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Comment by freedomben | Hacker News Reader

> Too much effort is going for dazzling graphics at the expense of overall gameplay.

Yes, 100%. I love good graphics, but game play is the most important thing. If you don't have good gameplay the graphics mean nothing. A game with great game play and great graphics is something to behold.

I recently finished Split Fiction and they really nailed it. I hope studios take notice!

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Split Fiction is fantastic. My wife, about 0% gamer when rounded down, is still talking about it months later. I had a blast too - the game manages to be extremely fun and a decent challenge for both gamers and non-gamers alike. We'll be replaying it, but swapping characters next time.

When we played it, we had just finished It Takes Two, which was also great, but Split Fiction immediately dethroned it. I can't wait to see what Hazelight comes up with next.

Is Split Fiction easier? While I thought the platforming in It Takes Two was fairly pedestrian, it was challenging enough that I was unable to get the other half to tough it out to the end.

Split Fiction has a couple of mechanisms that make it accessible for people who are not experienced gamers. There is a general "reduce damage done by enemies" setting that make dodging attacks unnecessary. If you get stuck on something, there is a "skip to next checkpoint" button. This is very helpfully for the one or two really oboxiously hard parts. This is an improvement in accessibility over the developer's previous game It Takes Two.

I'd highly recommend Split Fiction, both for its game play and story. It is also superior to It Takes Two in that there is no part where the games "to continue playing, press X to dismember your daughter's anthropomorphic stuffed animal to make her cry". That was a jarring and unpleasant shift in tone for an otherwise mostly light-hearted game.

TBH, the whole of It Takes Two made me think 'these people are pretty terrible, I'm not sure I want to help them'. The stuffed toy bit was just the cherry on the cake. Good gameplay, not very good writing IMO (Split fiction is better but still... irritating at times)

To me that was kind of the point of the story - people that entirely forgot why they ever did any of the things they did, their kid included, slowly realizing it was their damn fault all along.

Some spots were a bit hard with Split Fiction too. There is a third-person shooter styled section my wife got pretty frustrated with at one point. But the overall game was good enough that she got over it.

This has been a recurring theme since the dawn of video games: Everyone talks about graphics (devs and gamers), but ultimately the good and beloved games are the ones with great gameplay.

It was more interesting when there were real tangible improvements. Game graphics has been like smartphones for a good long time now. Performance and feel (low latency and high consistency) still matters though, that is not solved, but it's also never marketed. Quality is not included with a UE license.

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