| mZuzek said: [1] This is a very you thread. Sounds silly these days when there's avatars on the home screen, but I knew this was yours. Anyways. [2] I think you're getting a bit too carried away with the idea of game awards there. Something winning game of the year doesn't mean it's the best thing that came out that year, and certainly does not mean it's the most innovative or creative. Every year you see many games in the running for these awards that don't really do anything interesting for the industry, and also don't feel genuine. It's ironic and kinda funny how you like the idea of games coming from the heart, yet use a completely arbitrary and commercially-centric thing for determining which ones are the best. [3] Other than that, yeah, I agree. Nintendo certainly feels like the strongest definition of fanservice at the moment - not only in giving fans things they want that often don't feel genuine, but also in how they're methodically and carefully releasing these things at strategic times to hype up interest and demand, as so to continually overprice everything and get away with it. On their end, one such game that concerns me is Metroid Prime 4 - something pretty much all of us can be very excited for, but it's hard to believe that its existence didn't come solely from fan demand, and the state of its development leaves a lot to worry about, from a technical perspective surely but also a creative one. |
[1] You're welcome.
[2] There's to date been literally no overlap between my personal favorite games from any given year and the overall GOTY winners thereof except for the unique case of The Last of Us Part II. I don't think I put undo weight on such judgments myself, but there are those who do, and many of them are called video game developers. That's because it's like a film winning Best Picture at the Academy Awards or the Golden Globes a little. There's a difference between films that are recognized in that way and those that like sell the most tickets for a given year. There's rarely overlap, especially nowadays. That's because Hollywood is no longer in the business of making art house movies like they used to be. So my point anyway was that many of Sony's first-party games get recognized for artistic achievement, while Nintendo's sell more units. That's all I was really getting at with that. Wasn't saying that GOTY judgments are like objectively correct or something.
I mean seriously, I find that the GOTY winners -- especially the ones favored in the player's choice ballots -- tend to belong to familiar franchises and whatnot and check a lot boxes themselves. There's no universe in which a game like Celeste or Undertale ever had the remotest chance against the new God of War or The Witcher III in either sales OR awards, for example, purely because of the former's smaller budgets, and that just makes me roll my eyes at people's lack of imagination. Capitalism buys artistic achievement awards for established publishers for all intents and purposes. You think some little indie game or upstart publisher has a fair shot? I mean TLOU2 is literally the only overall GOTY winner for any year in history even to so much as use a female lead character. That's how imaginative these things actually are. I often feel similarly about the Oscars, incidentally, because there are clearly favored filmmakers who seem keep winning every time they make a new movie, and so on an so on.
At the same time though, there's also clearly a gulf of creative merit between the winners of such awards on the one hand and that of the Call of Dutys and the annualized sports simulations that are obviously made for competitions and the blockbuster Cyberpunk 2077s who's launch dates are practically international holidays and frankly most Nintendo games that typically outsell them because those institutions are even more entrenched, to the point of being largely insulated from professional criticism. Well you get what I'm saying.
[3] Yeah, I thought it was kind of sadly hilarious when Nintendo announced they'd given up and handed off development to Retro Studios for safe keeping because they couldn't come up with any ideas they actually liked for a new Prime game but wanted to make one anyway. Well it's for the best if their heart isn't in it, but...ya know, why would you dedicate yourself to a game you didn't want to make in the first place? Well we know the answer instinctively: there's money it it, or perceived to be anyway. Well anyway, based on their past record, I trust Retro Studios with a new Prime game a lot more I do Nintendo themselves with any Metroid game anymore, so my only hope is that there's minimal publisher intervention in this project. And that it actually gets released.
Last edited by Jaicee - on 26 June 2021
