It feels like we’re slowly approaching a stalemate between fans and developers. There’s no threat of catastrophic failure, but little potential for growth, either. The experience isn’t much different from playing a Nintendo DS-era game, much like Halo Infinite feels about the same as Halo 3 despite fresh visuals and new guns. Nothing in the remakes feels like a defining feature that’ll help the franchise grow. On some level, these are the exact games fans have been asking for, minus the lack of difficulty.Īs crowd-pleasing as they are, they’re also a bit boring compared to controversial entries like Sword and Shield. The Chibi art style sticks as close as possible to the old sprite art, and the general structure is paint-by-numbers Pokémon. Rather than trying something new, the remakes are overly faithful recreations of 2006’s Diamond and Pearl. The latest entries in the series, Pokémon Shining Pearl and Brilliant Diamond, feel like a direct response to the outcry. Sometimes, it feels like fans only want Red and Blue remakes every few years. Fans have been skeptical of everything from Sun and Moon ditching gym leaders to Sword and Shield’s open-world Wild Area.
But once the series’ developers started experimenting, toxicity started bubbling up to the surface. Players collected monsters, fought eight gym leaders, defeated a team of villains, and faced the elite four. For a long time, every Pokémon game was structurally the same.
Wild game innovations camera stand series#
It’s a tension that’s especially present in the Pokémon series right now. Take too big of a creative leap and you might upset your most loyal fans, but stick too close to previous games and risk stagnation. It’s a contradiction, and one that puts developers creating big-budget sequels in a tight spot. They want new games to be bigger and better, while simultaneously being the exact thing they already know and love. Fans can often be precious about series they’ve grown up with for decades. That means avoiding the kind of controversy that gets a game’s reputation dragged through the mud on Reddit before it comes out.īut discourse is almost unavoidable in gaming these days, especially when it comes to long-existing franchises like Halo. With budgets often exceeding $100 million, studios want to make sure they’re pleasing as many players as possible to max out sales. When it comes to AAA video games, failure isn’t an option. That last part is a terrifying notion for industry executives. Sometimes, that means letting developers experiment - and even fail. That’s led me to grapple with a hard truth: Our favorite video games won’t evolve unless we allow them to. Halo Infinite feels like a response to that - it plays it creatively conservative to avoid YouTube downvotes. Features like Halo Reach’s abilities and Halo 4’s loadouts have been a point of historical contention for the fan base over the past decade. Had 343 Industries revealed such a fundamental change, Halo loyalists would have revolted (gaming satire site Hard Drive was already poking fun at the tool when it appeared in a campaign reveal trailer). In my mind, Halo Infinite could have been a groundbreaking entry in a 20-year old series that reinvented shooters had it gone all-in on new ideas like the grappleshot.īut then I began to imagine the inevitable backlash. I have to find it during a match to use it, and I only get a few shots with it when I do. My only disappointment is that it’s not always equipped. The wrist-mounted grappling hook is the best addition to the shooter, bringing a creative mobility option to the game that can counter vehicles and is sure to produce clip-worthy plays. I can’t stop thinking about Halo Infinite’s grappleshot.