There’s no denying that the amount of good quality of 3D Platformers we get nowadays is nothing like what we got to enjoy a decade or so ago. There are some obvious exceptions to this rule however and it looks like Yooka-Laylee may be shaping up to be a good contender in the field. Character Designer, Steve Mayles, spoke to GodIsAGeek and provided his take on the reasoning to why we don’t see as many of these types of games as we used to:
GodIsAGeek: We could be seeing a comeback for the genre, with A Hat In Time, Crash Bandicoot Remastered and Yooka-Laylee. Why do you think this style of game died off?
Mayles: I think the market got very saturated in the late 90s with 3D stuff. As soon as we could do 3D, a lot of people did those sort of free-roaming open world platformers. There was a lot of them about. I think people got a little bit fed up with them. And also with the new technology coming in, new hardware that can do better graphics, people were eager to show that off – developers were eager to show that off – with a more realistic product that didn’t really fit in the cartoony world of the 3D platformer. For us, absence makes the heart grow fonder. If we tried this 10 years ago, we wouldn’t have got the response. But there has been that gap for so long that people have been crying out for another 3D platformer.
You can read the full interview here.
I think expense and time comes down to it, too. The idea behind console gaming for the last 15 years has been ‘just because you can invest the time, effort and money, doesn’t mean you necessarily should’.
I still wish they would have gone this way with Donkey Kong Country instead of making the same 2d game we had 20+ years ago. That said I didn’t like donkey kong for the n64 as much as Banjo Kazooi so something did feel wrong about it.
Dk64 was a good game, but it was just too big, too hard in many parts, and simply just plain uninspired too much.
I do remember it was a pain to play sometimes and thats pretty much my only memory of it. Than again games are way to easy these days, I remember dying 6 times tops during a full clear of Mario Galaxy.
In short, there were too many collectibles for too many characters. Not too mention some of the gilden banana requirements, such as the RACES.
Who needs to to get high scores in retro games just to reach the final boss!?
That’s when DK64 went downhill for me, too. I hated those retro games & they ruined the pace of the rest of the game. Yeah, it’s probably blasphemous to some others but… I. Hated. The. Original. Donkey. Kong. That Jetpak game or whatever wasn’t any better.
I don’t think “too big” was even its issue, because Banjo Tooie was much bigger but I still enjoyed that game even more than Banjo Kazooie.
I think the massive amounts of collectibles and the tedium of having to explore each area 5 times had to do with it.
||It has to do with limitless online gaming for the same price, nothing else is as significant…||
Online gaming did change allot for me indeed specially World of Warcraft and later on all the other Blizzard games and ofcourse FIFA and Call of Duty.
Since I started playing online the only single player games I actually finished are Mario Galaxy 1, Zelda Skyward Sword, Bloodborne and GTA 4. I rescently took a step back from online gaming besides Hearthstone and some games of Battlefield 1 to get back into single player games starting with Bloodborne.
I probally still got 40 games I bought and never played or didn’t finish lol. That changing now though.
||Sooner or later, everything returns to their origin, I too have certain weapons I need to finish, but I often do finish them once I get my head on them…||
For me I just think the name yooka Laylee is stupid. I hate the actual instrument sound (ukelele is the token hipster instrument) and graphics look like Spyro Enter the Dragonfly on the Gamecube. Cringe.
@nintandrew – and these points you’re raising are a bad thing why, exactly?
Spyro wasn’t exactly cool. Mario is cool. Spyro was excessively childish, like this Yooka. Mario have a broader audience.
Well, it is the spritual successor to Banjo Kazooie, named after the musical instruments of a Banjo and a Kazoo.
there was no way Nintendo was ever going to invest in anything remotely 3D for Donkey Kong in the Wii U era. I believe development on Retro’s fabled ‘new franchise’ was shelved at the last minute in favour of a HD iteration of DKC. I remember a lot of fans were disappointed by that. But think about 2D Yoshi and Kirby titles that looked pretty immense but were probably very cheap to develop.
Hopefully if the Switch takes off, we’ll see a bit of a renaissance for the sort of first party, 3D platformers we know and love
That still doesn’t justify the abundance of COD games, or Super Mario Maker.
After Capcom killing Mega Man, everything that is Skylanders (Crash and Spyro), and the Sonic Boom f**k-up, there are so many unrealized hidden gem platformers that need to be resurrected:
-Socket/Time Dominator 1st
-Tempo (32X)
-Ristar
-Dynamite Headdy
-High Seas Havoc
-Mr. Nutz (as a spiritual successor to Conker’s Pocket Tales/Conker’s Twelve Tales)
-Super Magnetic Neo
-DoReMi Fantasy: Milon’s DokiDoki Adventure
-Klonoa
-Trip World
-Hebereke
-Rocket Knight (under a new company that ISN’T Konami)
-Chameleon Twist
-Gex
-Tomba
I just like games with hub worlds. I don’t care what genre. Open world is kinda boring now that every game does it. Hubs are a great way to make level-based games feel more engaging.
It’s the 3D platformer’s turn to echo the 2D platformer revival of the Aughts.
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It’s a good thing I’ve barely played platformers over the last 10+ years. This will definitely help Yooka-Laylee sell to me at least.