“I can’t stress enough how often I’d hear a retail rep declare a genre/style/look was dead with zero supporting data.”
I mean… yeah, retailer gut checks were a major driver for the industry for ages. The entire myth of the videogame crash in the early eighties, blown out of proportion as it is, comes down to retailers having a bad feeling about gaming after Atari. I’m big on preservation and physical media, but don’t downplay the schadenfreude caused by the absolutely toxic videogame retail industry entirely collapsing after digital distribution became a thing. I’ll buy direct to consumer from boutique retailers all day before I go back to buckets of games stolen from little kids and retailers keeping shelf space hostage based on how some rep’s E3’s afterparties went.
That said, those guys really did flood the market with cookie cutter games in a very short time there for a while. There were a LOT of these.
Weirdly, Neverwinter Nights must have done extremely well for how much credit Bioware gives it for redefining the genre, but at the time I remember being frustrated by it. It looked worse than the 2D stuff, the user generated content stuff was fun to mess with it didn’t create the huge endless content mill you’d expect from something like that today.
I should go look up if there’s any data about how commercially successful it really was somewhere. Any pointers?
Agreed about Neverwinter Nights, BG2 was (and remains) one of my favourite games and I remember being super hyped for NWN. Being an earlyish transition to 3D really did hurt it visually, much the same as how Final Fantasy VI has aged much better than VII graphically.
The big letdown for me though was the cut down party size. BG2 was defined by the companions and party banter and I recall NWN feeling extremely lacking in comparison.
The post BG2 hype combined with the move to 3D and the very heavily advertised campaign builder probably built very intense hype though, so it wouldn’t surprise me at all if NWN sold extremely well despite not having as lasting of a legacy as BG2 for example.
For me, the problem is “isometric”. There have been very few games like that I’ve finished compared to others. It feels artificially constrained, especially in a 3D environment, when visibility is limited to like <10 meters away from your character. It’s worse if the camera rotates because then I find it quite hard to make a mental map.
I don’t have this issue with a top-down perspective generally. Maybe those tend to be more 2D (even if rendered they can’t really include environmental verticality) so it’s easier to navigate.
IMO there’s very few instances where an isometric camera makes sense these days unless you’re explicitly trying to capture the nostalgia of old isometric games.
I do find it’s a barrier for some fairly modern games I want to play like Divinity Original Sin 1+2 and Disco Elysium. I wish that wasn’t the case…
I’m not sure I’d call D:OS isometric, definitely birds eye view camera. I believe there are mods for divinity as well as BG3 that allow more dynamic cameras. I have one for bg3 and it’s definitely a different experience but if that’s one you’re after, you should try it out.
