this post was submitted on 14 Dec 2023
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Why didn't this movie develop the nerd following of other properties?
It seems to check all the boxes. Why isn't there a huge Avatar fandom running amuck on the internet?
It was very pretty, but not all that memorable. I remember thinking it would make a good video game, which...didn't one just come out? [checks] Yes! Let's see..."Alien Far Cry." Not a fan of that series, unfortunately.
Supposedly it's actually pretty decent if you just turn off all of the quest markers and whatnot in the settings. Turns it into more of an immersive story driven exploration game instead of an Ubisoft clear the map checkbox game.
I'm kinda interested because I really liked the three "Witcher 3 ripoff" AC games, but I tried Far Cry 3 and 4 and just couldn't get into them. I don't know if it's the using guns rather than melee or first person perspective or what.
Shooters work best when there's plenty of cover or when projectiles move slow enough to dodge. Open world melee games often have wide open spaces with little cover, but shooters can't work in those environments. Open world shooters need dense urban settings, areas with plenty of trees and shrubbery, or only have fights take place in those locations. When there's too much wide open space, it becomes a game of waiting for enemies to peak and hiding to prevent getting shot. That's not as interesting as fighting in close quarters where you can move around more and can choose when to engage enemies instead of waiting for the NPCs to peak.
Unfortunately, dense environments are also more demanding on computers, especially in open world games where you can go almost anywhere. In a linear games, areas can be blocked off and never need to be modeled, but open world games need to simulate a large area around the player, requiring even more resources. Heaven forbid the game needs to simulate the interior of a building 4 blocks away holding an NPC that needs to be able interact with the player at a moments notice. It's why most open world games have loading screens when entering interiors or mostly inaccessible buildings.
Melee based games don't need dense environments to have interesting combat, but shooters do, with denser and more dynamic being better. Open world shooters with dense environments need more beefy hardware to run, so they haven't been possible until recently.
That's a good point I hadn't really thought about. I'm trying to think of other open world games that primarily use ranged that I liked and the main one that comes up is GTA. Firefights are usually done in areas with a lot of cover (and the times it isn't are noticeable for how irritating they are) whereas, as you say, Far Cry has a lot of wide open bases when you're shooting, which I just don't enjoy.
Far Cry often has foliage to hide in, and the main places where you encounter enemies have buildings, hills, or other cover. Animals sneak up on you using flora, otherwise you'd be able to kill then before they got to you. Far Cry actually designs around these problems, but it's less repayable because hitscan gunplay is only fun the first time around. Once you lean the strategy, implementing it successfully requires little skill.
What actually made the Doom reboot and Doom Eternal have better gunplay than Call of Duty style games was making damage avoidable through movement alone. In COD style shooters, bullets travel instantly or move too fast to dodge. In multi-player hitscan can work because positioning and aiming takes skill, but in single player games, this isn't the case. It becomes a game of hiding behind cover, shooting until you take damage, hiding until you heal, shooting until you take damage, and so on. It's less repayable and not very deep.
Doom simply made almost every enemy ranged attack into a slow moving projectile. You have few long range hitscan weapons yourself, and your most powerful weapons have disadvantages that prevent long range fighting. However, if you stay close to enemies for too long, they all have fast and powerful melee attacks. This forces you to constantly move and dodge projectiles, attacking enemies with your shotgun before moving far enough away to dodge projectiles again.
What really makes wide open spaces bad in single player shooters is your inability to avoid damage. The best melee based games also make avoiding damage essential to survival. Hitscan shooters just can't do it as easily, instead giving you enough health to get out of the open and behind cover. It's less interesting.
Compare to Star Trek, Star Wars, Harry Potter, or Lord of the Rings. I'm pretty sure you know what those were about, and usually they had multiple layers of meaning.
I cannot for the life of me tell you what specifically the Avatar team thinks about deforestation, genocide, etc. It feels like they just put objectivelt bad things in the movie for the bad guys to do.
I think the difference is world building. In the stories you listed there's a sense that you're only seeing a tiny fragment of everything notable going on. History is being made by everyone concurrently.
In Avatar, you see everything notable. We don't care what's going on on Earth (they never hint anything), we don't care what's going on outside this one tribe, the only thing happening right now is the conflict on screen.
I actually really don't get the sense of a deep world from Harry Potter as an adult. I know as a kid I did, but the more I thought about the logic involved in the plot the less I felt it held up. I started getting really annoyed with the setting around 10th grade.
First one was a generic story with some interesting ideas and world, just isn't much to discuss once you get past the visuals. I think with the sequels coming and the expanded lore there will be an uptick in fandom size, but Cameron needs to take bigger risks in the story telling. Avatar hasn't really had a Vader/Luke reveal or "avengers assemble" moment
Because it's just Pocahontas but blue.
Star Wars is just Treasure Island in space, being derivative shouldn't have prevented it from being popular
Because it's a shallow prog-rock scribble with no faith in its audience. Two and a half hours of one-note characters yelling at one another to explain the blindingly obvious.
Cameron says he started writing this movie starting in the 70s, and I believe him. You can picture him sitting in his dorm room, listening to Tarkus and Olias of Sunhillow until the grooves wore out, doodling weird furry giantess smut, imagining all the claymation he was gonna do to make the bestest sci-fi film since Dark Star.
What the prequels were to George Lucas, Avatar is to James Cameron. This was his stupid childhood dream project. Somehow it made an entire billion dollars. Introspection will not occur.
The only reason it even made that much was because of the hue over the tech. God knows it's the only reason my mom bought 5 tickets for all of us to see the original. Now that all of us are adults non of us bothered to see the sequel because we saw what the original was in hindsight. There's just more people now than back then who fell for the new water tank hype plus new kids to pad those numbers even more.
I'm not saying people shouldn't enjoy it if they do, nor am k saying nobody should watch it. I'm just saying it's not for me.