I mean, what does he usually cover? Indie projects and maybe genres hes comfort in: Souls like games, Oldschool FPS games, maybe games that have some platforming or atmospheric walking horror games an most those will be in the indie category.
When it comes to other genres, he'll maybe touch em once (like say with Desperados 3), bitch about all the mechanics and then walk away feeling smug about it. Heck he never even finished the game an smugly admitted he dropped it.
Yahtz has half-given up. He has no venom and a lot of the humor seem dulled. He can't push people out of their comfort zones; the overall landscape is hyper casual.
Honestly, though, the video essays seem to be getting better.
tl;dr: Bad games have value; horrific value that confuses the player/consumer while bland games have nothing and are usually forgettable after the day (Back 4 Blood comes to mind). Personally I disagree (TLOUII) but I digress.
I'd argue TLOU2 comes under the bland tag more than bad, honestly. It's very functional as an experience, it just so happens to be shitting on the story.
That's just the youtube upload of the same video a little earlier in the thread. And look, I know people are mad about the story of TLOU2, but the gameplay and pacing and everything else in that shit sandwich is fine. It's not really great or even arguably good, but it's okay. Same thing with cawadooty whatever-the-fuck or battlefield-fuck-my-ass - certain things might be stupid about their monetization schemes, or they might be chasing stupid trends half a decade after the fact, but they're fine.
When Martin Scorsese said "Marvel movies aren't cinema," he wasn't saying that they literally aren't films or even that they're poorly made. It's the same sort of sentiment from Yahtzee. Barring that whereas Scorsese is an old and veritable master of his craft, Yahtzee is some weird autist with an entertaining internet video game review show.
Yahtz has half-given up. He has no venom and a lot of the humor seem dulled. He can't push people out of their comfort zones; the overall landscape is hyper casual.
Extra Punctuation: Yahtzee Croshaw discusses the problem of using game length as a PR selling point, as seen with 500 hours of Dying Light 2.
www.escapistmagazine.com
January being its usual void of significant gaming events because all the publishers are too full of Christmas turkey to want to commit to releasing any big titles until mid-quarter one, the upcoming Dying Light 2 was able to grab a few headlines by boasting that it will take 500 hours to complete it. And the response was immediate. My first response was to conclude that Dying Light 2 is trying to kill me, specifically. No reviewer can play 500 hours of game in the week we have before we all move onto the next temporary headline occupant. But they damn well know that. Clearly this is yet another blatant attempt by the big money industry to undermine legitimate criticism. Either we die of malnutrition trying to beat it or get an earful of apologists moaning that we didn’t give it its fair shake and REAL gamers know that it gets really good around hour one hundred and twelve.
Okay, let’s put Conspiracy Yahtzee back to bed and wake up Analyst Yahtzee, killer7 style. 500 is a pretty vague number that smacks to me of someone needing a quote and someone else getting caught on the spot. Instantly the scenario unfolded in my head – Johnny Development got cornered at the water cooler by Sally Marketing and pressed for some selling point to start driving those social metrics and that was the only thing that sprang to mind. So Sally Marketing hurried off to start pushing it before her brain could kick in and start thinking about it.
Because 500 hours is a lot. It’s like 500 lunch breaks. Two thousand if you work in an Amazon warehouse. You know Persona 4 Golden? You know how it’s a pretty long game, like most JRPGs, full of story and lengthy dungeon grinds? I’ve played through Persona 4 Golden like three times because I feel guilty about not giving equal attention to all the waifus. With all that in mind, all my playthroughs combined have only clocked 160 hours in Persona 4 Golden, according to my Steam profile page. 500 hours, that’s like Persona 4 Golden nine times.
It feels like too much, even non-reviewers want to get through games in time to move onto the next dish on the buffet of the popular vogue. It especially seems like a lot for this kind of game. I’ve checked some other metrics on my Steam profile page and most of the games that crack three figures on the hours played column are my comfort zone games that I tend to put on to idly kill time while listening to podcasts. So dungeon-grindy Persona 4, Stardew Valley, FTL, and, uh, Dark Souls. Which I’m so familiar with now it’s more of a comfort zone for me than parts of the actual house in which I live.
The point is, these are my quiet time games for zoning out with. Five hundred hours of full on triple-A action sandbox feels like it would be very mentally exhausting. Maybe that’s my age talking, there, but I can’t have been alone in expressing some misgivings because Sally Marketing was quick to come back with some clarifications on the 500 hour boast – they added that this was just for one hundred percent completion. If you’re hammering through the critical story path because you’ve got a deadline or need to rush out to buy Ritalin before the shops close, you can expect a much more easily split up across a weekly schedule twenty hours, and eighty hours if you just throw in the sidequests. Okay, fine… no, wait, not fine, how exactly are we defining “100% completion,” here, if not just main game and sidequests? Like, getting all the achievements? Yeah, I’m pretty sure there are a lot of games that will take hundreds of hours to achieve that. That’s why the only people who try to do it are psychotics.
I guess we already know this is 20 hours of main story and 480 hours of other stuff, which is probably why the announcement was met with a sense of foreboding by some. I happen to know from the E3 presentation I attended in 2019 – you remember E3, it was that thing from the before times when all us video game insider types met up in person to complain about people like you – that Dying Light 2 will have binary choices throughout the campaign that open up some parts of the map and lock off others, so you can’t see all of the game in one playthrough. If you have to play the game multiple times to get all the content then there’ll be an awful lot of repeating the fixed parts of the game to get to the new bits. But this was years ago so who knows if that’s still the case or if they’ve feature creeped it out.
Besides that, the general assumption was that “other stuff” consisted of slogging across a map sprinkled copiously with copy pasted side mission dandruff in the characteristic manner of what we tend to think of as the Ubisoft-style sandbox – one part actual game to ten parts faffing about. I note the 500 hour promise doesn’t include the caveat that it might vary depending on your skill level, which supports the assumption that this is all busy work, box ticking and going to the icon on the map and standing on a thing.
But hell, we don’t know that. I haven’t played any Dying Light 2 at time of writing. For all I know they could have stuffed the game up to the eyeballs with Witcher 3-style artfully crafted sidequests all with unique plots and characters that’s all so bloody well written that by the end of it my trousers will be more spunk than fabric. Kinda doubt it, though, mainly for the reason that Dying Light 2 is apparently the sort of game that boasts about its playtime length, and that’s not the sort of thing a smart game boasts about. Perhaps this gets us to the root of the negative reception to the 500 hour announcement, because I think what rubbed people up the wrong way is that it’s just not a classy boast for what we still generally pretend to be an artistic medium. It’s like telling everyone how big your dick is.
Yes, there are game databases online that list average playtime lengths, but that’s not a marketing boast, that’s a reference for people who want to know if they can fit it into their schedule. It’s the difference between telling everyone your dick size and carefully measuring your dick to make sure the thing you’re about to jam it in isn’t going to inflict serious trauma. Or undergo any.
To reduce your game to some purely quantitative statement like hours of playtime, as a selling point, well… it’s really illustrating the point I made back in my video about open worlds, isn’t it, when I compared triple-A games to the old Hollywood epics that just kept ramping up the spectacle and the number of extras and the budget because bigger was always better. It’s like Dying Light 2 saw that and immediately set out to double down in the exact opposite direction to the path that makes games less emotionally numbing to play and nightmarish to develop. Our game is better because it can kill the most time. Is that seriously the limit of your ambition? Do you have no higher aspiration than to distract us plebs from the nightmare of our shared reality with greater efficiency? Talk about giving the game away. Although I assume they’re not giving the game away. Not yet at any rate. Give it a few years of Steam sales. Anyway, can I have my review copy now?
What the hell happened to mobile gaming? Well. Money is what happened. Shitheads flooding the digital stores with cheap knockoffs in the hope of making a quick return, exactly the same thing that caused the ’80s video game crash. Fuck the one percent. There, that’s the requisite capitalism bashing out of the way, let’s talk about the rest of it.
Recently on my streams and videos I’ve been talking up Unpacking a lot. It’s a wonderful example of a game that focuses squarely on one interesting mechanic, in this case the act of unpacking all your stuff after moving into a new home, and uses it to covertly build a rich setting and story under the surface. The sort of thing Lucas Pope does very well. But what’s really soured the pleasant air surrounding the game is that some git hashed out an obvious clone of it called Unpacking Master and released it for mobiles, free to play and more wallpapered with ads than the average rally driver. It was brazen enough to rip off some of the room layouts, to say nothing of the title, and before complaints caused it to be pulled from stores it was sitting right at the top of Apple’s free to play chart.
The whole situation makes me depressed for several reasons. Firstly, as the Unpacking devs themselves said on Twitter, it’s very demoralising to see something truly creative and lovingly made so soullessly and opportunistically shaken down by money robots with no vision beyond the next quick buck. And secondly, it threw once again into sharp relief what an absolute hell hole mobile gaming has become. You think the indie game deluge on Steam is bad, mobile is currently demonstrating what might become of Steam if it lost what little quality control it still has.
‘Cos I used to love mobile gaming. Not even that long ago I genuinely thought it was the future of gaming. A platform with no buttons, only a touchscreen and ideally used one-handed, it required a complete ground-up rethink in the way you made games. It practically demanded elegance of design. Plus, everyone has a phone, there was a gigantic guaranteed audience all crying out for something to keep them distracted on the bus. The ground was fertile for innovation. But the line between fertile ground and compost heap only gets thinner over time.
I used to play all kinds of different games on my phone. The first legit breakout mobile gaming hit that I remember was Canabalt. One of the first of the infinite runners, where you’re a pixel dude running through a city that’s undergoing some kind of disaster. There was artistry to it, intrigue. Who was this man? What was happening to the city? What were those weird robot crabs in the background? But that was just the first one I tried. Doodle God, Fruit Ninja, Cut the Rope, Tiny Wings, even Angry Birds at first, simple, innovative, cutting edge game design with heart and soul. I would just browse the apple App store and try out random games on a whim.
Today, there’s only a few games I play on my phone. Solitaire, crosswords, Picross-style puzzles. Mainly because each round of such games usually takes a while so I don’t get constantly deluged with ads. Most of the games I try on a whim because the ads made them look sorta fun are based around very short levels so that ads can be plugged in at the start and end of each one. Levels usually of some mindless but viscerally satisfying task like sorting coloured balls. And all the ads that bookend them seem to be for an infinite number of games with slight variations of the same thing and almost no theming to speak of. Sorting colours seems to be the evergreen trend. I just searched for the word “sort” in the Apple app store and turned up Water Sort Puzzle, Ball Sort Puzzle, Sort It 3D, SortPuz, Sort Water Color Puzzle, Ball Sort Color Water Puzzle, Soda Sort Puzzle, Bubble Sort Color Puzzle, Color Ball Sort Puzzle…
See, the whole Unpacking thing was just a rare case of the standard operating procedure for mobile gaming spilling out into the real world. Most of the time mobile games just eat each other in a constant cannibalistic free for all where the moment anything proves even the slightest bit successful a thousand barely distinguishable imitators are hacked out with such speed that you’ve got to assume some kind of algorithm is involved that automatically tracks download numbers and feeds data into an automatic cloning device. That’s why all the ads for these games are exactly the same, as well. Always brief clips of the gameplay being played completely abysmally in a way that makes you frustrated and want to have a go so you can show them how it’s supposed to be done, the way you teach your grandparents to type.
And always with a fake quote over the top along the lines of “I’ve played level 3 519 times and I just can’t beat it!” because I guess trial and error determined this to somehow be the most effective wording.
Hacking through the jungle of free to play mobile games all I see are constant reminders that none of this exists because its intention is to amuse you or enrich your life. It’s all coldly and emotionlessly designed purely to sucker you in with the promise of quick scores for the rodent brain, so that they can add you to the big juicy number they use to lure in advertisers. It feels like being around at the tail end of a gold rush. After all the big claims have been made and the smart miners have already cashed in and pissed off, so all that remain are the latecomers still holding onto a shred of hope for a payout, and the whorehouses that were set up to exploit them. And now everyone’s lined up shoulder to shoulder at the riverbank desperately panning away, ready to start slitting throats at the first sign of glitter.
Probably because it was a gold rush, really, but it might be generalizing too much to blame it all on the corrupting influence of money when I’d really like to blame Flappy Bird a little bit. Flappy Bird, created in a matter of days by indie developer Dong Nguyen, was simplicity itself on a platform that favoured simplicity very much, but even so no one anticipated its sudden explosive popularity, and it set a foreboding precedent. So alarming was it that Nguyen took the game down himself basically because he was frightened of the monster he had created. An appreciably human thing to do, and yet, perhaps not the best move, because it immediately created a vacuum that emboldened the torrents of imitators that were already pouring in, having now learned exactly how much effort was required to get a big payout.
And now that’s what every game on mobile seems to be – nothing but dirt-simple gameplay and bland art offering quick dopamine hits, pounded into endless horizons of homogeny by algorithms, and the platform has no incentive to change or improve things because these games make too much money for the cunts who run the world. And it wasn’t actually Flappy Bird’s fault. I think Flappy Bird just inadvertently exposed an uncomfortable truth about mobile as a platform. I thought it was a new world of gaming. But what I think of as “games” are things you have to focus on. You stare exclusively at the screen and control it with a device you have to hold with both hands. You get immersed.
But most of the guaranteed audience for mobile games doesn’t want that. When the platform is a tiny screen usually used one-handed while the user is only half paying attention to make sure they don’t miss when their train passes through their station, you don’t want immersion, you want mindless distraction. You want quick highs, not difficult challenges or emotional engagement. And that’s precisely the demand that over the years mobile gaming has carefully refined itself to exploit. It’s sad, but complaining about it is like complaining that people are still sniffing glue in a world where perfectly good heroin exists. Now if you’ll excuse me, I want to leave before I start thinking about whether or not that analogy made sense.
My counterpoint: Apple's App Store, Google Play, Amazon Appstore, and whatever else out there are run by companies who don't give a shit about games, and have the absolute bare minimum of quality control necessary to keep their asses out of court. Opportunists, especially foreign ones well outside of the legal jurisdictions of anywhere in Christendom, know there's plenty of money to be made by just aping whatever's popular, and their derivative trash won't be deleted, so they take advantage of the situation. So does Yahtzee criticize these enormous goliath corpos for leaving the floodgates open?
Hahahaha, fuck no. He seems to stop right before he hits that point, offering no resolution, because how dare he criticize such wonderful corporations? He might lose his True & Honest Californian status he worked so hard for!
Yeah, I get it, mobile games did used to have potential, but this kind of problem is nothing new. They come from opportunistic shitheads running factories in the two most populous nations on the planet, the exact kind that've made this kind of shit since long before any of us were born:
But, we didn't grow up seeing that kind of junk sold at Target or wherever, thanks to their quality control, which kept bootlegs relegated to the likes of flea markets, where you go in with a lower expectation for quality in exchange for the hopes of finding hidden treasures.
Why all the app stores nowadays have such minimal QA is beyond me, but it really feels like one of those many many Clown World dystopia things. Even in the 2000s, when download stores were just kicking off on consoles, it really meant something to be allowed to sell your game on one of them. They were even designated by tiers as to the scope of the games. Like, Xbox Live Arcade titles were the middle point between Newgrounds-tier indie and full-scale retail, and it was great. You could drop $15 on something that looks interesting and get $15 worth of entertainment, and it gave a sense that it was in the right zone for its scope.
That's long gone now. Check the newest releases on your Switch, and all of the big pricey full retail game are alongside even the dollar games someone cobbled together in Unity with premade assets for a quick buck. The wheat gets mixed in with the chaff, so you go online to find out what's what, mentioning in passing how much total garbage you have to sift through, only to have scream at you for gatekeeping, and that garbage-ass dollar games are true & honest games just as much as the biggest $60 ones.
The same could be said for every form of media nowadays. It's getting increasingly like trying to browse through the Library of Babel for something of quality. Sure, it exists out there, somewhere, but you might die before you stumble across it. This problem could be easily prevented if quality standards THAT ALREADY EXISTED were just put back in place, but for whatever reason, like maybe it was a call from whatever shadow glowniggers run our world, all of that was yeeted directly into space.
@Pissmaster I disagree with quality control argument since how it's a recipe to make the front page the home of AAA and gay indie cliques.
Anyways Mobile games were shit more than a decade ago. I don't get the point of bringing back the point besides advertising his friends' game. And about that game, spending time trying to make an immersive mobile game is as dumb as getting a liberal art degree.
My counterpoint: Apple's App Store, Google Play, Amazon Appstore, and whatever else out there are run by companies who don't give a shit about games, and have the absolute bare minimum of quality control necessary to keep their asses out of court.
...
So does Yahtzee criticize these enormous goliath corpos for leaving the floodgates open?
To be fair, he does mention that the problem is mainly because of how little effort is required for a phone game to earn money - money earned not only by the creator of the game but also by the platform publishing it. Everyone's expectations for mobile gaming are already so low that there's no real benefit to the corporation of 'cleaning up' their app store.
Granted, he does seem rather hesitant to explicitly say this though.
@Pissmaster: To me, my real beef with it was not "why didn't he call out the corporations" but praising mobile games in general. Early games (Cut the Rope, Fruit Ninja, Angry Birds) were basically just Flash games you had to pay for, all those sorts of games and more were available through Kongregate. And while it's true there are a few games I liked that were on mobile (that Katamari Damacy game that used the iPhone's tilt features, or as late/recent as 2016, a fighting game called Iron Snout), I had no delusions that mobile was "the future of gaming" or whatever.
I think by the time Super Mario Run (a shameless cash grab by Nintendo standards) came out, "Free" (in the iPhone store) had become "Get" ("with in-app purchases"), and Super Mario Run was already an Internet-required, pay-to-play game. Again, that's been about five years ago at this point, and even though it hadn't gotten into the asset-flip concept-identical hellhole it became today, it smacks of hypocrisy or retardation to think that it was "good" or "the future" until 3-4 years ago.
If a game gets a physical release it probably means it's not going to be as shitty as digital only releases can be. That tends to be my metric on how to sift through the crap.
@Pissmaster I disagree with quality control argument since how it's a recipe to make the front page the home of AAA and gay indie cliques.
Anyways Mobile games were shit more than a decade ago. I don't get the point of bringing back the point besides advertising his friends' game. And about that game, spending time trying to make an immersive mobile game is as dumb as getting a liberal art degree.
The front page already is dominated by AAAs and gay indies; here's a screenshot of the front page of the App Store I took when I started typing up this post a couple of days ago:
Mobile games were, and have always been shit, but it really does feel like something more could be done with the platform. Modern phones are little pocket-sized touchscreen machines with gaming potential on par with maybe like, the Xbox 360, yet nothing substantial in gaming ever happens on mobile. I guess I always just overestimated the power of their touchscreens. Even after over a decade of use, they never came close to being even manageable replacements for a proper controller, let alone a keyboard, and the smattering of mobile games I actually play are ones that I play with my stylus, because our big goofy fingers still obfuscate way too much of the screen, even on big phones.
@Pissmaster: To me, my real beef with it was not "why didn't he call out the corporations" but praising mobile games in general. Early games (Cut the Rope, Fruit Ninja, Angry Birds) were basically just Flash games you had to pay for, all those sorts of games and more were available through Kongregate. And while it's true there are a few games I liked that were on mobile (that Katamari Damacy game that used the iPhone's tilt features, or as late/recent as 2016, a fighting game called Iron Snout), I had no delusions that mobile was "the future of gaming" or whatever.
I think by the time Super Mario Run (a shameless cash grab by Nintendo standards) came out, "Free" (in the iPhone store) had become "Get" ("with in-app purchases"), and Super Mario Run was already an Internet-required, pay-to-play game. Again, that's been about five years ago at this point, and even though it hadn't gotten into the asset-flip concept-identical hellhole it became today, it smacks of hypocrisy or retardation to think that it was "good" or "the future" until 3-4 years ago.
I never thought it'd be the future of games either, and I always found those "lmao portable games are DEAD" articles to be shortsighted as hell, but I saw potential in all of these new features that just never got realized. Last year, I wrote a post outlining an idea I had for a dungeon crawler that used Pokemon Go-esque real life landmarks that you'd travel to and collect dungeons to explore:
There could be a hell of a lot more done with this style of game, if they gave any actual reason for players to go and visit new places. Like, one game I've imagined is a dungeon crawler where you level up by scanning stops around your town. The levels would be permanently kept, with stops turning into shops, mini-dungeons, and little villages where you can get quests on repeat visits, but you'd be heavily encouraged to go find new stops to boost your level. These would be background to a main campaign which you could play at home, where the actual dungeon crawling would earn you in-game GP you could use to buy better equipment. And of course, you could drop off some items as treasures for others to find, alongside Dark Souls-style shitposts for others to laugh at. It's a game that would encourage exploration and exercise, forcing its players to touch grass to make progress, and appreciate the world around them.
Problem is, Niantic is made up of former Google employees, and they've got a whole system that's probably got patents and Google Maps API usage that's not accessible to us plebs. Maybe you could do something like that with OpenStreetMap, but it seems like an immensely difficult game to build out for any kind of indie developer.
But hey, it'd be the first RPG where you get experience points from actually having real life experiences.
But of course, nobody's making that game anytime soon.
Smartphones are, for better or worse, the ultimate convergence of technology, and it's a weird concept to me that there just aren't any truly great games out there that can utilize all the crazy inputs and sensors in a modern smartphone. Call me optimistic, or even straight up quixotic, but I load up Sensors Multitool and see that my phone has a magnetometer for some reason, and the gears in my head start turning, and trying to figure out how I can design a video game around this. There's probably nothing to make involving the magnetometer, but, like, even the GPS and camera can't be used to make something interesting? Like, come on, there's gotta be some good idea floating around in the ether for those.
If a game gets a physical release it probably means it's not going to be as shitty as digital only releases can be. That tends to be my metric on how to sift through the crap.
Smartphones are, for better or worse, the ultimate convergence of technology, and it's a weird concept to me that there just aren't any truly great games out there that can utilize all the crazy inputs and sensors in a modern smartphone. Call me optimistic, or even straight up quixotic, but I load up Sensors Multitool and see that my phone has a magnetometer for some reason, and the gears in my head start turning, and trying to figure out how I can design a video game around this. There's probably nothing to make involving the magnetometer, but, like, even the GPS and camera can't be used to make something interesting? Like, come on, there's gotta be some good idea floating around in the ether for those.
There are couple of problems to using the tech: it limits the amount of devices, almost certainly makes development exponentially harder and, most importantly, people won't play since they'll look like retards.
In the end of the day phones are just bad for gaming since they are full of distractions, need accessories to actually see the games, and getting their battery run out is extremely dangerous. You'd better off buying a Switch (which is cheaper even with scalping) and playing it on a long ride (with the added bonus that a Switch game will always work, while you might be fucked by phone games not updating to current os or being supported on your device).
Even after over a decade of use, they never came close to being even manageable replacements for a proper controller, let alone a keyboard, and the smattering of mobile games I actually play are ones that I play with my stylus, because our big goofy fingers still obfuscate way too much of the screen, even on big phones.
But I haven't had much luck with them, even the ones that plug into the controller, mainly due to the fact that the lag factor is a pain in the ass. I tried playing Sonic 2 Mobile on one of these things and there was like a 1 second (at most) delay between my input and the action taking place.
not yahtzee specifically but his co-workers have caught some flak for defending the new lord of the rings
its all the typical "if you dont like it, dont watch it" or "you just dont like black people argument" as we have seen so many times before.
they talk about wanting a discussion on the subject but still bans people form chat for being "trolls". i like that one of them was saying how its a good thing you cant see the dislike meter and someone had to point out you can still see it. and its glorious. the comment section is also pretty much in flames.
not yahtzee specifically but his co-workers have caught some flak for defending the new lord of the rings
its all the typical "if you dont like it, dont watch it" or "you just dont like black people argument" as we have seen so many times before.
they talk about wanting a discussion on the subject but still bans people form chat for being "trolls". i like that one of them was saying how its a good thing you cant see the dislike button and someone had to point out you can still see it. and its glorious. the comment section is also pretty much in flames.
www.escapistmagazine.com
scream at you for gatekeeping, and that garbage-ass dollar games are true & honest games just as much as the biggest $60 ones.
