The Errant Signal Thread

[Weierstraß]

As long as games have stories I see no reason they shouldn't be analyzed.

 

[Infinitron]

http://www.errantsignal.com/blog/?p=500



Hey, Metro, video description:

Bioshock Infinite is a game that recently came out and I played it.

Nothing I say here is all that original - most of what I had to say about the game was structural and design stuff, not lit crit stuff. I may or may not do a video on that part of the game in the distant future, but for now I'm sort of Bioshock Infinite-d out.

It's certainly an odd duck - a game that (when it's hitting the right buttons) is impossible not to love, and there are moments and characters here that are simply inspired. After I finished the game I couldn't stop thinking about it for days, and not just because of the ending - it was a game that had left some sort of emotional imprint on me.

And yet I had to force myself to keep playing in parts; to remind myself that there was a reason I wanted to finish a given combat section to see what good stuff waited on the other side. And as I began a second playthrough that curiosity had diminished and I was left with an seething loathing for the bits that prevented me from getting to the parts I cared about. At that point I realized that Bioshock Infinite is a charming two to three hour exploration adventure game padded out to seven to ten hours with some absolutely insufferable shooting mechanics that betray everything the *Shock series has ever been known for or good at. To be clear: It's not a "You changed it from what it used to be!" thing. It's more of a "You took a series of interesting systems and turned them into a stock shooter - worse, a *terrible* stock shooter. Feel bad about yourselves."

 

[Metro]

Hey, Metro, video description:

Bioshock Infinite is a game that recently came out and I played it.

Nothing I say here is all that original - most of what I had to say about the game was structural and design stuff, not lit crit stuff. I may or may not do a video on that part of the game in the distant future, but for now I'm sort of Bioshock Infinite-d out.

It's certainly an odd duck - a game that (when it's hitting the right buttons) is impossible not to love, and there are moments and characters here that are simply inspired. After I finished the game I couldn't stop thinking about it for days, and not just because of the ending - it was a game that had left some sort of emotional imprint on me.

 

[Infinitron]

Hey, Fallout 3 has left an "emotional imprint" on plenty of Codexers.

You complained earlier about his straying from gameplay analysis to narrative analysis, so there you go.

 

[Metro]

Unfortunately that snippet doesn't save him from being an art-house faggot as proved by my emphasis.

 

[Infinitron]

Unfortunately that snippet doesn't save him from being an art-house faggot as proved by my emphasis.

He's describing how he felt about the game, but not the contents of the video, which is what matters.

 

[Weierstraß]

No feelings allowed!

 

[Metro]

Unfortunately that snippet doesn't save him from being an art-house faggot as proved by my emphasis.

He's describing how he felt about the game, but not the contents of the video, which is what matters.

Not the only thing. Why would I want to watch videos by some guy who was emotionally moved by Ken Levine's writing?

 

[Gozma]

Kinda reminds me of how comic books have terminally crawled up their own ass. As in, the internal criticism of industry folk like videogame journalists is about people falling all over themselves to find shit to sacralize in between the 90% of the content that is alternating between bisexual cheesecake imagery and pro-wrestling tropes mediocre FPS gameplay, with an almost total lack of self-awareness.

 

[Stakhanov]

I feel like this video was a missed opportunity. It starts off badly with Campster aspying over how the narrative is dissonant with the gameplay, how plausible Columbia is, and how he just wanted to skip the gameplay (fair enough). Essentially he's giving priority to the narrative and thus the gameplay should exist in service of the story that's being told, which is a poor design philosophy unsuited to the medium.

His criticism of Bioshock Infinite's mechanics places too much emphasis on the fact that they took out a lot of systems that were shit in Bioshock 1/2 as well. Oh no, the research photography is gone! Only half the audio logs??! Perhaps a comparative analysis of the games from SS1 to Infinite like he did in the Tony Hawk series would've been a more productive approach.

It's still a good vid and I like his characterisation of the narrative as "milquetoast centrism" and the game design as a clusterfuck: it's a glass of cold water in a desert of mountain dews and doritos.

 

[Infinitron]

His criticism of Bioshock Infinite's mechanics places too much emphasis on the fact that they took out a lot of systems that were shit in Bioshock 1/2 as well. Oh no, the research photography is gone! Only half the audio logs??! Perhaps a comparative analysis of the games from SS1 to Infinite like he did in the Tony Hawk series would've been a more productive approach.

I agree, but remember that SS2 had research too (and audio logs of course)

 

[tuluse]

Essentially he's giving priority to the narrative and thus the gameplay should exist in service of the story that's being told, which is a poor design philosophy unsuited to the medium.

Better than the current method where gameplay is divorced from narrative.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Creating the gameplay to suit the narrative works fine if you know what the fuck you're doing. The problem is that devs still by and large have no idea what kind of impact various gameplay elements have. They throw in cover and rpg mechanics and QTEs because they're cool and trendy, not because they suit the narrative or have any sort of synergy or purpose. And thats just the gravy. They can't even get the main portion right- they throw in mass carnage in alongside a story that has nothing to do with that at all. Consider Doom by comparison. You run around destroying the shit out of everything you see in an action packed killing spree with little thought or hesitation. Which makes sense because you're a fucking soldier in a hostile environment, and one that has been disengaged from any sort of military structure at that. You're just on your own against the hordes of hell, frenzied and on edge. Now imagine if Fallout played like that. Oh wait, we don't have to, we have fucking Fallout 3, where instead of a turn based combat system that makes you consider what you're doing (if only briefly and infrequently given the simplicity) to weigh resources and consequences of your actions against your long term survival, you just mow everyone down in first person like fucking Rambo. Wow, it's almost like that shit in the original games meshes with the narrative of being in a post apocalyptic world struggling just to have food and shelter, while running and gunning people down while devouring 500 medkits that are stocked in every fucking bathroom, closet and shoebox, doesn't.

Gee, better forget all about this and bitch about feminism and specific mechanics without regard for their context, those things are defenitely what went wrong with the industry.

 

[Stakhanov]

I agree, but remember that SS2 had research too (and audio logs of course)

That's true, though I only referenced those because it sounded silly in the context of a video to mention those as an implicit saving grace when you spend the last ten minutes talking about how bad the shooter design is in every possible way. To put it less frivolously, it's worth pointing out that plasmids/hacking/exploration/combat had already been butchered by the translation of SS2 into BS: in the context of System Shock 2 as a whole, which emphasised survival, resource management, and a hybrid of RPG progression and action combat those systems worked - especially given the atmosphere of dread, isolation, and competing hostile forces far greater than the player. Bioshock was a hollow emulation that put too much priority on combat, too little on survival and RPG progression because it was too simplistic as well as too disconnected.

Better than the current method where gameplay is divorced from narrative.

I agree, but I'd still argue it's a sub-optimal alternative unless you are simply trying to tell a story in a game engine with minimal to no gameplay. Infinite isn't doing that so a better approach would be to start with a good concept for a game, design systems around that concept, and then develop a narrative and setting suited to it. Thief would be far worse if its goal was to "tell the story of Garrett", instead it demonstrates precisely the approach I'd argue for, and it still succeeds far better at cohesive world design and storytelling than this 200 million dollar 'auteur production'.

 

[Weierstraß]

Essentially he's giving priority to the narrative and thus the gameplay should exist in service of the story that's being told, which is a poor design philosophy unsuited to the medium.

Do you have any proof of that?

 

[sea]

It starts off badly with Campster aspying over how the narrative is dissonant with the gameplay

Reconciling mechanics and setting/story is game design 101 and BioShock Infinite fucks it up.

how plausible Columbia is

A setting and story must obey the internal logic and consistency of theme set by the author in order to successfully forge and maintain a contract of suspension of disbelief with the audience.

and how he just wanted to skip the gameplay (fair enough)

You may note this is because he thinks the gameplay sucks.

Essentially he's giving priority to the narrative

No he's not.

and thus the gameplay should exist in service of the story that's being told, which is a poor design philosophy unsuited to the medium.

The importance of story depends upon the game. Some games are all mechanics and no story. Some have mechanics that tie in well with story. Some have mechanics that constitute story when realized in succession through gameplay. Some are mostly story and use mechanics to guide that story and increase the player's engagement with it. All are valid approaches depending on the game and the goals of the developer.

His criticism of Bioshock Infinite's mechanics places too much emphasis on the fact that they took out a lot of systems that were shit in Bioshock 1/2 as well. Oh no, the research photography is gone! Only half the audio logs??! Perhaps a comparative analysis of the games from SS1 to Infinite like he did in the Tony Hawk series would've been a more productive approach

The point isn't that those mechanics and systems were shit. It's that they were removed and simplified heavily rather than improved on. Pointing out the lack of audio logs is important because it means there is less world-building and less compelling reward for exploration, which is the Shock series' primary gameplay conceit. BioShock did not really work mechanically, systemically or narrative overall, but at least it made an attempt to be more than just a generic shooter in mechanics as well as aesthetics. Infinite did not.

 

[Stakhanov]

Do you have any proof of that?

Proof? You mean like giving a list of examples? Modern AAA titles abound with games that exist to deliver narrative reward. For instance Call of Duty, Uncharted and so on. Though I'd rather base my argument on the premise that since the medium-specific feature of games is interactivity, designers should give that primacy. I don't watch films simply because I want to listen to the soundtrack or check out the mise-en-scene or even for the plot. It's a sequence of images unfolding in time, and how well this is executed is what separates the amateur from the master.

In part it's just logical: if the game is developed from a systems-first approach it's easier to integrate the setting and story into it. The games that get fucked over by ludonarrative dissonance tend to be those that start with a story and then are forced to try to find mechanics appropriate to it, which is more likely to fail than the other way around, since the vocabulary of storytelling is much greater than the relatively small set of actions that comprise game design. Moreover, there is a pressure when designing a game that emphasises the story to make it easier and less complex for the sake of narrative flow.

A different way of looking at it would be to say everything in a game is mechanics, from cutscenes to talking head NPCs to quests/missions etc. In which case narrative is embedded in the mechanics and the only criterion for judging the worth of a game is how well its mechanics have been implemented.

 

[Stakhanov]

Reconciling mechanics and setting/story is game design 101 and BioShock Infinite fucks it up.

Yes, but my problem with it wasn't the emphasis on ludonarrative dissonance per se, but the way he framed it, which I think is misguided. To paraphase, he says "20% of the game tries to be human and artful, tries to say something, the other 80% is awful violence". I have zero sympathy for those that want games to be a vehicle for humanistic narratives and think violence in video games is somehow a 'problem'. It reeks of the pretentious movement in gaming that wants to make mechanics emotionally moving, at least in regards to the sympathetic emotions, which is somehow the criterion of all art now thanks to popular pseudo-aesthetics. And worse, whatever moments there are in BSI are experienced passively through the breadcrumb trail of huge narrative payoff for tolerating stale mechanics. The objective of a game like BSI should be "do, don't show", as Campster has argued for elsewhere. He's trying too hard to be conciliatory, or perhaps he sometimes forgets his own principle about storytelling in games. For instance, look at what he says about storytelling in Half-Life and how he approaches it in BSI. Later in the video: "like Bioshock 1 this game really has nothing to say", lol. If both the story and mechanics fail at what they're trying to do, is getting them to mesh better as important as he seems to suggest?

The importance of story depends upon the game. Some games are all mechanics and no story. Some have mechanics that tie in well with story. Some have mechanics that constitute story when realized in succession through gameplay. Some are mostly story and use mechanics to guide that story and increase the player's engagement with it. All are valid approaches depending on the game and the goals of the developer.

I also said this. I'm not averse to games that wish to be interactive fiction or games that exist primarily to tell a story. A game engine can be used for a variety of purposes: however, in the context of BSI we are talking about a game that is much more mechanics than it is story. As I've argued elsewhere in this thread, if this is how the game is going to be structured, it is better to prioritise systems/game actions in that case.

The point isn't that those mechanics and systems were shit. It's that they were removed and simplified heavily rather than improved on. Pointing out the lack of audio logs is important because it means there is less world-building and less compelling reward for exploration, which is the Shock series' primary gameplay conceit. BioShock did not really work mechanically, systemically or narrative overall, but at least it made an attempt to be more than just a generic shooter in mechanics as well as aesthetics. Infinite did not.

Yeah, but he doesn't share that perspective. There's no mention of improving on those mechanics, just noting that they were removed. If more variety didn't help Bioshock, would it help Bioshock Infinite? These mechanics were stripped down and removed from a context of action-RPG hybridity and survival/resource management in any case. They don't work when the game only prioritises immediate decisions without consequences, as emphasised by the two-weapon system, further reduction in usable items, regenerating shield and so forth. Adding more mechanics that, as you point out, systemically didn't work in Bioshock for the sake of variety would be retarded. I get that it would make it less painful to play if there was more variety, but I don't think a critic should be content with going from bad to slightly less bad.

 

[Weierstraß]

Do you have any proof of that?

Proof? You mean like giving a list of examples? Modern AAA titles abound with games that exist to deliver narrative reward. For instance Call of Duty, Uncharted and so on. Though I'd rather base my argument on the premise that since the medium-specific feature of games is interactivity, designers should give that primacy. I don't watch films simply because I want to listen to the soundtrack or check out the mise-en-scene or even for the plot. It's a sequence of images unfolding in time, and how well this is executed is what separates the amateur from the master.

In part it's just logical: if the game is developed from a systems-first approach it's easier to integrate the setting and story into it. The games that get fucked over by ludonarrative dissonance tend to be those that start with a story and then are forced to try to find mechanics appropriate to it, which is more likely to fail than the other way around, since the vocabulary of storytelling is much greater than the relatively small set of actions that comprise game design. Moreover, there is a pressure when designing a game that emphasises the story to make it easier and less complex for the sake of narrative flow.

A different way of looking at it would be to say everything in a game is mechanics, from cutscenes to talking head NPCs to quests/missions etc. In which case narrative is embedded in the mechanics and the only criterion for judging the worth of a game is how well its mechanics have been implemented.

The thing is, with much publisher/marketing demands and simply bad game designers, I'm not willing to draw any conclusion about

 

[Tehdagah]

Essentially he's giving priority to the narrative and thus the gameplay should exist in service of the story that's being told, which is a poor design philosophy unsuited to the medium.

Better than the current method where gameplay is divorced from narrative.

No.

Story should exist in service of the gameplay. Actually, story isn't even necessary for a good game.

 

[Lorica]

I'm about half-way through. He complains that player agency is reduced and bosses are just thrown at the player whenever it has the most potential to look awesome.

He complains that Infinite is "suffocatingly linear"... As opposed to Bioshock, I presume.

He complains about scripted confrontations that sacrifice gameplay for narrative purposes...

Basically, it sounds like Infinite did to Bioshock what Bioshock did to System Shock 2.

I'm... This is the happiest moment of today. The people for whom Bioshock is one of the best games ever just got to experience what I did when Bioshock was released.

EDIT: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA ~10:18

EDIT2: To elaborate, some high fallutin' language about ludic language quickly segues into breathless butthurt ranting which culminates in a very delicious "how do retards stomach this and then call it a triumph?"

 

[Infinitron]

http://www.errantsignal.com/blog/?p=506



PEAK STAR WARS
Star Wars. It’s a thing.

Script below the cut.

Spoiler

I grew up in this really weird era with regard to Star Wars. The original trilogy started in 1977 and wrapped up two years before I was born. By the time I was a half-self-aware kid the original film was 14 years old – a little further back than we are now from the first Lord of the Rings film. So I can’t say I have any real sense of ownership over Star Wars, not in the way that the group of kids that saw it in the 70′s and 80′s did. It wasn’t *my* thing, it was the thing that belonged to people five/ten/fifteen years older than me. Instead to me Star Wars was largely an inherited – and I dare even say a *used, pre-owned* – thing. A friend’s college aged brother saw it as a kid and fell in love with it, so my friend and I did too, by proxy. Hand-me down storm trooper action figures and ten plus years of cultural adulation were gifted to us. I never really got to decide if I liked Star Wars because by the time I was on the scene Star Wars had been enshrined as simply something geeky kids liked. I didn’t have any say in the matter, really. I never even saw the films in theaters – just molested special editions and TV versions without the original aspect ratio and cut for time. Like the toys we played with the films we saw were themselves hand-me-down versions.

And there wasn’t really any new material to call *my own* in the 90′s. At least, not like the early and mid 80′s, which had two new films and an Ewok cartoon and a Droids cartoon and a Holiday special. Okay, aside from the movies most of those were cheesey and awful, but at least it was something. And the 90′s were certainly not like today, where a trilogy of films recently wrapped up, there have been two separate Clone Wars animated series that have both been highly regarded, a Clone Wars film was released, cross overs were made with Family Guy and Robot Chicken, and three more movies are in preproduction.

If you spent your childhood in the late 80′s and most of the 90′s, though, you fell in between the cracks of Star Wars releases: too young to lay claim to the original trilogy and too old to enjoy the new one with fresh eyes. There were novels, I guess, but by the time I could read I was focused more on Crichton and Gibson and embarassingly enough a whole host of my mom’s Grisham, King, and Koontz novels. I wasn’t really interested in picking up canonized fanfiction. Really, there was only ever one set of Star Wars properties I felt comfortable calling my own – the videogames.

My Star Wars wasn’t one of celluloid but one of pixels; it wasn’t one of plot points but of systems, it wasn’t *an* adventure but a possibility space of themes and ideas. My Star Wars was an action shooter, a racer, an adventure game, a platformer, a role playing game, a real time strategy game, and a space combat game. My Star Wars contained multitudes, and was all the richer for it. My friends brother may have gotten to claim ownership of the thrills of watching Luke blow up the Death Star on the big screen, but kids *my* age got to lay claim to the experience of navigating the trench run themselves. My point isn’t that Star Wars works better as a video game, but rather that my childhood was spent exploring Star Wars as a series of systems and rules rather than as a story. And game developers were quick to toy with how the Star Wars universe worked as a system. Taking out AT-ATs on Hoth with a snowspeeder’s grapple hook, dogfighting in deep space, the Death Star’s trench run, and lightsaber duels became fast favorites of devs and players alike as soon as each became technologically feasible. They were game systems that held on to the series’ operatic emotions and epic scale while still affording a degree of mechanical depth.

But with each new mechanic discovered and each scene or idea systemized the picture games painted of Star Wars’ world became more complete. I don’t need to imagine what it’s like to fight TIE fighters or avoid Storm trooper fire or resist the temptation of the dark side of the force. I’ve done it. And done it. And done it. And now – over 35 years since the original film debuted – I think it’s safe to say we’ve systemized most of the meaningful, recognizable elements of the series. We’ve hit peak Star Wars. I mean, how many games have that infamous scrolling exposition?

That’s not to say there aren’t any systems left to explore or that there are no stories left to be told. But the most immediate and recognizable systems distinct to the Star Wars universe have been pretty thoroughly explored at this point. What’s left to experiment with? Moisture Farmer Tycoon? A flavor of The Incredible Machine where you help Ewoks build traps on Endor? A Star Wars twine game about an Imperial Officer from Alderaan wrestling with his emotions about being on the Death Star when it blew up his home planet? Not that any of these are bad – they all sound kind of cool, actually – but how do they either help us understand the universe that inspired them or even just justify the use of that expensive Disney license? How much better could a farm simulator, Home Alone trap builder, or space opera twine game be without the burden of the increasingly worn Star Wars license? How far removed from the core Star Wars experience are we willing to go just to hold on to this franchise instead of letting these games be themselves?

Not that those questions matter anymore. I doubt whether we’ll even get to see wacky experiments like Star Wars Chess or quirky Japanese Star Wars platformers or Star Wars fighting games going forward. I think games like Force Unleashed and the cancelled 1313 and even Lego Star Wars show this desire to move beyond even trying to systemize Star Wars. The license is no longer something that inspires games – it’s something that inspires game settings. The vaguely Star Wars RPG, the vaguely Star Wars MMO, the vaguely Star Wars third person action game, the vaguely Star Wars family game. And let’s not forget that this happened. This universe that used to be fertile ground for countless new games with new mechanics is now just a wrapper to package stock genre titles in.

The earliest Star Wars games were obviously breaking new ground – Jedi Arena was pretty much a new game from the ground up, and the 1983 Star Wars arcade game established how the Trench Run would be turned into a game for the next 30 years. But even the later genre titles made an effort integrate newly minted Star Wars mechanics. Yeah, Dark Forces was a first person shooter, but it was a shooter that experimented with light and dark Jedi powers and how those crazy Star Wars blasters would actually work before those were things that had become commonplace. Yeah, Empire at War was an RTS, but it tried to be an RTS that incorporated ideas core to the Star Wars universe. Smugglers, droids, and bounty hunters were all units that had unique capabilities, and the game focused on balancing ground assaults with aerial combat like much of the third film showed. The Rebels had to steal technology while the Empire had to research it, which set up an interesting power dynamic between the two. I’d actually really recommend this game if you wanted to see some neat ways of systemizing a film. Battlefront was basically Battlefield, but that was sort of the point! It explored the pulpy World War 2 roots of Star Wars at the tail end of the World War 2 game craze, complete with grizzled soldiers speaking over oldtimey footage and dogfighting mechanics that kept everyone aligned with a singular “up” direction even though you were in space. It felt more like Red Baron than Freespace, and that was intentional. All of these games took systems and ideas that the films hinted at and turned them into something tangible, something you could test the limits of. Whether it was Podracing or taking part in Jedi training, Star Wars games of times past tried to explore Star Wars through systems.

In contrast, look at, say, The Force Unleashed. It’s a fine game, don’t get me wrong – it’s pretty and makes good use of lots of really neat tech. But its mechanics frame the game as basically “God of War with lightsabers.” It’s more interested in making the player feel incredibly powerful than in exploring how Star Wars works or what Star Wars means. I mean, it’s a game where Darth Vader can do this. It’s well intentioned and well designed, but it doesn’t seem interested in systemizing the universe the way previous games did. And you can see this with a lot of the more recent Star Wars games.

Knights of the Old Republic may have laid the foundation for games like Mass Effect, but in doing so it underscored how little the Star Wars license was core to its gameplay and systems. KOTOR was a bridge between Neverwinter Nights and the Modern Bioware RPGs that happened to be set in the Star Wars universe. Similarly, The Old Republic is a pretty stock post-World of Warcraft MMO. Its big selling point – a fully voice acted story – could’ve been applied to any license, really. Compare that to Galaxies, which may have struggled to come up with a Jedi system players could love but at least tried some interesting things by limiting the Jedi population on the servers. Lego Star Wars was cute and fun and had a million addictive collectibles to catch, but as all of the other licensed Lego games have shown there was nothing quintessentially Star Wars about it. Heck, by all accounts 1313 was gonna be a grimdark Star Wars coated version of Uncharted or Tomb Raider. I want to emphasize that these aren’t (or in 1313’s case might not have been) bad games, but they’re games that are more concerned with taking Star Wars and applying it as a wrapper for established game mechanics rather than a basis for new game mechanics. I mean, I don’t think I have to point to much more than Kinect Star Wars and its horrible Dance Mode for evidence of this.

Whether you think we should be done making new Star Wars games or not, it’s clear that the games industry is done making new games out of Star Wars. There was a small cottage industry – almost an entire subgenre of games – dedicated to examining parts of the Star Wars universe. Its vehicles, its technology, its rituals, its black and white moral compass, its influences, and its warfare were all poked and prodded via game systems. But at this point the games industry has taken what’s worked or what’s been most popular like Lightsaber Duels and AT-AT harpooning, appropriated those mechanics into its established genres, and shunted the rest.

So with all of this in mind I struggle to really care about Disney’s acquisition of LucasArts and now EA’s exclusivity deal with Disney. We may very well see some amazing games and memorable stories come out of these deals. But it’s going to be in the form of a Star Wars license applied to a stock Bioware RPG or a third person shooter set in the Clone Wars. They won’t necessarily be bad games. But they also won’t be games that do much more than look like Star Wars on the surface. They’ll have the opening exposition crawl, they’ll have the Star Wars soundtrack, they’ll make the references Star Wars fans want… and they’ll play like any other game you’ve played in the past five years. But they’d be that way whether the series was licensed by LucasArts or by Disney; they’d play that way whether they publisher was EA, Activision, or 2K. These deals don’t impact how Star Wars gets turned into games because we stopped turning Star Wars into games years ago. And not because developers are creatively bankrupt, and not even because it costs to much to experiment with new mechanics – but because we’ve tapped just about every uniquely Star Wars experience possible. What’s left is either stuff that would be better suited to being its own stand alone game, or stuff that reinvents the wheel with yet another trench run, Second Death Star Escape, or Hoth battle reenactment. And so in a certain sense I think we need to let Star Wars go.

The brother of my childhood friend had his Star Wars experience end in 1983 with the release of Return of the Jedi. After that there may have been cartoons and holiday specials, but the core experience of the universe was over for him. They had stopped making Star Wars movies. The date of when my Star Wars ened is more nebulous, but I can tell you this – it happened not when they stopped making Star Wars games, but when they stopped exploring Star Wars with games.

I’ll catch you next time.

 

[felipepepe]

"I don't know what I want, but I don't want this."

 

[DeepOcean]

Whether you think we should be done making new Star Wars games or not, it’s clear that the games industry is done making new games.

And because developers are creatively bankrupt, and because it costs to much to experiment with new mechanics – it will not sell to dudebros to tap just about every uniquely Star Wars experience possible.

I really agree with him about how pointless is to continue making Star Wars games in the actual AAA conditions but I had to fix those two things he said.

 

[Roderick]

He didn't mention the probably best star wars game: the "Tie Fighter" space sim