Comic: https://www.deathbulge.com/comics/441
Alt text: Yeah yeah, there's always exceptions, I mean look no further than the game in the 2nd panel, not the most thrilling gameplay, is it?
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Unfortunately a large percentage of the population (subconsciously) believe that if a product isn’t marketed to them, they shouldn’t touch it.
To put it more accurately, they don’t look. They don’t seek. They wait for it to get served to them via an algorithmic feed.
I think this is a core issue with all of civilization, right now.
We will mock this, but we all use Product X in industry Y, which is the more well-known brand of that industry. We don’t know that if we explore Z Niche Store, we can find excellent replacements for Product X that can take a little more effort to use and appreciate but are valued more for it.
You can fill in that mad lib in several ways; it’s very much down to which industries you pay close attention to.
How much difference does it make for your life?
What’s the fraction of your time you spend in it?
How long do you have to work to earn the money to pay for it?
As I see it, those are the kind of question which dictate how much time one should spend in trying to figure out the best option for something.
Trying to figure out the best cost/quality option in, say, soap or discardable plates for a party, is seldom worth it versus spending time figuring out, say, what’s the best house or car to buy or even just a good sofa for you living room or mattress for your bed.
And yeah, plenty of people won’t spend anywhere as much time researching even a purchase they’re going to spend the next 30 years paying for (the house), which IMHO is pretty sad - if something will cost you tens of thousands of hours of your life to pay for (by working to earn the money to pay for it), spending many hours of your time in making totally sure you’re getting the right one is the wisest way of going about it.
So, it’s totally logical for casual gamers to invest in their game purchasing decisions the same time and care as they do for, say, their soap purchases, and it’s logical for people who spend many hours a week playing games to care a lot more about finding the best games for what’s probably their main form of entertainment.
Sounds like a them problem
Technically it’s more of a Deez Paradox.
And there’s also those, who will throw a hissyfit if they’re forced to play something without modern AAA graphics, don’t want to play “woke” games, etc.
Yeah, indie and AA-gaming are doing fine, its the AAA that is suffering. And I think they deserve it for sure: predatory practices, lack of innovation, everything looking and feeling the same… Indie and AA-games are the ones I look forward to.
Watching Paradox Interactive transition from AA into a AAA studio has been painful. They fill a niche that nobody else is really paying attention to, but they’ve become so entrenched that the games are really starting to feel like reskins of each other, and while I wouldn’t call their DLC strategy predatory, they feel just a hair below that point.
“Historical strategy simulator” is a pretty tough genre to attack as an indie dev, though.
I will happily pay full price for an indie or solo dev/small team game even if I end up not loving it. I will always wait for a sale for the big AAA games.
Ultrakill, Deltarune and Celeste are my favorite video games, all indie I think.
I love deltarune and I enjoyed the ultrakill demo, never tried Celeste though
Most games I play are indie ones cause those are the best imo
never tried Celeste though
How solid is your relationship to your gender?
Is this really the best takeaway from the game? I love Celeste and I’m pretty solid with my gender identity. The music and game mechanics are the best parts. You reference the story, which ain’t bad, but definitely not where the game shines.
Ehh different people take away different things from the game. One of the pivotal experiences that lead to me finding out I’m trans was beating Celeste.
honestly unsure
Well, then Celeste sounds like the perfect game for you!
not played those but deltarune, undertale, and celeste are on my planned list, and might check ultrakill out
i rlly like hollow knight and hollow knight silksong, which are 2 very good indie games
the main non indie ones i play are minecraft and the legend of zelda series
Minecraft is an indie game that became super popular.
its not indie now
was originally
Depends on how you define indie. By my definition, Deltarune is still indie but made by a quintillionaire so like, meh. Celeste was indie when it was just a fantasy console bs thing.
I mean Deltarune was made by toby fox who became a millionaire from his other indie game Undertale. I think it definitely counts.
I did say “is still indie”.
You also said, “but made by a quintillionaire,” as if that is a point lowering its indie status, and as if money is the defining aspect of indie vs. AAA.
So if an indie game blows up because it’s great then it’s not indie? That’s a silly way to define it.
Have some mid-sized studios co-opted the term? Sure. Expedition 33 is on that AA spectrum, but a game by a very small team? In what definition is Celeste not an indie game?
Here’s one definition. If you go to the Steam page for Deltarune, it says “tobyfox” as developer, that’s a (nick)name. OneShot (2016) says “Future Cat LLC” but that seems to be made up since Steam asks for “company name”. Celeste’s “Maddy Makes Games Inc.” seems real, however. Therefore, Celeste isn’t indie.
You still haven’t defined anything. So if a game is only made by one person, it’s indie? Games made by very small teams aren’t indie?
Look, I get it, “indie” is actually a bit of a nebulous term, and is often co-opted by medium/large size studios who want to pretend to be “better” than the AAA games, but no reasonable person would call Celeste “not indie.”
So if a game is only made by one person, it’s indie?
The first two examples are clearly made by multiple people. They just haven’t registered a company. I good rule I found, not for games but just in general, is that if it’s a registered organization it’s probably not as good as you think it is otherwise.
I think the most accurate definition is “produced without a publisher”. That’s the thing they’re independent of.
Where it gets grey is things like “okay it has a publisher, but they’re tiny and cute and only publish indie-feeling game”
So the “feeling” of indie is “made by a small group of people with a shared cohesive vision and minimal outside influence”, where publishers tend to be large sources of outside influence, and teams larger than, like, 50 people tend to be unable to all have a truly shared cohesive vision. And a single person, by definition, always has a shared vision no matter what they make. But if a publisher is low-touch, or brings a game that’s basically done to market without asking for changes, and the game feels cohesive and personal, then that’s good enough.
Right, that’s where the other definitions come in. I’d say itch is a distributor rather than a publisher, but even if you don’t care about that distinction, it is definitely the case that itch doesn’t tell the developer to do anything. So publishing on itch doesn’t affect the vision for the game.
Nintendo… I mean kinda yeah. They’re a weird one. Some of their games they’re just the publisher, and there is another developer with a different name. But some things they do actually develop and self-publish. And some of the games have surprisingly few people working on them…
There may actually be a few Nintendo games that are kinda indie, oddly enough.
I think the most accurate definition is “produced without a publisher”. That’s the thing they’re independent of.
Yeah I think it was the original meaning. And New Blood, ultrakill’s publisher, is only doing small games so far IIRC (also they have some ridiculous merch for their games alongside some pretty cool one) so they fit the “indie-ish” publishers category I have
And ultrakill probably sold the least out of these 3 but actually has a publisher (it’s also my favorite of the 3)
both ultrakill and dusk look like arse, and that might turn people away
Retro gaming:
A bunch of Indiana Jones fighting against techno-feudalists seeking to hoarde proprietary
So true! If you ignore big corpo and their slop, we actually live in a golden age of gaming.
We always have and I’ve often ignored big corp.
Capitalism ruins another awesome part of our lives.
Indie games aren’t capitalism?
Are indie better because of capitalism or despite capitalism? It’s despite.
there have always been loads of shitty games, same witb movies/music etc. the bad just gets forgotten with time
I think you’re mistaking capitalism with corpocracy…
“The problem isn’t capitalism, it’s <fancy term to describe the inevitable result of capitalism>!”
No, I am not. I did think about my answer despite it being short.
Cozy Pixel Dating Exposition Building Pastel Farming Dog Quirky Fishing Rogue-lite Crafter
Shut up and take my money!
For real though, casual and chill-out games are so cathartic. Sure, I love my edgy soulsborne action adventures… But a couple of edibles and some Slime Rancher and I’m happy as a clam.
Played Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora recently, and it struck me almost immediately:
This is, without a hint of doubt, a Ubisoft game. The setting may change, the characters are swapped, but it is always the same gameplay. Like if they figured something that works with Assassin’s Creed and decided to never change it, ever.
Whatever Ubisoft action RPG you start, you always play Assassin’s Creed with extra decorations. Again. And again. And again. Zero creative vision, just new textures on top of the same mechanics.
you always play Assassin’s Creed with extra decorations.
Or if there are guns and vehicles, it’s all Far Cry :-)
They used to have good writing though. How’s Avatar’s story?
Well…it does have some good points. To provide an example without much spoilers, I’ll take one from the early game: while some RDA humans join the Na’vi resistance, and Na’vi are happy to have some help, they keep the original Avatar’s line of Pandorans’ mistrust towards the humans. You are being reminded that humans (the “Sky People”) might sometimes be allies, but they fight a proxy war, and you are here to protect your very homeland. This does get developed further down the story, and it’s a little gem, being a rare shift against humans in the game industry. It provides a nice shift of perspective, while being true to the original story.
Or, the fact that Na’vi clans all have their own vision of war, and some are hesitant to join in again after past defeats. This adds more political complexity to the lore, as opposed to “good guys - bad guys” mentality.
Also, on the crossection of story and game mechanics, there is a disharmony debuff granted when you get too genocidal towards local wildlife. It lowers your senses, makes you a pariah among na’vi, leads to your ikran abandoning you, and more. I think it’s nice, though they made a fairly poor job communicating what counts as a source of one.
On the negative side, it often feels like game design came before the story itself. A lot of it feels like they first planned where the player should go, and only then - the actual “why” behind it. This leads to some awkward turns in the story that feel like a patched afterthought.
Just finished Momodora: Moonlit Farewell. Couple of years old now but that game had more passion put into it than anything I’ve played in years. Puts many AAA to shame.
I still need to play that one. I played Reverie a few years ago and that was an amazing game that is still in my top recommendations.
Can also recommend Minoria from (I think) the same dev. I believe unrelated story but very similar feel.
I’m having more fun with Supplice than any AAA shooter since… idk, 2016 at least.
The games I always remember/return to the most are the ones that had an amazing storyline.
That doesn’t require a huge budget. But it does require the developer to love the game too.
So many companies are run from an excel spreadsheet. No true leadership or vision.
There are all these people who think it’s only a video game if it involves big fightymen killing things. That’s hyperbole (they could be big sportsmen doing sports), but not by much.
These are the people who view graphics as the be-and-end-all of a game’s quality. There are more kinds of games than anyone could count, but you wouldn’t know it by asking those people.
One sad thing for me is that even in story-rich indie games I’ve been seeing poor dialogues and developments. This area has been the most difficult one to find good stuff for me.
That’s always been a risk though.
Or you have great writing and then the developer turns stark raving mad (Mardek RPG).
Tried God Of War, lost patience after 30 minutes - too much of a “guided experience” for my taste.
Picked up Valheim again for my 6(?)th run of it and only lost patience with it maybe a month (in real time) later.
Been doing Saelig since (got it as a promo from GoG) but now have so much money in that game and such a steady way to make more that it’s not really fun anymore.
Just updated Songs Of Syx to v0.71 and preparing for a new run on that.
I’ve been gaming for almost 4 decades, originally in a ZX Spectrum and after than mostly on the PC (tried modern consoles with the WII, but found it a bit meh).
For me the modern AAA gaming experience is seldom as much fun as some Indie games out there and AAA games now tend to have much less replayability: AAA games in the last 1 or 2 decades mainly have fixed game areas with fixed and reasonably simple game rules so once I’ve seen it and done it I tend to still remember how it was for many years after playing it, so the exploration fun isn’t there anymore in a new run (in my experience it takes maybe a decade before I can come back to the best such games and have fun with it again) whilst many Indie games have procedurally generated playing fields and/or complex enough game rules that after I’ve played so much of it that I got fed up, it takes me a lot less time to have fun in a new run.
Even supposedly great games like Red Dead Redemption II turned out to, for me, be engaging and interesting for far less time than things like, say Terraria - sure, the former starts a lot more impressive, but the fun goes down a lot faster whilst the latter just keeps throwing challanges at you. Also having played it until you’re fed up, some months later Terraria is fun again for another run, whilst if you go back to it a year later, for RDR II you quickly remember what’s were in the game area and how to go around doing stuff, so the “discovery” part of fun isn’t there anymore (this especially so for the story: it’s really only interesting once)
Mind you, there are actually older AAA games for which this doesn’t apply. For example, I can still go back to the Sims 3, start a new game and it will be fun for quite a while.
I think that the problem with modern AAA games is that far too much was invested into glitzy visuals and a heavilly curated game area (not just visually but even things like scripted events) and not enough in engaging game play, plus I get the impression that game play tends to be low complexity so as to be accessible to more people, and for me after 4 decades as a gamer, simpler game rules are usually boring unless the interact in complex ways. Further, all that curating (read, “tight control”) of the game experience goes against a great source of fun in games - emergent gameplay (how the interaction between game rules and between them and the game environment can create varied and complex situations that need different solutions) - something which, IMHO, is part of the reason why in some games multiplayer is a lot of fun when singleplayer is not (humans are great at creating the novel and unexpected) and which works especially well with game with tons of things which interact with each other and with procedurally generated game spaces.
too much of a “guided experience” for my taste.
This shit drives me crazy, and Sony games are far and away the worst offenders - Spider-man, GoW, Death Stranding 2, etc. Otherwise great and enjoyable games damn near ruined by constant nagging and pointers for the most obvious things, like “helpful” reminders to get to the objective you’re already going towards. I have other problems with Death Stranding 2, but that was one of the bigger ones. Stupid doll man wouldn’t. shut. up.
As I recall The Last of Us two found a pretty organic sweet spot. The character you’re with would just make oblique observations if you were stuck for a while, increasingly explicit, until finally an actual icon would appear in the UI pointing you in the right direction (configurable).
I really do find hifi environments too busy to make out “significant” features, and if you’re not going to splash yellow paint on everything some kind of hint system is nice.
Source: I’m not smart
God of war Ragnarok gets even worse with the backseating
