Is anyone else completely over this tedious shite?
I understand the cases where it’s used to hide the fact that the game is loading in the next section of the level, but surely there are better solutions to that non-issue. Like a loading screen.
Regardless, it’s almost never the case that these shimmy squeezes have anything to do with slowing the player down for under-the-hood reasons (think of games like Sekiro, Hitman, Assassin’s Creed or Star Wars Jedi Fallen Order). They’re apparently there to provide the player with ‘gameplay’, I guess because they’re free gamey gameplay shit that you can just pepper into a level randomly to embloaten the experience a little.
It’s like a dog bowl with lots of nooks and crannies in it, designed to make the dog eat slower, but is presented as “enrichment”. I’m not a colicky dog and the rest of the game is providing ample enrichment, thanks. It would be even more enriching if you’d stop interrupting me to make me walk sideways through a fucking bookcase.
#CancelShimmySqueezes
My theory is that today’s load times are the Xbox 360 era of graphics. Wait let me explain.
When the 360/PS3 came out, graphics were suddenly really good. But the industry didn’t just want really good graphics, they wanted cinematic photorealism right now and the 360/PS3 weren’t good enough for that.
So, we got many games in that generation full of brown filters, blurring, lens flares, and bloom effects in order to hide the fact that games still had visible polygons. They looked worse for it.
Today, load times are pretty small. But the industry wants load times to be non-existent right now, so they’re using all of these scripted sequences to hide it. I suspect that, in hindsight, people will say that a lot of games from this generation had poor level design because of it. I definitely think that a lot of 360 games look bad because of their “cinematic” visual effects.