okay cool would you also like some crafting? a skill tree?? some factions to choose between??? a cover system and regenerating health???? online multiplayer????? some horse armour?????? you stupid fuck??????? shut up. fast travel in a fucking dungeon crawler immersive sim, listen to yourself. fuck you. go play Skyrim.
I can't believe that the (VERY DELIBERATE) lack of a fast travel system and the (VERY FUCKING DELIBERATE) quasi-voxel graphics are the most common complaints about SS'23. as much as I adore the game, there are definitely some criticisms to be made of it - the scrapping system is more tedious than it needs to be, the enemy AI is mostly pretty pathetic, there's still a lot of minor bugs, and (spoiler, highlight to read) the final boss fight sucks1.
all of these very real problems with the game seem to just be swept aside because moronic capital-G Gamers and Game Journalists can't stomach the idea of a game being particularly unique in any way. they can't wrap their heads around such abstract, high-level concepts like "tone," "mood," "metaphor," or "artistic choice," content to parrot that tired fucking thought-terminating Reggie Fils-Aimé quote2 as if it were the word of God, as if "fun" had an objective, concrete definition.
in conclusion, bomb your local Gamestop or something. idk
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but I guess it wouldn't be a System Shock game without an abrupt and disappointing ending, eh?
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"If it's not fun, why bother?"
Game design is not a science that progresses from "worse" to "better" over time. It is an art that has fads, sometimes spawns new ideas, and mostly retreads familiar territory. If you hear someone talking about contemporary games like their gameplay is more "advanced" than older games, know that they are silly.
There are aspects of games that kind of have a trajectory from "worse" to "better," like having reconfigurable controls, subtitle support, button prompts and instructions inside the game itself, and other general "quality of life" features. There have been advancements in graphics hardware, and some genres only became possible with faster processors. But none of that, itself, is game design. And, as one example, Doom had reconfigurable controls in 1993, and most first-party Nintendo games don't in 2023.
Give it ten years, and a lot of things that seem like a given in videogames today will be recognized for what they are: a fad that was eventually replaced by a different fad. What feels to you like games "getting better" over time is you having more familiarity with present-day conventions, and there being more conventions in general. But watch someone who is completely unfamiliar with videogame conventions try to play a game, and you'll see real quick that these games aren't intuitive. You're just used to them. I play Ultima: Underworld with more ease today than I did back in 1992, because I keep replaying it every year or so, and each time I become a little more familiar with it. The intuitiveness that feels like "advancement" is an illusion that is only felt by people who play a lot of contemporary videogames.
