memes

Once upon a time they innovated and released games that set a new level for the industry.

For real: Prince of Persia, Beyond Good & Evil, Far Cry, Rayman, XIII, the Tom Clancy games, Assassin's Creed (before it became a yearly by the numbers franchise)... There was a time when they were putting out some "riskier" titles that never seemed to just follow trends.

Splinter Cell was absolutely mind-blowing when it first came out. I HAD TO have that game.

Particularly I loved watching the making-of videos because they put so much love into their craft! There was a cheesy "interview with Sam Fisher" (voiced by legendary Michael Ironside) where they described their decision to cast an older, more experienced character for believability rather than some young cool kid. Or using keyframed animation for everything because it allowed more artistic freedom than just mocapping it all.

Assassin's Creed's devs talked about how they designed the controls to feel intuitive, where they tried to map the face buttons implicitly to parts of the body.

People CARED about this stuff!!

I used to think Ubisoft was a mark of quality and one of my favorite games companies. But now...people would call me INSANE if I still held that opinion! How far they've fallen.

(I'm glad people seem to enjoy Rainbow Six Siege but I'm forever mad that it means we'll likely never see another real R6 title again, and that its Fortnite-esque nature has all but pushed out collective knowledge of the previous titles.)

FromSoft could’ve fallen down that rabbit hole as well, but they keep changing things up in their soulslike games.

And then on top of that they were like "Hey you guys still like Armored Core, right?" and continued blowing everyone's minds. :p Soulslikes might not always be my cup of tea but I've got a lot of respect for Fromsoft.