Miscellaneous and Features
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Alongside the Assassin’s Creed series, the Far Cry games serve as Ubisoft’s flagship. The games’ collective acclaim and popularity is easily understood, for each individual game is brimming with enjoyability; player engagement is immense, whether speaking of the earlier Far Cry 2 or the later Far Cry 5. Such player engagement has undergone expected expansion
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Self-expression is an integral component of many video game experiences, for self-expression fosters immersion and intensifies the player / player character relationship; all parties involved benefit, absolutely. Robust morality systems, when properly and respectfully implemented, expand opportunities for such self-expression. On one level, any given player is forced to grapple with, say, equipable armor and
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Multiplayer games are thriving in the present moment, and their widespread popularity and success is easily understood. Foundationally, multiplayer titles offer experiences absent and forever absent in the conventional single player title – a rift exists, multiplayer games oftentimes capable of profounder player engagement, for in a multiplayer title the player is engaging with a
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Video game difficulty is an understandably divisive matter, heightened difficulty repelling some players, engaging others; it is difficult to regard the subject with ambivalence. Those who do embrace heightened difficulty settings often do so in search of exhilaration, catharsis. Exhilaration and catharsis both are discoverable in tamer, more tranquil experiences to be sure, but they
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Replayability’s presence is absolutely a positive, though its absence is not necessarily a negative; shorter titles, those which do not feature great player choice, branching pathways, and multiple endings, have their proper place within the industry, offering ample enjoyment. But longer titles, those with robust replayability, offer their own enjoyment, distinct from briefer titles which
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The video game landscape upon Assassin’s Creed’s release in 2007 was vastly detached from the video game landscape of today, and this difference is especially applicable to the open-world genre, which has now ascended to a position of dominance. The genre was indeed thriving in 2007, though the great potentials attached to the genre were
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The FPS genre is amongst the most popular genres of the present moment, countless titles releasing each year, though more than other genres, development of first-person shooters is largely dominated by larger, AAA studios; small indie studios mostly reject the genre, preferring instead to develop more artistic, creative experiences; a notable rift is in place.
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Video game studios develop sequels for a plurality of reasons, most commonplace being narrative continuance and gameplay refinement, though numerically the latter often eclipses the former; direct sequels, where one player character persists as player character throughout, where that player character’s narrative is directly continued from title to title: these instances are fairly minimized, frustrating
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The hastiness with which open world games have ascended to industry dominance is compelling and profound indeed. A much acclaimed, pioneer of the genre – Grand Theft Auto III – released little over a scant two decades ago, its release considered as a watershed moment for the industry, the release advancing that selfsame industry; Rockstar’s
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The stealth genre by nature is brimming with opportunity for great player engagement, primed to evoke an experience characterized largely by tension, the genre benefitting greatly from its oftentimes slower, more plodding pace relative to other popular genres, like the FPS genre or third-person shooters. Those games mostly embrace the bombastic; stealth games have the
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The surge in popularity and influence of indie video games in roughly the last decade and a half has fundamentally altered the video game landscape, fundamentally bettering it, greatly increasing diversity, the diversity of experiences communicated. It was not too long ago that the experimental attributes which typically characterize indie games were regarded with relative
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It is quite staggering to consider the meteoric rise of DLC and expansion packs within the video game industry in recent memory, their influence long mounting and continuing to mount. Much of this ascension is of course tied to the Internet, while similarly important are console dashboard systems, like those popularized by the Xbox 360;
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Save for the early years of my existence, when the Playstation 2 and the Xbox were the dominant home consoles, video games have consistently released at the same price point – sixty dollars, that price being established and accepted with the release of the Xbox 360 back in 2005. Given the poor present state of
Games With Grey 