It's amazing to see how such a great company had such a huge downfall so quickly. I mean, they had BOTH Silent Hill 2 and MGS2 released in the same year, that's insane.
The level of quality they had was great and it's really heartbreaking to see them go down this way. I don't know if they'll be able to win us back or not, but just thinking about the level of quality of the games they helped produce over the years makes me feel really sad.
How about any of you? Are you still hopeful they'll be able to win us back? Or have you given up all hope?
As a huge, huge fan of the original Mirror's Edge, I noticed a lot of things that went completely against the original's design that I felt were worth pointing out.
The overall design of the city looks just too messy for me, there's a lot going on and not enough space to breathe in the scenery, they went for the same bright color pallete which is nice, but everything just looks cluttered in Catalyst.
In the original Mirror's Edge it had a much more minimalistic design and everything just felt less busy and nicer to look at.
Not to mention for some reason they decided to give Catalyst this gritty look to it in a lot of areas, I guess they tried to give the city more personality but it doesn't feel right for a Mirror's Edge successor, part of what made the first one so unique was seeing such a clean aesthetic that was well complemented with the bright use of colors.
Now with the busy design and the somewhat gritty/dirty look to a lot of the environments I feel that Catalyst doesn't really look all that unique anymore.
I'd go as far as saying that it's starting to look generic.
Not to mention that I think it was a bad idea to make this a sandbox game, the linear levels in the first one were great, trial & error gameplay is what truly made it shine after numerous playthroughs, the way they could've improved it was by adding much more levels, pacing it better, instead of adding a bunch of Ubisoft generic padding to make it feel like you're getting your moneys worth.
Anyway, I made a video comparison so you get a good idea of what I'm talking about.
Or otherwise known as the previous gen. 360, PS3, Wii and PC gaming in those years. Did you felt like gaming was going in the right direction? Any fond memories? Memorable titles that you keep coming back to?
I hate a lot of things that came with new technology, like tacked on online gameplay in most games, developers feeling pressured to include an online component in order to make it seem like you're getting your money's worth, awful optimization in console titles, as in favoring prettier graphics over solid framerate was a step backwards, and one that keeps happening with current gen consoles.
But overall I still loved a lot of other things, the Wii ended up being one of my favorite consoles due to Nintendo keeping most of their games couch-based, reminded me why I started gaming in the first place despite hating motion controls. And I do feel like there were a lot of memorable titles.
So I made a tribute video for previous gen, showing off a multitude of console exclusives and other multiplatform titles, from indie to obscure to mainstream, I made sure to include most games I could, maybe you'll remember some that you've forgotten about. All I can say is I felt extremely nostalgic working on it.
One of the things that I see little to no improvement on as new games are released is AI, even within this current generation. When I was younger I kept thinking about how advanced games would be in this regard 10 years into the future, enemies would try to outsmart you at every chance, encounters would become more and more unique, etc. and yet here we are and the results are underwhelming. Sure we have some rare games like F.E.A.R. with excellent AI, but overall it hasn't been great. To illustrate this point I compared a game released in 2001 to one released in 2013, and the results… well… see for yourself.
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