Why Triple-A Struggles With Nostalgia | Cold Take
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- čas přidán 22. 10. 2023
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"A toast to nostalgia--it ain't what it used to be." What a line.
And the voice and accent only make it better. Gave me some solid "the narrator from Bastion" vibes.
Cold Take has become one of my favorite CZcams series from any channel, really glad Frost is full time now
Glad you're enjoying!
Yup, I think the escapist is really dialling it in on the content.
I used to watch ZP back when he started and kinda fell out of watching a bit after he got a dedicated theme tune. But I'm back now and yes! Frost's noir vibe is unlike anything else I've seen out there and I'm here for it.
Real
Yes
It's true that nostalgia does come with a bit of "I remember how this experience changed my life," but I think there's a larger portion of "I miss the older standards for games." Yahtzee has made this point a few times before, but a lot of the AAA gaming space is pushing for more graphical detail to the detriment of everything else, meanwhile a large group of gamers will gladly take PS1- or PS2-era visuals if the game suits their tastes. Big development studios will spend millions of dollars to make sure that trees are rendered in full detail down to every single leaf, and they sway realistically in the wind, but in exchange we lose the smaller flourishes like idle animations and more specific, unique details. We no longer see devs hiding cheeky messages or pocket dimensions full of content that was cut due to release scheduling in places they're sure 99% of players won't find. I could go on, but my point is that nostalgic players want to see is the *soul* of games coming back and shining bright again. They see where current AAA development practices lead, and it's right back into the soulless money vacuum that most are trying to escape or ignore.
I've been saying for a very long time that what pushes a game from 'excellent' to 'all time classic' is the little touches, the little details. Sonic the Hedgehog's foot tapping and cliff edge and skidding to a sudden stop animations. Mario 64's schools of fish swimming past you as you explore the castle aquarium. Deus Ex and Undertale's obsessive need to put in some kind of acknowledgement for any ultra-minor thing the player might try, even if it doesn't actually change the game in any way other than "I see what you did there". Perfect Dark's SECRET LEVEL CHEESE. Duke 3D's many secret messages from Levelord posted on the walls for people exploring map boundaries with cheats. Soulless money vacuums with endless branded costumes in an in-game store will never allow developers to put little touches into games like that.
I loved one line he had in a Thief video: "You can't do those sprawling open-ended levels with modern cutting-edge graphics that are apparently so fucking important". When you don't need to clean up every single pixel, there's a lot more variety and content you can put in.
They put all this money into 4k visuals, mocap, and famous actors… all to sell as well or less than a Nintendo game that had none of those things and the financial burden that comes with them. You could argue some are pushing for 4k, but no one cares about actors or mocap/scanning faces. No one’s actually buying the games because of that and whatever buzz it generates is so small that it’s not worth the cost.
Stardew Valley is super popular and that looks like could have dropped on PlayStation 1
Cyberpunk is a perfect example of this.
All the glitz, big names, hard work, for garbage.
Escapist: "Come for Yahtzee, stay for Frost" in all seriousness, I love Cold Take. As someone who works in the development side, it's a wonderful experience to see someone with their finger in the pulse of this industry.
Honesty I find Frost way more compelling because I think Frost is just a much more sincere look at games and the culture. Yahtzee is just too lazerfocused on "making the jokes" that a lot of what he says feels insincere.
@@TheSkaOreo It works because of how well they contrast each other. Like having a smooth jazz set after a standup comedy routine. They are the peanut butter to each other's jelly.
everyone saying Yahtzee has the ASMR voice has not heard Nick's
I like having someone I can tune into who says what I'm thinking better than I can say it.
@@PandaKnightsFightingDragons who the hell watched ZP and said that's ASMR
You know what I'm nostalgic for? The days when I'd buy a game and it stayed bought!
You don't want to play games like the ones you're nostalgic for; you want to feel that rush or discovering something new again. And AAA is too risk averse to make those innovations work (at least usually).
Indie, however, delivers in spades.
This is the first time I've heard anyone mention Amsterdam 1666 in YEARS, always wondered what happened to it.
Would've been interesting to see a videogame take on my country's history
The amount of vapourware Ubisoft's collecting is a little grim. Beyond Good and Evil 2 and Wild are just dust now.
Frothing at the mouth to play that game if it ever releases. It looks like a Six of Crows videogame
I love the noir narration style. Hits me right in the old 'nostalgia for movies that were released before my parents were born".
You kind of just rolled over the biggest knock on nostalgia in my mind - Some of my fondest memories are playing games as a late teen in the late 90s. I had freedom like I'd never had before and never will have again. The games were innovative, but it was the innovation plus the SITUATION that makes them so endearing to me. I can't go back and play them now. They just don't feel the same. They're like an ex-lover who is exactly how you remember her, but you've grown past her.
Nostalgia is painful because the past is gone forever. You can't recapture it. Any attempt to relive those days will always end in disappointment.
Unfortunately a lot of companies are attempting to sell people on the "good ole days," and a lot of people are willing to buy into it. Especially as life becomes even more chaotic as we reach adulthood. What people crave is simplicity; what people crave is ignorance. But you can't "go back home." You will never be 12 again--nor should you want to be.
On the other hand, I'm now discovering a ton of music, movies and games from that era that kind of passed me by back in the day, and I'm having a blast!
It's certainly different; I couldn't play for hours on end each and every day, like I did back then. I'm not as obsessed about games anymore. But I can still have a good time replaying the old classics from back in the day, or discovering gems I never got around to playing back then.
Reminder Team Reptile captured nostalgia the best way his year with Bomb Rush Cyberfunk. With a team less than 15 people too
"I want a new experience, just like the old ones"
Translation: Sell me the whole-game at the start with a full single-player campaign. If it's multiplayer, make the cosmetics and extra-content unlockable through gameplay, not through fuckin' paywalls, you greedy bastards.
Too much of that mentality that you should not let any money on the table. Like it's not enough to survive, or even better to get more than enough to thrive too and be grateful. No no, you have to take it all, as much as you can, like that's your ultimate duty, pretty much switching the focus from what it counts to the trivial aspects, a type of form without function type of deal.
I mean, take Rockstar and the GTA5 as example. Making more then their expense in the first three days of sales and then the next weeks going way way over that expense fund making it a very successful product was not enough for them. Why make DLC's as it was planned or why make other games? Just sit on GTA5 Online because people are dumb and it makes billions. We seem to not have self control specially when it comes to the upper level of things that seems no matter how much something makes, how much your wealth has become it's still not enough... Who cares about guild, work ethics, the environment, other people in general? Fuck all that noise, i must make more, i deserve it, it's my divine right to have it all!
I think it's a stupid understanding of capitalism that sooner or later needs to be addressed and taken care of.
Is it really greed if sales alone can no longer pay for development costs? There is something to be said about budgets continuing to skyrocket, and users willingness to continue paying for cosmetics.
@@somnorila9913That mentality does have a very valid reason though. If your next project flops massively, it is better to have a constant form of income or savings to keep you alive until you try again. Triple-A is risk adverse because failure is extremely costly to them.
@@AfutureV Not really because the extra doesn't really go in more projects, as in put your eggs in more than one basket. They still focus on one game or very small number of IP's.
Also that the funding is not quite spent properly. Sales alone do pay enough for the developing costs. As oppose dot movies for instance, the easy to find info about budgets for games do include the whole cost and the earnings.
So good games do sell more than enough to make a hefty profit not just cover costs, which by the way should be a sensible target. Getting your money back while you had work for all those years and covered all expenses seems a win in my book.
But that's not the point as from what i easily found "Grand Theft Auto 5 was originally released in 2013 for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, and within three days, had made over a billion dollars in sales, the fastest ever by any entertainment release in history." It had a budget of 265mil $. Pretty sure sales were good enough and halting everything to sit for a decade on the online thing wasn't really something that was required for them to not die in case of a flop. It was just money on the table and they wanted all.
Talking about big budgets and bad expense. How about not spreading the funding almost 50-50 between marketing and actual development?
Why not put a lot more from marketing in development for the game to make it as good as possible or even take that money and start another project? I don't know, keep your big main project as rigid as always but instead of spending on marketing so much take most of that money and put it in one or a few other smaller but creative, more daring and experimental projects, that could compete with indie games, be pretty much big studio reach on that level, or a return to roots type of thing.
It's not like they need marketing anymore, they are big names and people know of them, just make a statement and invite a few youtubers for a demo or whatever and it's done.
Launch a good, functioning finished game and success, not really rocket science.
Take a big game like Cyberpunk 2077, from wiki "According to a report from Kotaku, the base game cost $174 million to develop and $142 million to market."
And many others are following same recipe.
This surely doesn't support the idea that budgets skyrocketing is something that can't be managed if they would really want to.
But instead of tweaking the right parts, they would rather fire a bunch of people...
All while CEO's get their bonuses for "good" end of the year numbers. Yeah, like that has any endurance. That's why i said that capitalism is not understanded properly by people and needs some tweaking too.
@@AfutureV Elden Ring had a budget of 200 million. It has over 20 million sales thats 1.2 billion dollars. So no you can cover development costs with just sales
Kickstarter has also taught us that what we want in nostalgia is not what the games actually WERE, but what we REMEMBER THEM AS. When Yooka Laylee came out it parroted Banjo Kazooie to a Tee. By including all the design warts that our selective memories scrubbed out, and that no longer have hardware limitations to justify them.
On the other hand, the Lucas Arts adventure game remakes are a great example of it working in the other direction: the HD remakes look and feel exactly as I remember them from back in the day. I've long since forgotten how low-res pixelated they used to look back in the 90's.
The problem with endless samey-ness is that eventually you get to a game that "oh, it's like X game but not as good...so why am I not just playing X game instead?"
There's a tightrope games walk where they need to be familiar enough that I can pick up and play a new one with a solid understanding of how the genre it's in works and what to expect, and yet new enough and creative enough that it has a reason to exist.
Now I'm an indie guy-Johnny Triple-A and I had a mostly-amicable breakup in 2015, around the time that Banished and Papers, Please irrevocably changed my expectations-but having bought Let's School over the weekend and finding it to be a lot like Prison Architect and even Tropico but yet nothing like either of those games in terms of the character and vibe, I thought to myself "this is exactly what I want from a new game."
Contrast Coral Island, a game that "it's like Stardew Valley but not as good, so why am I not just playing Stardew Valley instead?" I can play Let's School, Prison Architect, and Tropico 4 and even though mechanically they play all the same notes, they do it in three different keys and at different time signatures and make distinct and interesting music.
Same, I suppose, is true for these remakes and reboots. Unless the original game just aged like milk mechanically or won't run right on my shiny new 2023-issue gaming PC compared to the one I had in 2011 or 2004 or back in high school in the early 90s, better to go back and play the classic. I can appreciate something like Total War: Rome Remastered, and I would have my wallet out in a flash if Microsoft and Obsidian remastered Fallout: New Vegas. But it's purely technical. It plays on nostalgia, but only insofar as the periodic desire to go back and play the original does.
tl;dr Maybe "the same but different" ain't as bad as it sounds.
This man has the magical ability of making 8 minutes feel like 2. Keep on keepin' on, boss.
+AAA games don't have an issue or struggle with nostalgia. They just lack care, patience, and passion for their work and the games that laid the foundation of their success which is today.
I mean that sounds pretty much like AAA games struggling with nostalgia. The point is is that games are increasingly looking back to sell to an audience that increasingly sees their own childhood as the "good ole days." But no one takes into account that both games and the audience have changed tremendously. Even the remakes that we're consitantly getting aren't even made by the same people so its impossible to recreate those times.
@@TheSkaOreoThe issue is that people don't want "nostalgia" mostly, we just want good games. We're only nostalgic for older games because modern gaming is so terrible.
Sure, there's some aspect of nostalgia that anyone would be wise to tap into. But if modern games from AAA studios were just as good and creative as AAA games from 10 or 20 years ago, most people would be willing to move on to good stuff now while keeping what was in the past behind them.
Indie studios nail nostalgia all the time tho.@@TheSkaOreo
@@echomjp I don't think that's true at all. If it were, we wouldn't see the amount of Remakes and Remasters that we keep getting. And companies keep doing it "because" people keep buying it and getting hyped for it.
Also: I don't really believe in any golden eras. As in, I think a lot of the problems that plague AAA games now, were doing something similar to the industry 10 or 20 years ago. It's just nostalgia removes all of the cracks.
@@TheSkaOreoI'm not arguing that nostalgia lacks power by any means. I simply am arguing that it cannot account even remotely for the problems in modern gaming.
Though as far as not believing in "golden eras" goes, I suppose we'll have to agree to disagree on that one. Games had issues in the past, but it was vastly different playing a fully-featured multiplayer game online 15 years ago versus playing one now that nickles and dimes you into oblivion with microtransactions and greed. There are great games out there now, but for every Elden Ring or Baldur's Gate 3 there are multiple mediocre games like Starfield that are inferior to games from 15-20 years ago like Skyrim or Oblivion by miles (despite looking better). Games with deeper mechanics, better writing, and so on.
Nostalgia does remove some cracks, but I have gone back and played games that came out in the early to late 2000s and still am able to enjoy them. I even have gone back to games that don't play with proper widescreen support - like Nintendo 64 games - and still can enjoy them because they manage to execute a core experience very well. Modern games have every advantage, but few developers take advantage of them, and greed is rampant.
The irony of this take and it's timing couldn't be more dramatic.
GG, man.
The irony of this video after what just happened is nearly lethal
Frost calm and soothing voice is the perfect complement to Yahtzee's meth infused style.
love both their work!
“A toast to nostalgia, it ain’t what it use to be” is my new favorite quote and I’m convinced this man is our version of a philosopher/poet.
Holy hell, that closing line, hahaha. It's a shame how nostalgia gets weaponized and the word gets robbed of its meaning. Here's to another awesome Cold Take. Cheers.
Shit's actual poetry. That's something that elevates this series over being just another industry analysis - the writing isn't just great but legitimately poetic sometimes. Makes it that much more interesting to listen to.
@@TheRedKing247 agreed, gotta appreciate a good wordsmith.
That's why I end up replaying my actual favorite games without chasing nostalgia too much. I love BioShock Infinite, so I replay it on various difficulties. I don't go looking at games like Atmoic Heart or anything else that might have a passing resemblance to it. Nostalgia is a fickle thing even for players. There are a ton of factors that make nostalgia what it is. No, I don't especially want to actually be a little kid again, but I miss the feeling of staying up late reading a book. The feeling of sneaking onto the family computer when I should have been in bed hours ago. I don't have to sneak around and can set my own bed time now. I can still stay up late reading a new book, but it feels different being an adult. Sometimes it all hits just right to create that same feeling, but it's a rare thing. The same applies to games. I've never played an Armored Core game before I played AC6. Yet somehow I was hit with nostalgia I shouldn't have even had when I started playing. It immediately became something very special for me. Of course it's not the same for me as for those who grew up playing those games. I'm not at all trying to take away from that. It still managed to feel special to me and I think that says something about FromSoftware's talent. Creating a feeling of nostalgia even in those who haven't played a game in that series before.
AAA would be able to generate more nostalgia if only they didn't have yearly or almost yearly releases. How can I be hype about going back to an old location of Assassin's Creed when my interest in the series has been diluted over more than 10 years? At least with something like God of War it was an actual nostalgic comeback of a character we hadn't seen in a while
What I enjoy about Mario Wonder is that its breaking away from a lot of nostalgia retreading found in the NSMB games. Hell, even Odyssey is guilty of this too at times even with all the fresh ideas it has. It's refreshing to play in another kingdom with a fresh coat of paint and creativity found in every corner.
unless you have already played the hack "newer super mario bros". a programmer of the hack, skawo, is currently playing wonder and noticing a lot of, 'newer moments'.
This was the best cold take yet Frost
I just don't get the sense of intimacy from the modern AAA fair that my childhood games used to give me, the sense that I'm playing something that was made with love as the driving motivator, rather than money. I know that isn't a fair comparison, but it's how I feel.
Love the video, think it also would make a good topic for a Breakout or Slightly Something Else: who will be the next Death Stranding/Apex Legends developer (i.e. developer successful in a big studio now striking out after the studio kicked them and is wasting their old IP)?
I mean if Activision had any sort of self-awareness when it comes to Call of Duty, they'd call the MW reboot series Postmodern Warfare.
For Nostalgia to work, I'd have to be an 8 year old, with all those 8 year old thoughts and feelings. It's 30 years later and there's so much more in me now. Or maybe more adult worries.
I'm always excited for a cold take video the whole vibe it sets is great really puts me in the mood
As Civvie-11 once said, in front of the original Shadow Warrior's footage:
"Just give me a crosshair and make the bullets go there that's all I want!"
Me, I'm just nostalgic for when we got complete games you only paid once (twice if expansion sometimes).
I'm both sorry for and jealous of young people who never knew this time but also can't miss it
Damn such good writing and narration. Those slams on Modern Warfare 2 was so damn smooth and solid. I love this!
Oh my god, look at you you little series just under my nose this entire time. I guess I'm going to have to binge every single episode
This particular show is my favourite on the escapist. Always pulls me in with a concept and then leaves me asking my friends questions and starting debate. Keep up the excellent work Frost.
You got the thumbs up just for that first line in the script. Well done, sir.
So true!
Nostalgia needs the developers and the gamers are on the same wavelength and thats not possible when the people making games say "you should feel this way" rather than "Hey remember when you felt this way"
Telling someone how they should feel is not the same as feeling the same way about something as your consumer
people nowadays just kinda forget that even though people making games now grew up on games, that doesn't mean they liked the same things you the consumer do, developers change all the time and other times they feel different now about what they used to make like the God of War devs
My dirty secret is that I plagiarise every cool one-liner from cold take and play it off as my own.
There is no magic bullet but I think breath of the wild is a really great case study in this. They knew what made Ocarina of Time iconic at its core. It wasn't the triforce or even any of the specific characters, arguably it wasn't even the lore and world they built. It was a million little things. They allowed you to go off course and fail, they didn't lock things behind invisible walls but through natural progression, every shop keeper and npc had some level of personality, and so much more. It was, up to that point, the best example of a classic hero's journey ever made into a game. BotW captured that exact same feel with what the new technology could muster and while copying very little.
BotW barely mentions the master sword, the big bad is there but isn't even a character anymore, the triforce is completely removed, and they completely changed your tool belt with a new one of all new things. They changed most the mechanics, combat, items, and core gameplay and yet playing BotW for the first time FELT exactly like playing OoT for the first time all those years ago. No soulless money grab design by committee game could ever pull that off.
If this had been left to AAA you know exactly what would happen.Well OBVIOUSLY it was the hook shot, the master sword, the princess and the triforce that made the old game work. So for the new game, give them two hook shots, give the princess more screen time, and give them the master sword at the start (or make it a microtransaction), and make the triforce a funny little talking sidekick.
I'm not disagreeing with you, but Zelda games are definitely AAA games. It's a rare example of a AAA studio understanding what was good about the works they're building nostalgia for, and using that as a foundation to build something new that also innovates and takes the genre into new directions.
Regarding the story with Zampella and West. There is actually a bit more to it. InfinityWard was almost completely out of money and letting go of staff after CoD4 was done. A lot of staff also left on their own accord. So you could say that Activision saved InfinityWard but the studio itself exists only exists in name. The team behind the earlier pre-activision buy out CoD games are pretty much all gone at this stage. Just like all the other studios that Activision bought i.e ravensoft and turned them into zombies.
I think this perfectly tackled the topic of nostalgia in the games industry (and also in other industries in some aspects). Plenty of people have voiced a mix of opinions on the usage of nostalgia but I think Frost condensed everything into clear points:
(1) nostalgia-based products inherently shouldn't work because it's impossible to recreate the context and cause/effect relationships of the past (but sometimes creators can still pull it off);
(2) people move and change and generally the new product will not have the same team (or if it does, life events have happened and people are usually different than before); and
(3) the obvious one, AAA/big companies all try to distill nostalgia into copy/pasting and min/maxing effort and profit (and he makes it explicit with many examples).
I might be missing something or misinterpreting one of the points, but that's generally my takeaway.
It's funny how we use "familiarity" and "tradition" in the same bucket of words as "nostalgia." The original meaning of the word was meant to describe a DISEASE. Finns on the front lines would be so homesick for their peaceful, bucolic life that the depression would make them essentially unable to fight. They called the condition "Nostalgia." I still think of Nostalgia as the negative part of people who enjoy the familiarity of things they like and prefer when games follow traditional genre structures instead of modern conventions as well. The downside of retrodding familiar video game folktales and mythologies instead of new fresh heroes and stories to tell. IMHO, Breath of the Wild isn't a "nostalgia" game. A "Nostalgia" game is what would objectively be considered a "bad" game by all other metrics, but is loved and enjoyed because it's a key part of a specific lore's interactive canon and adheres to that story's canonical thematic presentation. BotW is a new, revolutionary way of interacting that lore's story and broader genre conventions, so it can't be "nostalgic" by the original use of the word nostalgia. I GET that words evolve and we use it as a colloquialism in the US to mean "enjoying a thing because it references elements and genre conventions of a body of lore the individual enjoyed historically" but, to the point of all of this, this video is kind of exactly outlining that we use Nostalgia wrong. "Nostalgia" IS the CODMW3 release, NOT the Apex Legends content. Nostalgia ARE the naive corporate retreading of games banking on your familiarity with their IP and not doing anything to push the body of lore or genre conventions forward. This video is just interesting to me because it IS about the evolution and meaning of nostalgia, and is arguing for it being a word used positively and not negatively, instead of the inherently sinister and cynical use of the word as it was conceived.
"Nostalgia's a refreshing concoction of brightest maroon, the color of childhood passion."
4:10 Closest thing I’ve seen to that is Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey p, where a former AC dev used AC’s parkour as the blueprint for Ancestors tree climbing. Probably not quite what AC fans would have in mind though.
I used to love riding around on my BMX with my buddies when I was 12.
I'm 40 now and I took my 12 year old son's BMX out for a spin the other day.
It just wasn't the same.
Why are modern bikes not as fun as they used to be?
more cold take? yes, please. Frost has actually interesting takes that become like a fine wine once youre over the completely jaded phase 🥃
Triple A higher ups just assume anything that's 5-10 years old automatically becomes a nostalgic hallmark when that isn't the case.
Wonderful, exquisite work as always. Can I be nostalgic for these awesome videos 20 years from now already?
Nostalgia is NOT remastering TLOU part 2, Johnny Triple-A!
I clicked on the video such that it started with, "Ain't what it used to be," and it had the effect of being the clearest, most concise indictment of a thing that I've heard... in a very long time.
This cold takes are sooo good, with that nostalgic noir of old movies (ironically in this video).
Please never stop making these.
Personally I feel Capcom has been really good at remakes the RE2 and RE4 remakes were amazing and really did hit that I want something old but to feel different vibe
God, I have grown to love this format. Cold Takes is so refreshing after having been watching ZP for the last six or so years.
Deepley held beliefs, burrowing thoughts and mental road blocks to be untangled. Dayum Ruiz, you found your niche in this ouroboros of an industry. And I'm here for every video! Cheers!
The noire shtick is genius, been hooked on CT for months, now. Congrats on full-time, Mr. Ruiz!
I just wish I could erase all memory of playing through to get that experience again. but I think that wouldn't quite be the same either lol
"That's what the label says anyways." Great final note, sums up what AAA advertising tries to sell you on.
Always love a Cold Take on a Monday. Puts me in a better mood.
You deserve to be the voice of reason for games. Our Roger Ebert, our JJ Reddick.
These videos are always top tier, but this one is a diamond among gems
Nintendo does nostalgia properly.
Almost to a fault at times.
I considered debating this, but I recently purchased Baten Kaitos 1 and 2 remastered and have loved it, especially because of the QoL improvements that make playing the game much faster (albeit more difficult).
It’s the sabotage of the past that really makes me just frustrated by it all.
You have hundreds of games left behind on defunct consoles, basically unobtainable to the average consumer even if they want to pay at reasonable prices and these publishers refuse to make their games better available or have backwards compatibility and instead will only bring back games and t start waving the nostalgia flag if they have a sure fire means to monetize it wether it’s keeping it behind subscriptions or making the remakes to begin with. Holding IPs hostage and making no money off it somehow is a better decision to them than letting others have at them. It’s spite behaviour from an otherwise amoral system.
It's an interesting observation: the nostalgia for these old games likely lies as much in their place-in-time as what they actually were though I guess that's the pitch. Play this remade version and you'll *relive* your college dorm nights playing Halo on four connected Xboxes and TVs! Except now you all are grown up, so you'll all need to buy your own copies, have sixteen consoles, all subscribe to the online service, play on official servers, and it will be nearly impossible to get everyone around for a game under the best of circumstances, let alone these.
Just like the good ol' days.
I loved this ep. I would love to see one about studios like Supergiant games. So much of AAA is recycled nostalgia fuel, but there *are* highly successful studios out there making games that sell because the way they operate makes for good games, and you have the time and resources to really do the topic justice
I am routinely not nostalgic for the shooters I played. I'm nostalgic for thr guys I played it WITH
REAL AS SHIT
''It's a little more awkward to ask for Mom's credit card at 28 compared to 17..."
You nailed it again
Frost talks like he was born holding a cold glass of whiskey and a cigar while wearing a nice deep blue tux in a smokey jazz lounge on a rainy night in the city.
Glad I wasn't the only one who found MW3's trailer callback to MW2's trailer more intrusive than nostalgic. Strange that they want us to remember the MARKETING behind MW2 instead of our memories of the actual GAME.
Escapist: this series is the only one on all of CZcams I eagerly await, and watch//listen to as soon as I see it
If you like this, check The Stuff of Legends too! Sebastian also writes and narrates it.
@@theescapist I do. This guy's a keeper.
Cold take and thing of legends are tied for my 2nd favorite bits of content you produce
What a thing to watch after the escapist video team breaks off of escapist to form their new venture.
Frost could have an hour long video of reading the dictionary and I'd still watch it, his voice is great.
Great cold take. You are doing great, Frost. And kudos to Escapist for bringing Frost on
A noir gumshoe whose femme fatale is gaming. This is one of the most satisfying series on this hellsite.
I have a counterpoint, Mr. Frost: Nostalgia is the corruption of memory. Instead of taking in the good AND the bad of what we loved in our younger days, we miss out the lessons we could have learned from the mistakes of what we loved. After all, nothing is perfect, and criticism often comes from a place of affection, making it a necessary impact point for us to improve on what we already know so it can be better the next time. I recall a story about a pottery class where the teacher told one half to make the best pot they could in one hour and told the other half to make as many as possible in one hour. Turns out trial and error makes a better case for latter group because they had the chance to learn from their mistakes while the former were never afforded such a chance. Too bad Johnny AAA's risk averse habits don't allow for that sort of thing.
That pottery class story is fantastic
@@purplegill10 It's helped me realize practice makes progress, not perfect. It also helped me a lot with my own writing, but that's neither here nor there.
Aaahhh I love that this is not part of my weekly Monday morning routine
"The accounting department convinced everyone our fondest memory was when we paid for the game". Fucking brilliant.
Always happy to drink to Cold Take.
So THAT'S why apex legends is so much fun for me... I was always weirded out by how good apex legends felt to play yet couldnt explain why a F2P game hit that note so well. I grew up with MW2 (2009) yet havent been able to find something to scratch the same itch since.
The Count of Monte Cristo reference was great
the last bit with Respawn is chefs kiss material.
When you take risks you get greatness.
When you dont you get Diablo 4 or Overwatch 2
Just here to drop some love for the recently-resuscitated Titanfall 2, don't mind me
Great video as usual!
a voice like a warm cup of cocoa. great video
Money, Money makes big bigness go back and use nostalgia while they just continue going forward with horrible modern gaming tactics...
To add another example to the list you created - Ben Brode and his squad left Hearthstone and made Marvel Snap.. which is now appears to be more popular than Hearthstone.
What a surprise… Letting creatives be creative and explore their new ideas is how good games are made.
in my eyes, a good example of upgraded nostalgia games is DOOM 2016 and the ongoing win streak of super mario games. My personal bucketlist of good remakes would be the first metal gear solid remade in Fox Engine, with the original music and voice acting, Or a pixel perfect remake of Super Metroid in the engine made for the Another Metroid 2 Remake game. the HD pixel art there is phenomenal. And finally, C&C Tiberian Sun + Red Alert 2 getting the same remaster treatment as the previous games a few years ago
It’s not gonna take me back when i was 12 astonished by the open world of oblivion 😢
"Nostalgia... ain't what it used to be."
Can't slip a Watchmen reference past me, Frost.
Another issue is the kind of people who run these companies. Since they're usually sociopaths, they have no empathy. That means they have no intuitive understanding of what the average person wants. Normally this isn't a problem, as sociopaths are very good at observing people, but as their wealth insulates them from the common man they observe less and less. All they have to fall back on is what's worked before, despite the fact that they aren't really capable of understanding why it worked.
Nostalgia is a powerful weapon. I have so many remasters of classic PS1, PS2, GameCube, GameBoy, and Gameboy Advanced games, that I could almost prove the effectiveness of weaponized nostalgia by myself.
It's almost like having business people in charge of artistic works is a bad idea or something.
IMO the Final Fantasy VII remakes are the sort of nostalgia I want: Give me the game, story, and characters I imagined I was playing 20 years ago, and make it a game that I would be excited to play today. Not just "it's the old game with HD graphics" and not "it's a reboot with all new story and characters and gameplay"
Is Nintendo the most consistent capitalizing on nostalgia?
Also while not the whole company, Sonic Team, despite it's multiples failings still has managed to stay open throughout all these years.
I suppose that could speak to how the examples shown are big bets that can either raise or sink a company with only one game. Instead of making several titles that are marketable and cheaper to make, a lot of these companies aim for the short term success.
And even developers as Rockstar and Naughty Dog or even Bethesda are struggling to come with the next big thing with huge gaps between these big releases. I assume even if one doesn't want to admit it, the race for more and more detailed games has made some studios stagnant on rereleases, remasters, or online multiplayer versions of the worlds they've already made.
Nintendo, for all its faults, is a company steeped in its own culture, staffed and run by people who understand how the company got where it is today. It resisted the siren call of "MOAR GRAFIX POWAR", and as much as I like to tease the company for "marching to the beat of its own xylophone", it's very hard to argue with success.
A lot of Nintendo franchises are barely nostalgic because they never really changed. Mario Odyssey didn’t make me feel nostalgic for Mario 64 because between Sunshine, Mario Galaxy 1 & 2, I’ve had a steady steam of 3D Mario platformer in the same style & with the same quality
The endless pursuit of realistic graphics has been the worst aspect of modern gaming to me. We reached a “good enough” point a decade ago.
@@AfutureVCurrently the best use of current-gen consoles… is to play last-gen games at a stable frame rate.
They’re not really capitalizing on nostalgia. Continuing a franchise isn’t that. You’d have to harken back to a specific previous game and specific moments in it, and have to use that in marketing as a selling feature. BotW having some easter eggs in terms of names and ruins wouldn’t be enough. Wolf Link is the closest and I’m not sure even that really counts since it was made for the TP remaster. Zelda is really the only series that (consistently) gets remakes/remasters. Pokémon does but that’s a different beast. It’s only recently they’re really starting to get into more remakes/remasters as the Switch winds down. At least they’re games people have been asking for a port/remake of for years/decade(s) so I wouldn’t count that as milking it.
"Nostalgia ain't what it used to be."
That sums it up nicely.
This was absolutely fantastic
The Escapist is starting to be the only channel i watch such good content
The cycle continues. The majority of Respawn's leads departed to form Gravity Well over a year ago with a dream of making games the 'old-fashioned' way with a limited team. EA seems to have that effect on people.
I would kill for some time to ruminate about old games with Frost over some beverages.
We did see studios like respawn pop up. It’s called Callisto protocol remember that game?
I do wish the cinematics in death stranding were more capturing like in metal gear, juat felt like skipping the boring parts more often then wanting to listen, great game though imo i beat it and still periodically get back on to help build the highway. Live the system in the game, unique gameplay, gotta say this to hideo, hes a talented dude and he knows what he wants in his game.
I think the Dead Dpace remake is the perfect example of nostalgia done well. It hits the same beats as the original but mixes some stuff up that just didn't work well originally as well as a new ending. It showed real love and respect for the original