| d21lewis said:
That's how I think people feel about BotW right now. As a total package, it's an unbeatable experience. |
This is all that really needs to be said though. It's not about whether each individual part was brand new tech or not. It's about the fact that the total package felt revolutionary. Super Mario 64 wasn't the first 3D game or even the first 3D platformer. It's still revolutionary though. The total package is what the gaming community points to as the moment that we all understood what a 3D platformer could be. Even Super Mario World, which did much less in the way of new things, ultimately, still felt revolutionary because it just defined the moment where the 4th gen showed what video games could be, that they couldn't before. The total package was just something on another level. The same goes with Uncharted 2 and cinematic experiences. It defined a new era for Sony where it moved beyond competing with Nintendo over mascots and to the cinematic storytelling it's more known for now (yes that started a lot sooner, but this acted as a defining moment for the zeitgeist). Gears of War did that too, for cover shooters and the shooter genre in general. Kill Switch just...didn't, come on man. Who cares if the mechanics are similar?
It's not about being the literal first to have a particular piece of tech, a particular innovation, etc. It's about being the first time the total package really got through to the gaming community as a whole. These revolutionary games are the moments we as a community remember as THE moments where it felt like it had finally happened. Where we got it, that THIS was something gaming could do now, and it could do it really fucking well, and it was fucking awesome. Those games then go on to set the example for whatever that thing was, for the rest of gaming, at least until something made that obsolete, if it ever did. To suggest that because you can't pin down one precise mechanic to point at, that these games hold no significance beyond that we all thought they were really fun, that is disingenuous and does a disservice to the games and gaming history. What you've essentially suggested with that last post is that games can't really be revolutionary because if you break them down enough, you can reduce a game to elements that have been seen somewhere else. And that's just silly, and we all know that. I think you know that too.
