tangental observation: i'm currently making my way through The Last Guardian, and while i'd never claim to be an expert, it's somewhat striking how much open world games with that naturalistic, muted color palette owe to that Ueda style of game...Breath of Wild in particular (not to mention the general feel of the climbing and ragdolling when you're knocked about, though BotW skews more forgiving).
perhaps similar to how some find the explosion of color/detail in Horizon fatiguing- at least in Last Guardian (and I have recollections of Shadow of the Colossus)- it kinda feels like I'm playing Pale Green Light: The Game. i admire the aesthetic consistency and choice- but it isn't exactly my cup of tea.
eeey, this was great! it still stings that jess thinks aloy is an uggo, but at least i get it :')
real talk: i really appreciate jess walking through her (very well-reasoned tbh) critique, even if it appears we're on opposite sides of aesthetic preferences. i quite like super dense, perhaps overly-busy environments (Horizon and TLOU are among my favs of the past few years)- even with the consequence of sometimes getting spun around and temporarily disoriented. at the risk of using a marketing buzz word- i actually find myself more fully IMMERSED when the world takes a little more effort to parse- though i recognize that might not be the common experience or preference.
...and then just to go full contrarian- i honestly find the washed-out, (at least relative to Horizon) muted and subdued visual language of Breath of the Wild, Neon White and Elden Ring a little flat. i'll grant that both those worlds are orders of magnitude more legible than Horizon, but on a personal level i just find the super-saturation of Horizon nice change of pace. it's clearly divisive- but i think if you remove characters and were just to show screens of environments you'd be able to pick Horizon out of a line up.
one aspect of the overall game design i'd be interested in learning about with all these open world games is how different devs approach visual language and how that interacts with with narrative intent. Horizon is pretty distinct from Elden Ring and Zelda insofar as it has a Mass Effect style, dialogue driven narrative with a defined protagonist it's attempting to convey- whereas Elden Ring and Zelda seemingly just want you to be in a player avatar in a space (yes, they have 'stories' but clearly the devs didn't have a distinct narrative as a prioritized goal). for example- jess made the good point of how the Focus is often a bandaid for guiding the player- but the story relies pretty fundamentally on it as a narrative tool as well.
@drm2thej: i mean, effort costs money. there are now full time accessibility people at sony that are now working on the new God of War as a result of this push. i'm not a business man so i can't tell you how much it actually costs to do these things, but much like the adaptive controller that Microsoft sells for $100- these efforts appear to require buy-in from the consumer. it's definitely not charity (there is no honor in capitalism, etc) but regardless it gives other devs a roadmap and sets expectations that i think pushes things forward.
@manlypup: no the exhaustive suite of features as found in TLOU2 haven't been available for the first game until now.
@castiel: is $70 too much to add the accessibility suite in addition to the visuals?
i'm not a dev nor business man, so i truthfully don't know. from what little i understand, the new features go beyond the scope of a patch. but in any case i'm just stoked more people are going to get a version of the game that plays and looks better for them.
lul, i get the joke (i thought there was an upload error when i saw the thumbnail). but to show nothing of even just the new accessibility features available seems kinda lame/wasted opportunity.
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