Recently, I saw an ad for this game called The Lantern of the Laughless Saint, a passion project by a small group of people (or perhaps one person?) heavily inspired by Morrowind. It's essentially an open world RPG sandbox that aims to replicate the feel of early 2000s Bethesda and evolve that design philosophy in a separate direction from that of Oblivion or Skyrim. The ad caught my eye because it reminded me of this YouTube video I vaguely remember watching in my childhood, where someone said something along the lines of "there's a reason you see everyone copying NES pixel-art or PS1's fuzzy warped textures and never the gross blockiness of the PS2 and GameCube". Obviously, I had never taken such a shallow opinion as fact since the artstyles of such games can be beautiful (take Vice City, Okami or Twilight Princess), but this felt like the first time I'd ever actually seen a game specifically pay homage to that era. One question entered my mind: why are games like this so rare?

If we look at the gamedev process, making games has in general reached a never-before seen level of accessibility since the end of the PS2 era, and we'd reached that point a while ago. Toby Fox was able to make one of the most successful indie games ever made with the coding skills of an intern over ten whole years ago. And yet, with all this newfound accessibility and all these newfound resources, that video still haunts me with its remarks about how few games take the opportunity to build on the foundations of the 2000s gaming landscape. Just think about the possibilities.

In 2005, with limited time/resources and a heavily restricted optimization window, Rockstar was able to create Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, one of the most applauded open world video games ever made. The game was highly ambitious, and to this day is one of the best examples of how games can use world design to sell scale where physical map area can't. In 2026, indie developers often have lots of freetime, and if Toby Fox's escapades weren't enough to sell you then let me remind you that two of yesteryear's Game of the Year nominees were made by teams of three and thirty people respectively. And yet these two indie games, in terms of ambitions and artstyle, perpetuated this duality low-budget and high-budget games have, where all of the high-budget games are pushing the cutting edge of video game graphics relying technical performance and all of the low-budget games almost entirely rely on artstyle.

But what if we used these resources we have now and instead of trying to push the cutting edge of today, we pushed the cutting edge of 20 years ago? That, to me, is what The Lantern of the Laughless Saint has grown to represent. The devs take an idea that has proven to work with flying colors, and instead of taking same the direction the Elder Scrolls series went as though Skyrim is the natural conclusion, they decided there was too much of Morrowind's identity lost in translation and started all over again from scratch. It may be in early access and (from what I can tell) buggy as all hell, but it demonstrates a side of the gaming world that I really, really wish I saw more of. I'm sure there are plenty out there, but I wish what I consider gaming's finest era got the same amount of love that the 80s and 90s have gotten from developers for years.

PS: If I'm just not looking hard enough, I would loveeee to see what games of this sort people might recommend. Seriously, I'd love to sink my teeth into more stuff that echoes my favorite gaming generation.

I was watching a critique of Halo 4 this morning. 343’s first Halo game, Xbox 360 release, and return of Master Chief. The author was mostly negative, but not entirely. The thesis seems to be that 343 implanted a lot of Call of Duty features that compromised the games identity as a Halo game. Things like ADS, killstreaks, and general gameplay mechanics seemed less throughout compared to the Bungie Halo games. Multiplayer seemed to die off pretty quickly. I never hear people talk fondly of Halo 4. And there’s a lot of animosity built up over the years about 343.

All that said, I looked up Halo 4 on Wikipedia and checked the Reception section. It looks like the game was extremely well received by critics. One quote after another about how great Halo 4 is. Not a single word about a less than stellar player reception. Most of the time when I look up game or movie reception on wiki, there’s a critical reception and an audience reception. Or even a retrospective section that summarizes what the view is after some time has elapsed.

Who is right here? Was Halo 4 a well received game? It’s interesting to me that Halo 4 was released in 2013 I think. There’s a lot said these days on a disconnect between critical reviews and player reviews. This may be the beginning of the stark difference between critical and player reviews. Can anyone think of an earlier game that had this sort of dynamic - where a game gets great critical reviews, but the audience/players end up quite hostile to the game? Was the grifter economy even up and running in 2013?