@“Hunter”#p153202
Your description and timeline with respect to FFX and FFVIII seems a bit off. FFX is not really similar to LOTR at all aside from involving a group of people going on a journey which describes a lot of stories so this seems like a very forced comparison. It also came out before the release of the Fellowship of the Ring movie (which I presume is what you were referring to since this is what put LOTR into the popular consciousness in a big way at the time). I have not played FFVIII, but school settings have always been popular in Japan and the Japanese translation of Harry Potter didn’t come out until half a year after the release of FFVIII, so I doubt it was much of an inspiration (HP was super popular in Japan in the early 2000’s, however, and there is definitely Japanese pop culture that took inspiration from it later).
I do agree that FFXIII was a much more interesting game to me than FFXVI which overall ended up feeling bland.
For me personally Final Fantasy XVI was a disappointment and ultimately I didn’t like it much. I enjoyed it a lot more in the beginning, like the first 10 hours or so that Brandon said he played, but the gameplay loop, boring side-quests and certain aspects of the plot/setting (the whole bearer thing was handled in such a silly fashion) ground me down until I felt like I was forcing myself to play every time I went back and ultimately I just stopped about 70% of the way in.
Not sure if I should post this, maybe I am just feeling a bit prickly today, but whatever, here goes.
@"yeso"#p153067
I think it is pretty presumptuous to imply or think that because something was made as a commercial product to earn money, it means that none of the people involved cared about what they were creating or that it is by necessity “corporate vat grown property content”. I ultimately didn’t like Final Fantasy XVI, but I think some of the people working on it were trying to make something they thought was good and interesting. But I also think that trying to divine the motivations of the people who worked on it is useless and as most games are made in a corporate environment it seems silly to decide which ones are soulless simply by what we think of the end product. I don't even necessarily disagree with your criticism/assessment I just think the framing is weird and counterproductive.
Moving away from FFXVI which I didn’t personally like, a similar discussion can be had about big budget corporate games that I do like, such as FFX. And I will definitely defend that some people working on that game had a specific vision of what they wanted. As games are large collaborative projects, I don’t think it is necessarily meaningful to judge them in a similar fashion to books which usually have a single author who is in control, so yes it is rare to have a game with a singular vision unless it is a smaller game made by fewer people (like Yeo, I guess), but I don’t think this is the only worthwhile way to create art. Some people may be more interested in working on the types of projects that can only be realized by larger teams which these days probably means working at a larger company with all the shitty shareholder-mandated bullshit that entails. But the end result can still sometimes be good. I mean, I don’t know anything about game development, maybe I am totally wrong about what one can do as a game developer whose vision involves larger game projects.
When I was younger I used to be quite annoyed (I still am I guess, it's just that annoyed is maybe a slightly strong word for what I feel) with gatekeeping in nerdy spaces, but also with people whom are mostly into fantasy novels disparaging “literary” or canonized older famous novels based on often projected notions of these being “pretentious” or more often as a reaction to the idea that fantasy/sci-fi novels are bad (as in, "Actually it's the other novels that are bad!", a pretty childish response). I’m going to put my cards on the table. I do not think all fantasy and sci-fi novels are bad, nor do I think you can just say the “good ones” transcend being “nerd shit” and that it is therefore fine to label the rest of it as the latter. Like there is clearly a sliding scale of quality, some are good, some are bad, some have interesting ideas or themes to convey (some do it well some do it terribly) and you pretty much have to judge on an individual basis. Conversely a lot canonized or literary novels that some genre-fans dismiss as boring and pretentious are perfectly enjoyable and entertaining reads (and as many like to point out several canonized novels were popular culture back when they were actually written). For fantasy junkies, the 2022 Booker prize winner, which is probably a symbol of pretentiousness for many people who hate literary novels had very strong fantasy elements, maybe you would like it!
Overall I don’t believe that there is such a distinct and clear line between what you and others dismiss as entertainment or “nerd shit” (is there a hierarchy here, is “nerd shit” better or worse than popular mass entertainment that is not “nerd shit”? Does fewer people appreciating something make it better art?) and what they hold up as “true art”.
If you want people to appreciate what you believe to be good art I think the worst approach is to tell them that what they enjoy sucks. It puts them on a hostile footing from the beginning and rather than being receptive to suggestions or discussions surrounding this they are likely to dismiss you as either pretentious or a jerk. This is true in general by the way, lots of nerds love to do the same thing themselves where they will recommend book/show/game Y by saying how much X sucks in comparison when someone says they like X. This is rarely a constructive way of making people want to try out Y.
So I am sorry, but a passage like
> who has like an actual human, adult brain and reads actual books and watches actual movies instead of just nerd shit (that elusive link between video games, and actual human culture)
makes me roll my eyes very hard.
As I said I wasn’t sure if I wanted to post this, because I think it is hard to make this argument without coming across as slighted/taking cheeky language a bit too seriously or as trying to say that there is no point in criticizing media/art and claiming that there is a qualitative difference between two pieces of art is impossible since it is all subjective so who cares. This is not my intent! I think it is worth discussing media, I think it is fair to think that some literature is more worthwhile than other literature, but I also think one can do this without implying that people who are not as into the specific art you champion don’t have actual human, adult brains (yes I am aware that you are probably exaggerating for effect). The latter is just silly and try-hard, like a first year college student wanting to sound smart. In fact it is not unlike the eponymous character in Erasmus Montanus, a very famous canonized Danish play from 1731 that many schoolchildren probably unfairly think of as boring and pretentious. :p
Finally I don't want to deny that there is such a thing as nerd shit, i.e. media that has marinated in the specifics of certain nerd subcultures, but I think this is somewhat tangential to the above points. Also there is plenty of stuff which used to be nerd shit, but is now just popular culture.
On the actual topic of the episode, FFXVI, Diablo 4 and Baldur’s Gate 3 were all new entries in old franchises I was looking forward to (with BG3 it was more as a sequel to the Divinity Original Sin lineage of games, however). Ultimately I found Diablo 4 boring (but it made me realize that I probably just don’t like the genre anymore) and FFXVI a big disappointment as I already outlined. But I had a lot of fun with BG3. Like FFXVI I never finished it, losing interest some time in the third act, but I had a lot more fun with it up to that point. It’s a good videogame implementation of 5th edition DnD and I enjoyed playing around with the various class mechanics and had fun with the battles. I am happy that it had dense relatively small environments full of stuff, rather than large open areas which kills my interest in most “open world” games very quickly. By far the weakest part of the game to me was the characters and story and ultimately they didn’t hold my interest once I eventually lost interest in the rest of the game/was overwhelmed with a bit too much stuff in act 3 (after playing for like 80 hours). Going back to the whole nerd shit discussion, it felt like the story and characters were below par compared to even a mediocre run-of-the-mill fantasy novel (it certainly also did not feel like the game was trying to tackle any particularly interesting themes). Like it was fine in conjunction with the game systems and structure, but it was ultimately quite bland and uninspired. But I still overall had a very good time with the game and despite it being a boring answer it was my game of the year.
Going back to the earlier discussion, whatever one thinks of the game I am pretty sure BG3 is in fact the kind of game the developers and studio wanted to make and not simply a corporate product made for the sole purpose of making money, seeing as they have been making these kind of games for years (of course it is also a corporate product made to make money, but these things can in fact coexist).
@"JoJoestar"#p153079
I don’t think you can really compare Larian with Square Enix in the sense that their size and management is clearly very different. The director of BG3 is both the CEO and holds majority interest in the company. In fact I remember a big talking point when BG3 came out was how specific and hard to replicate the development circumstances of it was because some gamers were being very entitled as usual claiming that the game “proves” other developers are lazy and such nonsense. I am not trying to lionize the studio or anything, none of their games are my absolute favorites of all time and being so tightly controlled by one person has its own potential issues, but it seems clearly distinct from a company like Square Enix. I absolutely agree that many people make liking certain products a large part of their identity in a way that is strange and take e.g. the success of a game like BG3 as some sort of positive personal affirmation (I saw a lot of people do that with Disco Elysium as well though).