Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 dev Tim Willits explains why the game was able to achieve massive success when so many big budget games have failed lately.
Games got bigger to their own detriment. Halo and Gears of War are open world games now, and they’re worse off for it. Assassin’s Creed games used to be under 20 hours, and now they’re over 45. Not every game is worse for being longer, as two of my favorite games in the past couple of years are over 100 hours long, clocking in at three times the length of their predecessors, but it’s much easier to keep a game fun for 8-15 hours than it is for some multiple of that, and it makes the game more expensive to make, raising the threshold for success.
Unpopular opinion: open world ruined Zelda. I thought I’d love the concept. But actually give it to me? Ughhh… Spend forever doing side quests because you don’t know if the equipment will only be good now or if youll need it down the road… No real guidance so you can end up just meandering around…
I liked the more structured narrative. Don’t get me wrong - it’s cool to play Link and just do whatever you want. But for a story game, a more defined linear path is more engaging imo.
For me it took away the joy of the puzzles and building on a theme that the older Zeldas did.
I’ve not played TotK so maybe it brings back more of the dungeon feel from the older ones that I enjoyed, but I don’t have huge amounts of time for gaming these days.
Drag finished BOTW and now likes riding around Hyrule on a motorbike looking for koroks. Drag thinks the game is great if you use it as something to pick up and play a little bit of every now and then. Good game for bringing on airplanes and playing on the bus. Drag would have very much liked to have a game like that when drag was a child being dragged to boring dentist appointments and waiting to be picked up from school. Drag thinks maybe Nintendo is making games for children.
Open world while still needing to go through the temples in a certain order. Various gadgets were required to progress, but crafty players often got around this. Pokemon would also be called “open world”, but could you just walk up to the Elite 4 from the beginning? Nope, had to get them badges first.
There’s “open to exploration” open world and “here’s a giant map, go wild”(a la Fallout/Skyrim). I prefered a Zelda with more guidance. Even Wind Waker, arguably the most open world, still had a progression the game tried to keep you on.
Yeah so today there’s more of a spectrum. Back in the 80s and 90s there were far fewer choices.
I get what you mean though, just wanted to point out it’s more complicated to judge older games by new standards. Eg. if Zelda were a new franchise it might just be a fully open world from the get go.
How is saying it’s not the same game mechanics “judging it by different standards”? That right there is the problem: this idea that everything modern is better. Not everything needs all the same features tacked on.
To me, they would be perfect games if they weren’t Zelda. That is to say, they are great games, just not what I expect from a Zelda game. Something I’d expect from Bethesda moreso(style, not gameplay lmao).
I feel like Wind Waker was the right balance between freedom and linear story.
You think Planetside blows and you’re asking for Planetside. That’s odd. What don’t you like about it? It’s probably a symptom of what you’re asking for.
(Also, you don’t really seem to know what you’re talking about anyway, because quantum computers aren’t super powerful computers or something. They’re like a GPU. They’re specialized processors that are better at a few specific tasks. Binary CPUs are still probably always going to be what’s used for most computation.)
No, I’m not asking for Planetside. You said what I’m asking for is Planetside, not me.
What I don’t like about Planetside is the shit graphics, the fact that the entire game is circle-strafing polygon spiders around on a GTA motorcycle, the fact that enemies simply teleport into existence and in perfect proportion to the number of people nearby, the monotonous world design, etc.
Quantum computers can solve some differential equation problems in essentially zero time. You seem to assume that most heavy lifting cannot be expressed in terms of this data type; that seems premature to me.
Quantum computers are insanely powerful computers. Their performance on the class of problems which they can solve is essentially infinite.
The graphics aren’t that bad, considering how old it is. Yeah, a modern game would probably look better but good graphics don’t make a good game, nor should realism be confused for good graphics.
IIRC Planetside used to at least have totally lopsided battles. They’d mark zones as hot and people could spawn there to even things out, but we used to do large server-wide organized attacks where we bring a large number of troops to capture zones before the enemy could organize a counter. I don’t know if this is still true, but the fact it isn’t (if it isn’t) means there were issues they were trying to solve, which there totally was. How do you suppose a Halo skin would fix the issue, especially if they can’t just spawn in there? How do they prevent one team from being rolled (which will be even worse without a third faction to level things out against the one faction doing the rolling)?
I actually prefer the world design of PS2 to Halo Infinite. Most of the world in HI is identical. PS2 at least has a few planets with very different terrain, and they also have regions that are largely different from the rest. The terrain also makes some vehicles more or less useful, which doesn’t really happen in HI. In HI every vehicle is essentially exactly as good in all locations.
We’re in here talking about how big budget games are making the industry unsustainable, and after Infinite came and went without making a huge splash, you think the next one ought to be even bigger?
Games got bigger to their own detriment. Halo and Gears of War are open world games now, and they’re worse off for it. Assassin’s Creed games used to be under 20 hours, and now they’re over 45. Not every game is worse for being longer, as two of my favorite games in the past couple of years are over 100 hours long, clocking in at three times the length of their predecessors, but it’s much easier to keep a game fun for 8-15 hours than it is for some multiple of that, and it makes the game more expensive to make, raising the threshold for success.
Unpopular opinion: open world ruined Zelda. I thought I’d love the concept. But actually give it to me? Ughhh… Spend forever doing side quests because you don’t know if the equipment will only be good now or if youll need it down the road… No real guidance so you can end up just meandering around…
I liked the more structured narrative. Don’t get me wrong - it’s cool to play Link and just do whatever you want. But for a story game, a more defined linear path is more engaging imo.
For me it took away the joy of the puzzles and building on a theme that the older Zeldas did.
I’ve not played TotK so maybe it brings back more of the dungeon feel from the older ones that I enjoyed, but I don’t have huge amounts of time for gaming these days.
Drag finished BOTW and now likes riding around Hyrule on a motorbike looking for koroks. Drag thinks the game is great if you use it as something to pick up and play a little bit of every now and then. Good game for bringing on airplanes and playing on the bus. Drag would have very much liked to have a game like that when drag was a child being dragged to boring dentist appointments and waiting to be picked up from school. Drag thinks maybe Nintendo is making games for children.
Wasn’t Zelda always open world? LttP was about as open world as they come back in the day?
Open world while still needing to go through the temples in a certain order. Various gadgets were required to progress, but crafty players often got around this. Pokemon would also be called “open world”, but could you just walk up to the Elite 4 from the beginning? Nope, had to get them badges first.
There’s “open to exploration” open world and “here’s a giant map, go wild”(a la Fallout/Skyrim). I prefered a Zelda with more guidance. Even Wind Waker, arguably the most open world, still had a progression the game tried to keep you on.
Yeah so today there’s more of a spectrum. Back in the 80s and 90s there were far fewer choices.
I get what you mean though, just wanted to point out it’s more complicated to judge older games by new standards. Eg. if Zelda were a new franchise it might just be a fully open world from the get go.
How is saying it’s not the same game mechanics “judging it by different standards”? That right there is the problem: this idea that everything modern is better. Not everything needs all the same features tacked on.
BotW and TotK are some of my favorite games of all time, but I really do hope we get another big dungeons focused game in the future.
To me, they would be perfect games if they weren’t Zelda. That is to say, they are great games, just not what I expect from a Zelda game. Something I’d expect from Bethesda moreso(style, not gameplay lmao).
I feel like Wind Waker was the right balance between freedom and linear story.
They used og Zelda as an inspiration for it
Just pretend it’s not a Zelda game then
Halo as an open world is fucking awesome. I love Infinite.
The next step, in terms of budget and computing power required, which I eagerly await, is a massively multiplayer co-op Halo:
That’s probably gonna require billion dollar budgets and quantum computers to pull off, but it’s coming. And I can’t fucking wait.
Planetside already exists. Just do that and scale up to more planets
Planetside blows
You think Planetside blows and you’re asking for Planetside. That’s odd. What don’t you like about it? It’s probably a symptom of what you’re asking for.
(Also, you don’t really seem to know what you’re talking about anyway, because quantum computers aren’t super powerful computers or something. They’re like a GPU. They’re specialized processors that are better at a few specific tasks. Binary CPUs are still probably always going to be what’s used for most computation.)
No, I’m not asking for Planetside. You said what I’m asking for is Planetside, not me.
What I don’t like about Planetside is the shit graphics, the fact that the entire game is circle-strafing polygon spiders around on a GTA motorcycle, the fact that enemies simply teleport into existence and in perfect proportion to the number of people nearby, the monotonous world design, etc.
Quantum computers can solve some differential equation problems in essentially zero time. You seem to assume that most heavy lifting cannot be expressed in terms of this data type; that seems premature to me.
Quantum computers are insanely powerful computers. Their performance on the class of problems which they can solve is essentially infinite.
The graphics aren’t that bad, considering how old it is. Yeah, a modern game would probably look better but good graphics don’t make a good game, nor should realism be confused for good graphics.
IIRC Planetside used to at least have totally lopsided battles. They’d mark zones as hot and people could spawn there to even things out, but we used to do large server-wide organized attacks where we bring a large number of troops to capture zones before the enemy could organize a counter. I don’t know if this is still true, but the fact it isn’t (if it isn’t) means there were issues they were trying to solve, which there totally was. How do you suppose a Halo skin would fix the issue, especially if they can’t just spawn in there? How do they prevent one team from being rolled (which will be even worse without a third faction to level things out against the one faction doing the rolling)?
I actually prefer the world design of PS2 to Halo Infinite. Most of the world in HI is identical. PS2 at least has a few planets with very different terrain, and they also have regions that are largely different from the rest. The terrain also makes some vehicles more or less useful, which doesn’t really happen in HI. In HI every vehicle is essentially exactly as good in all locations.
We’re in here talking about how big budget games are making the industry unsustainable, and after Infinite came and went without making a huge splash, you think the next one ought to be even bigger?