Disclaimer: I don't like Joanne Rowling. I don't think I need to explain why, but the start of the video has a little disclaimer portion about her. And while people should talk about her politics,...
Disclaimer: I don't like Joanne Rowling. I don't think I need to explain why, but the start of the video has a little disclaimer portion about her. And while people should talk about her politics, this is not a video about that. It would be impossible to analyse anything set in the HP universe without removing her from the conversation, if that makes any sense. The video description includes some links to videos about Rowling and lengthy discussions about why she is a difficult person, to say the least.
Hey folks,
I made another video, centered around the interesting case study of Hogwarts Legacy. It's a game elevated by it's art design, artistic fidelity and clear love for the source material by those developers, who are then utterly betrayed by failures on director level.
The choices that were made when designing Hogwarts Legacy unfortunately turn it into a husk of a game. It seems like while the art people loved making Hogwarts, the game designers and writers were completely uninterested in making a game set in Hogwarts. It is incredibly strange to me that a game director, given such a surefire success, would opt for such an approach. Maybe they were uncreative. Maybe they were held back by publisher committees. I don't know.
Aren't all WB games just clones of each other? Arkham Asylum Arkham City Arkham Knight Mad Max (Batman with cars) Shadow of War (Batman in Mordor) Shadow of Mordor (Batman in Mordor 2) Hogwarts...
Arkham Asylum was new and fresh when it released in a way that it isn't really now, and Arkham City did a really good job taking what succeeded in that game and making a bigger game with more...
Arkham Asylum was new and fresh when it released in a way that it isn't really now, and Arkham City did a really good job taking what succeeded in that game and making a bigger game with more stuff and escalation of people's favorite elements. They're not perfect games, but they're generally well-made. I haven't kept up with the later Batman games much, but those two were genuinely doing something interesting when they first came out, even if they have a lot of imitators by now.
To be fair, Mordor did something new and fresh too, with its Nemesis system. And I actually wish more games had copied that system, because it's a genuinely fun and interesting game mechanic! p.s....
To be fair, Mordor did something new and fresh too, with its Nemesis system. And I actually wish more games had copied that system, because it's a genuinely fun and interesting game mechanic!
p.s. You have Shadow of War and Shadow of Mordor reversed, BTW, @ZeroGee. Mordor came first. ;)
Not sure how true this is, but I've seen people talking about how the nemesis system as a whole is copyrighted and can't be copied by other games. edit - It's a patent, not a copyright. I'm also...
Not sure how true this is, but I've seen people talking about how the nemesis system as a whole is copyrighted and can't be copied by other games.
edit - It's a patent, not a copyright. I'm also reading it's unlikely to hold up in court unless you practically copy-paste their entire system, but who knows.
I think one of my most disappointing moments in Mad Max was when I thought they had brought in the Nemisis system, and I would have war-bosses who got smarter. Doesn't seem so.
I think one of my most disappointing moments in Mad Max was when I thought they had brought in the Nemisis system, and I would have war-bosses who got smarter.
I'd need to play the OG Arkham games to truly judge, but I've played the Shadow of Mordor games and Mad Max; and they are very different games to Hogwarts Legacy. Removing the setting and focusing...
I'd need to play the OG Arkham games to truly judge, but I've played the Shadow of Mordor games and Mad Max; and they are very different games to Hogwarts Legacy. Removing the setting and focusing on gameplay only; Legacy is a ranged combat only game where you have multiple different classes of attacks (the spell colours) among your basic attack. It emphasises combos on individual targets much more than the Shadow games, where you have your light and heavy attacks and there's a bigger focus in changing targets constantly as the flow of combat demands it, which I've heard is very similar to the Arkham games. In Legacy, you can mostly stand still during combat and just hit dodge or block when the indicator shows up.
Mad Max has the added car combat portions which are the main driver of the game (hah, pun). People generally agreed that the on foot portions were weak, but they are very close to the Arkham gameplay.
I agree that there's some variety in the combat, but most of the game isn't combat. Most of the game is "Find this relic, disable this ward, gain more influence in this area". Which is a carbon...
I agree that there's some variety in the combat, but most of the game isn't combat. Most of the game is "Find this relic, disable this ward, gain more influence in this area". Which is a carbon copy between the games.
Sure, there's a little bit of combat to keep you on your toes. In most of the games it's brawling. But 99% of the time you're walking around using your 'Witcher senses' to find the highlighted item on the map.
This still feels really reductive. You're distilling the games down to a handful of shared features and stripping out all the other context that makes them unique. Comparing latter Arkham games to...
This still feels really reductive. You're distilling the games down to a handful of shared features and stripping out all the other context that makes them unique.
Comparing latter Arkham games to Mordor, while their combat systems have similarities, and both franchises leverage an open world design, they're still very different games. Arkham City and Knight are built around navigation, stealth, and puzzle solving in addition to the brawler combat. The Mordor games focus on map control with a unique faction system that drives a very different gameplay loop. Other games on this list, while also open world, have radically different combat systems.
We can pull the same trick with storytelling. There are seven identified "basic plots" and pretty much every movie I've seen cleanly fits into one of them. But a movie library with only seven films would be boring because there's a lot more that goes into telling a compelling or interesting story than just the basic structure of the plot.
Adding on to this more from a gameplay angle, most shooters are just finding different guns and ammo, shooting people and killing them, and moving between and finding cover.
Adding on to this more from a gameplay angle, most shooters are just finding different guns and ammo, shooting people and killing them, and moving between and finding cover.
I don't think I've read a more succinct break(take?)down of the WB series like your post. Yes, it's exactly that, and largely the reason I didn't get halfway through the second Arkham before...
I don't think I've read a more succinct break(take?)down of the WB series like your post.
Yes, it's exactly that, and largely the reason I didn't get halfway through the second Arkham before realising that I was just doing more of the same so I could do more of the same and look forward to do more of the same.
Only in broad strokes, and only because WB demanded similarities the same way Ubisoft did during the peak of Assassin's Creed and Far Cry where every game had "climbable towers". Most of them are...
Only in broad strokes, and only because WB demanded similarities the same way Ubisoft did during the peak of Assassin's Creed and Far Cry where every game had "climbable towers". Most of them are open-world exploration games so they have a lot of design similarities but they also all focus on different things to the point that they feel different from each other and appeal to different audiences.
Asylum is the one that is the most different since it's the only one that's not an open world, and the earliest success. That game is set up much more like a Metroidvania where you explore an island in an interconnected way. In some ways, one could see it as more of a clone of Dark Souls or Castlevania than the rest of this list. What it did introduce was the combat style that would become the default for most action brawler style games since then (e.g. Insomniac's Spider-Man games).
City was their first foray into open world with that combat gameplay style, and Knight was mostly the same but with the added Batmobile. But the way the world is explored is very different from the other games because of all the verticality, and the side stories require a lot of discovery. It's entirely possible to miss entire sideplots in City because you didn't spot a character on a rooftop somewhere, and finding all the Riddler trophies requires some actual puzzle solving and exploration.
Mad Max is mostly car-focused and about resource collection. Even though it borrows the hand-to-hand combat from the Batman games, it doesn't focus on that as heavily and instead is all about the car. The way the world is explored is also very, very different from the rest on this list as it's a barren wasteland with empty space between points of interest. Most of what you do is drive around and look for resources to collect to then turn into upgrades for the car you're driving around in. It's a gameplay loop around making exploration more convenient. If I could peg one game that felt closest to Mad Max, it would be RAGE 2 despite RAGE 2 being a solid FPS with some excellent combat but very, very mediocre exploration. Of course, this is helped by both Mad Max and RAGE 2 being made by the exact same developer: Avalanche Studios. RAGE 2 definitely was built on top of Mad Max.
The Shadow games and Hogwarts are the most "Ubisoft" feeling of the list, where they're about clearing a map of objectives to collect minor skill upgrades. The Shadow games feel very much like Assassin's Creed games while Hogwarts is more "generic Ubisoft" for many. The Shadow games make sense since it uses the exact same style of stealth/action open-world gameplay that the newer AC games use. It uses the Batman games base combat but with AC trappings where ambush and hit-and-run tactics are preferred. The most interesting part of these Shadow games is the Nemesis system really, where fighting the boss enemies with specific abilities and weaknesses is the real highlight and focus of playing through most of the game. And, funny enough, this is the mechanic that the newer AC games borrowed for themselves as well.
Hogwarts is probably the single most generic game on this list because outside of the license it doesn't really stand out in any way. It has the least Batman style combat out of anything here between all the magic and the action RPG levelled gear with skills approach. I bounced out of this game very early since it was the one that least appealed to my gameplay tastes out of anything on this list, and mostly because I felt like I had already played this sort of game many times before. If it was anything more like the Batman games, I definitely would not have bounced out of it.
If anything, I really wish there were more clones of Arkham Asylum than there actually are out there. The kind of exploration that game provided is still unmatched, and not something an open-world game can really provide.
Disclaimer: I don't like Joanne Rowling. I don't think I need to explain why, but the start of the video has a little disclaimer portion about her. And while people should talk about her politics, this is not a video about that. It would be impossible to analyse anything set in the HP universe without removing her from the conversation, if that makes any sense. The video description includes some links to videos about Rowling and lengthy discussions about why she is a difficult person, to say the least.
Hey folks,
I made another video, centered around the interesting case study of Hogwarts Legacy. It's a game elevated by it's art design, artistic fidelity and clear love for the source material by those developers, who are then utterly betrayed by failures on director level.
The choices that were made when designing Hogwarts Legacy unfortunately turn it into a husk of a game. It seems like while the art people loved making Hogwarts, the game designers and writers were completely uninterested in making a game set in Hogwarts. It is incredibly strange to me that a game director, given such a surefire success, would opt for such an approach. Maybe they were uncreative. Maybe they were held back by publisher committees. I don't know.
Feedback is always welcome!
Aren't all WB games just clones of each other?
Arkham Asylum was new and fresh when it released in a way that it isn't really now, and Arkham City did a really good job taking what succeeded in that game and making a bigger game with more stuff and escalation of people's favorite elements. They're not perfect games, but they're generally well-made. I haven't kept up with the later Batman games much, but those two were genuinely doing something interesting when they first came out, even if they have a lot of imitators by now.
To be fair, Mordor did something new and fresh too, with its Nemesis system. And I actually wish more games had copied that system, because it's a genuinely fun and interesting game mechanic!
p.s. You have Shadow of War and Shadow of Mordor reversed, BTW, @ZeroGee. Mordor came first. ;)
Not sure how true this is, but I've seen people talking about how the nemesis system as a whole is copyrighted and can't be copied by other games.
edit - It's a patent, not a copyright. I'm also reading it's unlikely to hold up in court unless you practically copy-paste their entire system, but who knows.
It’s not, the patent is very narrow and effectively unenforceable. There’s plenty of games with nemesis system clones. Warframe has one, for instance.
I think one of my most disappointing moments in Mad Max was when I thought they had brought in the Nemisis system, and I would have war-bosses who got smarter.
Doesn't seem so.
I'd need to play the OG Arkham games to truly judge, but I've played the Shadow of Mordor games and Mad Max; and they are very different games to Hogwarts Legacy. Removing the setting and focusing on gameplay only; Legacy is a ranged combat only game where you have multiple different classes of attacks (the spell colours) among your basic attack. It emphasises combos on individual targets much more than the Shadow games, where you have your light and heavy attacks and there's a bigger focus in changing targets constantly as the flow of combat demands it, which I've heard is very similar to the Arkham games. In Legacy, you can mostly stand still during combat and just hit dodge or block when the indicator shows up.
Mad Max has the added car combat portions which are the main driver of the game (hah, pun). People generally agreed that the on foot portions were weak, but they are very close to the Arkham gameplay.
I agree that there's some variety in the combat, but most of the game isn't combat. Most of the game is "Find this relic, disable this ward, gain more influence in this area". Which is a carbon copy between the games.
Sure, there's a little bit of combat to keep you on your toes. In most of the games it's brawling. But 99% of the time you're walking around using your 'Witcher senses' to find the highlighted item on the map.
This still feels really reductive. You're distilling the games down to a handful of shared features and stripping out all the other context that makes them unique.
Comparing latter Arkham games to Mordor, while their combat systems have similarities, and both franchises leverage an open world design, they're still very different games. Arkham City and Knight are built around navigation, stealth, and puzzle solving in addition to the brawler combat. The Mordor games focus on map control with a unique faction system that drives a very different gameplay loop. Other games on this list, while also open world, have radically different combat systems.
We can pull the same trick with storytelling. There are seven identified "basic plots" and pretty much every movie I've seen cleanly fits into one of them. But a movie library with only seven films would be boring because there's a lot more that goes into telling a compelling or interesting story than just the basic structure of the plot.
Adding on to this more from a gameplay angle, most shooters are just finding different guns and ammo, shooting people and killing them, and moving between and finding cover.
I don't think I've read a more succinct break(take?)down of the WB series like your post.
Yes, it's exactly that, and largely the reason I didn't get halfway through the second Arkham before realising that I was just doing more of the same so I could do more of the same and look forward to do more of the same.
Only in broad strokes, and only because WB demanded similarities the same way Ubisoft did during the peak of Assassin's Creed and Far Cry where every game had "climbable towers". Most of them are open-world exploration games so they have a lot of design similarities but they also all focus on different things to the point that they feel different from each other and appeal to different audiences.
Asylum is the one that is the most different since it's the only one that's not an open world, and the earliest success. That game is set up much more like a Metroidvania where you explore an island in an interconnected way. In some ways, one could see it as more of a clone of Dark Souls or Castlevania than the rest of this list. What it did introduce was the combat style that would become the default for most action brawler style games since then (e.g. Insomniac's Spider-Man games).
City was their first foray into open world with that combat gameplay style, and Knight was mostly the same but with the added Batmobile. But the way the world is explored is very different from the other games because of all the verticality, and the side stories require a lot of discovery. It's entirely possible to miss entire sideplots in City because you didn't spot a character on a rooftop somewhere, and finding all the Riddler trophies requires some actual puzzle solving and exploration.
Mad Max is mostly car-focused and about resource collection. Even though it borrows the hand-to-hand combat from the Batman games, it doesn't focus on that as heavily and instead is all about the car. The way the world is explored is also very, very different from the rest on this list as it's a barren wasteland with empty space between points of interest. Most of what you do is drive around and look for resources to collect to then turn into upgrades for the car you're driving around in. It's a gameplay loop around making exploration more convenient. If I could peg one game that felt closest to Mad Max, it would be RAGE 2 despite RAGE 2 being a solid FPS with some excellent combat but very, very mediocre exploration. Of course, this is helped by both Mad Max and RAGE 2 being made by the exact same developer: Avalanche Studios. RAGE 2 definitely was built on top of Mad Max.
The Shadow games and Hogwarts are the most "Ubisoft" feeling of the list, where they're about clearing a map of objectives to collect minor skill upgrades. The Shadow games feel very much like Assassin's Creed games while Hogwarts is more "generic Ubisoft" for many. The Shadow games make sense since it uses the exact same style of stealth/action open-world gameplay that the newer AC games use. It uses the Batman games base combat but with AC trappings where ambush and hit-and-run tactics are preferred. The most interesting part of these Shadow games is the Nemesis system really, where fighting the boss enemies with specific abilities and weaknesses is the real highlight and focus of playing through most of the game. And, funny enough, this is the mechanic that the newer AC games borrowed for themselves as well.
Hogwarts is probably the single most generic game on this list because outside of the license it doesn't really stand out in any way. It has the least Batman style combat out of anything here between all the magic and the action RPG levelled gear with skills approach. I bounced out of this game very early since it was the one that least appealed to my gameplay tastes out of anything on this list, and mostly because I felt like I had already played this sort of game many times before. If it was anything more like the Batman games, I definitely would not have bounced out of it.
If anything, I really wish there were more clones of Arkham Asylum than there actually are out there. The kind of exploration that game provided is still unmatched, and not something an open-world game can really provide.
And they're all just ripoffs of the Assassin's Creed quest-and-task-stuffing time waster concept.