and add new content and features. By rights, it should be one that gets a lot more attention and credit.
@@aravindpallippara1577 Could be a good time to check back in. Their new update hits today and is a big story driven one with new characters and gameplay mechanics.
I've been sick of the constant remasters and re-releases the games industry is so happy to do right now, along with all the excessive and horrible monetization. So good to see Frost do a video discussing where that came from and what should be done instead.
The game I keep returning to is Katamari Damacy. It has a tremendous sense of itself, sticks to the core loop, and (for the original game at least) doesn't overstay it's welcome. Whenever I get the itch, I can go back, play the full campaign in 15 hours or so, and put it aside for another couple of years. I think the relatively brief length actually makes the nostalgia more accessible. Occasionally I've gone back to other, bigger games but I seldom find myself wanting to invest as much time as I did the first time through; the nostalgia is satisfied before the full campaign is complete, and I find myself hitting the inevitable slow points of a game and not wanting to push through. I can't think of another PC/console game that I've returned to more than twice.
One of the games I think hits this balance of old and new really well is Monster Hunter. Every main entry has flagship monsters and/or unique gameplay mechanics that get refined in later entries while adding new and returning monsters. With the upcoming Wilds, they are the only team i feel confident in pre-ordering because I saw how they handled 4U, Generations, World, Iceborne, Rise, and Sunbreak. They all felt like complete products in the present, with aspirations for the future and dipping their toes in the past in small enough ways to make me happy to play their games during the present.
The thing I loved about Rise was that it really felt like they tweaked and fixed all the things that kind of put me off about Worlds without tossing the good ideas in the trash. Game publishers are constantly saying "we're listening and we hear you" but with Rise, it felt like they actually did.
They also really listen to player feedback, which helps a lot. The beta test for Wilds happened a bit back, and in response to player feedback they are reworking several of the weapons and adding features back in, like the bounce when performing an aerial combo with the IG. This is just a couple of months before launch, and they apparently told press that they gave a more recent preview to that they shouldn't use a couple of the weapons in said preview, because they're reworking them quite a bit in response to feedback. It feels like so many devs really underestimate how much listening to feedback can improve a game, and get people more excited for it.
I'm playing the Legacy of Kain remakes right now. It's rough but not in a bad way, Byzantine, almost, but it also doesn't have layers of the "We have to have [X]" features piled on top of it like a modern game, it's an interesting reminder of where we came from. It's refreshing.
For a long while I thought I was slowly becoming disinterested by games, I felt the spark of joy slowly leaving each time I downloaded a new game on steam, played another freemium cashgrab, or saw the latest EA/Ubisoft releases. I had played warframe in the past, during some of its more troubling times especially, and I counted it out mentally, I would go back and play now and then but never let myself become invested in it. This latest time however its really stuck with me, in part because of its gameplay, but also between the story, the content releases, and the way the developers treat the community, I finally realized warframe was a game that respected me, respected its players, and I would argue goes out of its way to express love for its community. I feel like Ive discovered that respect is what Ive been missing from games. I thought it might have been difficulty, I thought it might have been tutorials, I thought it might have been monetization. No, what I was nostalgic for was at a young age where I was being discounted by adults around me, games had no idea who they were talking to and so they gave the same respect to everyone. Games didnt treat me like a child, they didnt treat me like an adult, they didnt treat me like a boy or a girl, they treated me like a person. Nowadays the majority of the gaming landscape treats you like a number, brainless, like a stream of water to be directed down a channel for the flow of money straight into company pockets. Im nostalgic for humanity.
For me, Oldschool Runescape is that game that has always treated me right. Thank god for the devs who made it happen in 2013 and have continued to stick to that vision.
When it comes to current live service games, I really appreciate what Helldivers 2 is like. Much like the Warframe devs you spoke about towards the end, with Arrowhead's CEO hopping fully back into the development space, he was able to help with re-applying the consistent vision they've had with the Helldivers universe. They made the commitment and have largely delivered to improve things. They still make progress month after month too - even if you don't count the update they released literally yesterday to reintroduce the Illuminate faction, they've managed to create a game that is consistently, repeatedly enjoyable, and there's not unethical pressure to spend any money beyond the price of the game itself.
Nintendo for me, specifically 3D Mario but the rule applies to all their major franchises. They only release one game every generation and make sure it has a unique selling point to keep it fresh.
8:45 God this just makes me respect Frostpunk 2 EVEN MORE. 11Bit Studios just didnt listen to their "fans" at all and they made a BLOODY MASTERCRAFT. It truly is Game of the Year🥰🥰
I've been playing Path of Exile for about 12 years now, and while GGG has made their share of mistakes I think their main positive trait is their transparency. GGG has always been very clear about their intentions for the game and the state of the game in general. This helps maintain good will with the community and helps make players, especially new ones, not feel like they got duped into a different game. I've been playing Path of Exile 2 and, while I didn't enjoy it nearly as much, this isn't because the game was different than I expected it to be. On the contrary, it's exactly what I expected it to be for years now, which is an old school Path of Exile feel, or "Ruthless" as the new game mode is. It's a true return to form for them, and it's exactly as they said it would be. I probably won't be playing it as much, but I can still appreciate what an incredible game it is.
The fucked up thing is Saints Row had the perfect set up for something crazy at the end of 4. Saints in Time. They had access to a fucking time machine. Keep the goofy powers and guns. You could've made whole games off one setting. Saints in Time: 1942. Civil War. Feudal Japan. Medieval Europe. Shit had legs, but no. "We want a return to roots!"
The new Saints Row wasn't even really a return to roots though. It got rid of a lot of the edgy humor people liked about Saints Row 2 and went too safe for "modern audiences."
@@ZeroKitsunei No it did not. There was nothing Saints Row about the new game. If anything, the new game was rooted in SR3 but without anything that made that game fun either.
Talking about Live Service games with a reasonable pace of content so you can drop it and come back as much as you want definitely made me think of Deep Rock Galactic, which has been an absolute delight of a game. No Microtransactions, they just release a new cosmetic DLC each time they make an update that you can treat like a tip jar. The grind is real, but it's fair- you can generally get something new every 2-3 missions, and you don't have to get too terribly deep into the game to feel like you've unlocked your first choice of options to make yourself stronger, and now you're collecting cool new sidegrades to experiment with. Plus it's managed to foster one of the best, friendliest, and absolutely goofiest player bases that I've ever seen. The silly space dwarf game does not want you to take it too seriously, and wants you to have fun, and that does wonders for making players actually be nice to eachother.
This guy and his cold take videos are quite possibly the most well written and insightful episodes of anything I've seen in my life. I try to never miss an upload because I can't get enough of his thoughts. Honestly and truly he is one of the best.
Deep Rock is my security blanket these days when I find myself losing a drive to game due to a number of factors. I hope they keep true to themselves and what they do/believe when it comes to making games
Despite not liking it, i respect the devs for just saying "yea no new seasons until we release rogue core" instead of splitting their attention and half-assing everything
I would take the video game hype trains back tomorrow if it meant we could get rid of the toxic social warring that happens now. A game gets announced and half the discourse is about DEI, the other half is calling that half stupid, and nobody is actually just happy about the new game.
@@multiverserift DEI is usually used as a subphrase of "woke". The two go hand in hand. And to add to the OP, but another reason it is so troublesome is that it diverts attention from what could be genuine problems with a games mechanics or narrative
@@matteste Like the new Dragon Age game. I've never played any game in the series, but it seems like the game has a lot of writing, mechanical, and tone problems that get drowned out because half of the Gamers are too busy complaining about the fact that one character is nonbinary or how they think the dialogue sounds too Twittery
Every December around Christmas season I feel a heavy nostalgia for Red Dead Redemption 2. It reminds me of back then staying with my parents, and the only responsibility I had was shoveling the tons of snow in the driveways.
I've turned to older games. 7th and 8th gen games. They feel less corporate, with more humanity, sensibility and good intentions. When a lot of people just wanted to make a kickass new game and make some money, instead of trying to make all the money and preach to you while at the same time subverting expectations and not giving you what you want.
Your videos are amazing, not only for your interesting (cold) takes, but also because as you watch them you are constantly surprised by one banger quote after another. You are truly talented
Some important life lessons are brutally hard to learn, like "don't feed the trolls" or "you can't change or fix people". Another one of those is "you can't go home again". Nostalgia is great as long as you know that things will never ever be the same again. Things change because YOU change. You live, you grow, you learn, you go through stages, and you become a different person. So no, you can't play World of Warcraft just like it was back when you were new to it because you're not new to it any more, and blaming your lack of recapturing past thrills on the devs not having every single detail exactly as you NOW remember it is foolhardy and futile and sad. The best a remaster can hope for is to appeal to who you are NOW, not who you were THEN. That version of you is gone forever and you're better off looking for the next thing you will love - just like you did when you were young.
Fighting games are a fascinating microcosm of identity, nostalgia, and change hype. Mortal Kombat as a franchise is actively choking to death on this very topic as we speak, and genre diehards often stand up tournaments for games that are done changing - they CAN go back. Fighting Games also might provide a counter-example to the "franchises don't recover after losing their way", because after 15 King of Fighters games, there have been some real gems and some real shitshows, the graph is far from a smooth curve. (Now, of course, SNK is owned by a genocidal regime, please don't give them your money)
You mentioned never seeing a game or series that started great, lost its way and became beloved again when a new team takes over. One idea comes to mind: Metroid Beloved until Other M and Federation Force, returned to previous heights with Samus Returns and especially Dread, which were handled by Mercury Stream.
I've been super impressed by Age of Wonders 4 in regards to how its worked with its player base while maintaining a good cadence of new content that is overtly from the studio rather than just bending to player whims. Good job Triumph Studios
I really enjoyed the second and third sections specifically: a presence in the present and uncontrolled growth. I played a lot of OW and OW2, finding myself unable to put into words why I've recently developed a distaste for it. Hope you're able to keep finding success, my good man.
Boils down to corporate ego. "We can't do wrong, we're multi million dollar entities! You think you know what you want, but you don't." says Blizzard balking at the mere notion of bringing back Vanilla, rose tinted nostalgia laden WoW. And oops, Vanilla WoW is a huge success. They can't fathom they're doing wrong and some random inquirers could blow their carefully calculated and strictly focus-grouped testing out of the water with something as simple as "Go back." And thus, they will either knowingly or unknowingly sabotage their own nostalgia bait, unable to help themselves, far too many cooks in the kitchen and blind to their customers desires for their own ego stroking. No, that old stuff is old. We can do better, reimagine it. Make it nicer, improve it. Where their 'improvements' are the kinds of changes that made, as an example, Vanilla WoW no longer Vanilla.
Minecraft has provided me with more entertainment than anything else in my life, from vanilla to modded. I may have my issues with Mojang Studios, but the fact that they're still chugging along providing regular content updates for free, while keeping things like MineCoins limited in nature, has cemented my respect for them. Are they perfect, no, they're a corporate entity, but I appreciate the work the team running the show continues to put in.
Volition didn't directly get shut down because of how poorly that Saints 5 did, but it might've been a big factor of why they got shut down after the Embracer deal fell through. It wouldn't make sense to close a studio right after you had them set to work under another studio, unless you've just went into a massive debt from buying up a bunch of studios.
I appreciate that there was not shade given at people who tend to like new or changing games, just that it's your preference. (And it's good to understand your preference and not shame/harass others for not sharing the same preference )
I think my biggest asset when it comes to video games, is not having much time to play them. Some months I'll have 4 or 5 hours a week, some months I won't even be able to play at all. Keeps me well stocked with games to play
I agree. Both lack of time and restraint help enjoyment immensely. Rather than jump from one game to another I can take my time and finish something I enjoy and never run out of fun.
The awful impact of drip-feed, live service games that I am beginning to notice is the negative reviews on Steam where players rage against a developer for "abandoning" the game. The game in question isn't live service and isn't abandoned, it's complete.
I'm happy with gaming for me, but then again I don't touch online gaming if I can avoid it. Civilization, Rimworld or CK3 if I feel in a quiet podcast or smalltalk with my wife mood, Rogue Trader, BG3 or cyberpunk 2077 if I wanna dissappear into a world. Total War or grand strategy if I wanna feel the rush of setting things in motion and watch them play out, as my heavy cavalry hits the enemy flank. Or just a smaller snacky indie game for something new and exciting. Like Tactical Breach Wizards, or Stray gods. Of course, a lot of these games will switch out as time goes, but there are a lot of evergreens growing in my personal gaming garden.
This is honestly the right play. Its what I've been doing almost (aside from AAA I truly can trust) for the last 10 years. I've had more gems in the indie scene for the longest time.
I'm an old "gamer" who's seen the industry and the culture do its thing over the past decade and a half. These days I don't care for gaming content on TH-cam, unless of course if it's coming from Mandalore or you. Keep up the good work, bro
I kind of suspected, or perhaps rather wanted to believe that the Warframe team were different... that they valued one another, that each team member's efforts were appreciated in ways that more traditional game-corpo cubicle-cavern setups do not. I'm thrilled to hear there's some truth to that rosy idealization. I'm sure it's not quite as simple or clear-cut as that, but there does at least seem to be an _element_ of seeing the human beings on your team, of trying to understand them, learning to work with them. And that creates value and quality _far_ beyond what a team of strangers can do. This is why the "normal" corpo approach of "treat people like coal, burn them out and then shovel the ashes out in the street, shovel in another load of fresh eager minds and repeat" is so fundamentally flawed and - quite frankly - moronic. When you keep burning through the creative minds on your project, you _continuously_ reset the overall competence level of your team to a very low value. Add to this the fact that constant layoffs (to pad those quarterly profit reports and deceive investors) will utterly ruin any semblance of team morale you may have had slowly building up, and it all comes off as incredibly short-sighted. But none of this matters to the investors, the CEOs, the boards of directors; to them, all they need the teams to do is make products that technically count as "games", and that gamers will keep buying. They dig their hooks into games media with the simple trick: "If you want early review copies, you play ball with our review guides. You say what we tell you to say, or you don't say anything until everyone's already played the game." And so the average gamer is hyped up for every release with glowing, favorable reviews that don't mention any unfortunate, irrelevant little side concerns like "the game is utterly broken" or "the game is not fun". To these people, these corporate decision-makers, the games shouldn't have to be fun, or even very good. All they need is to make us _think they will,_ just long enough to snake their fingers into our wallets and relieve us of ever more of our limited disposable income. We need to stop indulging them. All of them. With tears in my eyes, I hope to have the strength to say "we should do the same with DE, if they ever lose their way so badly that there's no hope of recovery". From what Frost reports here, it sounds like they've managed to keep their souls even with the highly sussy Leyou/Tencent buyout of their company. I guess even a corpo clock is right twice a day? Some CEO went "This seems to be working. Generating a lot of income. No need to stick our dicks in it." That, or they just didn't notice DE exists yet. Or they keep trying to interfere in decision-making, and the actual game developers who know what they're talking about are having to shut them down with relevant data, examples and reasoning every time it happens. Wouldn't surprise me if the latter was the case... if so, good work holding them off so far, and keep up the good work! Anyway, this has gotten rather long, so for anyone skipping to the end... in summary, game development should always be mindful of the many, many benefits of a positive, respectful and sustainable work environment, a stable environment where each team member is steadily accumulating skill, expertise, understanding and confidence in their field. This is how we get quality, innovation, fun, and most of the other qualities that make a game attractive to players. Short-term benefits bought with costly sacrifices, on the other hand, are what's hollowing out the heart and soul of mainstream video games. Only someone completely disconnected from reality would make those kinds of decisions. Someone rather like a corporate CEO, director, or shareholder...
DE is the modern ideal gaming company. They care about their work but are willing to adapt. They aren't afraid to do weird things. They aren't trying to min/max their quarterly profits. 20 years ago it was Blizzard which, at the time, would put off releases indefinitely and only release "when its done". I have no doubt this would sometimes hurt them in the short term, but the payoff was that they became the biggest gaming company in the world, and everyone bought everything they made with the justified assumption that it would be a masterpiece every time.
Well finally the algorithm deigned to show me where Cold Take went. Subscribed and clicked the Ringabel icon without being asked. Looking forward to future Cold Takes.
The only circumstance in which I find a new team can breath life into some other team's creative baby, is when the original creates a compelling universe with scope for many different game types but the original devs aren't interested in fleshing them out. At the simplest extreme, new teams are great for spin-off titles - but also fresh blood is good for creating games that are similar to, but subtley different in style from, the progenitor's.
I think that's an accurate description. Nostalgia is the absence of hope for a better future, so a desire to return to the past emerges. I like the idea of modern video game companies crushing people's hope for the future but figuring out they can just monetize the past, trapping people in an endless state of hopelessness and pessimism. And monetizing that. Path of Exile was one of my favorite games and you're right, their unwillingness to simplify things like the skill tree was something I loved about it. It knew what it was and held fast to their design philosophies. I do think it started to suffer from bloat over time though. Like Dark Souls in some ways I liked that it was a game that didn't want to hold my hand.
"I can't think of one that started off great, lost it's way, and then found itself again after a new team took over" might I interest you in a little Old School Runescape? It might not be 100% exactly that, but it's pretty damn close!
For me, that live service game that feels loved by its developers is The Finals. Free, faced paced shooter with innovative destructible arenas, lots of gadgets to adapt your playstyle, frequent updates to address player concerns, and actually pretty generous with the free and paid cosmetics. I enjoy playing the game just because its fun to play, no carrot on stick needed.
I see it as balance of art and commerce, where they both push and pull the other. Commerce seems to win out in the decision-making because it is quantifiable and demonstrative, leading the way when the way feels scary. The trust and communication in a work environment eases that uncertainty and encourages hesitancy and mindfulness. You explained it very clearly imo and helped bring together notions in my mind that weren't then connected. Thank you.
Thank you for your deep dives into subjects like this. I use to think I was getting to old for da vider games and movies in general, while in reality, my tastes were/are evolving. Once I understood that, I looked for different games in different genres. Now, I play a wide variety of games. I have Xbox Game Pass so, trying out new titles has never been easier for me. This helped me get off the nostalgia treadmill. I'm in my 40's and now I finally feel like I'm not chasing the my nostalgia for the 90's to late 2000's media. I'm just playing games and enjoying new experiences. GG Frost.
I actually can think of one game that lost itself, and found itself again with a new team. Runescape. After the shift from the beloved Runescape 2 to Runescape 3 and the slow but steady death of the game, the revival that came with Old School Runescape pushed it into a future that not only brought players back, but excited to see grow into what it "should have been" as it embraces a new future.
"Because it felt icky". I can imagine monetization experts across the globe shuddered in unison, feeling a disturbance in the Force.
Modern monetization is basically the Dark Side of game design. You take all the psychological tricks and tactics used in game design, and instead of using them to make games more fun, you use them to manipulate people out of their money.
@@PotatoPatatoVonSpudsworth It was nice being in the golden age of games: Nestled between the scammy monetization of quarter guzzling arcade games of old, and the scammy monetization of macro-transaction hell we live in today.
I'm usually skeptical of simple emotional arguments, but for someone with a decent moral compass and an understanding of the relevant game design principles, "don't do things that feel icky" is a good first step towards using monetization ethically.
Modern monitization is essentially the logical extension of marketing, except it's easier to collect data and faster to change tactics based on results. The same sort of soulless "It's okay if I do this, because if I didn't, somebody else would in my place" types fill the ranks. Some of them may even delude themselves into thinking they're benefiting the players. Maybe they decided against implementing some particularly vile monitization strategy and now believe that they're unsung heroes.
@@Mick0Mania As someone who grew up during the quarter-guzzling arcade years, for a while, it worked. It created a system where designers wanted to make games that people wanted to play, because everyone downstream depended on it if they were going to make a profit. But I can also remember how the games went from "you can get a good twenty minutes from a quarter, if you're good", to "seven minutes" to, "two-and-a-half, and no way you're making it any further without another credit." The fun was leeched out of playing arcade games along with the skill and sense of accomplishment. When consoles ate arcades' business, if almost felt like arcades' customers were being rescued.
"Like watching monkeys create God so they can kill him over and over again."
WOW, what a line. Great video Frost.
Yeah, this one was super solid.
The naked financialisation of most AAA games, regardless of genre, has had me give up on basically all of them. The trend of removing older games when remakes come out is just disgusting. If your remake is threatened by the availability of the original, it's a bad remake.
Yep even the highly lauded games by the community (Eg Space Marine 2, a good game that is rather light on content unless you like skins) are loaded to the gills with monetization schemes, and schemes to drive engagement (login bonuses, endless grinding, twitch drops, etc). I just want a good fun game where I don't feel like the developer/publisher doesn't constantly have their hand down my pants trying to find my wallet, or trying to normalize 10-20-30-40$ skins as being ok.
All remakes and remasters should include a copy of the originals where possible.
@@MrJekken I completely agree. Perhaps the most egregious example in that regard is the recent Dragon Quest 3 remake. The original is an NES game; it would have taken almost no effort to include it in the remake. Moreover, before the remake released, I was trying to find a port of the original while looking for NES games, and all I could find was a port of the 16-bit remaster, so now the game has two remakes that are more widely available than the original.
I'd go a step further and say "if your new game is threatened by the existence of any older game it's a bad game"
especially considering how much processing power is available, modern tools and past lessons learned should make new titles better by default.
@@ARockRaider Definitely agree there!
"They burned away their future to fuel the hype train, ran out of steam and started burning their past."
This line not only goes hard, but accurately sums up a large part of my grudge against the mainstream game industry; they keep saying "The next one will be the most amazing experience, you can pre-order today for only a hundred dollars!"
And it's never worth it. Bland slop narratives, repetitive gameplay, lackluster scenery full of invisible walls. No thanks, I'd rather go indie.
This video’s full of gems. “Newstalgia” is a great new term I’d like to incorporate into my daily life.
Here's a question. What was the best pre-order bonus you ever got? I can't even really think of one.
@@zachweyrauch2988 Exactly!
* Skins?
* XP boost?
* 7 days early access (so you would see even MORE bugs! xD)
Game on the first/second sale is less buggy and less expensive! So it's a win-win! ;-)
Thanks for including the names of the game footage. Too many other videos you need to search the comments to find out what game was at what time.
I'm sorry but I was the 70th like on your comment 😭
Tru
Agreed.
Even if they mention the name once it's not unlikely that you spaced out that moment.
@@Kannakin-x3pok?
"Do the players like you for you, or do they just like you while you’re changing."
This is brilliant. I’m all for games getting updates and becoming a better, more full version of themselves, but they need to have a self to be.
Yeah, I liked the chaos of OG 1.0 Overwatch. OVertime it grew into a sweatfest that tried the porrly emulate Esports.
I think something that’s really caught me off guard gaming since the 90s is how often corporations are victims of their own success. Like the deluge of remasters comes in part from a resistance to invest in modern game development unless they know the formula works already. We expected big publishers with a bunch of studios to take more risks and subsidize less successful studios to cultivate them, instead they close unsuccessful studios and acquire/create new ones. We expect developers to have steady jobs with long-running studios but they cut costs by hiring cheaper contractors instead. Corporations find something that works and they keep pushing it over and over again until people hate it. Then there are the executives that get massive compensation packages (so it isn’t taxable income) while they lay off the developers that actually make games. Any developer that actually makes a breakout success risks being acquired and gutted, the big publishers feel like more of a looming threat to game development than a boon to it.
Capitalism baybee
this is everywhere. There's a lot of 80s/90s/early-2000s economic theory, particularly globalism/Chicago-school/Reaganomics based, that suggested large economic actors will be more innovative because they can afford to invest in relatively "small" risks. If Visceral develops Dead Space and it flops, goodbye Visceral, goodbye Dead Space. But if EA BACKS Dead Space and it flops, that's pennies in the pocket of the publisher compared to their overall output. Like Coke testing out new drink flavors, the thought was "they can afford it, and innovation rewards the innovators, so they'll do it." Ignoring, willfully or otherwise, the plentiful counterexamples to this behavior, presumably in large part because the entire school of thought was founded and funded BY large businesses looking to statistically justify their own deregulation.
Why do you think people are playing so much DnD?
Plenty of us could probably spend mild effort and make great indie games.
Almost none of us have the time resources or willpower after selling ourselves to do that work, and even if we did, what's the end goal? Having your work bought out and warped into a profit machine.
The good people aren't trying just the recklessly passionate.
The thing about that which grosses me out is when they functionally resurrect a studio name just to sell you something.
Like, the new Metroid Prime that'll be released at some point. "Whoa! Cool! They've got Retro Studio developing it!" Is the desired response. Never mind that the key people who developed the original Prime series are long gone. Never mind that Retro have mostly worked on Donkey Kong in the intervening time. Yeah, things aren't that cut and dried and developers tend to bounce around. But the point is that the name is being sold on a false pretense. The Retro that made the Prime trilogy hasn't existed for a decade. The people don't matter. Only the brand.
It's the terrible irony: the more successful and well-moneyed a game studio becomes, the lower it sets its sights. Rather than acting with more creativity, more humanity, more scope for art and quality, they all suddenly become consumed by a drive for cut-throat competition at all costs. Money money money, growth growth growth, and do whatever shitty deed is needed to kill off rivals. It's almost like we have a culture that cannot understand noblesse oblige - especially in the context of art, leisure, human joy, and I suppose culture itself.
Listening to you keep a coherent train of thought and leading your audience to your point of view for 20 whole minutes is awe inspiring. Truly a masterclass in writing and communication
I got bored within 6 minutes. A lot of it was stuff he’s said before.
I like that nostalgia isn't disparaged as a dirty word in this.
I've gotten sick of it being used as a thought-terminating clichè that more or less just means "There cannot ever exist a genuine reason to enjoy anything that is old."
If we loved something way back when, there's probably a reason. Often a valid one. Often, it still holds up today. There will be cases where we look back, cringe, and think "what did I ever see in that?" ...But also times when we go, "Yeah, the Jazz Jackrabbit soundtrack is still a parade of absolute bangers, as evidenced by the fact that people are making remixes from it to this day (or at least, not too long ago)." As long as we're aware that not everything back then was great, it's okay to say some things were.
I had recently reread a series of books that I had nostalgia for. And at least for me, I fortunately did recall the flaws I saw in it back then, and noticed new ones. But even so, I still enjoyed myself, and found a few more things to enjoy. Razbuten recently made a video talking about nostalgia. I'm someone who on average does not have nostalgia for things, I am eager for the future and wish to see things be better than what has come before. Don't get me wrong, I do have certain things that of course I am nostalgic for, but usually, unless it is something I can determinedly say I'll enjoy again, I don't tarnish those memories by re-experiencing them, I don't go for that lightning in the bottle effect.
I think that this approach isn't very popular, people go at the objects of their nostalgia forgetting that whatever their object is still undoubtedly has flaws, and that their overall opinion of those flaws may have changed without their realization, and it leaves them with a messy taste in their mouth for that feeling of nostalgia that drove them to try to relive that time again. So at least for me, I don't put much stock in others nostalgia because they usually haven't considered it too much in reality.
Most of the people who say you can't enjoy something old are the types of people usually trying to sell you on something new. That's the feeling in general with gaming today. Everything is a PRODUCT now, except no one can tell you why YOU need it. And so all that's left is to repackage the stuff you did like and hopefully sell it back to you, or tell you the new thing is better than your old thing and you just don't get it.
Read the Ilias and the Odyssey and tell me it's bad just because it's 3000 years old.
Nostalgia isn't about enjoying old things. It's about longing. The danger is in the risk of that longing blinding you to the flaws of the object of your longing and dismissing new things which do not conform to the impossible standard set by the desire.
People aren't misconstruing it when they say that it is bad. It is. But so is consuming alcohol. Turns out, harmful things can be fun. You should always be aware of the danger they present and indulge in alcohol and nostalgia responsibly.
I never realised how valuable employee retention could be for games development until you mentioned it here. You might have discussed this on a stream in detail but I might have missed it.
On the top of my head I can think of many benefits:
1. You don't have to waste time and money training new devs on the game engine and tools you use
2. Even if the new devs already know about the engine and the tools, you still have to align them to your vision and practices.
3. A stable team of devs means faster turnaround times and consistently meeting deadlines, that's critical in games development.
No wonder Warframe is so successful!
On the whole, the industry (and to an extent, the whole of software engineering, not just games) massively undervalues employee retention, but Bethesda Game Studios (the bit of Bethesda that made The Elder Scrolls, (non-Interplay, non-Obsidian) Fallout and Starfield) is a notable example of getting things wrong in the other direction. If you don't have *any* churn, then you don't have the experience to onboard new employees, so if you ever hire any, they're left underutilised because they don't have all the studio-specific experience, like knowledge of how to work around limitations of your internal tooling or the design principles behind the software they're tasked with improving. When people eventually retire, knowledge that only they know (because until then, it's always been faster to ask them to deal with their area of expertise than to teach someone else to do it) ends up leaving the company, too. There's also a risk that if the tenured employees used up all their good ideas on the last game, there won't be anything to make the next game innovative unless someone has new ideas, or new employees bring ideas with them.
A little bit of turnover is good, but you should always be worth more to the company you're already working at than any other, as that's the company where you've got recent experience with all their internal stuff.
In his book, "the Mythical Man Month", Fred Brooks stated this idea as "adding more manpower to a late project makes it even later". Excellent book.
Ahhhhhh, but you see, there is a big, *BIG* advantage to high employee turnover:
1) Drive wages down and keep anyone from becoming an indispensably wise and experienced insider
And don't let anyone tell you that's really two advantages! It's all the same thing: keep the workers fucked over so you, an extremely well-connected corporate squidperson, can keep bankrolled. Right?
hellllzzzzz yeeeaaaaahhhh, glad to finally see the result of some great convos on Frost's twitch streams
19:17 Sonic the Hedgehog.
With the renaissance is experiencing right now is easy to forget just how close it was to burning itself out before the Sonic movies and Sonic Frontiers relit the flame.
That and the extremely relaxed relation that Sega has with fan projects.
Kept the series afloat through stuff that would have and did kill many other franchises over the years.
For me it was the IDW comics that got me in. Saw a video covering the Metal Virus arc, thought "Oh wow, this looks sick", and promptly got more interested in the franchise than I had ever been before.
The existence of "The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog" shows that Sega is willing to let devs take their IP in interesting new directions
Tbf they did burn themselves out. Through most of the 2010s Sonic was a joke. It was only after they realized that that they loosened up a bit and started making things like Mania and Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog.
@@Bishrekual Lol, yeah. People these days forget how bad the sonic games were in the Xbox 360 era.
Sonic's turnaround is more than anything showing that chasing a larger audience at the expense of a core fanbase doesn't work.
Throughout the 2010s we saw Sega always trying to appeal to some combination of Mario fans, people who liked the Genesis games but refused to believe anyone actually liked the 3D titles, children so young they didn't really know what quality was, game journalists who wrote obnoxious thinkpieces on how Sonic "should" work, and internet memesters who thought "your name the hedgehog" was the epitome of comedy, and it always felt like it was at the expense of their core fanbase.
I think one differentiating factor between games that do and do not have that "strict presence" is often whether they have someone in charge who has a clear vision. While this can still backfire (as in the case of Helldivers 2), it often mitigates that "uncontrolled growth" issue. Masahiro Sakurai had a video that mentions this: Game development is not a democratic process. While it's important to listen to those around you, if you don't have someone to steer the ship you find yourself going around in circles.
If you look at Dark and Darker, that's EXACTLY it's issue.
When I first started in sales / customer service, my first manager told me something that stuck with me. "The customer will always tell you what they need, but it won't be the same thing they say that they want. It is up to you to ask the right questions to make the sale that will make them happy."
@@benhobson3084 This is very true! I've observed this phenomenon in the game's industry myself as a developer. Players are very perceptive: they can easily recognize that something isn't fun. However, sometimes they might not use the right words or they may offer a suggestion that, if implemented, may not fit within the overall design goals. It's the game designers' jobs to take that feedback and distill it down to get to the root problem.
Nostaligia is big right now for two main reasons: reusing old ideas is cheaper than making new ideas, and as a society our present sucks so hard that we're all pining for the days when we had hope for the future. There's zero surprise that the millennial generation is being baited hard with nostalgia as they're the generation that the majority have woken up to the fact that hope for the future is a lie, or a luxury that only the born-wealthy can afford.
I wish volition had become almost a parody game company, making other "clones" of other franchises and pushing them to the absolute max insanity within the confines of the genre. Imagine an Assassin's creed trilogy clone made by volition where Adam Sandler lives long enough to fight Adam and Eve in that weird garden of Eden.
Put him a loli maid outfit, a blindfold and a katana and it becomes a Nier Automata parody.
This is why I keep physical media. I want to walk down memory lane, I'll boot an old console and take a stroll.
It's why I resisted using Steam for years. I still hate the fact that I can't buy physical copies of most games anymore. And it's why I always check GoG to see if a game's available there before getting it on Steam.
Here to wave the Terraria flag! Over a decade and counting of, low costs, free content updates, mod support, and positive community interaction with the industry and players. Among the best selling, highest rated games ever made and has gotten next to no awards or recognition. Relogic dosen't seem to care about anything but making thier game the best they can for everyone.
Low costs also applies to the game itself! It's still one of the cheapest great games out there imo
I think Old-school Runescape may be a good example of a game going downhill, becoming hated, then getting a sorta new team and a reset to earlier days where it finally shines again and becomes beloved all over again.
It's a different game though, original Runescape still exists. It's like Sonic Mania in that it's just a new instance of old design.
I feel a big part of that is that it had it’s own niche, and new-school RuneScape tried to take a filled nische instead of improving the one they already had
@@EresirThe1stthe current game (RS3) is more of a different game than osrs as compared to before it declined
It's the terrible irony: the more successful and well-moneyed a game studio becomes, the lower it sets its sights. Rather than acting with more creativity, more humanity, more scope for art and quality, they all suddenly become consumed by a drive for cut-throat competition at all costs. Money money money, growth growth growth, and do whatever shitty deed is needed to kill off rivals. It's almost like we have a culture that cannot understand noblesse oblige - especially in the context of art, leisure, human joy, and I suppose culture itself.
There's something so charming about the graphics in this video. Especially with the "basicness" of the pure images versus the complexity of how they're put together to build a narrative, alongside the clear experience in the script and its delivery. It feels cosy, and such a clear marker of going fully independent! It might not be as fancy as before, but gosh darn it, it's fully _yours_ now to do with as you wish! Here's to your continued development as a fully independent video creator and a wonderful analysis-filled 2025🍻
Best games journalist out there.
One game always comes to mind when the topic of a game staying true to itself and not destroying itself and it's player base: Deep Rock Galactic. Rock and stone.
If you ain't Rock and Stone, you ain't going home
Tropico 5? Transport Fever 2?
I kept hearing about this game whenever someone wanted to bring up a good example of an online game with battle passes. I finally managed to convince my friends to jump into it with me. Not only did they like it, they keep playing it even when I'm not available. I tried getting them into Sea of Thieves and Deadlock, and had to basically drag them in. So it was a breath of fresh air to finally land on a game that is so good that I no longer have to try and sell my friends on it. Thanks Deep Rock Galactic fans. Rock and Stone!
Rick and stone
I've put my fair share of hours into Deep Rock Galactic, many of them playing with random people. Only once have I encountered someone engaging in trollish behavior. Feels refreshing in a multiplayer game to have such a positive community.
60% of playtime spent on games over 6 years old is a pretty wild statistic. I can guess at a number of factors that cause this, but a big one I feel is just that AAA gaming has simply gotten WORSE on almost every objective metric. The number of big-budget flops this year alone is a testament to that.
I think Live service games are the biggest reason though. Heck, it wouldn't surprise me if Fortnite *alone* was like, 10%. Especially since Steam's numbers for 2024 says 15% new releases, 47% 1-7 years old, and 37% 8+ years old. And this is going off original base game release dates, so things with big updates or DLC releases in 2024 are going to be in the other categories.
Also interestingly, in 2023, it was 9% new, 52% 1-7, and 38% 8+, and in 2022 it was 17% new, 19% 1-7, and 64% 8+. Data beyond this isn't too readily available, since steam's recap feature only started in 2022.
Age of Empires 2 team has been very responsive to the community. After some great innovations/new civilizations, a sect of the community began to decree the civs were becoming overwhelming at 45 options to choose from. So the developers focused on single player campaigns, and unique scenarios for their next two DLCs, and consolidated 2 years of DLCs into the base purchase of the game. This is in addition to focusing on more patches/bug fixes for a game released over two decades ago.
You can say it. Publishers pushing for live service and monetisation is why the industry is in such a parlous state. No originality, no continuity, high staff turnover and constant mergers/demergers/acquisitions purely to push the numbers on the spreadsheet.
I have always loved your videos, your intelligence, insight into the industry, and humor go so well with your voice that is like butter. I don't know how I feel about this new visual style though. That gray is oppressive and the clipart feels like a costco brand yahtzee attempt. Still love you doing what you do, keep at it!
"Why do some live services end up succeeding? Because they make *_enough money_* to comfortably grow and sustain themselves, and that's all they could ever ask for." -Frost
Investors: "I don't want one -position- monies, I want all -positions- monies!"
That's the whole point of a private company...
Always happy to hear Warframe getting recognized for the things it does right, especially in an industry where so many studios refuse to recognize the lessons that could be learned. Looking forward to your assessment as a long-time Warframe vet.
I legit got whiplash when WF was mentioned, I rarely hear people ever talk about it
It is a shame that while it's a game many people know about, it rarely gets actively noticed or talked about by the gaming industry at large. It's been ongoing for over a decade now, has a sizeable enough player base that on any mission worth doing you can usually get a full team quickly, and has been constantly trying to improve over the years and add new content and features. By rights, it should be one that gets a lot more attention and credit.
I am so grateful to Warframe, it was the right game at a troubled time in my life.
Rarely play anymore but happily buys play whenever I login yearly!
@@aravindpallippara1577 Could be a good time to check back in. Their new update hits today and is a big story driven one with new characters and gameplay mechanics.
I've been sick of the constant remasters and re-releases the games industry is so happy to do right now, along with all the excessive and horrible monetization. So good to see Frost do a video discussing where that came from and what should be done instead.
The game I keep returning to is Katamari Damacy. It has a tremendous sense of itself, sticks to the core loop, and (for the original game at least) doesn't overstay it's welcome. Whenever I get the itch, I can go back, play the full campaign in 15 hours or so, and put it aside for another couple of years. I think the relatively brief length actually makes the nostalgia more accessible. Occasionally I've gone back to other, bigger games but I seldom find myself wanting to invest as much time as I did the first time through; the nostalgia is satisfied before the full campaign is complete, and I find myself hitting the inevitable slow points of a game and not wanting to push through. I can't think of another PC/console game that I've returned to more than twice.
One of the games I think hits this balance of old and new really well is Monster Hunter. Every main entry has flagship monsters and/or unique gameplay mechanics that get refined in later entries while adding new and returning monsters. With the upcoming Wilds, they are the only team i feel confident in pre-ordering because I saw how they handled 4U, Generations, World, Iceborne, Rise, and Sunbreak. They all felt like complete products in the present, with aspirations for the future and dipping their toes in the past in small enough ways to make me happy to play their games during the present.
The thing I loved about Rise was that it really felt like they tweaked and fixed all the things that kind of put me off about Worlds without tossing the good ideas in the trash. Game publishers are constantly saying "we're listening and we hear you" but with Rise, it felt like they actually did.
They also really listen to player feedback, which helps a lot. The beta test for Wilds happened a bit back, and in response to player feedback they are reworking several of the weapons and adding features back in, like the bounce when performing an aerial combo with the IG. This is just a couple of months before launch, and they apparently told press that they gave a more recent preview to that they shouldn't use a couple of the weapons in said preview, because they're reworking them quite a bit in response to feedback.
It feels like so many devs really underestimate how much listening to feedback can improve a game, and get people more excited for it.
First video that calls out palworld - in passing - having an identity. Feels good, honestly.
"I want more fishing, I want more lore, I want more to explore".
That is going on my wall
Oh yeah. Hey Frost!
Dude I'm not even halfway through and I've had to pause 4 separate times to reflect. Phenomenal. Thank you for this lad.
I'm playing the Legacy of Kain remakes right now. It's rough but not in a bad way, Byzantine, almost, but it also doesn't have layers of the "We have to have [X]" features piled on top of it like a modern game, it's an interesting reminder of where we came from. It's refreshing.
For a long while I thought I was slowly becoming disinterested by games, I felt the spark of joy slowly leaving each time I downloaded a new game on steam, played another freemium cashgrab, or saw the latest EA/Ubisoft releases. I had played warframe in the past, during some of its more troubling times especially, and I counted it out mentally, I would go back and play now and then but never let myself become invested in it. This latest time however its really stuck with me, in part because of its gameplay, but also between the story, the content releases, and the way the developers treat the community, I finally realized warframe was a game that respected me, respected its players, and I would argue goes out of its way to express love for its community. I feel like Ive discovered that respect is what Ive been missing from games. I thought it might have been difficulty, I thought it might have been tutorials, I thought it might have been monetization. No, what I was nostalgic for was at a young age where I was being discounted by adults around me, games had no idea who they were talking to and so they gave the same respect to everyone. Games didnt treat me like a child, they didnt treat me like an adult, they didnt treat me like a boy or a girl, they treated me like a person. Nowadays the majority of the gaming landscape treats you like a number, brainless, like a stream of water to be directed down a channel for the flow of money straight into company pockets. Im nostalgic for humanity.
Man, you've got such a great way with words Frost! Several parts of this made me smile at how smart, amusing and well written they were!
Right? It’s almost like he’s a talent that a group benefited from more than he benefited from the group. He really stands on his own two feet.
Time to watch, 20 minutes. Time to unpack everything being said? Literal days.
Your writing style is extremely dense and I am here for it.
For me, Oldschool Runescape is that game that has always treated me right. Thank god for the devs who made it happen in 2013 and have continued to stick to that vision.
When it comes to current live service games, I really appreciate what Helldivers 2 is like. Much like the Warframe devs you spoke about towards the end, with Arrowhead's CEO hopping fully back into the development space, he was able to help with re-applying the consistent vision they've had with the Helldivers universe. They made the commitment and have largely delivered to improve things. They still make progress month after month too - even if you don't count the update they released literally yesterday to reintroduce the Illuminate faction, they've managed to create a game that is consistently, repeatedly enjoyable, and there's not unethical pressure to spend any money beyond the price of the game itself.
Nintendo for me, specifically 3D Mario but the rule applies to all their major franchises. They only release one game every generation and make sure it has a unique selling point to keep it fresh.
8:45 God this just makes me respect Frostpunk 2 EVEN MORE. 11Bit Studios just didnt listen to their "fans" at all and they made a BLOODY MASTERCRAFT. It truly is Game of the Year🥰🥰
I've been playing Path of Exile for about 12 years now, and while GGG has made their share of mistakes I think their main positive trait is their transparency. GGG has always been very clear about their intentions for the game and the state of the game in general. This helps maintain good will with the community and helps make players, especially new ones, not feel like they got duped into a different game. I've been playing Path of Exile 2 and, while I didn't enjoy it nearly as much, this isn't because the game was different than I expected it to be. On the contrary, it's exactly what I expected it to be for years now, which is an old school Path of Exile feel, or "Ruthless" as the new game mode is. It's a true return to form for them, and it's exactly as they said it would be. I probably won't be playing it as much, but I can still appreciate what an incredible game it is.
Great video Frost, keep up the good work!
The fucked up thing is Saints Row had the perfect set up for something crazy at the end of 4. Saints in Time. They had access to a fucking time machine. Keep the goofy powers and guns. You could've made whole games off one setting. Saints in Time: 1942. Civil War. Feudal Japan. Medieval Europe. Shit had legs, but no. "We want a return to roots!"
The new Saints Row wasn't even really a return to roots though. It got rid of a lot of the edgy humor people liked about Saints Row 2 and went too safe for "modern audiences."
I'd say it returned to OG SR1's roots. I.E. a semi competent, worse alternative to GTA.
@@ZeroKitsunei No it did not. There was nothing Saints Row about the new game. If anything, the new game was rooted in SR3 but without anything that made that game fun either.
Talking about Live Service games with a reasonable pace of content so you can drop it and come back as much as you want definitely made me think of Deep Rock Galactic, which has been an absolute delight of a game. No Microtransactions, they just release a new cosmetic DLC each time they make an update that you can treat like a tip jar. The grind is real, but it's fair- you can generally get something new every 2-3 missions, and you don't have to get too terribly deep into the game to feel like you've unlocked your first choice of options to make yourself stronger, and now you're collecting cool new sidegrades to experiment with.
Plus it's managed to foster one of the best, friendliest, and absolutely goofiest player bases that I've ever seen. The silly space dwarf game does not want you to take it too seriously, and wants you to have fun, and that does wonders for making players actually be nice to eachother.
Mushroom.
Frost being extra lyrical today. Caught the alliterations and rhymes and the meters, it's good listening.
This guy and his cold take videos are quite possibly the most well written and insightful episodes of anything I've seen in my life. I try to never miss an upload because I can't get enough of his thoughts. Honestly and truly he is one of the best.
Deep Rock is my security blanket these days when I find myself losing a drive to game due to a number of factors. I hope they keep true to themselves and what they do/believe when it comes to making games
Rock and Stone brother
Did I hear a Rock and Stone?
Rock and stone in the heart!
Despite not liking it, i respect the devs for just saying "yea no new seasons until we release rogue core" instead of splitting their attention and half-assing everything
I would take the video game hype trains back tomorrow if it meant we could get rid of the toxic social warring that happens now.
A game gets announced and half the discourse is about DEI, the other half is calling that half stupid, and nobody is actually just happy about the new game.
DEI? I thought the current bigot buzzword was "woke"
Most of those pushing the "anti-woke" agenda are not even gamers. They appear to be incapable of answering the simplest games related question.
@@multiverserift DEI is usually used as a subphrase of "woke". The two go hand in hand.
And to add to the OP, but another reason it is so troublesome is that it diverts attention from what could be genuine problems with a games mechanics or narrative
@@matteste Like the new Dragon Age game. I've never played any game in the series, but it seems like the game has a lot of writing, mechanical, and tone problems that get drowned out because half of the Gamers are too busy complaining about the fact that one character is nonbinary or how they think the dialogue sounds too Twittery
@@incognitoburrito6020 Similar story with Guilty Gear Strive.
0:24 probably the only incubus reference on all of TH-cam.
That man just gave a free seminar on how to succeed at live service
Nostalgia is now a consumable product
Always has been.
Nick just unlocked supervillian backstory: zombie apocalipse started with a managment of a gaming company investing into a development of a new virus.
Yoink! 😈
Every December around Christmas season I feel a heavy nostalgia for Red Dead Redemption 2. It reminds me of back then staying with my parents, and the only responsibility I had was shoveling the tons of snow in the driveways.
Also here’s a scary thought: Red Dead Redemption 2 is now old enough to have nostalgia for.
I've turned to older games. 7th and 8th gen games. They feel less corporate, with more humanity, sensibility and good intentions. When a lot of people just wanted to make a kickass new game and make some money, instead of trying to make all the money and preach to you while at the same time subverting expectations and not giving you what you want.
8th gen was definitely part of the problem. I'm still playing 5th and 6th gen games.
@brianmckee2267 it was, but it has many great games.
Imagine splitting games into generations.
this post was made by a pc user
@benismann it's a useful rubric in my opinion
Your videos are amazing, not only for your interesting (cold) takes, but also because as you watch them you are constantly surprised by one banger quote after another. You are truly talented
Some important life lessons are brutally hard to learn, like "don't feed the trolls" or "you can't change or fix people". Another one of those is "you can't go home again". Nostalgia is great as long as you know that things will never ever be the same again. Things change because YOU change. You live, you grow, you learn, you go through stages, and you become a different person. So no, you can't play World of Warcraft just like it was back when you were new to it because you're not new to it any more, and blaming your lack of recapturing past thrills on the devs not having every single detail exactly as you NOW remember it is foolhardy and futile and sad. The best a remaster can hope for is to appeal to who you are NOW, not who you were THEN. That version of you is gone forever and you're better off looking for the next thing you will love - just like you did when you were young.
When that sax hits, I know I’m in for a good time
Fighting games are a fascinating microcosm of identity, nostalgia, and change hype. Mortal Kombat as a franchise is actively choking to death on this very topic as we speak, and genre diehards often stand up tournaments for games that are done changing - they CAN go back.
Fighting Games also might provide a counter-example to the "franchises don't recover after losing their way", because after 15 King of Fighters games, there have been some real gems and some real shitshows, the graph is far from a smooth curve. (Now, of course, SNK is owned by a genocidal regime, please don't give them your money)
You mentioned never seeing a game or series that started great, lost its way and became beloved again when a new team takes over. One idea comes to mind: Metroid
Beloved until Other M and Federation Force, returned to previous heights with Samus Returns and especially Dread, which were handled by Mercury Stream.
I've been super impressed by Age of Wonders 4 in regards to how its worked with its player base while maintaining a good cadence of new content that is overtly from the studio rather than just bending to player whims. Good job Triumph Studios
The 'monkey craving and killing god over and over again' analogy got me so good, cause it's true.
I really enjoyed the second and third sections specifically: a presence in the present and uncontrolled growth. I played a lot of OW and OW2, finding myself unable to put into words why I've recently developed a distaste for it. Hope you're able to keep finding success, my good man.
Boils down to corporate ego. "We can't do wrong, we're multi million dollar entities! You think you know what you want, but you don't." says Blizzard balking at the mere notion of bringing back Vanilla, rose tinted nostalgia laden WoW. And oops, Vanilla WoW is a huge success.
They can't fathom they're doing wrong and some random inquirers could blow their carefully calculated and strictly focus-grouped testing out of the water with something as simple as "Go back." And thus, they will either knowingly or unknowingly sabotage their own nostalgia bait, unable to help themselves, far too many cooks in the kitchen and blind to their customers desires for their own ego stroking.
No, that old stuff is old. We can do better, reimagine it. Make it nicer, improve it. Where their 'improvements' are the kinds of changes that made, as an example, Vanilla WoW no longer Vanilla.
Minecraft has provided me with more entertainment than anything else in my life, from vanilla to modded. I may have my issues with Mojang Studios, but the fact that they're still chugging along providing regular content updates for free, while keeping things like MineCoins limited in nature, has cemented my respect for them. Are they perfect, no, they're a corporate entity, but I appreciate the work the team running the show continues to put in.
Seeing anthropomorphized game cases reminds me a lot of the glory days of Extra Credits with the original artist
Volition didn't directly get shut down because of how poorly that Saints 5 did, but it might've been a big factor of why they got shut down after the Embracer deal fell through. It wouldn't make sense to close a studio right after you had them set to work under another studio, unless you've just went into a massive debt from buying up a bunch of studios.
Man, Frost is out here dropping videos like Kendrick is dropping albums. All bangers, no misses.
I appreciate that there was not shade given at people who tend to like new or changing games, just that it's your preference. (And it's good to understand your preference and not shame/harass others for not sharing the same preference )
I think my biggest asset when it comes to video games, is not having much time to play them. Some months I'll have 4 or 5 hours a week, some months I won't even be able to play at all. Keeps me well stocked with games to play
I agree. Both lack of time and restraint help enjoyment immensely. Rather than jump from one game to another I can take my time and finish something I enjoy and never run out of fun.
Crazy how I've only started to really enjoy these post escapist and second wind. Keep it up, if you keep posting I'll keep watching!
So weird hearing Digital Extremes sound like the good guys after what they did to Airship Syndicate / Wayfinder.
Absolute banger ! Thanks for posting.
Abiotic Factor is an incredible game with a very unique identity
The awful impact of drip-feed, live service games that I am beginning to notice is the negative reviews on Steam where players rage against a developer for "abandoning" the game. The game in question isn't live service and isn't abandoned, it's complete.
I'm happy with gaming for me, but then again I don't touch online gaming if I can avoid it.
Civilization, Rimworld or CK3 if I feel in a quiet podcast or smalltalk with my wife mood, Rogue Trader, BG3 or cyberpunk 2077 if I wanna dissappear into a world. Total War or grand strategy if I wanna feel the rush of setting things in motion and watch them play out, as my heavy cavalry hits the enemy flank.
Or just a smaller snacky indie game for something new and exciting. Like Tactical Breach Wizards, or Stray gods.
Of course, a lot of these games will switch out as time goes, but there are a lot of evergreens growing in my personal gaming garden.
Indie games. I didn't game for like a 15 year stretch, but since I've come back I've focused almost exclusively on indie titles.
This is honestly the right play. Its what I've been doing almost (aside from AAA I truly can trust) for the last 10 years. I've had more gems in the indie scene for the longest time.
I'm an old "gamer" who's seen the industry and the culture do its thing over the past decade and a half.
These days I don't care for gaming content on TH-cam, unless of course if it's coming from Mandalore or you.
Keep up the good work, bro
Dude, you got a great voice. I can listen to you talk about stuff all day.
Fantastic, well made video. Good points made about early access games and the lack of strict identity
an excellent speaker, damn. I feel like you are very conscious of the rhyme and rhythm of words you choose. Almost musical quality. first time viewer.
I kind of suspected, or perhaps rather wanted to believe that the Warframe team were different... that they valued one another, that each team member's efforts were appreciated in ways that more traditional game-corpo cubicle-cavern setups do not. I'm thrilled to hear there's some truth to that rosy idealization. I'm sure it's not quite as simple or clear-cut as that, but there does at least seem to be an _element_ of seeing the human beings on your team, of trying to understand them, learning to work with them. And that creates value and quality _far_ beyond what a team of strangers can do.
This is why the "normal" corpo approach of "treat people like coal, burn them out and then shovel the ashes out in the street, shovel in another load of fresh eager minds and repeat" is so fundamentally flawed and - quite frankly - moronic. When you keep burning through the creative minds on your project, you _continuously_ reset the overall competence level of your team to a very low value. Add to this the fact that constant layoffs (to pad those quarterly profit reports and deceive investors) will utterly ruin any semblance of team morale you may have had slowly building up, and it all comes off as incredibly short-sighted.
But none of this matters to the investors, the CEOs, the boards of directors; to them, all they need the teams to do is make products that technically count as "games", and that gamers will keep buying. They dig their hooks into games media with the simple trick: "If you want early review copies, you play ball with our review guides. You say what we tell you to say, or you don't say anything until everyone's already played the game." And so the average gamer is hyped up for every release with glowing, favorable reviews that don't mention any unfortunate, irrelevant little side concerns like "the game is utterly broken" or "the game is not fun". To these people, these corporate decision-makers, the games shouldn't have to be fun, or even very good. All they need is to make us _think they will,_ just long enough to snake their fingers into our wallets and relieve us of ever more of our limited disposable income.
We need to stop indulging them. All of them. With tears in my eyes, I hope to have the strength to say "we should do the same with DE, if they ever lose their way so badly that there's no hope of recovery". From what Frost reports here, it sounds like they've managed to keep their souls even with the highly sussy Leyou/Tencent buyout of their company. I guess even a corpo clock is right twice a day? Some CEO went "This seems to be working. Generating a lot of income. No need to stick our dicks in it." That, or they just didn't notice DE exists yet. Or they keep trying to interfere in decision-making, and the actual game developers who know what they're talking about are having to shut them down with relevant data, examples and reasoning every time it happens. Wouldn't surprise me if the latter was the case... if so, good work holding them off so far, and keep up the good work!
Anyway, this has gotten rather long, so for anyone skipping to the end... in summary, game development should always be mindful of the many, many benefits of a positive, respectful and sustainable work environment, a stable environment where each team member is steadily accumulating skill, expertise, understanding and confidence in their field. This is how we get quality, innovation, fun, and most of the other qualities that make a game attractive to players. Short-term benefits bought with costly sacrifices, on the other hand, are what's hollowing out the heart and soul of mainstream video games. Only someone completely disconnected from reality would make those kinds of decisions. Someone rather like a corporate CEO, director, or shareholder...
DE is the modern ideal gaming company. They care about their work but are willing to adapt. They aren't afraid to do weird things. They aren't trying to min/max their quarterly profits.
20 years ago it was Blizzard which, at the time, would put off releases indefinitely and only release "when its done". I have no doubt this would sometimes hurt them in the short term, but the payoff was that they became the biggest gaming company in the world, and everyone bought everything they made with the justified assumption that it would be a masterpiece every time.
3:10 HD2 pop is currently higher than when they removed the game from sale in a bunch of countries
Well finally the algorithm deigned to show me where Cold Take went. Subscribed and clicked the Ringabel icon without being asked. Looking forward to future Cold Takes.
The only circumstance in which I find a new team can breath life into some other team's creative baby, is when the original creates a compelling universe with scope for many different game types but the original devs aren't interested in fleshing them out. At the simplest extreme, new teams are great for spin-off titles - but also fresh blood is good for creating games that are similar to, but subtley different in style from, the progenitor's.
I swear i was looking to see for the first time in a month if there was a new cold take, and you uploaded minutes later heh
I think that's an accurate description. Nostalgia is the absence of hope for a better future, so a desire to return to the past emerges. I like the idea of modern video game companies crushing people's hope for the future but figuring out they can just monetize the past, trapping people in an endless state of hopelessness and pessimism. And monetizing that.
Path of Exile was one of my favorite games and you're right, their unwillingness to simplify things like the skill tree was something I loved about it. It knew what it was and held fast to their design philosophies. I do think it started to suffer from bloat over time though. Like Dark Souls in some ways I liked that it was a game that didn't want to hold my hand.
"I can't think of one that started off great, lost it's way, and then found itself again after a new team took over" might I interest you in a little Old School Runescape? It might not be 100% exactly that, but it's pretty damn close!
"A big ball of wibbly wobbly, timey wimey stuff"
I see your Dr Who reference there. Love it
If Frost suddenly disappears, it was the Riven Mafia. Those people are scary.
Thanks man, i needed that
For me, that live service game that feels loved by its developers is The Finals. Free, faced paced shooter with innovative destructible arenas, lots of gadgets to adapt your playstyle, frequent updates to address player concerns, and actually pretty generous with the free and paid cosmetics. I enjoy playing the game just because its fun to play, no carrot on stick needed.
The difference between a grave robber and an archaeologist is intent, time, and prestige. I look at game remakes the exact same way.
I see it as balance of art and commerce, where they both push and pull the other. Commerce seems to win out in the decision-making because it is quantifiable and demonstrative, leading the way when the way feels scary. The trust and communication in a work environment eases that uncertainty and encourages hesitancy and mindfulness.
You explained it very clearly imo and helped bring together notions in my mind that weren't then connected.
Thank you.
Thank you for your deep dives into subjects like this. I use to think I was getting to old for da vider games and movies in general, while in reality, my tastes were/are evolving. Once I understood that, I looked for different games in different genres. Now, I play a wide variety of games. I have Xbox Game Pass so, trying out new titles has never been easier for me. This helped me get off the nostalgia treadmill. I'm in my 40's and now I finally feel like I'm not chasing the my nostalgia for the 90's to late 2000's media. I'm just playing games and enjoying new experiences. GG Frost.
Great video frost. Look forward to the next one!
I actually can think of one game that lost itself, and found itself again with a new team. Runescape.
After the shift from the beloved Runescape 2 to Runescape 3 and the slow but steady death of the game, the revival that came with Old School Runescape pushed it into a future that not only brought players back, but excited to see grow into what it "should have been" as it embraces a new future.