|IlI|lIIl|IlIll|Il|IllI|

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  • 29 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: June 16th, 2023
  • |IlI|lIIl|IlIll|Il|IllI|@lemmy.worldtoGames@lemmy.world•Did anyone really think the Final Fantasy 7 remake was better than the original PS1 version?English
    31·
    18 days ago

    The original Final Fantasy VII was a “lightning-in-a-bottle” moment in gaming history.

    FFVII came at a point when Nintendo’s most beloved 3rd party partners had felt wronged by Nintendo’s semi-monopoly / greed - in that Nintendo had continued to charge a massive premium on cartridge production for anyone who wanted to sell a cart to run on their systems (think Apple pre-USB-C where everyone who wanted to make “Lightning Port” accessories basically had to pay Apple a premium every time they built any iPhone / iPad accessory), and this had only worsened with the N64 due to the increase in hardware costs (some SNES games like Chrono Trigger were already $80-$85 in the mid-1990s which was VERY expensive for the time). So 3rd party partners were willing to pivot to take a risk with SONY who was relatively unproven in video games (and who also had a very big chip on their shoulders thanks to Nintendo backing out of a hardware deal with SONY at the last second so they literally set up shop to poach 3rd party partners to bring exclusively to their new PlayStation project).

    FFVII also came out at a point when there was excitement and a rush to produce new “3D” (polygonal mesh-driven assets) visuals as opposed to “2D” (traditional sprite sheet-driven assets) visuals, and the amount SquareSoft (before they merged with the Dragon Quest “Enix” guys) was willing to spend to invest in making these kinds of assets for a video game - at least at the scale they were attempting - was unheard of at the time.

    Hironobu Sakaguchi had been at the helm of the Final Fantasy JRPG series for more than a decade, and had just lost his mother. FFVI was already a masterpiece in storytelling (which is the main thing that JRPGs brought to the table in gaming), but he had decided to try and tell a story that resonated with the same sort of feelings he had in losing his mother.

    All that combined :

    • the first new big SquareSoft JRPG for the “32-bit” era
    • launching on MULTIPLE CDs (also a somewhat new and novel concept) instead of a cartridge
    • the first to do some 3D graphics instead of 2D sprites for visuals (though backgrounds were still pre-rendered sprites)
    • the first to incorporate SOME real orchestration as opposed to pure MIDI-style instrumentation
    • Sakaguchi’s loss inspiring him to add that aspect to the story - which lead to one of gaming’s most impactful moments of all time at that time in an era when “storytelling” still had not evolved much… we had yet to get cinematic games like Metal Gear Solid yet - which kind of was the first truly movie-like experience with full voice performances and advanced emotive animations from character bodies, and camera actions designed to mimic cinema.

    So any remake would NEVER live up to the original, because even the original cannot live up to itself anymore - because the original’s story relied on how voices played in your head, rather than some actor maybe not being up to snuff, the graphics not aging very well b/c of how early-on it was in the creation of polygonal assets and animations - which simple emotes were used to represent deeply moving emotions in some cases that you had to “imagine” as being more detailed than they really were (like with how characters may have sounded in your mind), and how there wasn’t really anything of equivalent cinematic awe in gaming that had been released yet to compete with the story-telling of JRPGs like Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, Chrono Trigger, and Earthbound (Mother 2).

    I think taking on the challenge of remaking it is interesting, but I always would rather an effort be made to make something new, rather than rehash anything - even things that I grew up loving… because nostalgia is always chasing a ghost… and ghosts never live up to your hopes and expectations.

    All that being said, the thing I had the biggest issue with was the “style” of the characters in the remake. They are inherently very stylized in the original, and there seems to have been zero effort to maintain any of that “style” from the original, because it seems the modern interpretation was to toss out any possible “style” arbitrarily in exchange for more “realism” in the character designs… think “Disney live action remake” adaptations of characters vs their original animated character styles.

    Here’s what I mean… I wanted Barret to look like THIS :

    …instead of this :

  • |IlI|lIIl|IlIll|Il|IllI|@lemmy.worldtoPC Gaming@lemmy.ca•One-Third of U.S. Video Game Industry Workers Were Laid Off in 2025, GDC Study RevealsEnglish
    1·
    1 month ago

    It’s not so much that Nintendo is massive… it’s that they don’t FIRE their devs after every project. Miyamoto, Sakurai, Aonuma, etc. have all been working at that company for DECADES.

    They are MASTER artisans, in the same way a carpenter becomes one over a lifetime.

    The games industry outside of a very select few companies like Valve, Nintendo, Insomniac, etc. DEVOUR people and churn through them at a completely horrific pace.

    Constant crunch, burnout, underpaid, firing as soon as a game’s profit chart shows even a slight slowdown… all that results in a broken pipeline where you always have 20-something-year-old interns being paid dogshit who are desperate to keep their job working 60 hour weeks and hoping they can jump ship to a better studio before they get shit-canned… and then bailing on the industry completely.

    Even hit game making celebrities like Cliff Blezinski, John Carmack, and other relatively well-known game devs either no longer work at their hit studios, or have left the industry all-together.

    The reason it’s shit now, is because those who own the studios think making games is more like the textile industry or people working as cogs in a burger factory than any sort of artisan work… so they have reshaped it to be one where people are expendable and replaced constantly by bright-eyed young folks excited to work on their dream IP for them.

    It’s just finally catching up as the owners’ boundless greed has only continued and conditions have worsened for the actual game makers.

    It’s not going to improve until the current way of making games is completely overturned and regulated in such a way where those who work on games can have their careers grow in the same way other artisan fields can - where they apprentice under masters who teach them the ropes, and who slowly gain knowledge and skill over many game projects they ship under the banner of one company - and they get royalties and other real tangible benefits for their hard work.

  • |IlI|lIIl|IlIll|Il|IllI|@lemmy.worldtoPC Gaming@lemmy.ca•One-Third of U.S. Video Game Industry Workers Were Laid Off in 2025, GDC Study RevealsEnglish
    5·
    1 month ago

    This presumes that the closing of studios / layoffs will result in the same sort of funds used to pay for those sorts of investments are going to be recycled and available to new startup studios…

    Also assumes that it doesn’t result in people leaving the game industry as a consequence of career game devs deciding the video game industry is largely an untenable career path if any sort of job security and stability is a goal in your life…

    …because that’s why I left…

    Started working in more general software industry work around 2012. The last game studio I worked for generated something like $8 million / day at its peak revenue point, but they still closed us down and let us all go within 2 years of hitting that milestone in the middle of a new project we were working on.

    Haven’t worked more than a handful of days crunch since, and doubled my pay as well.

    Not saying I wouldn’t have rather stayed because I didn’t love the work, but I wanted to own a home someday and start a family, so I had to pivot in order to be a relatively more reliable bread-winner for my family.

  • |IlI|lIIl|IlIll|Il|IllI|@lemmy.worldtoGames@lemmy.world•Settings you believe ANY game should have? (This is me advocating for a restart/reboot button on ALL games)English
    3·
    3 months ago

    Agreed on the “shifting focus” part for vignetting specifically - but everything else… outside of specifically tailoring to fit a particular “aesthetic” I think are crutches that are generally used to obscure an overall graphical presentation in order to work in a similar way to how squinting your eyes works.

    I agree that highly stylized games like “Bodycam…”

    …use it to create a highly appealing visual aesthetic designed to match an actual low-fidelity police body camera, but Battlefield and CoD have much less excuse in my book.

    The camera aesthetic stuff only makes sense on things like the AC-130 killstreak in CoD where you’re emulating the on-aircraft cameras actually used in the real deal.