Re: Is it time for a new paint job?
All these things having been said - and there are some good points here, I should add - I do want to make a counterpoint.
Final Fantasy VI came out in 1994, and it's still a damn good game. Crono Trigger came out a year later and it's hailed as one of the greatest games of its genre. Does it stand up to Skyrim for depth and complexity? Nope. Perish the thought. But what it does, it nails.
This can be true of audio games as well. Games do not, absolutely do not, have to tread new ground in order to be worthwhile, but my stance is that if you're going to do something that's been done before, do it well.
For me, AHC does this. We don't have too many good blind-accessible RPGs out there, but AHC does a lot right. Does it need all the fancy dialogue trees, positional audio and such to make it good? No, but those things help.
I guess my point here is to remember that while it's true that good games push the bar much of the time, they don't have to. Final Fantasy took the same basic setup for years and made it work, and not just on a brand either. Ditto Mario, Zelda, even Metroid, Castlevania...you get the idea. They took something they knew how to do, did it well, and fans wanted more. Sure, they wanted better, but they also wanted more. The community has been crying for a good RPG, and Out of Sight delivered. Now that we've got a good one, it'll be up to future developers to make sure that their own entries into the genre don't just roll over the same old ground with little to no differences.
Personally, anything you said about AHC, Nocturnis, I'd say about Manamon nine times over. That game is way, way, way closer to source material than AHC is, and really didn't do anything particularly innovative that hasn't already been done before to some extent. Was it fun? For a loose little romp before you figured out how it worked, sure. But would it stick as something that raises the bar in the genre? Perish the thought.
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