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And I can’t think of a single Ubisoft game that didn’t ship without a mostly stock Ubisoft socially-connected photo mode. Control got a much demanded (from me too) photo mode in a later patch. Red Dead Redemption 2 gave us a hokey, frustrating, and largely feature-less bit of non-verisimilitude cloaked in a grubby, era-appropriate model of the original Eastman Kodak box (shout out to the artists on that). Shadow of the Tomb Raider found Lara Croft playing at National Geographic-style photojournalism even in the middle of a kinder, gentler colonialist pillaging. Three years, and a number of major releases later, we’ve yet to see anything like the pre-patched FFXV.īut we have gotten photo modes. It was a safe decision, and creative safety is boring. t eroded what was precious about the originality and ingenuity of Prompto’s photographic AI. Pushing back against the new and different, the constrained but expressive, the random and the wild. Not a personal one, mind you, but one of intent and design. To trying to find joy in just a game where players can take photographs largely on their own terms.īut if I’m honest, I’ll never get over a sense of betrayal. Resignation that this is what people want, and that’s fine I guess. Astonishment and disgust at how a game that made such a revolutionary decision at launch could subsequently undercut that immensity by returning direct control to players. It’s a decision I’ve gone through so many different emotions over. Giving players the ability to take their own road trip photos.
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But then something happened, a decision that would really mark the last three years of this generation where game photography reached the console audience in a huge way.įinal Fantasy XV added a photo mode. But I know that AI-driven blonde shutterbug had enthralled both me and Kotaku’s Gita Jackson into writing multiple articles about him. I don’t know just how well FFXV sold, or what the final consensus was on the game. Blur, shake, blown highlights and blocked-up shadows are hallmarks of many of Prompto’s photographs. Shot from the hip with the shutter released just a second too early or too late. They are poorly composed or lacking in focus. Sitting around a hotel room with the lads while Prompto paged through the day’s shots, his friends offering feedback and the occasional joke. It was Final Fantasy XV that finally brought with it feelings of inspiration, that cut through functional but conventional captures. Even as I was bored, I couldn’t help but shoot.
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If I didn’t immediately love the games of this generation, God I sure did love the Share button. Somewhere north of 85 gigabytes (nearly half the space taken up by my conventional photographs) are sitting on an external hard drive, and those are the ones after the culling. I don’t remember the first photograph I took in this generation. Cohesion has been placed into a state of primacy, friction is a mistake to be routed, and because of this, game photography suffers at a time when it is more prevalent and popular than ever. We have created worlds that refuse the illegible, the secret, the lost. We can’t have a player miss the expensive set piece that AAA demands, that moves units, gets high metacritic awards, and looks phenomenal on Twitter marked #PS4Share with a URL to buy the game. We have best practices, rubrics for successful map design, techniques and technologies to guide players - and we need to guide them - down explicit pathways. We’ve gotten too good at designing video game worlds. It’s what I’m starving for when I consider the game worlds where I try, and so often fail, to get similarly lost. Only my memory and the occasional snapshot of some gargoyle, laundry forgotten in the unexpected snowfall, or a precariously perched Laško can to Hänsel-und-Gretel my way back to the hostel where my partner rested.Ī day of finding those incongruous spaces is what feeds me creatively. No compass, no watch, no smartphone, no map. In these tall, narrow passages there were no colossal landmarks for even a general orientation. Wandering over damp cobblestone in alleyway after alleyway, meandering through a city I didn’t know until all bearings had been lost. 20 Live Christmas Radio Stations – Mobile View.