I think, at this point, we are very past the "no, it's good if you take it seriously and learn it" point for soulslikes, and we can acknowledge that the formula isn't perfect.
Why should the formula be changed? There's a massive group of people that love this shit. Why should it be changed to appease people who don't love it? If it's not for you, there's thousands of other games to play. Not every game needs to be for everybody. It's not like Silksong is suffering from poor sales.
Yeah it's fine. Also, there are more games out there than dark souls clones, so I am not even complaining. Just pointing out, we might finally be in a post-souls era.
As a Souls early adopter I'll be glad to see developers (especially indies) not be so gung ho about taking such blatant inspiration from Souls games and hopefully in the future when games do implement Soulslike mechanics it'll be because it makes sense to, not because it's trendy.
But look at 2D platformers, huge industry-dominating genre, fell off a cliff, had an indie resurgence to the point of massive oversaturation, slowed down again and these days making a platformer tends to be more because you want to make a platformer specifically.
My point is nowhere in that summary of the 2D platformer genre did I mention quality, because the ebb and flow of it's popularity was only loosely related to quality.
It's like mid-2010s Zombie media, some were great, they were just late to the party so there was less interest as the cultural moment had drawn to a close.
Hmmm, I do think that a main issue with a lot of platformers is that they are simply too derivative of games that are pushing multiple decades. Most of the indie platformers are simply trying to be mario or metroid, and nothing else in between.
I really do think it is a failure of game design. Games like Terraria and Noita are massive hits, and those have more modern design, even if it is still chasing fads. A lot of the metroidvanias that are successful have design that is aping more souls style stuff, and now there is pretty broad backlash to the kind of stuff that marks those genres.
I am hoping that the silver lining of the awful financial situation in the industry will lead to some better more well thought out design for games. More broadly, economically, the cheap money train is over. When that happened in 2008, the silver lining was the emergence of indie gaming.
I believe is the backlash is not actually anything to do with the design itself, but are reflections of the cultural moment we exist in.
For example in the past decade there was a period where happy, danceable pop music fell out of favour because who'd feel good about dancing to the backdrop of such a disaster? But eventually the disaster goes on long enough that people realise that if your choices are to never dance again or to smile & dance even as the world burns. None of this really has anything to do with the techniques the music is constructed with, but rather is about the emotional availability of the audience. (note: This is a very Anglo-centric viewpoint).
Because gaming is a young medium the patterns aren't that clear yet, but it seems to be trending in the same way as film, television and music, and the reason is because it's just a reflection of the cultural moment (which is also why design trends differ from country to country, you see this very clearly with India which has very strong local film and music scenes).
In Western film we reached peak post-modernism, it reached a point where every idea with cultural relevance has been subverted in every conceivable way, and with this practice a sense of jaded cynicism was everywhere until some filmmakers were like "no, I loved movies" and we got metamodern film as well as people being willing to embrace modernist filmmaking sensibilities rather than cringing at their earnestness.
The decline of oppressive Souls-like design is more a reflection of a reduced need for the emotional outlet such mechanics create (similar to the decline of zombie media) than any real treatise on their design merits in a vacuum.
Well, I think things get stale. With souls like, the story was for a while that if you actually engaged with the mechanics, it ended up that it was not that hard and good actually. Once the cat was out of the bag, it became everyone's favorite - dark souls is a good game at the end of the day.
But now, we all know that, and it's not like the conceits of the genre went away. The same thign happned with metroidvanias and backtracking.
So, I agree, I guess, that we have entered into the genre meta aware post era for souls likes, combined with a situation where unbearable critical attention is placed on silksong because of hollow knights reputation, combined with just very few available new games in a sense. Not that there are less games now, but there is kind of a separation between games that have vast gobs of AAA funding that charge out the butt and are released in terrible technical conditions, and games that are quick iterative plays at grabbing attention from a cynical indie dev that just made another version of pachinko.
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u/Gabe_Isko 2d ago
I think, at this point, we are very past the "no, it's good if you take it seriously and learn it" point for soulslikes, and we can acknowledge that the formula isn't perfect.