Formerly the editor of PC Gamer magazine (and the dearly departed GamesMaster), Robin combines years of experience in games journalism with a lifelong love of PC gaming.
You can never truly predict which games will be a hit and which won't, but there are certain tropes I've learned to be very wary of whenever they're touted in pre-release marketing. These are the concepts that will never stop sounding exciting and fun, but almost never deliver—usually because there's something about them that simply clashes with the realities of game development.
Dialogue options and moral choices will let you play as a dastardly bad guy! Particularly seen in RPGs, such as Dragon Age or Owlcat's Pathfinder games, this trope draws on our love for narrative freedom and agency, as well as the transgressive thrill of not having to be the goodie two shoes for once.The evil choices will mostly be cartoonishly malevolent and often pointlessly self-destructive.
You'll get to stomp your way around as a Godzilla-sized monster—or perhaps Godzilla himself! Whether it's just a short sequence in a larger adventure, or the whole game is dedicated to kaiju chaos, what could be a better power fantasy than getting to tower over everyone else and wield unimaginable strength? Even better if you get to smash a whole city to bits!Your enormous character will feel slow and clunky to control, and the game will struggle to find interesting things for you to do.
Particularly in recent titles, following that cutscene, you'll often just get dumped back into the world, where the status quo doesn't seem to have changed at all either way. And then when the sequel comes out, you'll find out your ending wasn't even the canon one. Making one satisfying ending is hard enough, let alone multiple, and that problem only gets exponentially harder when you try to include the player's choices beyond just"good" or"evil".
The game will feature an entire galaxy to explore! You'll be able to go to a thousand different planets, or a million, or 18 quintillion, and experience your own unique adventure. With a near-endless amount of content, you'll be able to keep enjoying fresh new stories in space forever, doing everything from hunting pirates to discovering new alien species to trading in valuable finds.
One of the problems here is that while you can use techniques like procedural generation to create almost as much content as you can imagine, it's always going to feel mass-produced. The system might spit out the occasional fun oddity, but investing a galaxy with noticeably crafted, interesting encounters still requires human creativity and time, and there's always a limit to how much of that a developer team has.
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