Not Marathon Infinity... (Gaming)

by uberfoop , Seattle-ish, Tuesday, June 12, 2018, 20:37 (2142 days ago) @ Cody Miller
edited by uberfoop, Tuesday, June 12, 2018, 21:00

Play Destiny and Titanfall 2. Then go back and play Halo.

I haven't played TF2, but I've switched between Destiny and Halo plenty.

The weight and physicality of movement is severely diminished. Halo feels like you are floating across the ground, not running on it. But Halo also felt way better than anything before it.

While Halo's movement definitely comes across as slow and floaty when felt back-to-back with a game like Destiny, this isn't really a new thing. Halo has never been very punchily kinetic with its movement. Go back to 2001, and there were plenty of folks who noted that it felt sluggish and floaty after playing, say, Quake.

In terms of the comparison with games like Destiny, I also view this as being more of a loudness war thing than a real evolution in game quality. Halo feels excellent when I'm actually engaged in the game; it's only if I rapidly switch between it and Destiny side-by-side that Destiny feels "better."

And none of this invalidates the desire to build on the past anyway, because Destiny is a totally different game than Halo and doesn't scratch all of the same itches. Even if Destiny's movement is both better and applicable to a Halo-like experience, why not take that and apply it to a Halo-like experience? Why not take advantage of that nostalgia AND build a fresh experience that stands toe-to-toe with the new stuff? These things aren't mutually exclusive.

It's not easy. It's harder for newer games to be better, but when they are better they can be a lot better.

I guess I just mostly disagree. And it's not like it's just for stuff that I played back in the day and have nostalgia for; like, I tried the original Doom for the first time around 5 years ago, and I think it's easily one of the best first-person shooters I've ever played.

There are definitely tools in the developer's toolbox that they have today that they didn't have decades ago. Plenty of games today would never have been able to work the way they do, if they'd been made back then. But the toolbox was already expansive enough to do some things very very well, and not everything has had that much room for direct improvement; and some things haven't improved at all, because nobody has been trying to improve upon them.
There weren't a whole lot of good electric guitar riffs coming out of the 19th century, but some of those symphonies are still quite nice.