Final Fantasy XV aimed to retain the soul of a Final Fantasy game, while breaking from the disappointments many felt with recent installments in the series-to reclaim the Throne as the best JRPG. It’s such a small detail, but it does so much to sell the trip. Not only are there an obscene number of beautifully rendered meals to choose from, they’re rendered to the point of applying different physics to the food based on its consistency. When your party rests at a camping site, you can choose a meal that offers stat boosts. It’s the pat on the back when someone stumbles, the jokes that are snarky but never at the expense of someone, and the frank conversations only four people entirely comfortable with each other can have. Final Fantasy XV spares no effort to let the player feel the moments that matter, and the moments that matter aren’t the enormous set-pieces or towering monsters. I could spend time talking about how clever the mechanics are, the beautiful mechanics applied to the day-night cycle, the amazingly clever trick of using maximum HP as a variable, the smoothness of the combat, the impact of the series’ summons-but they’re all not relevant.įinal Fantasy is defined by people navigating a world of crystals and monsters and magic and gods, but roadtrips are defined by the people you travel with, the stops you make, and the stories you experience during the trip. I’ve been hoping for a road trip game for almost a decade, and this is the first open-world game where the controls encourage and allow you to drive a giant world according to the law. 2016 - the ever-odd transitional year full of masterpieces. You should absolutely play it-and it’s not in my list. It’s brilliant game design, it’s a perfect blend of genres, and it’s a piece of craftsmanship, and it has well-designed, diverse characters, and it has gorgeous aesthetics. Oh, and before we get started, I didn’t like how the action feels in Overwatch. With the increasing pressure of the finances of blockbuster games, I feel like we’re going to see much more of that in the future. Infinite replayability in the Twitch-era almost comes for free for online multiplayer games, and eSports are an enormous part of games culture in 2016. Microtransactions, loot boxes, and gachapon mechanics have snuck their way into some of the most popular AAA games of today. “Indie” in 2016 is barely recognizable from the frustrated counterculture making games for the hell of it in 2010, and while I must admit a certain fondness for that period of time, the games that the scene produces today are of such quality and relevance to the medium, that I don’t think I’d ever wish to go back.Īs the mobile space earns more and more each year, with a projection that it will earn more than PC and console in 2017, I can’t help but feel that 2016 might have been the end of an era, and the beginning of a new one. In the independent space, my home, the battle for visibility rages on amongst increasingly polished titles with increasingly large budgets. On the other hand, if there’s anything you can’t accuse the behemoths of our industry of, it’s a lack of genuine enthusiasm: it felt like each blockbuster might be the magnum opus of its series, with no effort or money spared. I can’t help but feel that the AAA industry is feeding off of the last remnants of ancient IPs, with only a few new titles punctuating a steady drip of rereleases, remasters, and sequels targeting the nostalgia of the audience that has so far kept the traditional AAA blockbuster alive. As a culture, we have seen some of the most impressive gameplay and game narrative ever this year. As a community, we’re slowly improving our diversity, our ability to deal with toxicity and harassment, and our support structure for developers from countries outside of the traditional game-making world. As an economy, this industry is hitting a lot of records. In 2016, the industry finds itself at a strange impasse. Nobody has fully figured out VR yet, and in the meanwhile AR and MR are somewhere around the corner. PC has no idea what it’s doing, but I guess no one is really in charge of PC, so that’s no surprise. Mobile is more like console, with pre-orders and connections to TV’s. In 2016, consoles are more like mobiles, with multiple hardware devices sharing SDK. If you would’ve told anyone in 2010 what games would look like in 2016, you’d probably get laughed at. People often ask me what I think the industry will be like in five years, and I answer that if I knew, I’d get bored and leave.
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