2/29/2024 0 Comments Desperados iii achievements“In the beginning, we knew that we wanted to do that, and we knew that this was the way to go for us," Wagner told us. Mimimi Games has been implementing adaptive systems into its games for years now, and it starts by designing a game to be playable on a controller from the beginning. Radial and fast-navigation menus have opened the doors for numerous genres to make the jump, from MMORPGs to real-time strategy games. These quick-access menus have given developers a way of snapping commands and prompts on-screen by the press of a single button, and for console users, it's been a game changer. ![]() Now we're at a point when the use of pop-up menus and radial dials is common, in PC and console games, across a range of genres. When it comes to console users, though, juggling the speed of the gameplay unfolding on-screen with the less-than sufficient, and often clunky, use of controller-directed cursors has proven to be a tricky problem to solve, and as such, many developers have simply skipped console ports of their games. On PC, developers have been able to display a multitude of buttons and functions directly on-screen or provide ways for players to create macro shortcuts to any of the buttons featured on a keyboard. One form of "pushing" the limits of the genre, which has predominantly utilised the ease of access offered by PC users' mouse and keyboard setups, has been the evolution of gameplay mechanics and restructured user interfaces. It has a history of that, so we need to be a little careful again.” And then people were like, this is not what I want to play anymore, and the whole genre collapsed into itself. "Commandos also went into the very narrative-focused thing, and they made it a shooter and stuff like that, so they pushed too far out of that zone. ![]() I mean, we could have made the same mistake, right? Hindsight is easy, but that killed the genre. “And then with Desperados 2: Cooper's Revenge, Helldorado, and stuff like that, they added things like third-person mechanics where you had shooting mechanics and third-person stuff, which when I look at it now in hindsight, I totally get it. They had Desperados: Wanted Dead or Alive launch at the same time as Commandos 2: Men of Courage, and it was sort of a clone basically, but in the Wild West it was a great game, fun, and people loved it," Wagner said. It’s funny, because a prime example of this, I think, is the Desperados series. “I mean, the genre died at some point because the devs went too far. While you could say that hardware performance is a key factor, it's also a case of developers "pushing" new systems and features to ensure these games can be played on multiple systems - not just require the ease of a mouse and keyboard. Much like the real-time strategy games mentioned, stealth-strategy games have also been a prominent feature on PC, with only the odd title receiving a console launch. This year we've already seen Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition's console release join some of the best games on Game Pass, and Age of Empires IV will follow suit soon, as well as Company of Heroes 3. We're currently seeing a surge in real-time strategy games making their way to consoles, which has generally been a genre almost exclusively available on PC due to the complex nature of each game's systems. "How far can you push it without breaking what made it great in the beginning?” Wagner asks - a question many developers have more than likely contemplated after spending a significant length of time with a genre or series of games. ![]() A key one, though, was the studio's experience in bringing the stealth-strategy genre to console, and the growing pains it had to go through to achieve the gameplay we enjoy today with the likes of Desperados III and Shadow Tactics on Xbox. When we sat down to speak with Wagner, we had originally planned on focussing on Mimimi Games' upcoming project, but as it does when a conversation is far too good - and no PR representative is present to politely tell you to zip it - we managed to blow through our allotted time and discuss a whole bunch of different topics.
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