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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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.
I don’t even have time for all the great indies.
Like seriously, that’s a real problem. I had to remove Deltarune from my wishlist. DELTARUNE.
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.
I’m having more fun with Supplice than any AAA shooter since… idk, 2016 at least.
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.
Me, watching at the pages upon pages of games I haven’t even touched yet in my collection… Even if half of them are complete duds, and half of what’s left is kind of meh, I’ve got enough to be entertained forever even if all gaming studios vanish overnight.
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.
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.
It’s a logical outcome. The big studios are risk-averse. Why bother with something that hasn’t been already ‘proven’, and also if they think something has gone “out of fashion”, then similarly don’t risk revisiting something that will make them look dated.
The pleasant creative outcomes stem from people who want to do it for the sake of doing it rather than constrained by predicted business results. It’s by no means a guarantee of quality, a lot of Indie stuff sucks, but certainly being overly business minded inhibits anything ‘different’ coming out.
The indie games often don’t look as nice
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.
There’s definitely amazing indie games, but there’s also hundreds of shitty and terrible indie games for every decent one.
That’s why the Indie side is a full ecosystem.
Shitty games die and fertilize the ground so that all the good ones can grow.
If a AAA game dies, it takes another 6 years for investors and executives to gain the balls to maybe risk spending the money to make another game, so it fertilizes nothing, just sits and rots on sand.
And thats the natural way of the world. Without shitty artists there would be no good artists, because every good artist was once a shitty artist.
Sure everyone needs to start somewhere. I’m just saying it’s also very far from all sunshine and rainbows in indie-game land.
I mean don’t play the ones you don’t want to…?
Also, I’m a lot more willing to gamble on a $20 game than an $80 one.
My experience has been indie games are pretty well vetted if they are able to sell for $20.
Plenty of $3-5 games that are a bit of a gamble though. Even if it ends up being kind of lame I figure it’s funding for the developer to make another attempt.
Adding on to that: Sometimes these indie devs, who made a cool thing as a passion project and get rewarded with life-changing money via sales, then go on to continually update the thing since they can now devote time to passion. Thinking Minecraft, Terraria, Vampire Survivors, Stardew Valley as my personal “I have sunk hundreds of hours into this title” games. That $3 game might have good bones and just need time to flesh it out.
Also the communities will rally around devs that don’t use predatory pricing and cash-grabs. I know I’m not the only one who bought more copies of some of these games (or their OSTs, donation DLCs, Patreon, etc) to gift or even just as a thank-you when something updated and gave me more content or more polished experience.
My game list were so popular it was almost cliche, but we can’t really predict what the next great thing will be until it’s there and pricing your new best-seller at $3 means you get exposure and good will.
Yeah you are right there is plenty of small slop games that were clearly made as a cashgrab full of microstransactions and bugs. But i jist wanted to point out that its not so black and white.
If you read the negative reviews on steam, you can often filter these shitty ones out. Also, be suspicious by default of free games. There are some that were made by some game dev just having fun but most want to make money some way or another and f2p monetization is often pretty toxic, like adding a long grind just to sell ways to avoid it or p2w mechanics.
I haven’t felt like I’ve gone wrong by generally just buying the cheapest well-reviewed games on my wishlist, occasionally stretching the budget to grab a mid-priced game I’m interested in and rarely going for a AAA priced game. Means that I get to some great games later (eg, Hollow Knight is one of the more recent ones, highly recommended btw) but it’s been a great way to experience a wide variety of games from today and the last 15 years for not that much money.
I can respect a shitty indie game that has passion. You can tell a lot of people are ALMOST there on itch.io sometimes. And its just so close. Or just something that doesnt click with you. But thats ok.
“Or just something that doesn’t click with you. But that’s ok.” You’re going to rile up the rage addicts with this calm logic.
It’s funniest when they act like their rage is justified. Or destroy their own things.
This wisdom is strong. I respect the fuck out of shitty games that have crazy passion. I often enjoy them far more than soulless titles that are perfectly polished. A lot of my favorite games gain their character from their rough edges. Peripetia, Alisa, Webfishing come to mind.
I don’t think the intended message is that all indie games are great. The message is that if you’re frustrated with AAA-games and haven’t considered indie games, you should.
there’s also hundreds of shitty and terrible indie games for every decent one.
I would skip those and play the good ones
I would play them both. Because fuck me I guess
Yes.
Ratings systems and reviews aren’t perfect, but they are a good starting point.
If you dont play a game for 2 hours and didnt buy it more than 2 weeks ago, you can refund it if you bought it on steam
Oh no I spent $3 on a game that could use some more polish.
Honestly even if the game ends up being kinda lame I won’t ask for a refund.
There’s a lot of indie games costing $30+ these days
There are more good indie games than ever. It doesn’t bother me that there are also more bad indie games than ever. We have a variety of ways to separate the wheat from the chaff. And I don’t think the ratio has ever been better than 1:100 in any genre in any time period. 🤷♂️
yes but more chances to be good. variance is expected ln chances. the choice is your’s to pick which ones to play. no one said you absolutely had to play the shit ones. use your free will.
That is why indie gamer bloggers still exist, to write about which ones are bad and which are good.
All the old cool shit still exists even if its not “mainstream”.
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.
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
Retro gaming:
A bunch of Indiana Jones fighting against techno-feudalists seeking to hoarde proprietary
