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What's up with so many major game designers/directors ending up being more or less hacks? Lots of them seem gimmicky, pretentious, or that they otherwise don't really understand what it was that made their past work so great in the first place. Kojima, Miyamoto, Aonuma, Todd Howard, David Jaffe, Neil Druckmann, just to name a few. Even Sakurai, as much as I like him and regardless of how much he works, has been guilty of this in the past. This extends to other media as well and it's why I no longer feel any hype towards advertisement campaigns that use "we brought back the original creator!" as a selling point. It seems like often it is the fans that understand the game more than the creator did when he made it. I heavily subscribe to the "death of the author" mentality because the author will usually screw things up if you put all your stock in them.
To take a good example from cinema, Martin Scorsese has frequent and long-lasting repeat collaborations with actors, screenwriters, film editors, cinematographers etc. for a very good reason. Knowing whom you can work with well is critical.
@Tadano this was prompted by an interview with Eiji Aonuma where he stated that the reason why people like old Zelda games is nostalgia and that he can't understand why people who would want to return to a more restrictive game for any other reason.
It's stuff like Miyamoto INSISTING on forcing motion controls into crap that doesn't need it because it's a "new way to play." Kojima making a worse game because his whims alone aren't conducive to good game design as much as they would be to some underground film festival movie. Sakurai feeling like people were playing his party game wrong so he added random tripping in the next one just to spite them, or getting so upset that the story for previous games leaked that he didn't focus as much on it later. I don't think a lot of them actually understand what makes people play the games sometimes, and they look solely at sales figures numbers to guide them but it's quite often misplaced because that's not always representative of your core userbase.
That's why having a good team around you is good, though, for sure. Maybe these people have been given a bit too much power over what a game should end up being like at times. Honestly, that's probably part of why something like the original Silent Hill games did so well, because it was a small team and they all contributed to a lot of the game in some way or another. In fact, that might be why a lot of older games seem to have a bit more "quality" to them, for lack of a better term. They were made by significantly smaller teams that could actually contribute, whereas at this point the dev team sizes are expanding at unreasonable amounts (to the point of massive industry layoffs) so there needs to be just a handful of guys who all report to one guy calling the shots.
I don't know, just spitballin. I'm not too happy with the state of modern gaming as I'm sure many people aren't and I think there are a lot of reasons for that, even just beyond "woke" stuff. Gaming's gotten a little too big, perhaps, which sounds like a good thing in theory because more money, more games, more players, more spotlight in the social zeitgeist. It's very easy to feel that magic has been lost, though.
@otokonoko @Tadano this happens with writers too. Jk Rowling and Rick Riordan are pretty good examples of that. And I have no doubt that if any of these game designers were capable of making a game entirely by themselves anymore, it would also turn out to be unrecognizable from the work that made them so popular in the first place.
It is kind of funny though, I've seen a lot of videos and interviews of games that were developed 30 years ago where the devs all had so much passion for what they were working on that they would stay late or sleep at the office, or they would all go to lunch together and pass ideas around. That just seems impossible in a larger studio with more politics.
@heavens_feel @Tadano my hope for TotK was that it was more like zelda 1. Botw really showed off that it wanted to return to those roots, but the idea hadn't been cooked long enough. The exploration was there, but the dungeons left something to be desired. I wanted TotK to have that same kind of design but require certain items to be found in order to progress in dungeons, going back to that original Zelda formula and adding lots of great modern sensibilities. It doesn't deliver on that at all, and instead just follows in botw's footsteps, asking how they can make botw better. They made it more expansive and introduced a lot of freedom, but as I've come to realize over the past decade, bigger isn't always better and at some point you're going to see diminishing returns.
@beardalaxy@gameliberty.club @Tadano@amala.schwartzwelt.xyz
intriguingly, though, good writers tend to have repeated successes as long as they stay true to their own vision and refuse to let editors and publishers and sales figures distort that. that's a lot easier to do with literature and manga, since those are far less collaborative efforts in most cases, so you are expected to retain full control over the work, and it is furthermore acknowledged that your genius is what sold the story, and you know best.
that's likely also why critically acclaimed authors, designers and developers of visual novels tend to have repeated success—except when their publisher decides to censor things, often for better sales figures in the West. it's harder to be forced to give into publishers' whims when you or perhaps a small team have full artistic control over your creation.
to that extent: i think your note about the team sizes having been smaller in game design and development historically is incredibly accurate in terms of why they were of such quality.