erysdren

I mean hell, Strife is literally a doom engine game that's made to be a nonlinear RPG with multiple endings, so there's a lot of precedence for that kind of engine being able to do stuff that's not necessarily Yet Another Run N Gun Shooter.

I also remember seeing people who have made some pretty prominent Sonic Robo Blast 2 mods/add-ons planning their own original game called "Out-Class Hunter" based around the "Sonic platforming in a doom-like engine" concept.

yeah, as a game developer i've pretty much subdued my urges to make a "Boomer Shooter" by making mods & maps for the original Quake instead. a much more productive exercise, i think.

The greatest boon of the boomer shooter craze is making way for games that have Quake 2-level graphics at best because the hobby is always full of babies crying about muh visuals.

A good sprite animation can have a lot more impressive death animation than any ragdoll, and I'm here for it. Plus, Selaco and AWOL seem to pushing the engine to places it was never meant to go.

Push doesn't even need to come to shove, I'll sacrifice visuals as long as the gameplay and story are good.

kind of obvious comparison but it reminds me of the annoyance I got around "pixel aesthetic" games a few years back.

the thing about "pixel aesthetics" (like any aesthetic) is that there's a way to apply it intentionally (either due to desired goals of visuals, or perhaps necessity due to cheaper development costs) or you can apply it in... what I might term very pettily as "a cash-in".

i think there is a very thin line between "boomer shooter" (i hate that term) as aesthetic for cash-in, that relies on cheap nostalgia for (frankly) better games, or there is an approach that does it intentionally to heighten the mood of the game (I think DUSK does this brilliantly, for example).

it's just the sort of thing that happens whenever an aesthetic bubbles out of the subcultural space and into the mainstream, and it's not intrinsically BAD or whatever, but it does provoke exhaustion

y'know I was gonna write something as a comment here but it was actually really long. I think I might do it by adding onto a share instead, because I think it's long enough and interesting enough to warrant it.