A bit of a tangent, but:

I think you’re probably right, and I also think Sony’s a little more afraid of innovating within those franchises: the distance between Mario games in a ten year span is huge versus the difference between, say, the games in the Uncharted series - and I mean on a gameplay level, not just a technical improvement level.…

That makes total sense to me, and I get what you mean about the ‘edge lord debauchery’, too: it was never really a selling point of the franchise for me, but at least I could mostly ignore it in the sillier entries. One of the places I’ll dock 5 in was that it often felt like it was trying to take itself super…

Here’s the thing: intellectually, I absolutely agree with you. Art that’s not evolving is art that’s inherently derivative, and derivative art is always less interesting because it will never have the ‘shock of the new’ that the original influence possessed.

Thank you! And it’s definitely a mix of both for me - I know Far Cry doesn’t really have any redeeming artistic merit, I know it’s from a company with a... questionable corporate culture, I know that it’s been built from the ground up to grab my attention and manipulate me into enjoying it, rather than being…

I also think it’s worth noting that those ‘jarring points’ take a lot less to create than a lot of gaming executives want to admit, simply because the changeover between console generations essentially forces their customer base to re-evaluate whether they want to stay in the inertia lane or not.

Oh, don’t get me wrong - it’s far from the only AAA game series I play; it’s just the only one where I have to kind of admit to myself that it has no real actual artistic merit, that it’s more or less a cultural wasteland and I’m only playing it for the adrenaline shock lizard-brain serotonin drip of it all.

Oh absolutely, PC is still king when it comes to niche indie games - by a pretty huge margin. I just wanted to push back a little against the notion that those titles were entirely gone from the console space.

Again, you’re absolutely right - but that also applied to plenty of those other, formerly ‘top of the world’ companies, and it didn’t stop them from sailing right off a cliff once they started thinking they could just coast on their previous successes.

Absolutely; we can have all the discussion we want about whether or not video games constitute ‘art’ (I mean, it’s a dumb discussion, of course they are, even Far Cry - just because something’s ‘art’ doesn’t mean it’s ‘good art’), but there’s also something to be said for video games that function really, really well…

Thank you! I also think it helps that Ubisoft has a pretty good schedule for Far Cry: the ‘main games’ are about 3-4 years apart, and then the ‘smaller, slightly weirder’ games fall in between those, and that’s often enough to keep the series comfortingly familiar without being so often I get completely sick of the…

I totally get that; I enjoyed the first one, but felt like the formula had worn thin by the second, so I never picked up the third. Thing is, though? One can totally level that same complaint at the Far Cry games, so I absolutely get how one can look past that if you really, really enjoy that particular formula.

Interestingly enough, one of the things I really liked about New Dawn was that - in general - it felt really pared down compared to the others, so there was markedly less ‘spaghetti on the floor’ for me. I feel like, on average, I get kinda sick of Far Cry games about three-fourths of the way through - I’ve got most…

I feel like everybody has that one piece of big-budget, not-particularly-innovative gaming that they still really enjoy, just because it stimulates very specific, relatively base desires really, really well... and yeah, Far Cry is totally that series for me. I’ll wait to pick it up on sale, for sure, but I will pick…

The thing about that argument, though, is that everyone’s right up until the moment they’re not. Viewing Sony’s current success as an inevitability moving forward ignores Microsoft’s success during the 360 era, Nintendo’s success with the Wii, Sony’s own success in the original Playstation era - which was predicated…

As the inverse of that, I find it kind of fascinating how much Sony right now reminds me of Microsoft coming out of the 360 era; specifically, how much they both (Microsoft then, Sony now) seemed to just assume their customer base’s fealty based on their success with the prior generation. And it’s not that either…

Interestingly enough, I think those quirky, cheap, weirdo games are still out there - and still very much in the console ecosystem, even! - it’s just that they’re almost entirely digital; physical release is now a luxury, basically, that only those $70 games can afford.

Exactly; Ryan seems to be conflating hitting really good sales numbers and/or winning awards with being ‘the favorite game of everyone who ever played it’. Which... isn’t really the case. (And I say that as somebody who really enjoyed TLOU - but I absolutely get why it might not appeal. I feel similarly about Horizon…

I also remember games that were ‘ambitious but flawed’ a lot more fondly, I think, than games that were ‘technically impressive but creatively uninspired’. (Which certainly isn’t an apt descriptor for all of Sony’s output, don’t get me wrong - but you are going to wind up tending in that direction if you’re aiming for…

Ha! I actually almost used the MCU as a point of comparison, but as much as Feige and Disney get accused of going for that ‘lowest common denominator/broadest possible appeal’ approach, I honestly don’t think they’re actually nearly as guilty of it as the accusation implies. (And, to be fair, neither is Sony: as far…