RE: We chat about videogames and videogame accessories.
02-10-2014, 10:30 AM
(This post was last modified: 02-10-2014, 11:14 AM by Jacquerel.)
If the Final Fantasy Tactics games were not set in the same worlds as the previous installments and also a mainline Final Fantasy game, would they really have been improved by mandating additional development time be put towards creating fresh character, creature and job class concepts or would the creation of a new setting for the sake of having a new world be worth the loss of development time?
My money's pretty firmly on "no". They already had frequent reuse of art assets, not having the luxury of drawing from the past would have made the game even more repetitive in looks. You'd be talking about one sprite per playable race, not one sprite per job per playable race.
Taking video games purely as a medium of storytelling is a bit of a mistake I think. I can understand the argument "you should not extend settings after they have already encompassed their entire narrative arc" when applied to novels and other works where the fiction is the entire thing (though I still don't think recurring characters such as Batman experiencing more than one adventure before being thrown in the garbage is really a bad thing, just because someone's finished their story doesn't mean they die and stop interacting with anyone else's).
This isn't true of gaming though, in fact often the setting and storyline take a back seat to everything else and aren't the largest part of the experience at all.
Maybe you would get a fresher narrative if they set Final Fantasy Tactics Advance somewhere else (although as the theme is entirely different to the first game I'm not even sure that's true), but you'd get a more uniform and boring look and as the writing is tied into the character classes they'd have had to restyle how those worked too rather than allow a building upon the mechanics of the previous game, allowing less tactical depth.
What narrative is there to keep at all in Angry Birds, that necessitates you either replace them with weasels or never release any more content at all for people who finished everything available in the first?
Games development is fraught with deadlines and few games ship feature complete as originally envisaged, people are not going to want to front load any more work on top if they can avoid it, to avoid shipping products that miss their dream entirely.
"Do we want additional sets of NPC buildings or the art assets for an entire additional dungeon" are not isolated decisions.
Would cutting off a level from Metroid Prime in order to give it its own setting have made it a better game? Would Super Metroid have been superior if there had been no Brinstar, but it featured the exploits of Rachel Franklin, Ace Cavern Explorer instead of Samus Aran? Would Super Mario Sunshine be improved if some of the level variety was reduced so that we could facilitate the replacement of Mario with Dominick the Waste Disposal Expert and Bowser with Lord Graffiti?
I'm not confident the answer to any of these questions is yes either.
My money's pretty firmly on "no". They already had frequent reuse of art assets, not having the luxury of drawing from the past would have made the game even more repetitive in looks. You'd be talking about one sprite per playable race, not one sprite per job per playable race.
Taking video games purely as a medium of storytelling is a bit of a mistake I think. I can understand the argument "you should not extend settings after they have already encompassed their entire narrative arc" when applied to novels and other works where the fiction is the entire thing (though I still don't think recurring characters such as Batman experiencing more than one adventure before being thrown in the garbage is really a bad thing, just because someone's finished their story doesn't mean they die and stop interacting with anyone else's).
This isn't true of gaming though, in fact often the setting and storyline take a back seat to everything else and aren't the largest part of the experience at all.
Maybe you would get a fresher narrative if they set Final Fantasy Tactics Advance somewhere else (although as the theme is entirely different to the first game I'm not even sure that's true), but you'd get a more uniform and boring look and as the writing is tied into the character classes they'd have had to restyle how those worked too rather than allow a building upon the mechanics of the previous game, allowing less tactical depth.
What narrative is there to keep at all in Angry Birds, that necessitates you either replace them with weasels or never release any more content at all for people who finished everything available in the first?
Games development is fraught with deadlines and few games ship feature complete as originally envisaged, people are not going to want to front load any more work on top if they can avoid it, to avoid shipping products that miss their dream entirely.
"Do we want additional sets of NPC buildings or the art assets for an entire additional dungeon" are not isolated decisions.
Would cutting off a level from Metroid Prime in order to give it its own setting have made it a better game? Would Super Metroid have been superior if there had been no Brinstar, but it featured the exploits of Rachel Franklin, Ace Cavern Explorer instead of Samus Aran? Would Super Mario Sunshine be improved if some of the level variety was reduced so that we could facilitate the replacement of Mario with Dominick the Waste Disposal Expert and Bowser with Lord Graffiti?
I'm not confident the answer to any of these questions is yes either.