Which developer is it? Most people probably know Yoko Taro as the Director of NieR: Automata from 2017. However, he had been working on video games long before that. He has been in the industry for almost 30 years, and his first title as Director was the action RPG Drakengard.
Even within this series, he showed that he realizes quite unconventional ideas. This became apparent at the latest with the secret endings in Drakengard 3. The first NieR game is based on one of the endings from Drakengard 3. Yoko Taro himself also presents quite eccentric and wears the head of the character Emil from the NieR series during interviews.
Now he stated that one thing has changed in the gaming industry over the nearly 30 years of his career: Strange people are becoming fewer.
Are there fewer weird games?
What does Yoko Taro say? In a Q and A, Yoko Taro was asked by a fan how the oddity of developers has changed in comparison from the time of Drakengard (the first one released in 2003).
Yoko Taro replies that he feels there are fewer weird people among game developers:
I have been in the gaming industry for 30 years and feel that there are fewer “weird people” today. I’m not sure if this is just a phenomenon that I have observed, if it is a phenomenon that only occurs in the gaming industry, or if it is a phenomenon affecting the whole world.
Yoko Taro on x.com
So are there really fewer weird developers or games? This question requires differentiation. In the indie sector, there are regularly games that deviate from common conventions, genres, or styles. One thinks last of games like Pizza Tower, Promise Mascot Agency, or The Alters.
In larger-budget areas, there are still such games. Just this year, Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza was released in Hawaii, where you play a Japanese gangster who suddenly becomes a pirate and can summon animals with cursed instruments.
But one must also say that the AAA sector has become riskier, which makes it more difficult to experiment. The development of large games is becoming increasingly expensive and time-consuming. A single flop could mean the end for a studio. This is quite unattractive for experiments. One prefers to stick to established ideas. This ensures that some genres are dominant.
In a prior interview (via automaton-media.com), Yoko Taro himself once explained that the first NieR was developed as an experiment, and they did not expect it to be successful. Only with NieR: Automata did the series achieve mainstream success, and to this day, the main character 2B is frequently seen as a guest in other games.
Not only in the case of NieR can one see that risky and quirky ideas can pay off. On paper, Clair Obscur also sounds quite risky, but the RPG is one of the best games of the year: Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 in review – The most emotional RPG of the year, but you have to earn the story
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