My friend Mirai has been doing her first play through of Demon's Souls and, bless my heart, she's been playing on the PS3. Mirai and I talk a lot about art stuff, so I couldn't help but to throw random screenshots from the Remake at her so we could have a giggle. Surely this wouldn't devolve into hours of screenshot comparing, and grumbling, and... well(It always ends up as an article, I swear to fucking god Mirai).

... I thought I was over this, but here I am, accidentally scratching open old wounds.

To be clear up front, I hate the art direction of Demon's Souls Remake. I mean hate hate it. If you like it, that's cool, no shade, we all have our own priorities. We care about different things, and tolerate different things differently and it's fine IT'S FINE YOU'RE FINE~

I think it's deeply important for a remake to have it's own identity. I think it's impossible to make a perfect remake without having your own opinion. Even if you slavishly upscaled everything exactly to match the original designs, changing the fidelity of the content changes the context. You get the repeating grass field in the ps3 Shadow of the Colossus(Don't ask Neolucky, the BEP cutscene artist about Bluepoint's SoTC remake, she might be a bigger hater than me) remaster. Stuff just doesn't work the same way when you scale it up(so stop upscaling and smoothing out vagrant story you fucking animals oh my fucking god).

You gotta make decisions and they made decisions, as they should have! But I swear to god, somehow, as far as my tastes are concerned, and despite all odds...

Every single one of them was bad.

Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth released a demo and... there are yellow painted cliffs, reigniting a conversation that keeps coming up every few months. Now, I have no exact opinion on it's use in FF7R. It seems to be explained in universe (it's a temporary route, purposefully marked), and marking paths is hardly a sin. Hinting at the so called Golden Path is a fundamental aspect of level design. This isn't about FF7R.

... But oh god did it unfortunately choose that yellow paint that has come to symbolize a type of hand holding that has been wearing on players over the last decade. It has started to feel similar to the ancient Old Man Murray "Start to Crate" system, judging a game on "How long it took to see a crate", representing the point where "the developers ran out of ideas".

This standard wasn't exactly fair and neither is judging a game on using yellow paint. FF7R is probably fine, because again, this isn't about FF7R. It is, of course, not even about the yellow paint. It's about what the yellow paint represents.

Since everyone is doing their ... anti?? game design takes, let me do mine.

We'll start with the coldest take. Good Game Design accomplishes a Goal. I think that's... pretty universally uncontroversial? Like even if someone somehow disagreed, I don't think they'd say I was going out on much of a limb. But despite this, there is trouble!! Because not all goals are good goals and I feel like the majority of budding devs who go down the design rabbit hole start designing with two of the worst...

This seems to be the type of cranky ass old person take that cohost loves so lets go.

There are a lot of shitty things about gaming. Exploitative and predatory micro transactions, terrible DRM schemes, addictive but shallow gameplay loops to feed point 1... But most problems we have in gaming are inevitable. Not that they can't be fixed, or overcome, but no one person or company could stop these things from initially happening. Ideas born from market forces.

... But Achievements, for something so unfortunately ubiquitous now... are kinda a weird idea? That we needed a... platform specific list of arbitrary accomplishments with their own, universal sound and popup message? It's easy to imagine a world where that didn't happen and arguably, it happened the only time it could happen.

When the 360 came out, we didn't have any idea what online services should look like. What did it mean to have a profile and friends on your console? Microsoft had an idea for "Gamer Score" (which, while it is a still existing niche is... something only weirdos talk about now) and needed a way to give that relevant, but neither of these things were inevitable. Nintendo still doesn't have them (Notably actually saying 'Achievements don't actually solve any kind of problem games have') and Sony seemed to only do it since it was a point used against them in the console wars. If Microsoft never added them, as they blindly stumbled around trying to figure out early online systems, it's easy to assume that they never end up happening. Despite this. Achievements are very much in the popular consciousness. And they suck.

So Lies of P had patch that adjusted difficulty and I haven't played it, but I have played though AC6 who had the same thing happen and the discourse seems to be... about the same and it really just got to me how poor the nuance around difficulty discussion can be. Maybe it's more accurate when talking about Lies of P, maybe it's the same crud, but whatever.

Now, I'm very much on record saying the AC6 patch stuff is massively overblown. Only one thing really seems like a significant nerf and...