User banned (1 day): Creating a platform warring/troll thread
Over the years it's become apparent the legacy of 2013 title The Last of Us has been corrosive, dare I say flat out poisonous to the growth of the game industry, with it's faux grasp on maturity and focus on presentation over gameplay. How many times have you played a game where, instead of breaking off into a cutscene you could skip, the game instead wasted your time with a needless, meandering walking section that didn't provide the strengths of a carefully considered cutscene nor the freedom the exploration/tense combat sections provide. These sections were obvious filler in the first part, but the amount of games that feature them has ballooned alongside these sections's length. This, ironically, culminates in TLOU2, who's free form exploration and combat is absolutely smothered by the overabundance of these sections. You can't play a AAA Sony game without them these days.
The homoginization of Sony's output on the whole is worth discussing. Serious, grounded stories influenced heavily by cinema have become their default mode. The vast majority of their exclusive this gen have chosen the same over-the-shoulder camera angle despite how ill fitting it is for titles like God of War and Horizon. Fatherhood is a central theme in 3 different releases this gen, with the broader themes of vengeance and the post apocalypse becoming even more permanent fixtures. With smaller studios closing and Sony's remaning studios leaning more and more toward homogenization, it's hard to get excited about their output going forward.
There's a better thread that goes into this that I'll link here, but there is also a specific trend of anti-blackness that is prominent in their games that reached a crescendo in TLOU1. How such a studio that is blatantly thoughtless in it's portrayal of POC could be considered a leader of progress in the industry is beyond me.
What can we do about such a toxic series being an influence on Playstation Studios and gaming as a whole?
The homoginization of Sony's output on the whole is worth discussing. Serious, grounded stories influenced heavily by cinema have become their default mode. The vast majority of their exclusive this gen have chosen the same over-the-shoulder camera angle despite how ill fitting it is for titles like God of War and Horizon. Fatherhood is a central theme in 3 different releases this gen, with the broader themes of vengeance and the post apocalypse becoming even more permanent fixtures. With smaller studios closing and Sony's remaning studios leaning more and more toward homogenization, it's hard to get excited about their output going forward.
There's a better thread that goes into this that I'll link here, but there is also a specific trend of anti-blackness that is prominent in their games that reached a crescendo in TLOU1. How such a studio that is blatantly thoughtless in it's portrayal of POC could be considered a leader of progress in the industry is beyond me.
What can we do about such a toxic series being an influence on Playstation Studios and gaming as a whole?