Wednesday

That's a good way of thinking about it tbh. I would expect league to have 'brand value' from its characters but nothing on the level of dragon ball

But you're right that the real #1 reason is capitalism. No fighting game is gonna survive the outsized expectations of a 10yr dev cycle (not to mention being compared to the numbers of league and valorant). Trying to make 'fortnite but it's a fg' is never gonna work

Alternative content is a great way to get people past the "not being that into the genre" barrier. I'm not a jrpg fan but still played most of p4/p5 because of the social sim and story. Undertale/Deltarune has introduced tons of people to bullet hells.

I think this is true, but I also think that "lack of single player content" is a much more acceptable reason than "they shouldn't have made a tag fighter / 1 button specials / x gameplay decision". Dbfz, marvel 3, etc sold plenty!

When unity was the asset flip engine it became known for a particular look bc of the engine default settings, even though lots of unity games are unrecognizable as such. I think the same thing is happening with UE5 now, it's just I hate the fuzzy temporal defaults way more

Good example of this is Abiotic Factor. The game is trying to replicate the Source engine feel but is made in UE5 so there's still lots of disparities, or places where devs just don't have time/knowledge to implement custom solutions. A game mimicking Source doesn't need realtime GI lmao

UE5 almost as a whole (Nanite is black magic for geometry) leaned heavily into using temporal denoise, upscaling, AA, etc - especially Lumen (realtime GI solution). I think part of it is all of the engine defaults creating the "fuzzy" look and the other part is the game devs not modifying it.

I've been riding the high the last week and now it's finally setting in 🥺

I think it's pretty magical that in a 15ish year old game, one of the best active players picked it up post-covid and doesn't even use the defining piece of movement tech in the game. And even though practically every hit kills, because of that there's so much freedom to choose how you get there

A lot of this essay echoes how I've felt getting into marvel 3. I think true expression comes from a combination of execution and similar outcomes. On the low end I can learn characters that don't need to do movement tech. Or I can learn wave dashing, or I can invest lots of time into plinkdashing

this is where the game lost me as well, I ended up stopping and just assisting a friend's playthrough that was further along. puzzles only being able to be solved by circumstance is fun until you have less and less puzzles to do, then it's just grinding out runs until you get one that works

I always imagine you latched on like a lamprey eel

woah......

escape?