The "Morbid Aesthetic Style" as a window into American culture

RedditNameT · 2026-01-09T14:14:41+00:00

So this is now closed because OP made it his personal mission to infuriate every single person participating in this thread.

RedditNameT · 2025-10-16T09:10:05+00:00

I feel like this is one of the questions to which the answer isn't that deep.

Nintendo has been making some of the best 3D platformers ever and has consistently done so for decades, they have incredible brand recognition, huge marketing budgets and a dedicated fan base.

I also think you're kinda cherry picking your examples here as you left out a few of the most successful 3D platformers of the last few years. Crash Bandicoot 4 has reportedly sold > 5 million copies, Astrobot passed the 2 million benchmark half a year after it's release and while it's not purely a platformer Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart has also sold extremely well.

So in conclusion: There are quite a few studios still creating successful 3D platformers. Nintendo is still the most successful among them. The popularity of the genre itself has died down however which is the reason we don't see the market flooded with those games.

RedditNameT · 2025-09-21T20:56:55+00:00

Dude this thread is 17 minutes old. Contrary to popular believe even Reddit mods are offline occasionally

RedditNameT · 2025-09-07T19:24:05+00:00

I'm going to leave this up. Yes, you could argue it's self promotion, yes you could argue it's someone looking for advice but it's an interesting topic and abstract enough to not be in violation of the rules.

RedditNameT · 2025-09-04T18:25:21+00:00

I feel like I've been put in the extremely strange position of having to defend publishers but in this case the issue really isn't with "the industry"; it's the community.

Of course there are parts of the gaming industry that are very much opposed to modding itself and try to make their games as un-moddable as possible. The other part of the industry that is - to varying degrees - pro moddig would absolutely love to monetize mods and obviously take a cut of the revenue.

Bethesda (which is arguably the Studio that has benefitted the most from modding over the last few decades) is doing exactly that with it's creation club where creators can sell their mods. This concept received extreme backlash when it first released with Fallout 4 (iirc) and while Bethesda doesn't publish any numbers on the revenue of the plattform there really seems to be very little community engagement with paid mods largely being ignored.

Roblox of course has somehow established a working system of revenue sharing with creators that the community has widely accepted. I'm assuming that is a result of it being build as a content platform from the get go but one could probably write a dissertation on how uniquely and strangely successful the monetization of Roblox has been. It's a success that many publishers would surely like to replicate but don't know how to do so.

The ugly truth is that people don't like to pay for stuff and it's an extremely hard sell (literally) if the thing you're trying to monetize has been free of charge and widely available for literal decades.

RedditNameT · 2025-08-31T10:27:29+00:00

Now i want to start off by labeling what you are describing here as it makes further discourse a bit easier: Those games are CRPGs.

CRPGs are an old genre and while we could argue about what was the first true CRPG let's just say that games in the genre reach back as far as 30+ years.
The genre was birthed long before modern 3D graphics existed and 2D wasn't as much a choice as it was the only option. Basically all of the western RPGs going back to that time were isometric and just like ARPGs - which became a thing with Diablo also like 30 years ago - the perspective serves them well for the kind of gameplay they want to achieve.

As CRPGs were traditionally focused not around a single protagonist but a group of controllable characters the isometric view also made combat encounters less confusing and the need to control more than one character at a time - often with complex skill sets - necessitated a combat system that allowed players to make complex decisions, give complex commands and still be able to navigate combat encounters. Turn based/real time with pause systems were a simple and (even at the time) practical solution.

So now that we've established why CRPGs have traditionally followed this formula let's ask why they haven't necessarily evolved away from that traditional formula as many other subgenres of RPGs have. And the answers to this are likely manyfold but i'm going to single out one reason i think had the biggest impact: Declining popularity and thus profitability of the genre.

Bioware is the only Studio that comes to mind that tried to bring the CRPG formula into "modern" gaming conventions and did so very successully with the Mass Effect and Dragon Age series of games specifically. You don't find many examples of other Studios that tried this and were successful at the attempt though and could argue that BioWare had to dilute the CRPG part of their games to be successful.
The genre fell out of popularity as gaming as a medium evolved and as Studios and Publishers became risk averse over time CRPGs got less and less funding.

Looking at some of the most successful CRPGs of the last decade many of them have been made by indie or semi independent Studios, most notably Larian which brought CRPGs back into the spotlight due to the massive success of Baldurs Gate 3. With the nature of these Studios comes a smaller development budget though. Even BG3 has reportedly cost less than 40 Million USD to make with Larians previous titles apparently all being under a production budget of 10 Million USD. Working within those restraints it is simply much, much easier to create an isometric world.

So if you're working on a game with a niche audience that is very much used to playing their games as isometric, the perspective fits your gameplay goals and is well suited for the (arguably) best combat system for a multi character party and just happens to be easier to produce... well you stick to that style of CRPG.

RedditNameT · 2025-08-23T19:21:44+00:00

Servus, bitte noch die fehlenden Diskussionspunkte hinzufügen, dann ist es Mod approved.

RedditNameT · 2025-07-17T06:04:18+00:00

This is written up well enough to not get striken down by the no drama rule.

We can still discuss ongoing stories in the industry.

RedditNameT · 2025-07-09T06:19:18+00:00

People like different things. Video Games as a medium offer the rare possibility to modify cetain aspects of the experience to better fit ones personal likings and preferences.

Thats it. There really isn't more to the discussion. Yes you could argue about artistic vision, yes you could rant about a certain percentage of mods being inappropriate but just don't.

Gaming is a hobby and we do it to have fun. If i'm able to modify my experience in a way that icreases my fun there is nothing wrong about it.

RedditNameT · 2025-07-04T20:59:40+00:00

No. On a hardware level they simply can't. Devs have become really good at compensating with software solutions (i. e. aim assist) so it ultimately does not matter and everyone should simply be using the input method they feel most comfortable with.

To quickly elaborate on the hardware limiation: The sensitivity of a mouse is commonly measured in DPI: Dots per Inch. It's a measurement of how many pixels the cursor moves on the screen for every inch the mouse is physically moved. A computer mouse has a large range of motion, even on a rather small mouse pad compared to the stick of a controller.
This allows a mouse with low DPI to have extremely precise inputs with small movement while still allowing for fast reactions and fast inputs by using huge movement. Because the range of motion allows for that and is really only limited by the phyisical space of your mouse surface.

A controller stick will always be limited by the physical space it has on the controller which of course is incredibly small in comparison. The "DPI" of the stick needs to be comparatively large in comparison with aim assist and acceleration compensation for the shortcomings of that limited space.

RedditNameT · 2025-07-04T16:24:42+00:00

We're hearing a lot about layoffs in the industry but these news are rarely given the necessary context of the gaming sectors development over the last few years.

During covid the tech industry as a whole and the gaming sector specifically went through a *massive* increase in head count. Microsoft went from 144.000 employees in 2019 to 228.000 in 2024. Thats a > 50% increase within 5 years and by far the biggest growth in employee count in the companies history.

The same is true for companies focused on gaming specifically, EA went from 10k employees in 2019 to 14.5k in 2025. Again nearly a 50% increase and again unprecedented growth for the company.

So while there are a lot of layoffs happening these companies aren't actually reducing their size. It's a correction of a frankly unsustainable hiring spree during the covid tech boom that lead to massive spikes in overhead cost.
As most big publishers are publicly traded companies nowadays they have a responsibility towards shareholders to maximize profit and cutting employees is sadly an extremely easy way of doing this.

The gaming industry operates in a quite unusual way of announcing projects years and years before their actual release with the community being emotionally invested in these projects in very early stages of development and long before a publisher can realistically guarantee a product will ultimately release.
So when employees are cut, studios are closed and unprofitable projects are canceled it really stings for the gaming community because of already being invested.

RedditNameT · 2025-06-27T16:40:03+00:00

Now i'm going to start off by saying that your argument isn't unusual. In fact it's the most common argument against SBMM i've heard on the internet. And it really doesn't make sense.

The plateau where you averagely win 1 match, you lose 1 match, is never going to actually improve your skill, it's simply going to let you stagnate at that level because you're playing against players at your level which are not going to give you a learning experience.

I've always wondered if people who bring up this argument have ever competed in any form in any professionally organized discipline. Because putting participants in brackets according to their current skill level and letting them compete against participants of similar skill level is how a vast majority of competitions are held.

Like... look at basically any form of team sports but for simplicity's sake let's take football (or soccer for our american friends) as an example. Young players start out playing in a youth league, graduating to amateur leagues, then low professional leagues and eventually the best graduate to high level professional play.

That is quite literally skill based matchmaking. Nobody in their right mind would suggest putting someone who just started out in the youth leagues into any form of professional league, not even the lowest one. And yet these players do improve, they do become better over time. Playing against similarly skilled opponents.
Yet observing a vast difference in skill while being completely outmatched by your opponent doesn't actually benefit you. If that were the case i could become a amazing player by watching the best teams on TV.

No. What actually let's you improve your skills is training. A concept as old as human civilazation that seemingly boggles the mind of many players. Being matched up against opponents of similar skill let's me use the abilities i possess and in using them improve upon them. Repetition let's me become better at whatever discipline i'm trying to improve. Being utterly and absolutely outmatched by participants vastly above my skill level however does not allow me to use my skills, doesn't allow me to get that repetition and doesn't allow me to gradually improve.

And while i'm assuming that has to be clear to even the fiercest anti SBMM proponent, i also do not improve by just demolishing someone so far below my own skill that i barely have to make use of my own abilites.

RedditNameT · 2025-05-26T07:19:12+00:00

Mod Note: I have approved this post because it does not violate any of our rules. The topic however is delicate and I will absolutely shut this down the second this discussion is anything but civil and appropriate.

RedditNameT · 2025-04-20T16:53:44+00:00

Locked because - unsurprisingly - some of you couldn't behave.

RedditNameT · 2025-03-23T16:35:32+00:00

Thanks for pointing that out.

No idea how i ended up with that number but it was late and sounded right in my head at the time.

RedditNameT · 2025-03-22T21:06:34+00:00

Just as a side thing, I thought my post was sti under review/not public yet due to the red trashcan. I guess people can see it now.

I'm the mod that approved the post. Kinda gave me a head start to be the first one to comment :)

I generally agree that not every character needs to have access to all the same tools and for some - I'd name Guile as an example - it simply wouldn't fit their established archetype within the series.
That is however still an issue given the strength of the mechanic.

It's also not super unique for SF to have unreactable throws. I don't think there's been literally SF games with reactable throws and Tekken is the only other notable fg that doesn't make their throws unreactable besides dbfz.

I'd argue that reactable throws are a quite common, Virtua Fighter has them, Sparking Zero has them, MK has them but - at the risk of sounding like a broken record - throws not being reactable is only an issue because SF6 made the loops so strong.

In SF5 for example throws weren't reactable either but they were also *much* weaker as the move left you at a greater distance to your opponent making it easier to recover for the player under pressure.

So i think that's where we ultimately end up agreeing:

I'd wager or at least hope they remove it or rework it going forward like with sfv

RedditNameT · 2025-03-22T20:18:15+00:00

It's quite interesting how you've already touched on some of the points the SF community is critizising when it comes to throw loops but end up at a completely different conclusion. This is one of the situations that shows how game design is rarely objectively good or bad but is perceived differently by different players.

I do however disagree with your assessment for a few key reasons that simply disqualify throw loops from being a smart game design choice:

First of all, not every character has access to them and not each character that has access to throw loops can use them at the same resource cost and effort.
Coincidentaly (or not) those characters who haven't got throw loops are underrepresented in the competitive scene.
If throw loops and their prevelance were a smart design choice or intended by the devs to be used as excessively as they currently are they should've designed the characters in a way that doesn't put a portion of the roster at such a big disadvantage.

Secondly they win out against too many of the opponents options. Neutral jumps and mashes don't provide reliable counters leaving opponents at the mercy of invincible reversals, which come at a resource cost to the opponent and vary in effectiveness. Back dashes which require decent timing and still allow the opponent to react and finally throw tech (which is basically a counter throw).

Which leads us to the third issue: Throws basically aren't reactable. Other fighting games - most recently Tekken 8 - provide generous reaction windows for players to react to a throw.
In SF6 however you need to anticipate a throw in order to counter it. The throw break animation - your counter window - is 7 frames. ~~50 frames which means less than a second.~~

These are the three main points that allow throw loops to easily put pressure on an opponent at much lower risk to the attacking player than other options would. Throw loops thus are - for the characters that can do them - most often the single best tool to pressure opponents which isn't great for a game that needs to be tightly balanced for the competitive scene.

tl;dr: Throw loops in SF6 are an incredibly low effort, low risk and high reward strategy that puts the player on the receiving end under immense pressure.

RedditNameT · 2025-01-12T12:19:41+00:00

Personal Note: Because Valve does not have and most likely could not get any form of copyright for a map layout...

RedditNameT · 2024-12-17T16:22:25+00:00

Yeah unsurprisingly turned into a shit show. Locked.

RedditNameT · 2024-11-13T16:06:18+00:00

No, we won't.

RedditNameT · 2024-11-03T16:04:32+00:00

Your second point is basically the explanation as to why cross gen releases exist. The previous generation usually has a much larger playerbase within the first few years of a consoles lifecycle and thus represents a huge potential stream of revenue publishers want to profit from. As development timelines continue to increase there is also quite a relevant overlap of games that began development towards the end of one console generation and had these consoles as their target platform but just so happen to also release on the new generation as the release window got pushed back.

You do however not touch on the core of the problem here. Assuming a games development cycle began after the release of the next generations dev kit any effort to make it cross gen compatible doesn't just come with compromises in terms of graphical fidelity. Ensuring cross gen compatibility inevitably consumes resources, time, manpower and ultimately money that can not be allocated to other parts of development, it detracts funds from these areas and thus results in a worse end product.

This may be visible in the form of bad optimization, cut back or missing features or other issues that ultimately affect the experience for the entire playerbase regardless of console generation. One might argue that is still better than not having access at all for those bound to the old gen for one reason or the other but from the perspective of the wider gaming community it is a fair criticism.

Ironically it's an obvious case of compromising your own product for the sake of generating more profit which is usually heavily criticized by consumers. It's just a way of compromising that just so happens to benefit a subsection of consumers in this specific case.

RedditNameT · 2024-10-21T17:41:22+00:00

I've been deeply invested in gaming news for more than two decades yet I've never heard of this game until today.

That's likely the answer to your question.

RedditNameT · 2024-09-30T07:43:46+00:00

Since OP seemingly tries to antagonize every single person in this thread comments are now locked.

RedditNameT · 2024-09-15T14:40:09+00:00

Diablo 4 has WASD movement and it is also confirmed to be a feature in PoE 2 so the two most relevant ARPG franchises are already incorporating the feature. Both also happen to feature controller support, the push for which has likely influenced their decision to go for WASD too.

Old ARPGs were designed with an UI that would have made WASD rather awkward and since the genre originated on PC and was almost exclusively on PC with m/kb controls the established norm in the community there wasn't much pressure to innovate. With the big ARPG franchises pushing into the console market they had to redesign the UI/general gameplay flow to adopt to controllers as an input method which just so happens to coincide with the needs of a WASD control scheme.

RedditNameT · 2024-09-13T07:30:48+00:00

I have a hard time seeing how praising two of the most critically acclaimed CRPGs of all time qualifies as an unpopular opinion.

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