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I have been playing FFVII Remake and it's such a stark difference to see how differently games are paced these days compared to the 90s.
The Midgar chapter of FFVII is a pretty tight and well-paced story segment in the original - not much filler, and has lots of memorable segments.
Modern RPGs almost necessarily have tons of sidequests and filler content added in between major story beats to justify the high cost of asset creation.
So it's glaringly obvious when a game like FFVII is remade with a modern design philosophy - it feels way slower & denser.
So it's glaringly obvious when a game like FFVII is remade with a modern design philosophy - it feels way slower & denser.
To be fair, the original had lots of sidequests too, but they didn't really come until after you left Midgar - it makes me wonder how the remake is going to handle all of those when the time comes 0_o
And nearly all of the minor content in the original is optional, whereas in the remake, a large portion of it is mandatory padding for the main story questline.
It's sad that AAA games feel the need to justify their creation with excessively long playtime. Game budgets don't really allow for tight, well-paced, big-name RPGs anymore. Only action games seem to be able to maintain a short length in the AAA space.
Squaresoft could release such a staggering amount of games for the PS1 because they were on top of the world and shaping the industry around them in the late 90s, yes, but also because big RPGs could be short & experimental then, and the PS1 was easy & cheap to develop for.
IMO, the late 90s was the most prolific period in AAA gaming history.
The PS1 hardware was mastered & CDs made games cheap to make, so there was tons of room for experimentation without risk of major financial losses. The DC was bringing online gaming into prominence, and the N64 started getting its titles that would totally reshape whole genres.
Compare that to now, when games take exponentially more money and time to make in order to feed the ever-hungry beast that is visual fidelity expectations - where every big game could actually make or break a studio.
Thank goodness we at least have indies now.
Thank goodness we at least have indies now.
We'll never see the industry of that era again because it was defined by the hardware limitations that existed at that time, and we have so thoroughly trained the game market to demand constant graphical improvement that considering the benefits of low fidelity seems unthinkable.
But the development tricks and shortcuts of that era are still worth preserving. Pre-rendered backgrounds, thoughtfully-low-poly models, and most importantly, a tight scope and pacing are all things that could make modern games easier to make and give us more diversity of games.
I feel the biggest challenge facing the AAA industry today is finding some way to finally break the insistence on perpetual growth in graphical fidelity. I don't know if it's doable, since the reflex towards it is as old as video games themselves, but it's a nice goal to have.
Maybe once that finally happens, we'll start to see big-name games have the confidence to be short, well-paced experiences again.
