Gaming Discussions

[Ashley_AMD]

Hi all, hope you’re staying warm!

One thing I love about winter is when games feature seasonal in-game content, specifically – SNOW! I know this can be a relatively unpopular feature. Like in GTA V when you’re actually wanting to drive around without spinning out every 3 seconds.

But I love it 😁 Maybe it’s because I live somewhere where it hardly snows or maybe it’s just the fact that it’s something different in a game I may have already played for hundreds of hours.

My absolute favorite game with snow is Red Dead Online – nothing better than riding the trails with snow falling.

Any thoughts about snow in games? Do you like it, or would you prefer if it was optional?

[XelaVo581]

I love it being honest, but I understand that some people would want more frames so making it so snow fall can be optional would be the best play in games.

[Omnipro]

I love it, but don't think it is something you can have an option to turn it off especially in online service games.

If some don't like the seasonal effects the only option to disable it would be private servers, instances, and matches.

[Ashley_AMD]

@Omnipro That's a good point. Before AMD, I worked for a number of years as a community manager at a game studio with an established/long running MMO. For a time we used to have seasonal snow across the entire game map, but when we wanted to majorly overhaul our graphics it became clear that keeping the snow as a creative option, or even seasonally, wasn't viable.

We had sooo many players write in wanting us to keep it in some form, but as mentioned - just wasn't possible (unless maybe we had an entire team dedicated to *just that*, which is not realistic). Our solution was to create a seasonal "land" (basically a small temporary location) that players could travel to that had snow, etc. 

Anyway, I could see it being possible maybe in some games if there were certain servers that had that setting, and people could opt in or out of playing on those servers. For example, in GTA and RDO, maybe having "seasonal" and "non-seasonal" servers that people could choose to play on. Still pretty unrealistic though I guess lol

[Sam_AMD]

I played a few MMOs in my gaming life. Age of Conan and Guild Wars 2 were and still are my favorites (well I also like World of Warplanes). IIRC, GW2 had a "Christmas" DLC and AOC had winter zones/maps. I think the more realism (yes even in fantasy games!) the better, especially with today's tech. 

Age of ConanGuild Wars 2

[Robbert]

It depends on the game! I love it in RDR2 and RDO, especially how your char interacts with it. It's fun in Rimworld too, for totally different reasons. 

If it is part of the game in someway, it's great, if it is an afterthought, then yeah I prefer to toggle it off.

[Key-J]

Funny, though I've never really thought about snow in games - I have an extremely fond memory from it. I actually moved to Canada from overseas, and with I got here in the summer I met some friends and started playing a game called Combat Arms, in it there are a couple of snow maps and your character when moving around made a very audible crunch noise with every step. I thought it was a little weird, perhaps some unfinished audio design. That first winter I experienced my first ever snowfall, and came to learn that walking on snow made a crunch sound.

It was quite an epiphany and I immediately thought of my snowy gaming experience.