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« on: March 19, 2013, 09:46:02 PM »
I've come to realize myself that the way things have seemed to go most of the time is that one man's innovation is another man's degradation. Some view the move to P&C with the mouse as innovative, while I know for a fact that there are others (though, less) that consider it devolution because it's not as versatile. My dad is one of them. Yet, I know that he would not have the time or patience nowadays to play a parser adventure game anymore.
But I definitely see the sacrifice for a wider market view here. Innovation has always sacrificed something, even if it was only sacrificing simply the way things have always been done before. That in itself can most of the time be enough for people to call it sacrifice. Even the move from straight text adventures sacrificed something; the art of a writer's ability to describe a scene and paint scenes in your imagination. We've replaced it with someone else's personal exact perception of that description (a description of which, we usually will not ever see, except maybe in a small narrator box, and nowadays we rarely have even that). It was definitely innovative to be able to see somebody's actual vision of a scene and requires us to think less (or imagine less, to the glass-half-empties out there), but we did sacrifice one artform for another. I guess the main issue is, is that new artform worth sacrificing the older one in every case?
Sierra sacrificed the beauty of the imagination's power to replace blocky 320x200 pixels with a full real-life resolution piece of imagery. Our mind's fill in the blanks when there isn't enough actual detail. Anyway, they sacrificed it for the innovation of having higher resolution graphics with more detail. Even less of our imagination doing the work. The decision to move to Disney-style cel-shaded animation changed the whole atmosphere. The fact that the animation wasn't done well adds as an unnecessary detriment to the "degradation factor" as I'll call it. If the animation was done better it could very well have been a better game....oh yeah, and if they had time to actually finish the game properly.
Speaking of which. did the earlier KQ games have the problem of shipping before running out of time? I tend to think not near as much, if any. Each game felt complete and perfect (if a little feature-deprived....and by that I mean unintentional dead ends were left in the game) and didn't give any sense that whole sections, sequences, or story blocks were completely cut from the game altogether. And that would probably be due to all the extra "innovation" they added to that wasn't there before. Then again, I don't think KQ5 suffered from this when innovating up from KQ4. Maybe there's a critical mass where it all starts to break down eventually? Is that what we're living in/settling with now I wonder. Or maybe it's like you say where they stopped innovating to further the vision and just started innovating for the sake of it. Personally, I think that if you've lost the drive, passion, and vision to do something REALLY well where you KNOW that it's good and don't have to hope that it's good, then you should stop doing it.
Just some random wonderings...good topic, this.