![iron-titan:
[ SEDUCTIVELY EATS YOUR FRIEND ]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/e02da4064d0dd193d655091d7f1a103c/tumblr_mogn0zZ2Kg1qhdl5bo1_500.png)
armin’s character arc culminates in a final battle with his own evil twin
legout
You’re a goddamn rhinoceros. What made you think this was a good idea?
Here’s a dangerously calcified game-industry assumption: For a single-player narrative game to be purchased by all 6 million members of its console’s target audience — to become a “must-have” title — it needs to hit a Metacritic rating no lower than the low 90s. To achieve a Metacritic rating in the low 90s, you must make a game that impresses critics, who by their nature crave novelty, which is the very thing that scares away gamers who buy only three to six games a year, and who are, by far, the largest constituency in the game-buying audience. To impress these critics, you often have to invest in the hardest, most difficult-to-engineer elements of game design and work your employees half to death. All of which means that game companies are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to impress people whose taste is unrepresentative of the wider game-playing audience and whose power to create an impression of “must-have” titles is still largely unproven. If you’re wondering how any of this is sustainable either economically or creatively in the long run, so am I. So is everyone.
— Tom Bissell, True-Ish Grit: On Naughty Dog’s latest game, The Last of Us (via doritowizard)
(via doritowizard)
