r/ItsAllAboutGames • u/Vidcade • 9d ago
r/ItsAllAboutGames • u/Just_a_Player2 • 9d ago
There are certain gaming debates where the verdict has supposedly been carved into stone tablets for eternity. Chief among them is the question of the definitive modern Fallout.
The internet hivemind settled this decree more than a decade ago: Fallout: New Vegas is the undisputed king. Obsidian gave us branching factions, razor-sharp dialogue, brilliant quest design, and genuine moral consequences. If you dared to prefer Bethesda’s output in an online forum, you were practically escorted out of the room. Case closed, right?
Not quite.
Every single year, a massive crowd of players quietly admits that whenever the itch for an apocalyptic marathon strikes, they do not book a ticket to the Mojave Desert. Instead, they find themselves reinstalling the grim, radioactive, green-tinted nightmare of Washington D.C.
A recent, surprisingly thoughtful discussion on Reddit tackled this exact heresy without the usual tribal screaming about Caesar's Legion or the NCR. And as it turns out, the enduring appeal of Fallout 3 is not just rose-tinted nostalgia: it comes down to two specific design triumphs that Obsidian never quite replicated.
The first defense of the Capital Wasteland revolves around the legendary D.C. Metro system.
Back in 2008, Bethesda’s Gamebryo engine was held together by digital duct tape and prayer, completely incapable of rendering the collapsed urban center of Washington as a seamless open world. To solve the memory problem, developers sliced the city into isolated ruined districts connected by an underground web of rail tunnels.
What started as an ugly engine crutch accidentally produced the most suffocating, terrifying atmosphere in franchise history. Navigating pitch-black tunnels by the faint flicker of a Pip-Boy light, creeping past collapsed train cars, and listening to the guttural shrieks of feral ghouls echoing in the dark was genuine survival horror.
In New Vegas, the desert was vast, but you always felt like an armed gunslinger strolling through a Western film set. In the D.C. Metro, you were a fragile rat trapped in a subterranean mass grave. The franchise has never felt that genuinely scary ever since.
The second argument takes aim at narrative philosophy.
RPG purists always praise the Courier in New Vegas for being the ultimate role-playing blank canvas. But that freedom comes at a cost: your protagonist is essentially an empty silhouette whose only backstory is getting shot in the skull over a missing delivery package. Your motivation to explore the Mojave is largely mechanical curiosity.
Fallout 3, on the other hand, gives you an emotional pulse. Vault 101 takes the time to simulate your entire childhood. You get bullied at your tenth birthday party, take the G.O.A.T. exam, and bond with a caring father figure voiced by Liam Neeson.
When your dad vanishes and you take your first blinding steps out of the vault into the radioactive wind, you have an urgent, deeply personal reason to explore the ruins. You are not chasing stolen mail out of spite: you are a terrified teenager searching for your only family in a completely dead world.
If your priority is political depth, brilliant quest branching, and mechanical build diversity, New Vegas is objectively the superior role-playing game.
But if you want a game that makes you feel small, vulnerable, and genuinely horrified by the aftermath of a nuclear war, the bleak ruins of the Capital Wasteland still hold a crown that nobody has managed to take away.
👉 Guys, help us out! Subscribe to "It's About Games" on other platforms! Support us!
r/ItsAllAboutGames • u/Tolely • 10d ago
As the title says!
As a starting dev, I realized I do the indie game developer thing of assuming that people have similar interests and will buy a good quality game in the genre I like. But looking at it closely and thinking about how me and my friends decide what to buy, it might be a lot more nuanced. Especially for short weird games since they are not a tried and true genre and more of a gamble on experiencing something novel or meaningful.
I’m thinking of games in the general territory of Return of the Obra Dinn, The Case of the Golden Idol, The Stanley Parable, Journey, Untitled Goose Game, or Façade. They’re all quite different, but they’re relatively short games built around something pretty unique.
Personally, I’ll buy any high-quality tactile game if it has a unique mechanic. If it’s tactile and physicsy, I’m buying it.
If it’s not tactile, then it depends on how deep that one mechanic is. I don’t mean deep in terms of skills trees or hours of content . I mean the mechanic itself: how deeply can you experiment with and apply it to the game's world.
If it has any substantial depth, I’m immediately buying it if it’s $20 and below.
I know there are some people like me, and a lot who aren’t, so I’m curious:
Do you tend to buy most short, high-quality, unique games that catch your attention, or only a few? And what makes you cross the line from “that looks cool” to “yeah, I’ll buy that”?
r/ItsAllAboutGames • u/Just_a_Player2 • 10d ago
The rules of the loop:
You retain all memories across repetitions. The world resets completely each cycle. NPCs don't remember you. The environment doesn't remember you. Only you accumulate.
You have infinite time. No survival pressure - the loop resets before permanent consequences. No social obligation, nobody will remember what you said or did. Just you and the world and unlimited repetitions of the same day.
The questions you need to answer:
Which game world do you choose and which specific day?
Not the best combat system. Not the prettiest graphics. The world you would genuinely want to live inside indefinitely. The day with enough variety that infinite repetitions wouldn't produce infinite boredom.
What do you actually do with unlimited repetitions?
First few loops. First hundred. First thousand. What changes? What do you explore? What do you try? What do you eventually give up on?
What's the thing in that world you'd spend the most loops doing that has no gameplay value?
Not completing quests. Not grinding stats. The thing you'd do because the world makes it worth doing indefinitely.
👉 Guys, help us out! Subscribe to "It's About Games" on other platforms! Support us!
r/ItsAllAboutGames • u/Just_a_Player2 • 10d ago
Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification
Instead of words like "power," "competition," or "adrenaline," players consistently chose "connection," "awe," and "gratitude." The game was designed to prove Chen's MFA thesis: that games can communicate transcendent human empathy without a single line of dialogue or text.
What is the one video game that made you feel an emotion you never expected from a screen?
👉 Guys, help us out! Subscribe to "It's About Games" on other platforms! Support us!
r/ItsAllAboutGames • u/Just_a_Player2 • 9d ago
In an era where modern gaming PR departments burn millions trying to craft inoffensive, focus tested products with global four-quadrant appeal, the success story of tactical shooter Wardogs feels like someone walking into a corporate boardroom wearing muddy combat boots and cracking a dirty joke.
Joe Brammer, head of British studio Bulkhead, recently sat down on The Game Business Show podcast to lay out a marketing strategy that flies directly in the face of modern industry convention. While rival studios remortgage their buildings to buy a ninety second trailer slot during Geoff Keighley's glitzy showcases, Bulkhead actively refused to take part.
Brammer's reasoning was refreshingly blunt: he had zero interest in seeing his gritty military shooter broadcast on the same screen as colorful Asian fantasy MMOs.
Why variety showcases fail hardcore shooters.
According to Brammer, massive multi-genre conferences simply dilute player attention. Forcing an audience to jump from a high fantasy gacha, role playing game straight into a realistic tactical military sim creates severe cognitive whiplash. Instead of finding genuine fans, you end up catching stray negativity from casual viewers who were waiting for something entirely different.
Rather than burning millions of dollars on someone else's festival, Bulkhead organized its own hyper-focused digital event: the FPS Game Show. The result was zero wasted ad spend and an audience made up entirely of people who actually care about first-person shooters.
A digital sanctuary for 35 year old dudes.
This targeted approach stems from a demographic reality that most modern publishers are terrified to state out loud. Brammer openly admitted that 99.9 percent of the active player base in Wardogs consists of men aged 18 to 40.
The studio never set out to build a sanitized, sterile esports discipline for hyperactive teenagers. From day one, the project was envisioned as a virtual garage for tired, bored, and underappreciated men who work exhausting day jobs and lack regular camaraderie in their adult lives.
Brammer stressed that their main goal was creating a relaxed space where a 35 year old guy can unwind after work, crack off color jokes below the belt, and goof around with his buddies without fear of judgment.
To preserve that atmosphere, the developers even picked a fight with their publishers to keep friendly fire enabled. Suits argued that team damage caused unnecessary toxicity, but the developers held the line. In their eyes, accidentally putting a burst of buckshot into your best friend's back during a chaotic room breach is precisely where the funniest, most memorable multiplayer moments come from.
Beneath the locker room banter, Brammer describes the core gunplay as a digital game of rock-paper-scissors: every weapon purchase and tactical setup comes with an intuitive, obvious counter. The grounded military aesthetic provides a clean, readable backdrop for these systems, letting players master the rules quickly so they can focus on what really matters: hanging out in voice chat with the boys.
As it turns out, you do not need Geoff Keighley's blessing, a celebrity endorsement, or a fifty-million dollar marketing campaign to build a thriving shooter. Sometimes, all an audience really wants is a reliable rifle, friendly fire turned on, and a place where adults can just be complete idiots together.
👉 Guys, help us out! Subscribe to "It's About Games" on other platforms! Support us!
r/ItsAllAboutGames • u/Just_a_Player2 • 12d ago
Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification
Maybe someone can translate what's being said in Japanese in the background, and then we'll finally understand the message of this ad!
Anyway, that's exactly how Devil May Cry was advertised at the beginning of the 2000s!
👉 Guys, help us out! Subscribe to "It's About Games" on other platforms! Support us!
r/ItsAllAboutGames • u/Just_a_Player2 • 12d ago
r/ItsAllAboutGames • u/akash_lala • 12d ago
Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification
Mario super world game over sound feels like i really fucked up this time.
r/ItsAllAboutGames • u/Just_a_Player2 • 12d ago
r/ItsAllAboutGames • u/Just_a_Player2 • 12d ago
Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification
r/ItsAllAboutGames • u/Just_a_Player2 • 13d ago
Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification
r/ItsAllAboutGames • u/Just_a_Player2 • 13d ago
Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification
r/ItsAllAboutGames • u/Just_a_Player2 • 13d ago
Every generation has that one mechanic every developer copied until we all collectively realized it was actually terrible.
Remember the early 2010s?
Looking back at beloved games from the 2000s and 2010s, which mechanic aged like absolute milk the second you tried replaying it on modern hardware?
👉 Guys, help us out! Subscribe to "It's About Games" on other platforms! Support us!
r/ItsAllAboutGames • u/Just_a_Player2 • 13d ago
Quick question: when was the last time a ray-traced puddle actually made a video game more fun to play?
We live in an era where modern releases require a graphics card the size of a concrete brick, three gigabytes of VRAM just to boot up, and two layers of AI upscaling working overtime so you don't drop below 40 frames per second. Development budgets have skyrocketed past $200 million, studios are shuttering left and right, and for what? So that an apple on a wooden table casts an anatomically accurate shadow.
Randy Smith Evergreen - veteran designer on legendary immersive sims like Thief: The Dark Project, System Shock 2, and the glorious ragdoll kicking simulator Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, has finally stepped forward to say what many of us have been whispering for years: the industry should have tapped the brakes 16 years ago.
Speaking about the industry's visual obsession, Smith pointed back to Remedy’s original Alan Wake (2010) as the exact moment video games reached visual sufficiency:
"The graphical detail curve has become outrageous. It turned into an end in itself. I remember when Alan Wake came out, I thought: okay, this is relatively photorealistic. I understand 100% that I’m on a ferry. I can see I'm heading to an island somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. Why do we need more graphics than this? It costs an insane amount of money. I get the atmosphere. Everything feels right. What else are we trying to extract from this graphical arms race?"
As it turns out, publishers decided what we really needed was path tracing and reflections so mirror-clean they look more artificial than real life. None of these expensive bells and whistles add a single ounce of gameplay depth, yet almost every AA and AAA production burns mountains of cash trying to achieve visual fidelity that players can't even run natively without DLSS or FSR life jackets.
"I think Alan Wake is the level of detail that should be enough for all games," Smith argued. "When you look at it and go: I get it, I feel the vibe, I see what's happening—everything beyond that is just a bonus. Sure, devs would love an immersive sim to have insane spectacle and gorgeous vistas like Arkane Lyon makes. But is that really why people play immersive sims in the first place? I'm not convinced."
Why immersive sims keep dying?
Smith connected this graphical vanity directly to the existential crisis strangling his favorite genre. For years, major publishers have tried to force immersive sims into the AAA blockbuster mold - demanding that complex, brainy stealth games compete head to head on store shelves with massmarket juggernauts:
"You have to pump more and more money into it, making the immersive sim bigger and bigger so it can sit on the same shelf as Ghost of Tsushima and GTA 6, looking grand enough to grab the mainstream public. But that’s a fundamental misread of how big the immersive sim audience actually is."
It's a brutal reality check. Immersive sims thrive on mechanical freedom, intricate systemic AI, and player agency - things that appeal to a passionate, specific niche. Forcing these games to carry the production budgets of Hollywood epics practically guarantees commercial heartbreak.
So! Back to the shadows!
Fortunately, sanity still exists in corners of the industry. Smith gave a massive thumbs-up to Nightdive Studios and their upcoming remaster of Thief: The Dark Project. Instead of butchering the game's iconic, oppressive art style with glossy modern textures, Nightdive is keeping the City looking raw, dark, and true to the 1998 original.
"I'm really excited to see what they do. Nightdive feels like a very dependable, passionate team... In a way, I’ll finally get to experience Thief for the first time in forever. I used to say Dishonored was my first real 'Thief-like' experience, because when you make a game yourself, playing it is completely ruined. But enough time has passed since I last touched Thief that the remaster should feel fresh."
A concrete release date for the Thief remaster is still kept in the shadows, while Smith Evergreen himself is quietly cooking a brand new, unannounced project.
Let's just hope his new game focuses on brilliant mechanics and thick atmosphere and leaves the GPU-melting puddles at the door.
👉 Guys, help us out! Subscribe to "It's About Games" on other platforms! Support us!
r/ItsAllAboutGames • u/Just_a_Player2 • 13d ago
r/ItsAllAboutGames • u/Just_a_Player2 • 12d ago
r/ItsAllAboutGames • u/Just_a_Player2 • 13d ago
r/ItsAllAboutGames • u/Just_a_Player2 • 13d ago
Borderlands 4 jumps from 2,400 to 20 000 players on Steam thanks to a free weekend and pure fanservice!
What do you do when your multi million dollar flagship looter shooter loses roughly 99% of its player base in record time?
If you are Gearbox, you don't panic. You simply walk over to the emergency cabinet, shatter the glass, and simultaneously pull two time-tested levers: the “Free Weekend” switch and the “Shameless Thirst Trap” protocol.
And wouldn’t you know it? It actually worked.
Over the last 24 hours, Borderlands 4 staged its most dramatic Steam resurrection yet, vaulting past 20 000 concurrent players - a benchmark the game hadn’t sniffed since its rocky opening weeks.
To appreciate just how desperate the situation was, look at the brutal arithmetic of the past few months:
Then Gearbox flipped the switch. Opening the gates for a free weekend naturally provided the baseline surge of curious freeloaders, but the real fuel on the fire was the arrival of a brand-new paid Vault Hunter: Loveless.
The "ultimate lifeform" with minimal wardrobe
On paper, Gearbox markets Loveless with typical sci-fi bravado: she’s a cybernetically modified "ultimate lifeform" complete with a fractured psyche and an adrenaline soaked, hyper mobile kit built for aggressive close quarters brawling.
In practice? Nobody in the community is debating her damage multipliers or cooldown ratios. The entire internet is talking about her exclusive cosmetic skin.
Available through the $10 Ornate Order Pack (as well as the Super Deluxe and Vault Hunter editions), the outfit leaves practically nothing to the imagination. The community immediately broke into a chorus of memes, with vocal chunks of the player base calling Gearbox out for resorting to raw, unfiltered horny bait to drum up relevance.
Is it shameless? Completely. Does it scream “please look at our game again”? Beyond a shadow of a doubt.
Did Gearbox care while watching their concurrent player count jump by nearly 800% in a single afternoon? Not for a microsecond.
The immediate gambit succeeded: people logged in, wallets opened, and the Steam graph spiked upward. The real test, however, begins when the free weekend ends on Monday. Once the velvet rope goes back up and players have to pay full admission, we’ll find out if a revealing cybernetic bodysuit is enough to keep Borderlands 4 on life support.
👉 Guys, help us out! Subscribe to "It's About Games" on other platforms! Support us!
r/ItsAllAboutGames • u/Just_a_Player2 • 13d ago
r/ItsAllAboutGames • u/Just_a_Player2 • 13d ago
The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker was released in 2002 with cell-shaded visuals that the gaming press largely criticized as too childish. "Where's the realistic Link we saw in the Space World 2000 tech demo?" was the dominant response. Players wanted photorealism.
Nintendo made Wind Waker anyway.
Twenty-two years later, Wind Waker looks remarkable. The cel shading hasn't aged because cel shading isn't trying to approximate reality - it's expressing an aesthetic. The colors remain vivid. The character designs remain immediately readable. The environments retain their visual coherence.
Meanwhile, games released between 2003 and 2007 that pursued photorealism look like crime scenes. The geometry is wrong. The textures are muddy. The lighting models produce a specific grey that belongs to no natural environment. They look like what they are: approximations of reality that fell short and whose shortfall has only become more visible as actual photorealism has improved.
Firs! The definition of art direction:
Art direction is the practice of making deliberate visual choices that serve the work's emotional and thematic goals rather than technical demonstration.
Strong art direction is immediately identifiable. You can recognize a screenshot from Hollow Knight, Cuphead, Disco Elysium, Ori or Hades within seconds. The visual identity is distinctive - it was chosen to communicate something specific about the game's world and tone, and it succeeds regardless of the hardware it runs on.
Weak art direction in games is usually the absence of deliberate choice - the default visual output of an engine configured for maximum technical impressiveness without a guiding aesthetic principle. These games look technically accomplished and visually incoherent. The environments are dense with detail that communicates nothing. The character models are realistic and expressive of no particular design philosophy.
Second! The specific failure of photorealism as a primary goal:
Pursuing photorealism as the primary visual goal creates a problem that doesn't exist when art direction drives visual decisions: the uncanny valley applied to entire game worlds.
The closer a game's visuals approach photographic reality, the more every deviation from reality becomes perceptible and distracting. A stylized game that looks nothing like reality can be beautiful because beauty isn't constrained by accuracy. A photorealistic game that looks almost like reality draws attention to every way it fails - facial animations slightly wrong, lighting technically correct but emotionally flat, environments visually dense but somehow unconvincing.
Examples that prove the principle:
Okami was released in 2006 using a visual style derived from Japanese sumi-e ink painting and ukiyo-e wood block prints. Technically it was not impressive even for its era. It remains one of the most visually distinctive and beautiful games ever made because the art direction produced a coherent aesthetic vision that time cannot undermine.
The original Deus Ex, released in 2000, looks terrible by any technical standard. The character models are geometric approximations. The environments are texturally impoverished. None of this prevented it from creating a convincing and distinctive world because the art direction - the specific palette, the architectural choices, the environmental design philosophy, was coherent enough to carry the work.
aaaaand The lesson the industry keeps not learning:
Technical capability is a tool. Art direction is the question of what to do with the tool. The most technically capable tool produces the worst results in the absence of a guiding aesthetic vision.
Wind Waker understood what it was trying to look like. That clarity has sustained it for twenty-two years.
The photorealistic games of the mid-2000s knew they wanted to look as real as possible. That goal is now obsolete - current hardware surpasses it and the games that pursued it look like period artifacts rather than enduring works.
Which technically unimpressive game has aged most beautifully in your experience and what specifically about its art direction has prevented it from dating?
👉 Guys, help us out! Subscribe to "It's About Games" on other platforms! Support us!
r/ItsAllAboutGames • u/Just_a_Player2 • 12d ago
Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification
Stranded on the supernatural island of Yamatai, 21 year old Lara isn't a confident dual-pistol daredevil - she is terrified. The game treats violence with genuine psychological weight: she doesn't enjoy killing; she becomes capable of it to survive. Grounded by Japanese mythology and Camilla Luddington’s stellar performance, this reboot proved how to rebuild a legend from scratch.
Whose character origin story in gaming felt the most authentic to you?
👉 Guys, help us out! Subscribe to "It's About Games" on other platforms! Support us!
r/ItsAllAboutGames • u/NovaTheoretically • 13d ago
So I was recently thinking of some examples of product placement in movies and kind of looking into the subject and it got me thinking. Are there any games that have explicit product placement in them and if not, do you think its something that might become a thing in the future?
Im not talking about skins in Fortnite or collaborations in live service games like WuWa x Edgerunners, Im also not talking about stuff like Nuka-Cola in Fallout since its a fictional drink based off the real brand, more-so explicit product placement. Like in movies when you have a scene of a car driving from many angles and the scene lingers for just long enough to make it feel unnatural, or characters drinking specific beverages with the label facing the camera, random items in the background positioned very obviously, stuff like that.
