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a stark change from chess to many grid based strategy games is how movement immediately gets homogenized. in chess every piece type has very different movement rules, but as soon as you remove the abstraction and put people in there like FE/FFT, suddenly it’s too weird for people to move that way

i bring this up because a part of my distaste for realism in games is how it has this homogenizing effect on the game’s design. as soon as your world starts to look real, you’re sort of making this promise that it will also behave more real. and so we drift away from grids and turn-based even

one of the reasons i really like pixel art is its abject refusal to go too far down that path. it always requires that you put your imagination forward, and leaves room for metaphors and mechanics that would feel entirely wrong in a less abstract environment

when you don’t give away all the details, it allows the imagination to fill in. the story here is “you adventure across a vast land with your allies, it takes days, maybe weeks” but in actual gameplay it takes like 1 minute but not when your game is realistic, and promises a realistic experience

i also use FF7 here because i think low poly can actually serve this same purpose as well. as designers were transitioning away from this more abstract style of design but i don’t think they realized what they were leaving behind

it’s had this really awkward effect where as we increase the fidelity, the metaphor breaks down and suddenly the world seems less vast and the adventures less epic. a faraway city is just like… over there and we’ll have like one conversation on the way, instead of weeks of hardship and journey.

I feel like Elden Ring had a good balance. You can get to pretty much every place you see, eventually, but the art direction often distorts these vistas for dramatic effect. (For example, making the Erdtree far larger from certain vantage points than mere perspective would allow.)