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Penny Arcade - Comic - Myopia
Dog
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Penny Arcade - Comic - Myopia
Videogaming-related online strip by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins. Includes news and commentary.
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Don't get me wrong, they're good games. Really good games. But I can't say they're "legendary" or "defining visceral melee combat for generations". Studios that actually do produce legendary and genre defining games require more than one shitty release to ruin their legacy.
-Antje Jackelén, Archbishop of the Church of Sweden
You're right that they weren't the first, gliding, grappling, two button combat, detective mode, and all the other things the Arkham games are known for were not "pioneered" by them in any capacity. But they were the first ones to put it all together in a polished package that exemplified how they all work together to form a cohesive whole, and paired them with an excellent "Batman" story showcasing a variety of villains, with a large number of well implemented gimmick fights that emphasized each villain's uniqueness.
I'd consider that "Legendary".
If you look at the old Assassins Creed games that came out prior to Arkham, the combat sucks. It's very fiddly and very spammy. Then Arkham came out and AC took a lot of inspiration from the Arkham games. AC3, AC4, Unity, and Syndicate all have combat that is very heavily inspired by the Arkham series.
The Shadow of Mordor/War games basically straight up rip the Arkham combat, but with swords and bloody eviscerations.
The Avengers flop game was inspired by Arkham combat.
Spider-Man 1 and 2 are extremely inspired by Arkham.
Checkmate, gamers
I'm thinking the Rocksteady guy is co-founder Sefton Hill. He and the other co-founder left after making this game.
When so many games are described as having 'Arkham-style' combat, that pretty much tells you everything you need to know about who's setting the definition.
Arkham didn't just make the combat good, it nailed the feel of being Batman; you got to a point where you'd look at a room filled with enemies and quite sincerely say "This isn't fair, there's only 20 of them". Get hit once in the resulting fight and you'd feel like you failed.
For games that wanted you to feel like an unstoppable one man army, it was perfect (so Sleeping Dogs, Spider-Man, Assassins Creed up until Unity, etc). For games that wanted every fight to be a life and death struggle, that's what Demon's/Dark Souls gave us (and the growing trend of games described as having 'Souls-style' combat).
but I guess the goal is multiplayer ongoing service and maybe there was no way to turn an arkham-esque combat game into that? I dunno man
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
C-suite execs and shareholders prefer profit to innovation unless the latter is the only way to obtain the former. Plus "just copy a profitable idea" is rife in multiple industries, even in creative ones like vidya games. The problem with the "just copy a profitable idea" approach is there isn't always an understanding of why it worked, the conditions it required to work, or possession of the necessary skillsets needed to make it work.
I remember a time when it seemed like every few months someone was trying to make a "WoW killer" MMO and failing.
And too many studio trying to make major oingoing services games at the same time are eventually going to run into the same problem. If the MMORPG playerbase is busy playing WoW they don't have the time to be playing something else, especially if that something else didn't understand what interested them about WoW in the first place or tries to applies it where it doesn't work and ends up a inferior version), and they'll likely stick to the one they already know and love. There isn't a infinite numbers of players, and they don't have a infinite amount of time. There can only be so many game requiring a regular investment of time coexisting in the same environement.
Some service will succeed, not all of them will.
Following the trend works better for something like gritty "real is grey" action games, FPS or "Vaast opun worlds" games that players can just buy several of them and play them when they feel like it.
Same thing happend to Toys to Life games to a extent. Of course, Activision expecting kids (or anyone else) to buy a entire collection of figurine every years the same way people buy a single new Call of Duty, Assassin Screed or Fifa, was already bound to eventually kill the trend. But other studio expecting more than one or two Toys to life Game to exist at the same time, especially as poorly executed as Disney Infinity or Lego Dimension, was doomed to kill it even faster.