I will preface this by saying I actually enjoyed the game and I hope people get what I mean. Honestly, I think the majority of the recent use of the term came up (at least in my own circle) from people upset that several reviewers called Driveclub "soulless" re: handling that didn't work for sim aficionados or arcade tastes and the barely-there social feature, and I've now seen it as a weird console-war name-call thing. I don't like using the term personally because I see other people use it as a catch-all for something they don't like that they can't put into words. You definitely see it in Steam asset-flip junk titles or PS2/Wii-era shovelware. It's not a term I use normally, frankly because I don't think it happens all that often in bigger-budget games. That was a weird overlap of a ton of small studios suddenly having access to nice raycasting engines and wanting to be the next Wolf 3D/Doom pumping out a bunch of similar, low-quality but otherwise technically adequate games. The most immediate example I have is some of the Doom clones in the 90s. I think a game that apes something else but with game design that doesn't really understand what was good about the original, and doesn't work well enough on its own. I was not able to play a souls game until Dark Souls came out on PC but that franchise revitalized my interest in gaming and now from the vantage point of 2023 I can confidently say that From Software helped change the direction of game design in a tremendous way. Mysterious, challenging, begging to be explored. Later, Giant Bomb did a quick look and I was captivated by this game. Then I heard about a game called Demon's Souls and it sounded incredibly exciting. I felt no sense of satisfaction for playing them, everything was overexplained and game mechanics carefully doled out in ways that made the challenges and puzzles boring. I started getting this feeling frequently with games around 2008, when it seems many developers had learned the "right" way to do AAA and AA games. A big part of that is because the game has been made for broad appeal, frictionless, sanded down, with nothing too difficult or weird or risky. It means the game lacks soul, and I feel empty while playing it. If I ever use the word 'soulless', it does not mean that the developers didn't put their soul into it.
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