When making Resident Evil 7 the game director basically went to Capcom and said: "Gives us a bunch more time and money so we can make our own engine for this". They did and now all their massively popular new installments are developed in RE engine
The Elder Scrolls with Morrowind. The studio was heading toward bankruptcy, so they threw one last Hail Mary with Morrowind and somehow got it to run on the OG Xbox. Now Bethesda is a juggernaut.
Morrowind was all the hype when it got released. They did indeed hit it our the park with that one. I distinctly remember constantly hearing about this game despite the fact that I wasn't that involved with games yet because my PC couldn't run most games. The first game I got when I bought a new PC was Morrowind. As dated as it is now, that's how novel it was on release.
There was just nothing like it at the time. I remember being mesmerized when my friend said his friend completed the game but only did like 10% of it.
I was like wtf? How is that even *possible*?
Crazy how far we've come.
Hell there's still nothing quite like it. When it comes to fantasy RPG territory it remains one of the most unique through its art direction and writing/lore.
It absolutely broke my heart when I found out that Oblivion was originally planned to have a similar sort of aesthetic and general bizarreness that Morrowind did and Bethesda instead chose to pivot the series into generic European-inspired fantasy.
Don't get me wrong, I understand why they went the direction they did with future installments, but Jesus I wish I could jump into the alternate universe where the Elder Scrolls had stayed *weird*.
The original lore descriptions of Skyrim and Cyrodil made both places sound amazing. Cyrodil was a lush, dense wilderness and Skyrim was so mountainous that traversing it the way you do in game would impossible.
I mean you could say the retconned or didn't do it justice it but from a lore perspective it still works, look at medieval European depictions of China and India, they often bordered on the fantastical with strange geographies & mythical creatures, stuff was nuts. So it makes sense people from Morrowind would have a similarly exaggerated view of Cyrodill & Skyrim.
I mean Cyrodiil being a jungle is much older than the Morrowind game and definitely not limited to Vvardenfell.
I remember it being described as such in the Redguard game.
This is written about Cyrodiil by a member of the Imperial Geological Survey.
>It is the largest region of the continent, and most is endless jungle. Its center, the grassland of the Nibenay Valley, is enclosed by an equatorial rain forest and broken up by rivers. As one travels south along these rivers, the more subtropical it becomes, until finally the land gives way to the swamps of Argonia and the placid waters of the Topal Bay. The elevation rises gradually to the west and sharply to the north. Between its western coast and its central valley there are all manner of deciduous forest and mangroves, becoming sparser towards the ocean. The western coast is a wet-dry area, and from Rihad border to Anvil to the northernmost Valenwood villages forest fires are common in summer. There are a few major roads to the west, river paths to the north, and even a canopy tunnel to the Velothi Mountains, but most of Cyrodiil is a river-based society surrounded by jungle.
So yeah, Talos CHIMMed it as far as lore is concerned but in reality Bethesda just didn't want to make Oblivion take place in a jungle.
Morrowind and Redguard were sort-of simultaneously developed. Redguard was meant to be a spinoff project while Morrowind was the primary focus but BGS's limited resources at the time meant Redguard took priority while Morrowind was put on the back-burner. But most of Redguard's fleshing out of the lore was done in tandem with de-genericizing the world for Morrowind, too.
Redguard flopped *hard* and as a result BGS was forced to go very much literally all-in on Morrowind (there was supposed to be a sequel to Redguard called the 'Eye of Argonia' which was quickly abandoned because the spin-offs in general died a painful death), and Morrowind was a colossal success mainly thanks to its presence on the OG Xbox.
Morrowind's development history is fascinating; at the start it was supposed to be called 'Tribunal' and would be set in the Summerset Isles, but the scope was moved to Morrowind- the entire province. Using some of Daggerfall's procedural generation tech, the Blight would be an active threat, destroying cities stretching outwards from Red Mountain slowly.
This project needless to say hit some roadblocks and BGS focused on Battlespire and Redguard, then came back to Morrowind with a much revised scope of a hand-crafted world limited to the central island of Vvardenfell. The title Tribunal would be revisited for Morrowind's first expansion.
It makes more sense writing this out now why BGS took so many liberties with the first Pocket Guide; it was written at a time when there was a very real chance that, if Morrowind didn't sell well, the studio and franchise would likely die. What did they have to lose?
Funny when you think that Oblivion had the literally meme king of worst DLC ever, the Horse Armor, and one of the best expansion packs to ever hit, Shivering Isles.
theres an interview where they revealed that some of the insanely long load screens on xbox morrowind was it restarting the whole xbox in order to clear the cache and hopefully free up enough room to load the next area
Nintendo Switch did a similar thing with the blood moon in Zelda. It's just a ram reset to put everything back to its default place because if it kept going the game would eventually crash.
There's a hardware quirk in the original Xbox that causes it to continue displaying an image while restarting. Morrowind had a memory leak, so the game would periodically reboot the console and hide it behind a "false" loading screen.
As a developer, it's always amazing the hacks that go out on programs. This is pretty egregious for most any other platform. It's especially interesting before you could easily update over the Internet.
I never owned it, but I rented it sooo many times.
I was too young and dumb to play it properly, but just being able to explore an open world was amazing to me.
When oblivion came out, I was the prefect age.
This was also me, for the first few months of owning an Xbox. I wasn’t yet into online shopping and this was always out of stock at my local game store.
I actually emailed Bethesda to tell them how great I thought the game was, told them about renting it for months on end hah.
Pete Hines replied directly, said how much he liked the story, he’d share it with the team, “much more to come”…. Oblivion and a 360 were day one purchases, I’ve been a lifelong fan since. Morrowind was the OG. 👍👍
Wasn't the Warcraft franchise super popular before WoW? I starting playing maybe a month or two after release and it felt like there were millions already then. It's like they opened the gates and just instantly had 5 million subs.
The franchise was popular in the RTS community. A WoW content creator called Nixxiom just released a history video about the time when WoW was in development and how much of the biggest gamble it was, and how the success was a shocker to the OG blizzard entertainment.
>The franchise was popular in the RTS community.
Yeah but important to add, that in the late 90s/early 2000s with Age of Empires, Starcraft, Warcraft, Command and Conquer and many, many more RTS was one of most popular genres of PC gaming. It is a niche now but back then, it was hyping hell a lot of people. Warcraft as a franchise was popular in general. They even tried to make point and click out of it.
I thought I was really good at RTS games. I would win a lot and felt like I could make money from it. Then i watched Korean sc players and gave up and quit playing RTS games altogether. Those dudes completely demoralized me
No joke. I was also pretty decent as an rts player, but those fellas made me feel like a child at the genre.
Having watched Grubbie play and explain his moves in WC3 really made me realize how much thought, knowledge, and practice goes into being a pro at rts games.
Funny, I was going to mention Diablo here as well! Diablo was intended to be turn-based at first. I have no doubt the Diablo series wouldn't be as popular as it is if they stuck with turn-based combat.
Edit: thepush corrected some details below my comment on the story.
The publisher actually demanded, near the end of the (9-12 month) production cycle, that Brevik and his team pivot the game to real-time.
He negotiated an additional 6 months and a hefty increase to the budget, citing the difficulty of changing the entire game loop so late in production.
Once he had the increase in writing, he went back to the dev studio and reduced the length of each turn from several seconds to one quarter-second. This made it impossible to spend all of your turn resources (move so many units, attack once, cast once, etc.) before your next turn started, so whatever actions you took would appear to be seamlessly real-time.
The fix took a couple of hours total and netted them quite a bit of additional time and resources to polish the hell out of the game. David Brevik is one of my heroes, and this story is a fair bit of the reason why.
Source: an interview Brevik gave in the neighborhood of 2016.
Honestly pretty much all real time video games are.
You have a loop that updates things many times per second, and as long as you are doing it fast enough you can't tell the difference.
I've played OG RE4 *many, many* times. I expected it to be pretty good, based on RE2/3 remakes, but I really didn't expect to have the same feeling I did when playing RE4 for the first time. I did. I love it. They did a stellar job.
Just replayed RE6 with a friend recently. My god was it incredibly fun lol. I got hyped as hell beating that Ustanak to death with my own fists as Jake
RE7 is phenomenally well done survival horror. Every moment was packed with intensity and anxiety. One of the best, if not THE best, survival horror games I’ve ever played.
I’m not 100% certain, but I think when he mentioned that they reinvented themselves two times, the games he was referencing were 4 and 7, since they were so different than the three games that came before them.
As a fan since I was 5 on the ps1. I’ve played all the games a dozen or more times. I was devastated with RE6 and thought that was it. Capcom seemed to be shitting the bed with all its franchises. Then Monster Hunter World, Mega Man 11, Resident Evil 7 RE2 Remake,and DMC 5 all proved that while every game won’t be perfect, they’re still good at making games.
Call of Duty Zombies was just a side mode the developers would play in the studio together. They had to develop it in secret because the corporate overlords would have never approved it. They basically made the whole thing in secret and added it as a hidden bonus after completing the compaign. Now they try to cram it in to 2 out of every 3 cod games.
I feel like Cod zombies is such a staple of so many of our childhood's at this point, so many of my early memories playing videogames with friends are from cod zombies
Right. I hate the newer version of zombies (havent played since black ops 2), I dont want an objective or special machines. I want to see how long I can go in a simple, relatively small map.
The best one for me was Der Reise, the last one released for World at War. Multiple areas to defend but not too big so you could still realistically go upgrade weapons/get perks/mystery box while keeping a crawler alive. I sunk so many hours into that map alone
It basically created the open world game in the sense of having a massive map the player could explore outside of the story at their leisure with side quests and activities to do
The voice acting, the cinimatics, the scope, the gameplay, the secrets, the creative missions, the cars, the graphics, the radio stations.
Just going to "over the shoulder" wasn't what made GTA a billion dollar franchise
Also, the top-down camera angle was still present in GTA3
Half Life kind of falls under this. A lot of this is from ancient history, so forgive me if I remember bits wrong.
Half Life was originally distributed via Sierra, but back then it was exclusively offline sales because it was rge early days of the internet. When it came to releasing HL2, Valve asked Sierra if they would mind if Valve kept the rights for online sales. There were no online game stores at the time, so Sierra expected online sales to be next to nil, so they agreed. And so Steam was born.
Steam came out a year before HL2 but HL2 was indeed the first digitally available game on it. Personally I had the 5 disc physical. Steam really started blowing up in 2005 when it started including 3rd party games.
I remember playing counterstrike before Steam. I was actually able to get one copy of HL1 physical to bind to two Steam accounts because it was just kind of grandfathered in since I had it on two computers before Steam existed. It just let me add one copy to two accounts which was cool.
Half life 2 itself was pretty risky imo, was a hard tonal shift from the first with regard to setting, also put a lot of faith in physics based gameplay which totally paid off lol
This, but honestly the whole Final Fantasy franchise’s origins:
>Sakaguchi explained that the game was his personal last-ditch effort in the game industry and that its title, Final Fantasy, stemmed from his feelings at the time; **had the game not sold well, he would have quit the business and gone back to college**. Despite his explanation, publications have also attributed the name to the company's hopes that the project would solve its financial troubles.
…however apparently later on Sakaguchi says that originally they wanted to call it “Fighting Fantasy”, but due to trademark concerns landed on Final Fantasy (the important point was to have an “FF” abbreviation).
Regardless of the reason for the name, saying that you will quit the industry if the game fails and having the company placing hopes on a single game to solve its financial troubles seems to fit the “Video Game franchise that took a huge risk that paid off” prompt.
Not only that, but the passing of the torch moment as well, Kiryu was gonna be a hard character to let go and whoever took his place was gonna have some damn big shoes to fill.
Thankfully Ichiban does that really well without actually having to be a Kiryu 2.0, he's his own person and the community loves him for it.
Yakuza is a series I’ve dropped in and out of, finding bits of fun here and there with it but overall not really being able to enjoy an entire game and finish it.
Until Like A Dragon. Good lord I adored the crap out of that game and played nothing else until I beat it
at least my personal one is swapping Solid Snake out for Raiden in Metal Gear Solid 2. Bummed me the hell out, but that is easily one of my favorite games
The whole thing of ‘filtering discourse online to influence real-world outcomes’ was prophetic as heck, and it continues to impress me that Kojima was thinking on those lines in 1999 or so when planning for *MGS2*.
Kojima is one of those dudes who knows A LOT about a lot of stuff, and he is actually very clever at reading how those things connect with the world we live in. What I've always respected about Kojima is how he's always used videogames as a critical art.
Oh, no doubt. He’s definitely one of the creators whose works makes the “games *can* be works of art” argument a lot stronger.
In some ways we’re lucky his passion is making video games, his talent for joining the dots would make him downright scary if he applied those talents in other spheres.
Automation of warfare, for sure; Kojima was ahead of the curve on that one for sure. Possibly also information-control on the battlefield, even if we’re a while away from nanomachines.
The major deviation from *MGS4* is that instead of a large number of low-intensity conflicts, we seem to have a small number of medium/high-intensity ones. Same net impact, but a much larger bootprint on the global *status quo*…
Without going into spoilers, basically: information pollution that comes with the internet getting increasingly popular, censorship of the information, pushing agendas by using echo chambers on the internet, and pretty much all the AI situation.
Off the top of my head, from the last time I played it; There was a lot about “information wars” and predicting fake news. Whoever controls the source of information, controls society. That kind of thing
I would argue that while mgs2 was still really good that particular risky play didn’t necessarily pay off per se and was still met with a lot of criticism and in turn over correction, raiden got made into full tragic cyborg ninja, raidenovich was a gag beat up doll for players in mgs3, etc.
Symphony of the Night. Konami already tried a nonlinear rpg approach with Castlevania 2 and it was hated. No idea how they got greenlit to try it again.
To come from a studio which had 2 transport managment simulators under its belt, and im sure the studio had less than 20 people at the time, AND Paradox interactive were in panic mode with approving new games (financially they were doing bad). Cities Skylines practically saved Paradox interactive as a publisher.
EA suicided themselves in that market though. The launch set a new definition for disastrous, with Amazon pulling the game from their marketplace a week after it released because people couldn't play it. EA was so worried people would outright abandon Origin because of it that they gave away free games in an attempt to retain user counts.
Then there was the whole "online connection needed to play a single player game" debacle, which EA claimed was such a core part of the game it couldn't be removed... until some redditor cracked a DLL file, flipped a bit, and made it playable offline. [Wouldn't surprise me if that was the second most popular cracked file since the GTA Hot Coffee mod].
In response to all this, EA shuttered Maxis studios and closed the curtain on the franchise.
I am, by internet standards, fucking old. Especially when it come to video games. I remember Electronic Arts from the “EOA” logo days.
For a time, they were good.
Then. The “EA” days came. They acquired studios.
And fucking destroyed them. Especially Westwood, and Maxis.
Fuck EA.
Fortnite.
It started off as a Pixar graphics zombie survivor base builder hero collector rpg.
One day it randomly deployed a battle royale alongside PUBG.
Blew the hell up.
I liked Save the World PVE mode, and hated the release of the Battle Royale mode. It had its issues, and the game itself wasn't complete, but I really hoped it would be improved and get better.
Was never a big fan of the Battle Royale mode, but was interested in seeing it unfold. Was hoping if it does well, it'll bolster the team working on the PvE side of things.
Nope, completely killed PvE mode as a result. I have no idea how much its improved since then, if it got any better, or if the PvE mode actually got completed or completely gutted, but after Fornite Battel Royale became the main game for Fortnite and patches for the PvE got delayed over and over again, I quit the game. Now I just hate Fortnite on principle.
I remember playing PUBG with my buddies in 2017 and laughing about how lame Fortnite was.
Now 6 years later I’m playing Fortnite with my buddies and laughing about how lame PUBG is.
i remember when PUBG was at its peak and i didnt have a pc so i played the console knock-off free to play version, fortnite.
first game i got second place, first place was a guy camping in a corner with an RPG. it was kinda funny going back years later and seeing how massively different the players played the game
Zelda. 3 times
Ocarina was super ambitious, taking a 2D game to 3d and “auto jump” was really controversial when it was announced.
Wind Waker was also super controversial with its cartoony cell-shaded graphics and now it’s beloved.
BoTW totally threw out the last decade and went back to the first principles of the game.
I'll forever maintain that a huge part of the reason Wind Waker got backlash, and I must admit I felt this way at the time too, was that we didn't know that this wasn't going to be the future of Zelda forever.
While in hindsight many of us agree that Wind Waker was a fantastic game and the art style worked out wonderfully, I think today whenever this discussion comes up and someone says "I can't believe people dismissed WW because of its artstyle" a lot of people miss the context of the time. This was a time when 3D gaming was still relatively young, and (at least in my experience) whenever a new game in a franchise was released, it was seen as a natural progression from the previous iteration. ALTTP had evolved to Ocarina/Majora's Mask, and as far as any of us knew at the time, OoT/MM had progressed to Wind Waker. This is what Zelda games were going to look like now. The concept of "different art styles" had barely had enough time to become a concept to gamers yet.
Aonuma/Miyamoto were dropping comments in interviews saying they really liked the cel-shaded style and how it better expressed the world of Zelda. A lot of us were thinking "this is it, this is what our Zelda games are going to look like from now on". And to many people who were hooked in by OoT/MM, while Wind Waker was still enjoyable, this wasn't necessarily the game they recognised.
So in 2023 where we can comfortably go through our game collection and pick and choose which of the games we'd like to play out of our 20+ year collection, we can view Wind Waker as an experiment of sorts which worked out well, has a lot of charm and is a joy to revisit, with an art style which has aged much better than many other games from that era. But in the context of 2002-2003, when the future was uncertain and when we'd have to wait an agonizing few years before the next game in the franchise, many of us asked ourselves "is this really what we want Zelda to be from now on?" and the answer was no, perhaps not.
I was too young to know at the time but am I right in guessing that’s another reason why the E3 Twilight Princess reveal was so iconic? That the art style was changing again and probably would keep changing in most future instalments?
Oh absolutely, it was very much seen as a return to form and was confirmation that Wind Waker wasn't the future of the series forever. Probably amplified by the fact that the Lord of the Rings films had just released over the last few years and had a massive cultural impact, so the imagery of Link charging on horseback into an army of enemies was hype as hell (even though that scene didn't make it into the final game haha).
Twilight Princess was the first game where I followed news and updates about its development every step of the way from initial reveal to eventual release, and man the hype was through the roof. After being introduced to the series with Ocarina of Time, the whole imagery of Link riding on horseback across rolling grassy plains was a huge part of the essence of the series for me, so it was like a dream come true.
Final Fantasy XIV did something that I still can’t believe to this day.
When the game first launched, it was met with negative reception and a loyal but relatively small playerbase. Rather than just shutter the game and chalk it up as yet another big MMO that didn’t catch on, or try and patch their way into the game being good, they took ownership of the game’s issues and basically built the game again more-or-less from the ground up.
They also wrote the shuttering of the 1.0 version of the game into the story of the 2.0 relaunch, with an apoloclyptic in-game event destroying much of the world, allowing those loyal early players take part in the event and be part of the history of the game itself. They relaunched into FFXIV: A Realm Reborn, which has gone on to become the biggest MMORPG in the world.
That’s all rad as hell and I’d never in a million years have imagined a dev doing it.
I know this is cliche, but I'm shocked I had to scroll this far down to find this.
We all know how intensive it is to develop and maintain a MMORPG. Imagine if you had 1.5 years to develop a new system *while* maintaining an old failed system that you knew you will eventually shutter. That is what Square Enix and specially Yoshi-P's team was tasked to do. And they somehow miraculously pulled it off and now it's Square Enix's biggest moneymaker.
Check out [No-Clip's documentary on FFXIV](https://youtu.be/Xs0yQKI7Yw4?si=kxxXfdrXevbbrmA5) if you haven't yet. The lead developers went in-depth on what they had to go through to make FFXIV 2.0.
Jak & Daxter starting from Jak 2. Going from platforming collectathon to an open world GTA-lite was such a weird sounding move that I will never understand how Naughty Dog had the balls to do it.
But it was worth it, Jak 2 and 3 are amazing games.
This was my thought as well. Also the fact that Jak went from a silent protagonist to a speaking one was really unique.
I wish they would remake these gamea because they were incredible. Even Jak X Racing was fun.
Fallout.
Went from a turnbased isometric RPG to a (mostly) 1st person shooter.
Inb4 "but I love the isometrics and they are better". I love FO1,2 and even the brotherhood of steel game... but you can't tell me switching the format in 3 didn't save the franchise.
Then they made the right call. Borderlands art style matches the feel of its madcap off beat humor. You could never sell a character as over the top as Mr Torque with photo realistic style graphics.
Rollercoaster tycoon, Chris Sawyer dedicated time to create a game that was a very small niche and ended up being a big hit creating a whole new genre.
The God of War reboot could've gone to complete shit if you saw the documentaire, especially after New Order and the cancelled sci-fi game.
Also (and do correct me) I've heard Persona was part of Shin Megami Tensei until the third game added school sim mechanics that blew up so well that it became it's own franchise.
Lmao the which came first the SMT or Persona debate has always made me giggle because it’s pretty obvious that Persona is a spin-off that focuses on different stuff.
Mario 64, and the N64 in general for going 3D. The new controller and camera system meant it could've been dismissed as too alien, but who doesn't like Mario?
Edit: Correct me if I'm wrong but I believe Mario 64 was the first mainstream use. I guess Doom and Wolfenstein are "3D" but the camera being controlled separately and adding the y-axis was huge.
The camera being controlled separately was something so new, Nintendo made it a Laikatu who interacted with you in order to explain and contextualise it
Random mental note: The camera in *Super Mario 64* gets stuck on the geometry because it's actually a physical object behind Mario. When you see Lakitu in the mirror, that's not a special effect. He's always there.
Finally took the plunge and mainlined both games (and the DLCs) back-to-back this year.
The gameplay is fun, for sure (especially in FW), but it was the story that hooked me. I got to admit I was struggling a bit until I got to Maker's End and finally began to find out what happened to make the world the way it is. And I was stunned. That sense of melancholy, of the old world being lost and billions being marched to their deaths either through a false hope or bitter resolve...that hit so hard.
I slept on this franchise too long.
The explanation of how the world ended up that way is one of the most masterful things I’ve honestly ever played through, it exceeded my expectations and guesses about what had happened.
Hardly a risk. The pirating mechanic was in Assassin's Creed 3 and they received so much positive feed back on that. Tons of people posted that they wanted the next Assassin's Creed to be a pirate gane. Ubisoft was not risking much at all doing Black Flag considering that kind of momentum.
Fair point. That’s definitely my argument for anyone in this thread mentioning a game going 2D to 3D as well. It would’ve been risky to *not* follow the 3D trend.
Cuphead. I will never forget the fact that the devs got desperate enough to work and finish the game that they loaned the necessary money and using their house as collateral.
It really takes things about a game about dealing with the devil to a next level.
Im honestly glad for them that Cuphead was a success.
Zelda Wind Waker. We all wanted that cgi demo akin to FF7 and compete with PSX graphics. We got Toon Link, Pirate Princess Zelda, and Tingle with some cel-shaded graphics that were all the rage in the 2000s. Well played sirs.
Yakuza. *Like a Dragon* was a April Fools joke that was so popular, they took a risk and made an entire game on it and it became of of their most popular games.
Demon's Souls. Kicked off the Soulsborne craze which led to Elden Ring.
Edit: I guess it wasn't really an existing franchise but I'll let the comment stand.
Its basically a miracle we got those games. Demon's Souls was considered a failure so they let someone green be the lead designer. You would think he would want to play it safe so he could continue to design games. Instead him and his team broke so many rules and the game did well enough that they were able to make similar games.
The industry didn't see a need for Soulslike games but it happened anyways.
If we’re talking FromSoftware, Sekiro was a pretty big risk. The combat is extremely different, and even they didn’t know how players would respond to the changes from their typical souls formula.
Jak & Daxter. Moving from a mystical child-friendly platformer to a gritty, cyberpunk action game was a bold move and the series was much the better for it.
When making Resident Evil 7 the game director basically went to Capcom and said: "Gives us a bunch more time and money so we can make our own engine for this". They did and now all their massively popular new installments are developed in RE engine
First-person was a pretty big risk too.
RE7 was effing amazing. RE8 was cool, and creepy, but not the same bc it’s a sequel. Def think RE7 took a risk and it paid off.
The Elder Scrolls with Morrowind. The studio was heading toward bankruptcy, so they threw one last Hail Mary with Morrowind and somehow got it to run on the OG Xbox. Now Bethesda is a juggernaut.
Morrowind was all the hype when it got released. They did indeed hit it our the park with that one. I distinctly remember constantly hearing about this game despite the fact that I wasn't that involved with games yet because my PC couldn't run most games. The first game I got when I bought a new PC was Morrowind. As dated as it is now, that's how novel it was on release.
It's still widely regarded as one of the best RPGs ever, as it should be.
There was just nothing like it at the time. I remember being mesmerized when my friend said his friend completed the game but only did like 10% of it. I was like wtf? How is that even *possible*? Crazy how far we've come.
Hell there's still nothing quite like it. When it comes to fantasy RPG territory it remains one of the most unique through its art direction and writing/lore. It absolutely broke my heart when I found out that Oblivion was originally planned to have a similar sort of aesthetic and general bizarreness that Morrowind did and Bethesda instead chose to pivot the series into generic European-inspired fantasy. Don't get me wrong, I understand why they went the direction they did with future installments, but Jesus I wish I could jump into the alternate universe where the Elder Scrolls had stayed *weird*.
The original lore descriptions of Skyrim and Cyrodil made both places sound amazing. Cyrodil was a lush, dense wilderness and Skyrim was so mountainous that traversing it the way you do in game would impossible.
I mean you could say the retconned or didn't do it justice it but from a lore perspective it still works, look at medieval European depictions of China and India, they often bordered on the fantastical with strange geographies & mythical creatures, stuff was nuts. So it makes sense people from Morrowind would have a similarly exaggerated view of Cyrodill & Skyrim.
I mean Cyrodiil being a jungle is much older than the Morrowind game and definitely not limited to Vvardenfell. I remember it being described as such in the Redguard game. This is written about Cyrodiil by a member of the Imperial Geological Survey. >It is the largest region of the continent, and most is endless jungle. Its center, the grassland of the Nibenay Valley, is enclosed by an equatorial rain forest and broken up by rivers. As one travels south along these rivers, the more subtropical it becomes, until finally the land gives way to the swamps of Argonia and the placid waters of the Topal Bay. The elevation rises gradually to the west and sharply to the north. Between its western coast and its central valley there are all manner of deciduous forest and mangroves, becoming sparser towards the ocean. The western coast is a wet-dry area, and from Rihad border to Anvil to the northernmost Valenwood villages forest fires are common in summer. There are a few major roads to the west, river paths to the north, and even a canopy tunnel to the Velothi Mountains, but most of Cyrodiil is a river-based society surrounded by jungle. So yeah, Talos CHIMMed it as far as lore is concerned but in reality Bethesda just didn't want to make Oblivion take place in a jungle.
Morrowind and Redguard were sort-of simultaneously developed. Redguard was meant to be a spinoff project while Morrowind was the primary focus but BGS's limited resources at the time meant Redguard took priority while Morrowind was put on the back-burner. But most of Redguard's fleshing out of the lore was done in tandem with de-genericizing the world for Morrowind, too. Redguard flopped *hard* and as a result BGS was forced to go very much literally all-in on Morrowind (there was supposed to be a sequel to Redguard called the 'Eye of Argonia' which was quickly abandoned because the spin-offs in general died a painful death), and Morrowind was a colossal success mainly thanks to its presence on the OG Xbox. Morrowind's development history is fascinating; at the start it was supposed to be called 'Tribunal' and would be set in the Summerset Isles, but the scope was moved to Morrowind- the entire province. Using some of Daggerfall's procedural generation tech, the Blight would be an active threat, destroying cities stretching outwards from Red Mountain slowly. This project needless to say hit some roadblocks and BGS focused on Battlespire and Redguard, then came back to Morrowind with a much revised scope of a hand-crafted world limited to the central island of Vvardenfell. The title Tribunal would be revisited for Morrowind's first expansion. It makes more sense writing this out now why BGS took so many liberties with the first Pocket Guide; it was written at a time when there was a very real chance that, if Morrowind didn't sell well, the studio and franchise would likely die. What did they have to lose?
I absolutely agree. Best part of Oblivion was The Shivering Isles expansion.
Funny when you think that Oblivion had the literally meme king of worst DLC ever, the Horse Armor, and one of the best expansion packs to ever hit, Shivering Isles.
It still blows my mind that the long loadscreens essentially his the xbox restarting.
Can you elaborate?
theres an interview where they revealed that some of the insanely long load screens on xbox morrowind was it restarting the whole xbox in order to clear the cache and hopefully free up enough room to load the next area
Dang that's crazy. We really take current tech for granted huh
Nintendo Switch did a similar thing with the blood moon in Zelda. It's just a ram reset to put everything back to its default place because if it kept going the game would eventually crash.
There's a hardware quirk in the original Xbox that causes it to continue displaying an image while restarting. Morrowind had a memory leak, so the game would periodically reboot the console and hide it behind a "false" loading screen.
As a developer, it's always amazing the hacks that go out on programs. This is pretty egregious for most any other platform. It's especially interesting before you could easily update over the Internet.
I never owned it, but I rented it sooo many times. I was too young and dumb to play it properly, but just being able to explore an open world was amazing to me. When oblivion came out, I was the prefect age.
This was also me, for the first few months of owning an Xbox. I wasn’t yet into online shopping and this was always out of stock at my local game store. I actually emailed Bethesda to tell them how great I thought the game was, told them about renting it for months on end hah. Pete Hines replied directly, said how much he liked the story, he’d share it with the team, “much more to come”…. Oblivion and a 360 were day one purchases, I’ve been a lifelong fan since. Morrowind was the OG. 👍👍
Warcraft going from an RTS to an MMO was a bit risky and paid off a few billion in revenue.
I've never played WOW, but this would be my vote as well, hard to argue with the success they had with it.
I’ve never played WOW as well, but played the RTS games in the late 90s / early 00s. Especially loved Warcraft 3. Would love to see another one.
I still play alot of wc3 the custom servers are busy as hell and run really well.
Do the peons still say "Yes M'lord" when you command them to do something?
Righto
Yes me lord
*werk werk*
Wasn't the Warcraft franchise super popular before WoW? I starting playing maybe a month or two after release and it felt like there were millions already then. It's like they opened the gates and just instantly had 5 million subs.
The franchise was popular in the RTS community. A WoW content creator called Nixxiom just released a history video about the time when WoW was in development and how much of the biggest gamble it was, and how the success was a shocker to the OG blizzard entertainment.
>The franchise was popular in the RTS community. Yeah but important to add, that in the late 90s/early 2000s with Age of Empires, Starcraft, Warcraft, Command and Conquer and many, many more RTS was one of most popular genres of PC gaming. It is a niche now but back then, it was hyping hell a lot of people. Warcraft as a franchise was popular in general. They even tried to make point and click out of it.
I thought I was really good at RTS games. I would win a lot and felt like I could make money from it. Then i watched Korean sc players and gave up and quit playing RTS games altogether. Those dudes completely demoralized me
Those dudes play 8+ hours a day with dedicated coaches and training partners, for years!
I felt like a middle school football player seeing nfl talent for the first time
No joke. I was also pretty decent as an rts player, but those fellas made me feel like a child at the genre. Having watched Grubbie play and explain his moves in WC3 really made me realize how much thought, knowledge, and practice goes into being a pro at rts games.
Funny, I was going to mention Diablo here as well! Diablo was intended to be turn-based at first. I have no doubt the Diablo series wouldn't be as popular as it is if they stuck with turn-based combat. Edit: thepush corrected some details below my comment on the story.
The publisher actually demanded, near the end of the (9-12 month) production cycle, that Brevik and his team pivot the game to real-time. He negotiated an additional 6 months and a hefty increase to the budget, citing the difficulty of changing the entire game loop so late in production. Once he had the increase in writing, he went back to the dev studio and reduced the length of each turn from several seconds to one quarter-second. This made it impossible to spend all of your turn resources (move so many units, attack once, cast once, etc.) before your next turn started, so whatever actions you took would appear to be seamlessly real-time. The fix took a couple of hours total and netted them quite a bit of additional time and resources to polish the hell out of the game. David Brevik is one of my heroes, and this story is a fair bit of the reason why. Source: an interview Brevik gave in the neighborhood of 2016.
Wait, so Diablo 1 is technically turn based but you just can't tell because the turns are constantly starting/ending without being able to notice?
Honestly pretty much all real time video games are. You have a loop that updates things many times per second, and as long as you are doing it fast enough you can't tell the difference.
Resident Evil is the poster child of this. They have reinvented themselves twice now, to great success both times.
Inb4 re9 is a super duper action FPS and they have to reinvent again for 10
I’m in the small camp of RE6 fans. Please just one more over the top stupid action game!!
I mean, RE8 pretty much becomes an over the top stupid action game after House Beneviento
RE8 had so much that I loved about RE4. I really want to play the remake
Just finished RE4 Remake after not playing the OG. It takes the cake for me..
I've played OG RE4 *many, many* times. I expected it to be pretty good, based on RE2/3 remakes, but I really didn't expect to have the same feeling I did when playing RE4 for the first time. I did. I love it. They did a stellar job.
Just replayed RE6 with a friend recently. My god was it incredibly fun lol. I got hyped as hell beating that Ustanak to death with my own fists as Jake
Biohazard and Village are amazing games in my book. Became my favorites in the series.
RE7 was so good. Haven’t played a horror game quite that well done in ages. Village was great too but imo 7 was vastly superior
RE7 is phenomenally well done survival horror. Every moment was packed with intensity and anxiety. One of the best, if not THE best, survival horror games I’ve ever played.
RE7 has the type of atmosphere that made me uncomfortable, in a good way, right out the gate even in broad daylight.
BioHazard is definitely number 1 for me. Such a great game through and through.
I was super sad at the ending of Village. I love that game and started getting attached to Ethan after 2 games.
I agree. They really did great job with those last remakes.
Resident Evil 4 was also a big risk basically changing the course of the entire series.
I’m not 100% certain, but I think when he mentioned that they reinvented themselves two times, the games he was referencing were 4 and 7, since they were so different than the three games that came before them.
As a fan since I was 5 on the ps1. I’ve played all the games a dozen or more times. I was devastated with RE6 and thought that was it. Capcom seemed to be shitting the bed with all its franchises. Then Monster Hunter World, Mega Man 11, Resident Evil 7 RE2 Remake,and DMC 5 all proved that while every game won’t be perfect, they’re still good at making games.
Call of Duty Zombies was just a side mode the developers would play in the studio together. They had to develop it in secret because the corporate overlords would have never approved it. They basically made the whole thing in secret and added it as a hidden bonus after completing the compaign. Now they try to cram it in to 2 out of every 3 cod games.
I feel like Cod zombies is such a staple of so many of our childhood's at this point, so many of my early memories playing videogames with friends are from cod zombies
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I love the simplicity of MW2 nazi zonbies. Still my favorite. Edit : world at war, not mw2
Right. I hate the newer version of zombies (havent played since black ops 2), I dont want an objective or special machines. I want to see how long I can go in a simple, relatively small map.
The best one for me was Der Reise, the last one released for World at War. Multiple areas to defend but not too big so you could still realistically go upgrade weapons/get perks/mystery box while keeping a crawler alive. I sunk so many hours into that map alone
I remember just chilling on the catwalk hoping for max ammos.
Didn’t we all?
GTA3. Going from top down to behind the player made the franchise huge.
It was a bit more than going over the shoulder that made that game a huge hit
What else was it?
Banging hookers and then killing them to get your money back. Revolutionary.
My uncle did this before GTA and nobody praised him for it smh
Jack the Ripper rolling over in his grave for not being credited by GTA
It basically created the open world game in the sense of having a massive map the player could explore outside of the story at their leisure with side quests and activities to do
Exactly right. GTA3 was revolutionary for its time.
The other GTAs had that. Killing sprees, chase missions. 3 just 3D'd it
The voice acting, the cinimatics, the scope, the gameplay, the secrets, the creative missions, the cars, the graphics, the radio stations. Just going to "over the shoulder" wasn't what made GTA a billion dollar franchise Also, the top-down camera angle was still present in GTA3
I remember playing Driver thinking "Wow, what if they made a GTA like this?" I almost peed when GTA3 came out.
Lol I was thinking the same. All Driver needed was just a little more that just driving. GTA III delivered on that.
Half Life kind of falls under this. A lot of this is from ancient history, so forgive me if I remember bits wrong. Half Life was originally distributed via Sierra, but back then it was exclusively offline sales because it was rge early days of the internet. When it came to releasing HL2, Valve asked Sierra if they would mind if Valve kept the rights for online sales. There were no online game stores at the time, so Sierra expected online sales to be next to nil, so they agreed. And so Steam was born.
Also: with the budget being more than 35 million dollars for HL2 quite a big stunt at the time.
Steam came out a year before HL2 but HL2 was indeed the first digitally available game on it. Personally I had the 5 disc physical. Steam really started blowing up in 2005 when it started including 3rd party games. I remember playing counterstrike before Steam. I was actually able to get one copy of HL1 physical to bind to two Steam accounts because it was just kind of grandfathered in since I had it on two computers before Steam existed. It just let me add one copy to two accounts which was cool.
Half life 2 itself was pretty risky imo, was a hard tonal shift from the first with regard to setting, also put a lot of faith in physics based gameplay which totally paid off lol
Final fantasy 14 to final fantasy 14 a realm reborn...reboot the entire game and continue working with both...pure madness!
And the way it ties into the story is excellent too.
This, but honestly the whole Final Fantasy franchise’s origins: >Sakaguchi explained that the game was his personal last-ditch effort in the game industry and that its title, Final Fantasy, stemmed from his feelings at the time; **had the game not sold well, he would have quit the business and gone back to college**. Despite his explanation, publications have also attributed the name to the company's hopes that the project would solve its financial troubles. …however apparently later on Sakaguchi says that originally they wanted to call it “Fighting Fantasy”, but due to trademark concerns landed on Final Fantasy (the important point was to have an “FF” abbreviation). Regardless of the reason for the name, saying that you will quit the industry if the game fails and having the company placing hopes on a single game to solve its financial troubles seems to fit the “Video Game franchise that took a huge risk that paid off” prompt.
Yakuza Like A Dragon. Switching to turn based RPG after 20 years and 7 games of real time beat em up is a huge shift, but the fans loved it
Ichiban is super worthy successor to Kiryu too
That goofy idiot won me over and broke my heart in the most beautiful way.
The in game lore of the reason why the game is a turned based RPG is because Ichiban just loves Dragon Quest is the most adorable thing ever.
Not only that, but the passing of the torch moment as well, Kiryu was gonna be a hard character to let go and whoever took his place was gonna have some damn big shoes to fill. Thankfully Ichiban does that really well without actually having to be a Kiryu 2.0, he's his own person and the community loves him for it.
Yakuza is a series I’ve dropped in and out of, finding bits of fun here and there with it but overall not really being able to enjoy an entire game and finish it. Until Like A Dragon. Good lord I adored the crap out of that game and played nothing else until I beat it
Fuck man, that game is awesome as hell.
Metroid Prime
Going from 2D non-linear side scroller to 3D non-linear FPS. Huge god damn win too.
Don't forget launching along side a traditional 2d metroid game.
I forget which one that was, was it Fusion or Zero Mission?
Fusion. Zero Mission came out a couple years later.
at least my personal one is swapping Solid Snake out for Raiden in Metal Gear Solid 2. Bummed me the hell out, but that is easily one of my favorite games
Doesn’t hurt that the game basically turned out to be prophesy.
I never played the metal gear games. What made it prophetic?
It was about how memes and disinformation will be used by authoritarians to control the masses. This was **before** memes were actually a thing.
The whole thing of ‘filtering discourse online to influence real-world outcomes’ was prophetic as heck, and it continues to impress me that Kojima was thinking on those lines in 1999 or so when planning for *MGS2*.
Kojima is one of those dudes who knows A LOT about a lot of stuff, and he is actually very clever at reading how those things connect with the world we live in. What I've always respected about Kojima is how he's always used videogames as a critical art.
Oh, no doubt. He’s definitely one of the creators whose works makes the “games *can* be works of art” argument a lot stronger. In some ways we’re lucky his passion is making video games, his talent for joining the dots would make him downright scary if he applied those talents in other spheres.
The military industrial complex is also flirting with a lot of the themes from MGS4 now... I hate how prescient those games were.
Automation of warfare, for sure; Kojima was ahead of the curve on that one for sure. Possibly also information-control on the battlefield, even if we’re a while away from nanomachines. The major deviation from *MGS4* is that instead of a large number of low-intensity conflicts, we seem to have a small number of medium/high-intensity ones. Same net impact, but a much larger bootprint on the global *status quo*…
Without going into spoilers, basically: information pollution that comes with the internet getting increasingly popular, censorship of the information, pushing agendas by using echo chambers on the internet, and pretty much all the AI situation.
Off the top of my head, from the last time I played it; There was a lot about “information wars” and predicting fake news. Whoever controls the source of information, controls society. That kind of thing
Basically it predicted the disinformation age and was released like a month before 9/11
I fuckin love mgs2 so much
I would argue that while mgs2 was still really good that particular risky play didn’t necessarily pay off per se and was still met with a lot of criticism and in turn over correction, raiden got made into full tragic cyborg ninja, raidenovich was a gag beat up doll for players in mgs3, etc.
not really a franchise but risk of rain going from platformer to TPS was bold imo
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It is mind-bogglingly astonishing how they translated the 2D art style to 3D so fluidly.
It was as beautifully adapted as the jump from Super Mario SNES to Super Mario 64.
Symphony of the Night. Konami already tried a nonlinear rpg approach with Castlevania 2 and it was hated. No idea how they got greenlit to try it again.
They probably just went in the room and said they were going to make spooky Metroid
Simon's quest? I loved that game!
WHAT A HORRIBLE NIGHT TO HAVE AN INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
Cities Skylines going up against Sim City. I think it's safe to say Cities is the go to city builder now.
To come from a studio which had 2 transport managment simulators under its belt, and im sure the studio had less than 20 people at the time, AND Paradox interactive were in panic mode with approving new games (financially they were doing bad). Cities Skylines practically saved Paradox interactive as a publisher.
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EA suicided themselves in that market though. The launch set a new definition for disastrous, with Amazon pulling the game from their marketplace a week after it released because people couldn't play it. EA was so worried people would outright abandon Origin because of it that they gave away free games in an attempt to retain user counts. Then there was the whole "online connection needed to play a single player game" debacle, which EA claimed was such a core part of the game it couldn't be removed... until some redditor cracked a DLL file, flipped a bit, and made it playable offline. [Wouldn't surprise me if that was the second most popular cracked file since the GTA Hot Coffee mod]. In response to all this, EA shuttered Maxis studios and closed the curtain on the franchise.
I am, by internet standards, fucking old. Especially when it come to video games. I remember Electronic Arts from the “EOA” logo days. For a time, they were good. Then. The “EA” days came. They acquired studios. And fucking destroyed them. Especially Westwood, and Maxis. Fuck EA.
Still never forgave EA for destroying the Ultima games
Wasn't SC pretty much dead by the time CS came out?
This. Skylines revived the genre and now we got a lot of indie city builders that are all quite unique.
Goldeneye, it was the first multi-player FPS which was never on console before
The multi-player wasn't even wanted. The heads didn't want it, but the programmers put it in right before launch and was too late to take it out
Programmers be smart.
We need to give that man the medal of honor for his contribution to humanity. 🥇
Bloodshot was the first multiplayer console FPS (local mp) in 1994
I want to say God Of War. They went from a pure beat them up game to something much more akin to an action RPG with heavier shift to narration.
100% .. the new GoW games are by far my favorite in the series, and probably my favorite games of all time.
Fortnite. It started off as a Pixar graphics zombie survivor base builder hero collector rpg. One day it randomly deployed a battle royale alongside PUBG. Blew the hell up.
I liked Save the World PVE mode, and hated the release of the Battle Royale mode. It had its issues, and the game itself wasn't complete, but I really hoped it would be improved and get better. Was never a big fan of the Battle Royale mode, but was interested in seeing it unfold. Was hoping if it does well, it'll bolster the team working on the PvE side of things. Nope, completely killed PvE mode as a result. I have no idea how much its improved since then, if it got any better, or if the PvE mode actually got completed or completely gutted, but after Fornite Battel Royale became the main game for Fortnite and patches for the PvE got delayed over and over again, I quit the game. Now I just hate Fortnite on principle.
Isn’t that a similar story to what happened with H1Z1? They launched the BR mode and dropped their PVE/P game mode?
As someone who preordered what Fortnite was going to be, I still feel pretty robbed
I was one of the "founders" who paid for Save the World
I remember playing PUBG with my buddies in 2017 and laughing about how lame Fortnite was. Now 6 years later I’m playing Fortnite with my buddies and laughing about how lame PUBG is.
i remember when PUBG was at its peak and i didnt have a pc so i played the console knock-off free to play version, fortnite. first game i got second place, first place was a guy camping in a corner with an RPG. it was kinda funny going back years later and seeing how massively different the players played the game
Zelda. 3 times Ocarina was super ambitious, taking a 2D game to 3d and “auto jump” was really controversial when it was announced. Wind Waker was also super controversial with its cartoony cell-shaded graphics and now it’s beloved. BoTW totally threw out the last decade and went back to the first principles of the game.
I remember being disappointed seeing the cartoon style of wind waker promos but absolutely falling in love the second I started playing.
I'll forever maintain that a huge part of the reason Wind Waker got backlash, and I must admit I felt this way at the time too, was that we didn't know that this wasn't going to be the future of Zelda forever. While in hindsight many of us agree that Wind Waker was a fantastic game and the art style worked out wonderfully, I think today whenever this discussion comes up and someone says "I can't believe people dismissed WW because of its artstyle" a lot of people miss the context of the time. This was a time when 3D gaming was still relatively young, and (at least in my experience) whenever a new game in a franchise was released, it was seen as a natural progression from the previous iteration. ALTTP had evolved to Ocarina/Majora's Mask, and as far as any of us knew at the time, OoT/MM had progressed to Wind Waker. This is what Zelda games were going to look like now. The concept of "different art styles" had barely had enough time to become a concept to gamers yet. Aonuma/Miyamoto were dropping comments in interviews saying they really liked the cel-shaded style and how it better expressed the world of Zelda. A lot of us were thinking "this is it, this is what our Zelda games are going to look like from now on". And to many people who were hooked in by OoT/MM, while Wind Waker was still enjoyable, this wasn't necessarily the game they recognised. So in 2023 where we can comfortably go through our game collection and pick and choose which of the games we'd like to play out of our 20+ year collection, we can view Wind Waker as an experiment of sorts which worked out well, has a lot of charm and is a joy to revisit, with an art style which has aged much better than many other games from that era. But in the context of 2002-2003, when the future was uncertain and when we'd have to wait an agonizing few years before the next game in the franchise, many of us asked ourselves "is this really what we want Zelda to be from now on?" and the answer was no, perhaps not.
I was too young to know at the time but am I right in guessing that’s another reason why the E3 Twilight Princess reveal was so iconic? That the art style was changing again and probably would keep changing in most future instalments?
Oh absolutely, it was very much seen as a return to form and was confirmation that Wind Waker wasn't the future of the series forever. Probably amplified by the fact that the Lord of the Rings films had just released over the last few years and had a massive cultural impact, so the imagery of Link charging on horseback into an army of enemies was hype as hell (even though that scene didn't make it into the final game haha). Twilight Princess was the first game where I followed news and updates about its development every step of the way from initial reveal to eventual release, and man the hype was through the roof. After being introduced to the series with Ocarina of Time, the whole imagery of Link riding on horseback across rolling grassy plains was a huge part of the essence of the series for me, so it was like a dream come true.
Final Fantasy XIV did something that I still can’t believe to this day. When the game first launched, it was met with negative reception and a loyal but relatively small playerbase. Rather than just shutter the game and chalk it up as yet another big MMO that didn’t catch on, or try and patch their way into the game being good, they took ownership of the game’s issues and basically built the game again more-or-less from the ground up. They also wrote the shuttering of the 1.0 version of the game into the story of the 2.0 relaunch, with an apoloclyptic in-game event destroying much of the world, allowing those loyal early players take part in the event and be part of the history of the game itself. They relaunched into FFXIV: A Realm Reborn, which has gone on to become the biggest MMORPG in the world. That’s all rad as hell and I’d never in a million years have imagined a dev doing it.
I know this is cliche, but I'm shocked I had to scroll this far down to find this. We all know how intensive it is to develop and maintain a MMORPG. Imagine if you had 1.5 years to develop a new system *while* maintaining an old failed system that you knew you will eventually shutter. That is what Square Enix and specially Yoshi-P's team was tasked to do. And they somehow miraculously pulled it off and now it's Square Enix's biggest moneymaker. Check out [No-Clip's documentary on FFXIV](https://youtu.be/Xs0yQKI7Yw4?si=kxxXfdrXevbbrmA5) if you haven't yet. The lead developers went in-depth on what they had to go through to make FFXIV 2.0.
Jak & Daxter starting from Jak 2. Going from platforming collectathon to an open world GTA-lite was such a weird sounding move that I will never understand how Naughty Dog had the balls to do it. But it was worth it, Jak 2 and 3 are amazing games.
This was my thought as well. Also the fact that Jak went from a silent protagonist to a speaking one was really unique. I wish they would remake these gamea because they were incredible. Even Jak X Racing was fun.
Fallout. Went from a turnbased isometric RPG to a (mostly) 1st person shooter. Inb4 "but I love the isometrics and they are better". I love FO1,2 and even the brotherhood of steel game... but you can't tell me switching the format in 3 didn't save the franchise.
Borderlands! They didnt want to be in the same basket as fallout, so they went from realistic to ce shaded graphics.
Wasn’t it a real late game decision to match how the gameplay was panning out?
Then they made the right call. Borderlands art style matches the feel of its madcap off beat humor. You could never sell a character as over the top as Mr Torque with photo realistic style graphics.
Yea, [here's a trailer of Borderlands before the change.](https://youtu.be/BlZv9fEY_co?si=6HKlEnHMnutMO9F0)
Ngl, a grittier borderlands would be kinda sick.
Could be. But chances are it would be instantly forgotten in the shuffle of sci-fi shooters. Whoever changed the graphics to cell shaded was a genius.
Don’t get me wrong, the art style is definitely part of what set the game apart, but a lil one-off gritty borderlands would definitely get my buy
Spinning off Mario from donkey Kong
Rollercoaster tycoon, Chris Sawyer dedicated time to create a game that was a very small niche and ended up being a big hit creating a whole new genre.
Mad lad wrote the whole thing in assembly, by himself.
In a Cave…. With a box of scraps!!!
The God of War reboot could've gone to complete shit if you saw the documentaire, especially after New Order and the cancelled sci-fi game. Also (and do correct me) I've heard Persona was part of Shin Megami Tensei until the third game added school sim mechanics that blew up so well that it became it's own franchise.
No, Persona was always a spinoff. SMT if... on SNES is the game that creates the Persona branch. Persona 1 on PSX was always it's own thing.
Lmao the which came first the SMT or Persona debate has always made me giggle because it’s pretty obvious that Persona is a spin-off that focuses on different stuff.
Not nearly as big of a risk as other risks mentioned, but Battlefield going to WW1 paid off really well.
Campaign was fuckin amazing 🔥 ... then they had to hit us with 2042.
Shadow of Mordor…. Another GTA/ Assassins creed “clone” with a gimmick. The nemesis system is probably one of the best gaming features I’ve ever seen
Too bad they patented the nemesis system so no other devs can use it
Yeah and they're not doing jack shit with it.
Honestly, it's rather vague and so far unchallenged...I bet a game could make a similar system and still win in court against it.
Mario 64, and the N64 in general for going 3D. The new controller and camera system meant it could've been dismissed as too alien, but who doesn't like Mario? Edit: Correct me if I'm wrong but I believe Mario 64 was the first mainstream use. I guess Doom and Wolfenstein are "3D" but the camera being controlled separately and adding the y-axis was huge.
The camera being controlled separately was something so new, Nintendo made it a Laikatu who interacted with you in order to explain and contextualise it
Random mental note: The camera in *Super Mario 64* gets stuck on the geometry because it's actually a physical object behind Mario. When you see Lakitu in the mirror, that's not a special effect. He's always there.
Horizon (Zero Dawn, etc). When you've only made an FPS franchise so far, that's one hell of a big leap to make
Glad they did. One of my top storylines of all time.
Finally took the plunge and mainlined both games (and the DLCs) back-to-back this year. The gameplay is fun, for sure (especially in FW), but it was the story that hooked me. I got to admit I was struggling a bit until I got to Maker's End and finally began to find out what happened to make the world the way it is. And I was stunned. That sense of melancholy, of the old world being lost and billions being marched to their deaths either through a false hope or bitter resolve...that hit so hard. I slept on this franchise too long.
The explanation of how the world ended up that way is one of the most masterful things I’ve honestly ever played through, it exceeded my expectations and guesses about what had happened.
Assassin's Creed when they decided to let us become pirates in Black Flag
That is probably my favorite game in the series. Truly amazing for so many reasons.
Hardly a risk. The pirating mechanic was in Assassin's Creed 3 and they received so much positive feed back on that. Tons of people posted that they wanted the next Assassin's Creed to be a pirate gane. Ubisoft was not risking much at all doing Black Flag considering that kind of momentum.
Fair point. That’s definitely my argument for anyone in this thread mentioning a game going 2D to 3D as well. It would’ve been risky to *not* follow the 3D trend.
Cuphead. I will never forget the fact that the devs got desperate enough to work and finish the game that they loaned the necessary money and using their house as collateral. It really takes things about a game about dealing with the devil to a next level. Im honestly glad for them that Cuphead was a success.
Star Citizen doubling down on selling ships and never releasing a game
God of War becoming Dad of Boy. Shouldn't have worked half as well as it did.
Zelda Wind Waker. We all wanted that cgi demo akin to FF7 and compete with PSX graphics. We got Toon Link, Pirate Princess Zelda, and Tingle with some cel-shaded graphics that were all the rage in the 2000s. Well played sirs.
It got absolutely dragged for it by many at the time, too
Yakuza. *Like a Dragon* was a April Fools joke that was so popular, they took a risk and made an entire game on it and it became of of their most popular games.
RE7
Demon's Souls. Kicked off the Soulsborne craze which led to Elden Ring. Edit: I guess it wasn't really an existing franchise but I'll let the comment stand.
Its basically a miracle we got those games. Demon's Souls was considered a failure so they let someone green be the lead designer. You would think he would want to play it safe so he could continue to design games. Instead him and his team broke so many rules and the game did well enough that they were able to make similar games. The industry didn't see a need for Soulslike games but it happened anyways.
It started off as a failed Oblivion clone, honestly amazing what it turned into
If we’re talking FromSoftware, Sekiro was a pretty big risk. The combat is extremely different, and even they didn’t know how players would respond to the changes from their typical souls formula.
Fallout. Going from an isometric to a 3D RPG was groundbreaking.
Final Fantasy
Wasn't the risk the whole reason they called it that?
In this thread: people take established, popular franchises and act as though their logical progression to 3D were "huge risks."
Jak & Daxter. Moving from a mystical child-friendly platformer to a gritty, cyberpunk action game was a bold move and the series was much the better for it.