Despite finding their actions vulgar, irredeemable, and “entirely responsible for the video games medium being stuck in a permanent cultural purgatory”. One of my most contrarian video game opinions is that there are no grounds, legally or morally, for the prosecution of those who “waited until it was done” for Kentucky Route Zero.
edit: And I’m not just saying that because I ended up doing similar to most of the …of the Killer games.
oh, don’t make me choose between going away and letting it hit 'em!
I set a reminder for the forums to show me this post again on June 1st, but I remembered it ahead of schedule. Please ignore my colleague.
I suppose I could share a contrarian opinion that I generally am not interested in buying early access games. I get that the social contract is that paying for the game helps with its ongoing development, and in return, the game is not finished yet. I’d rather just play a finished game. And I think that putting the responsibility of subsidizing game development into the consumers’ hands is as broken of an idea as making customers pay more for green energy or organic food rather than addressing the issues at a systemic level. And it also feeds into the problem of now the game developers need to potentially add a half dozen public facing jobs to the job they already have of making the game.
Kentucky Route Zero was a series of 5 games (more correctly 10 if you include the distinct side-chapters) released (in complete form) over a roughly 7 year period. All parts were playable separately. Pre-Steam, they were available for purchase piece-meal. Kentucky Route Zero - Act One in isolation was Rock Paper Shotgun’s 2013 game of the year. and so on…
The comparison I use to make was that knowingly “waiting til it is done” was equivalent to not playing/reviewing/critiquing any of the Mass Effect games until ME3 was released. But a more apt comment Today would be that KR0 is not afforded the same basic respect as the three-game series called “Final Fantasy VII”, because it (originally) was not backed by a large publisher.
My issue isn’t with those that didn’t know, came to it late, hated it, or otherwise avoided it somehow.
There are people that knew this and still decided they didn’t need to engage with a work on it’s own terms because it didn’t matter as much as a big commercial game.
This isn’t my contrarian opinion. My contrarian opinion is that no Earthly human can judge them for this, that’s what the afterlife is for.
All I know is that they will not transcend the aeons of matter and receive the true gnosis.
On a more serious note, I appreciate exploring the ways that marketing and the size of a game influences whether we see it as a “whole game” (and worthy of attention) or a “part” (and thus worth waiting for). I’m not one to wait until a series is done in general, but I still waited on Kentucky Route Zero, whereas I bought Final Fantasy VII Remake and Rebirth in succession. Even if my logic wasn’t just about whole/parts of games, I have to admit that the marketing and word of mouth influenced me to try Remake, whereas nothing similar influenced me to try Kentucky Route Zero.
Maybe I would have liked Kentucky Route Zero less and sensed that; maybe I am a Rational Gamer who pursues his Tastes. But, even granting that possibility, I think big marketing has more ways to pitch to me, and thus more ways to influence me to taste. I’m uncomfortable with construing that influence as sin, except by analogy: the influence is resistable through good media consuming habits but otherwise nigh unavoidable. What we can do is find and try things outside the big-publisher discovery pathways and then talk about the good stuff we find while listening to each other.
A lot of the “harm” here is that there were a lot of people that were publicly aware of Kentucky Route Zero, people with audiences, people who are quite vocal about what games can be or how culturally illiterate “the gamers” are. That then make zero effort to actually engage in anything remotely unusual, or even consider that their audience may be interested in hearing about something outside the mainstream.
These voices dominated the discourse once the collated TV edition of KR0 was released. and suddenly discussion around KR0 went from “Is the word ‘ART’ sufficient for this work?” to “This series of 10 games released over 7 years that I’m trying to play in one sitting drags on a bit too much”.
There are plenty of other games that have their contextual nuance similarly erased; Not treating Inscryption like the third game in a series that it is. Refusal to engage with the gesamtkunstwerk myhouse.wad and just playing the pk3. etc.
I had thought that name was taken, but I had confused it with The Logical Gamer.
Note to self: Don’t post in the early AM while unable to sleep and expect to make sense
(I’m going to guess that this reply really belongs over in this thread, even though it’s not a joke-y troll-y shitpost but what I genuinely believe)
I like it. I think it is better than any Final Fantasy released in the last, say, 20 years.
Sounds more like, that you like Clair Obscura belongs in that thread, that it’s better than two decades of Final Fantasy games belongs in this thread.
I’ll take this further and say that Namco is better than Sega.
I’m sad that indie games are starting to move away from awesome pixel art and embracing low-poly 3D as the default look.
We’re just 5-10 years away from PS2 higher res stylized 3D graphics becoming the indie norm. But 15-20 from brown PS3 aesthetic
i’m already ready for the return of ps2-style 3d graphics
That trend’s a decade old at this point. Old enough that one of the earliest exponents (Puppet Combo) has moved onto a different aesthetic.
I don’t even know if this is contrarian anymore, but it was when I first started saying it: better graphics makes games worse.
contrarian opinion - rail shooter (e.g. space harrier / star fox 64) style controls are absolutely miserable and i’m surprised that style of game has stuck around for the amount of time it has. that weird floaty moving linearly through a 3d world but all movement happens on a 2d plane thing where you’re constantly being nudged back into the field of action is nightmare material
but it’s so purdy!
