In 2005, the first 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:God of War game launched on PS2. It was a linear action game with flashy combos, an emphasis on platforming between brawls, and screen-filling boss battles against Greek gods. The next year, Square Enix released 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Final Fantasy 12, an open world RPG with turn-based combat, a “gambit” system that allowed the player to set the tactics for the characters in their party, and a 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Star Wars-inspired story.
Flash forward to 2022, when Sony launched 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:God of War Ragnarok for PS5. That game was also a linear action game, though following in the footsteps of its 2018 predecessor, a more grounded one. It also fo🧸llowed the general trends of third-person action games in the PS4/PS5 era, meaning that it’s 💝significantly more linear than the linear games of earlier generations, with levels largely composed of hallways with little branching, designed to funnel you into larger combat arenas, then back into a hallway. The platforming is gone, and has been replaced with the occasional pause to solve a puzzle, lift up a fallen tree or pillar, or boost another character up to a platform beyond your reach.
In 2023, a new Final Fantasy release is, once again, following a year after God of War, but this time, the two games have much more in common. Both God of War Ragnarok and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Final Fantasy 16 are action games with RPG elements that draw on Western fantasy (or, in GOW's case, the mythology that inspired it) as their primary source of inspiration. These two series were polar opposites on the PS2, but the homogenization of triple-A games has squeezed them into similar molds. In fact, the newest God of War is arguably more of an RPG than the newest Final Fantasy.
Though you can quibble about the similarities of their action — Final Fantasy 16 is quicker, more like 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Devil May Cry; God of War Ragnarok is slower, more like 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Dark Souls — the structure Santa Monica Studios and Square Enix built to house the action is functionally identical. When you start a level in Final Fantasy 16, you tend to run down a corridor until you reach a small arena, filled with easy-to-beat monsters. You dispatch them, then you and your companion chat a bit. Because the developers want to naturally gate the arena from the rest of the level, you may need to lift a tree trunk or climb over a platform to move on. You'll repeat this process several times as the level ramps up in difficulty. The enemies get tougher, until, eventually, you fight a miniboss. The process repeats and then you fight a big boss. The level ends, and you're free to head back to your base.
That description could be applied, verbatim, to God of War Ragnarok too. It feels especially obv🐟ious because the things that games once used to differentiate one space from another have largely been sanded away as production values have risen. Playing a modern triple-A game can♕ feel like riding an exercise bike while a screen shows the scenery changing, but your repetitive motions stay the same. In Final Fantasy 16, you may be infiltrating a castle, or running through the forest, but it all feels like gliding along rails.
Linear games haven't always felt like this. Older shooters like the 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Half-Life games might follow the same corridor-and-arena structure, but "On A Rail" and "We Don't Go To Ravenholm…" couldn't feel more different, because they give you different objectives and different tools to play with. Riding a railcar through the tunnels underneath a research facility and using a Gravity Gun to hurl circular saws at zombie enemies as you search for a route to the rooftops feels fundamentally different, even if both levels ultimately exist to transport you from A to B.
168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Naughty Dog tends to take a lot of the blame for this streamlining of triple-A design, and it's true that the success of games like 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Uncharted and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Last of Us set the template that Final Fantasy 16 and God of War Ragnarok are following - but Naughty Dog games don't feel like this. The studio talks about its "wide linear" approach to design, and that's most obvious in open-world levels like the "Downtown" area in The Last of Us Part 2, or "The Western Ghats" in Uncharted: The Lost Legacy. Both The Last of Us games consistently offer multiple buildings or rooms that you can explore as you travel from one destination to another. The Uncharted games are generally more streamlined, but none of them approach the sheer A to B funneling that's becoming common in triple-A third-person games.
"" has become a meme among online leftist gamers, and it's a sentiment that I agree with. The constant pursuit of better graphics and ever more expansive open-world leads to the developers behind those games having to crunch. There's a human toll, and the game industry needs the corrective. But, that meme is a meme and, as a result, doesn't make a comprehensive argument. What I think it misses is that scaling down the size and production value of triple-A games would also have a positive impact on what the teams making them can accomplish mechanically. When every inch of a game needs to look immaculately polished, it becomes more difficult to make every level interesting. We get really good graphics, but exploration is limited to one, glorious golden path.
Ragnarok and Final Fantasy 16 may approach graphical peaks, but if you care about robust gameplay, they're steps back. Our fantasy worlds could be so much more interesting if they stopped trying to convince us that they're real.