what makes a video game have the ''soul'' you guys are always talking about? and what makes it ''soulless''?
what makes a video game have the ''soul'' you guys are always talking about?
what makes a video game have the ''soul'' you guys are always talking about? and what makes it ''soulless''?
For me, soul is the complete passion and creativity of the creators poured into the project with no twisting and little to no interference, just a total passion project that's full of love and care to get the ideas and visions of the creators out into the world. The reason I feel soul is so few and far between nowadays is because there's so much influence from shit like lunatics demanding things like forced inclusion / diversity and censoring and shit like BlackRock and ESG scores blinding the creators with greed so that they'd rather cater to people on the outside of the project instead of the project itself.
I feel like even that is very vague tbh
Cause you can have an otherwise perfect game but that is otherwise very into ESG and stuff
Then you look at the dev and the director is literally trans,
I'd say this is a pretty good way of defining this.
I also think soul or lack of it doesn't make or break the game by itself. Like
noted - it's possible for a soulful game to still be bad, or a soulless game be good.
>Soul
Atmosphere, aesthetic, and passion/effort put into said medium
>Soulless
Bland, made for profit only, stripped all of the mentioned above
Kimahri is kitty cat. Meow Meow
Soul is old.
Soulless is new.
It's easy :
>Made by w*men, even partially
Soulless
>Made by males
Soul
>soul
shit that brings back memories from my childhood when i was still happy and knew how to have fun
>soulless
anything released now while i'm bitter and jaded.
Soul is being able to feel the humanity inside of a work of art. The reason the definition feels so nebulous is because humanity can be expressed in many different ways. In video games, soul is typically derived from two major sources:
1. A well executed personal vision. Most of the time, making a video game is a team sport, so it doesn’t necessarily need to be “one” creative voice, but the whole of the work is cohesive and their own (ie. Not a cookie cutter template game.)
2. Imperfections in older or amateurish work. These imperfections also allow games to stand apart from safe, corporate slop. This is why you’ll see something kind of ugly or jank get called soul as well, because it’s the kind of thing that gets smoothed over in a board room.
Soulless would be most of AAA gaming, stuff like Ubisoft clones, treadmills for in game purchases, stuff like that.
easy.
>soul
to be human. to know pain. flaws, frustrations, imperfections. 'soulful' stuff can be pretty bad without being an abomination, because you can tell there's genuine spirit behind it
>soulless
some lobotomite going through a checklist to make sure that the art style in (PRODUCT) will capture (MARKET)
Is there such a thing as a good game without soul?
Is there such a thing as a bad game with soul?
zoomer checking in
>good game without soul
NSMB DS, the gameplay is perfectly fine and I enjoy the level design, but the aesthetics aren't good.
>bad game with soul
the first three five nights at freddy's games. the gameplay is ridiculously shallow, and as long as you aren't a small child, developing a near foolproof strategy is incredibly easy. on the other hand, I love the art direction for the games, and find it very charming.
NSMB DS has soul. It's the sequels that are soulless cash grabs
I run into good games without soul all the time, just for some examples, I have recently been playing all the halo games, Halo 4 has some pretty glaring issues with its campaign but overall its pretty fun and I have good time with the multiplayer, similarly, I think MK11 is actually pretty fun and I enjoy alot of aspects of it, but I also think it is a dogshit ass game visually that shits all over MK in some ways, but is also pretty cool in others. I think video games just exist in a yin yang state
>good game without soul
I guess Counter Strike?
>bad game with soul
Most Yoko Taro games
Deadly Premonition
Suda51's games? They're soulful but idk if i'd call them good
And what the frick is forced soul?
A new cope that basically acknowledges something has effort put into it but it doesn’t count because they don’t like it. Gankers equivalent of “dishonest animation”.
Deliberately putting more effort into something to porpusefully seem charming and full of passion.
Its moronic and basically this
an accurate term to describe modern goyslop that makes people like
and
seethe
To me, Soul is things in the game usually art-related stuff that reflects genuine passion from the devs
"Soul" and even far worse, "Sovl" has been mostly ruined by those who use it all of the time. It's mostly now,
>soul = shit I like
>soulless = shit I don't like
Regardless of quality or the game itself, soul to me is how much it feels like the dev actually wanted to make the game
What about games where the dev has said that he didn't want to make it, like Kojima with at least half the MGS games?
>half
Only one that matters is the first MGS. Kojima has clearly lost his mind since then. The MGS games after were such a clown show with what they done to the characters.
I guess I didn't think of that all, I think maybe my definition of soul is flawed and maybe I am thinking of earnestness, because there are definitely some games that I really think have alot of soul and character to them, that the devs probably fricking hated working on
You see when a game has soul, it isn't soulless.
And to know when a game is soulless, the game lacks any soul.
Hope that helped!
confusing
Soul is a passion project. Soulless is when it's designed by a committee or some untalented developer making copycat games to make money with no care or quality put into it, even if they put ungodly hours into making a grain of sand moving after you shoot it or whatever.
By this logic, the following games would have soul:
>Five Nights at Freddys (Created solely to spite a reviewer criticising the puppetlike animation style of a prior game)
>Tribal Hunter (Created by furry inflation fetishists for other furry inflation fetishists)
>Friday Night Funkin' (The entire game is based around an enormous
>Assorted Roblox games, like that Peppa Pig one (Created by young, passionate developers, who managed to utilise a game engine to do something it shouldn't have been able to, and create a game which they wanted)
>an enormous
An enormous what?
AN ENORMOUS WHAT??
Five Night at Freddy's and Friday Night Funkin do have soul, or at least the latter does have one for having such a large modding community that even amazing OCs started to come from this shithole after every creativegay started to leave. Tribal Hunter is just a shitty fetish game that was pushed as a "joke" by some e-celeb, there's nothing passionate about it besides purely having a fetish, otherwise we'd put every shitty RPGMaker H-game in there if you think that's what a passion project is. I don't know much about the last one.
Is this supposed to be an own?
They are games widely panned by Ganker
It was probably a term made up by some assravaged trannies to shit on a game xhi didn't like and was angry that other people enjoyed it. It's exactly what this forced soul shit feels like.
Complete and utter disregard of modern day social justice standards, aswell as for monetization.
I you know you know, you can't explain it to someone who can't perceive it.
It would be like explaining color to a blind person.
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>Soul
Immersion, Soundtrack, Ambience, Atmosphere, Artsyle Direction, Little Details, Dialogue, Characters, Storytelling
>Soulless
Graphics, UI, Gameplay
>Example of a soul game:
Knights of the Old Republic II
Vampire - The Masquerade Bloodlines
Fallout - New Vegas
Dark Messiah of Might & Magic
The Witcher III - Wild Hunt
Dragon Age - Origins
Grand Theft Auto - Vice City
Firewatch
SOMA
>Example of soulless slop:
Apex Legends
Fortnite
Rocket League
Rainbow Six Siege
Genshin Impact
Honkai Star Rail
Fate Grand Order
League of Legends
Dota 2
The Last of Us
Pathfinder - Kingmaker
Legend of Zelda - Tears of the Kingdom
Example of SOVL.
If it makes you feel good it has soul if it makes you feel like you wasted money it doesn't have soul