Progression is slower than other survivor games, but they have increased the pace and added a mechanic with gear drops, which smooths out the curve and actually makes builds possible. All in all it’s one of the top survivor games i’ve played. I would place Vampire Survivors (because of the huge amount of content) and Halls of Torment (because i absolutely love the style) above it, but for me DRG:S is a solid 3rd place (and i’ve played quite a lot of bullet heavens)
I take there’s permanent unlocks/stat improvements/etc? Is gear permanent or per run? Surely the dwarves don’t enter the levels unprepared? :D
To me Vampire Survivors started to get a bit obtuse with some unlock requirements (have skills x, y, z, survive this certain level this long, be at this exact place, possibly with a character C, have the hand towel on second hook… etc). I’d assume DRG:S is a bit more straightforward?
Have you perhaps played Soulstone Survivors - it’s the one I’ve played the most, unlocked everything apart from some hidden/masked achivements? If you have, how does DRG compare?
With 20/20 hindsight it was obviously a good idea.
But at the time of making the decision, it was an unbelievably risky plan and the odds were stacked against it. As a matter of fact, for every successful 2D platformer made with care and love that gets released and becomes successful, there are dozens that fail miserably and that you will never hear of.
Yes, believing in yourself and taking risks makes success possible, but remember that it does not guarantee it.
This comment sounds like it’s discouraging these kind of risks. But I feel like you should almost always take them, because otherwise your life is just hollow.
I think you’ve got to work out what your appetite for risk is. It’s important to do take risks sometimes even if they scare you to move your life forward but also sometimes don’t. I’ve seen a bunch of people really fuck their lives up because they just kept rolling the dice.
One of my goals in life is to not become impoverished due to bad financial decisions, and think of how many people quit their jobs to try to make a successful game just for their plan to not work out and them then trying to somehow get their lives back in order so they won’t become homeless.
I’m sorry honey but you have to understand that daddy took a risk otherwise he would feel hollow! Sure we’re broke now because he quit his job to do a thing and it didn’t take off, and your little brother Timmy had to go live with Gramma or else he’d starve, but think of how daddy feels now! Not hollow!
I mean sure, your friends and family won’t let you starve. But you can’t rely on them forever. Government ain’t doing shit either: At least in my country, to get unemployment benefits, you need to be laid off or fired. If you quit your job to develop a game and fail, that’s on you. Yes, there’s also disability benefits, but those are small and require you to be disabled. Food banks exist too, but they don’t help you pay rent, nor do you get a full month’s worth of food every month.
All in all, a family with kids must have at least one working adult or HUGE savings.
So again, where’s the paradise where government will keep your rent or mortgage paid and your family fed if your game dev endeavour doesn’t pan out? I wanna move there.
We have decent worker protections in Belgium, but if you quit your job here to work on games I don’t know if you have the right to unemployment (since you weren’t fired). Even then, it only lasts for a year or so if you have worked at the place for 5 years, with the monthly payment decreasing significantly until the last few months you only get like 500€ per month.
Luck and a good review from a relevant reviewer. The devs of Nightmare Reaper credit Civvie11’s reviews of their game to the multifold increase of sales after they sent him a redeem code. And that’s not the only game that he’s helped out.
My friend quit his job and has been making indie games since 2015. It's been 20 10 years and he's made like $40,000 total in the time with all his games combined. His wife pays all the bills. Every time he releases a new game he tells everyone this is the one that'll make him a million bucks. He points to games like Hollowknight, Stardew Valley, Undertale etc as proof.
Previously, we offered free Key applications to replace game versions for existing players. However, as of this month, the number of supplementary Keys distributed has exceeded 30% of the total sales volume prior to this initiative—and we still receive numerous feedbacks from players stating they haven’t received their Keys, along with complaints about slow email response times.
This doesn't meet your "human enemies" requirement, but if you're looking for realistic firearm mechanics, you might want to look at https://store.steampowered.com/app/1129310/Receiver_2/. It does have procedurally-generated layouts, as per your roguelike point, and most of the game is firearm mastery.
Review embargo for hades 2 also dropped. What a month it’s been for gaming, between Silksong, Silent Hill f, Hades 2, and a couple of other big name titles releasing within a very short time frame
Hades 2 is a really fun game. Ive played it heavily on early access and even if they didnt change anything, it would still be solid. That being said, and actual ending will make this game one of the best in the year for me.
Your only arguments for your statement in this thread are, that there are a lot of Trails games, and that the games are all connected. Comparing this to FF7 seems like a real stretch.
If these games are so important, how about some examples of how they influenced gaming and their impact, either to devs or gamers.
BTW I think the Trails series is garbage and has only one good game in it.
This isn’t about “a lot of games.” It’s about building something no other JRPG studio has ever pulled off—a single, continuous saga that’s been unfolding since Trails in the Sky in 2004.
No resets, no reboots, no discarded lore. Every event, faction, and character connects across a dozen titles. That kind of long-form narrative discipline doesn’t exist anywhere else in the genre.
And don’t minimize how hard that is. Most JRPG studios can barely keep one trilogy coherent. Falcom has been weaving one uninterrupted storyline for over twenty years—through console generations and shifting hardware.
Holding a narrative together across decades isn’t just impressive, it’s almost impossible. Doing this wasn’t just because of luck. It’s taken discipline, patience, and vision on a scale no other studio has matched.
Influence is easy to trace. XSEED’s Trails in the Sky localization raised the bar for how seriously Western publishers approach text-heavy JRPGs. At the time, bringing over a game with hundreds of thousands of lines of dialogue was considered unworkable. They did it, and it set a precedent for the kind of effort fans now expect from localizations.
Falcom also helped legitimize PC as a JRPG platform in the West—back when most people dismissed the genre as “console only.”
And if you look at modern RPGs built around serialized storytelling and grounded politics—Disco Elysium, Baldur’s Gate 3, even the way Persona 5 structures its arcs—you can see Falcom’s fingerprints everywhere.
Critics agree. RPG Site flat out said this about the remake of Trails in the Sky FC:
If you’re here strictly for the magical number, here it is: Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter remake is a 10/10. What’s more, it’s the easiest 10/10 I’ve ever given.”
And the numbers back it up. Trails in the Sky sits at Overwhelmingly Positive on Steam with a 93% approval rating from thousands of reviews. Recent reviews are even better—96% positive.
Rather than burning energy on outrage, put that time into actually playing more games. You’ll get more out of them—and you’re better than just dismissing something this significant.
I believe you’re vastly overstating the importance of this game and franchise. As I said, I think it’s a terrible series of games (and I’ve played them up to CS3), so there’s absolutely some bias here.
Also, what do other people’s reviews have anything to do with how impactful or important something is to the medium? Does this mean that the Hentai game Mirror with ~96% positive, 85k+ reviews on Steam is even more significant than Trails?
And if you look at modern RPGs built around serialized storytelling and grounded politics—Disco Elysium, Baldur’s Gate 3, even the way Persona 5 structures its arcs—you can see Falcom’s fingerprints everywhere.
Please show me where those fingerprints are, because I don’t see them.
Ok well, then that’s definitely not like Final Fantasy 7.
Final Fantasy games are in their own contained universe.
Clearly the potboilers on your team don’t know what they’re talking about and are just saying bullshit to drum up hype so they can make money.
Rather than burning energy on outrage, put that time into actually playing more games. You’ll get more out of them
Fuck off with that nonsense. You’re here to sell a product and take people’s hard-earned money. They shouldn’t lower their standards to satisfy your ego and make you more money.
You should work harder because I guarantee your team didn’t put as much effort into this as went into FF7.
I’d even say the interconnectedness is often more of a handicap.
There’s one character in Sky whose arc is postponed into Azure. It…doesn’t fit with that larger narrative. Then, the biggest criticism of some of those later games is how there’s too many characters around. Most were enjoyed when first introduced, but then there’s way too many. In a lot of ways it suffers the same ways later Marvel movies do; banking on audience members shouting “I know what that is!!”
Supposedly some more recent games refocus on smaller groups but are still very much about “building a larger narrative”. I can’t claim I’ve played all of them to get a larger opinion, but Kingdom Hearts did a lot of that, and we saw its failed payoff in Kingdom Hearts 3 (actually something like KH8). I still enjoy the first two games in the series - the duology this one is remaking - but I’m pretty sick of the obsession with lore.
A video I watched even discussed how early Star Trek movies had blatant plotholes with earlier establishment, but that was fine because it was better to focus on the narrative the director wanted.
There might be some fringe impacts Trails has had on the industry here and there, but the only big influence it has had is on Honkai: Star Rail’s combat system. And at this point, HSR is so much larger than the Trails series as a whole that it’s going to look like Meucci’s contribution to telephone technology when all is said and done. Expedition 33 already took some of its UI design from HSR.
Even the impact of Trails’s hybrid action/turn-based system is debatable because Trails through Daybreak was in development at the same time as Metaphor: ReFantazio, which uses the same system. Ultimately, the series serves a very specific, small niche within a niche, and it’s never going to be a major trailblazer for the same reason much of Baldur’s Gate 3’s story design won’t be: that kind of narrative structure is not an efficient way to make money. You have to be an auteur or a major risk taker to do software engineering that way.
Meanwhile, Final Fantasy VII’s impacts on the entire industry, let alone the genre, are too numerous to list. The two series are not remotely comparable. OP’s neck-deep in atomistic fallacy here.
I’ll second the recommendation for Far Cry, particularly 3 and 4. Also, have you played Crysis? Later in the game it will move away from human enemies, but most of the game ought to be what you’re looking for, and it’s genuinely one of the best FPS campaigns ever.
Far Cry 5 meets the criteria too, and focuses on the strengths of mostly having the open world activities be the way you move the story forward rather than the dumbass missions these games always have for no reason.
It’s been a hot minute, but what I really liked about Far Cry 3 and 4 was that if you wanted a certain upgrade, you set your own goal as a player for a certain type of mission, and I really enjoyed that. I remember seeing in the marketing for FC5 that they changed that, and it killed my interest. I’m not sure what there is to take issue with story missions moving the story forward.
The grand arch-sin of Ubisoft games is that they miss their own point almost entirely and are afraid to be fun.
The simple thing is that most of the game should be the most fun bit of the game.
E.g. if an FPS with good gunplay as a central element has 51% of game time spent in hacking mini games, that’s probably gonna get pretty irritating, right?
In the case of Far Cry 3-5: most fun bit is the outposts. Therefore most of the game should just be approaching, assaulting and solving various outpost combat sandboxes of increasing complexity.
Blood Dragon still has the best scope and scale in that respect, the whole design around a basic linear mission structure feels like it’s out of sync with the fact the fun is elsewhere, so you just end up in a situation like you already having liberated every single outpost, but technically you’re in the beginning of the game at like mission 2, it just doesn’t gel together.
Far Cry 5 has planes and helicopters and outpost-esque or adjacent activities and it’s the only game in the series where it’s those that actually move the story forward.
It’s the same shit with assassin’s creed. The most fun bit is y’know, stabbing people with the thing in historical settings. So it should be most of the game. Instead most of the game is anything and everything but that.
Heck, watch dogs legion even severely limited the amount and variety of hacking in the game when that’s like the whole thing and what made the second game in the series shine.
As for the upgrade and crafting systems I would honestly toss the whole thing out, RPG mechanics don’t belong in action games. A shop at most with all guns and everything unlocked at the start and money made through open world activities would fit Far Cry just right.
I liked the story missions for being one-off unique challenges and set pieces. I liked the outposts a lot, so I did as many of them as I wanted to, which may or may not have been all of them. As far as rising and falling action goes, I didn’t see outposts as a great way to support that, so it made plenty of sense to me to structure the game the way they did. That said, I didn’t play FC5, so OP can feel free to check that one out on your recommendation as well.
There’s a bit where she has to kill somebody in self defence and then breaks down over it, before spending the entire rest of the game plonking arrows through people’s skulls.
How realistic does it need to be? If you’re down with being a Space Cowboy, Borderlands 2 is the best in the series. (So far. I’m still working on 4, and 2 should be cheap enough that it won’t be a huge waste if it’s not your style)
I enjoyed 2 and Wonderland tbh (I return to it often actually) but I’m hoping for something more realistic, impactful, violent. Locational damage, recoil control and headshots vs bulletsponges. That said, I like the rng weapons a lot and jumping around shooting monsters, like I do in SW2.
Not sure I want that after the reviews, which is a shame because a good fantasy city builder is something I’d pay for. But I wouldn’t want to invest time in an unfinished game that’s turning to a mobile idle thing model.
But I am a bit curious about how they are doing this. I don’t think Steam allows different pricing from the wishlist, do they?
Did they just hide the free base game purchase leaving only paid options on the store page? It’s looking like that, technically you can’t buy “Leviathan’s fantasy” alone from the store, only paid bundles (with the new version? and weirdly, this makes Leviathan’s fantasy cost money inside that bundle making it more expensive? so confusing).
Recently, we have been in continuous communication with Steam Support regarding the duration of our game's free promotion. The support team has also walked us through the potential drawbacks, advantages, and disadvantages of the free offering. Additionally, they assisted us in enabling the free access permission this past Monday morning; however, this free version remains hidden—as we still need to confirm the official launch time, it is currently not visible on the store page.
[...]
It seems even the Steam team was unaware that, with the hidden free version active and the paid version not yet fully removed, users could still claim the free version directly via their Steam Wishlist. I only discovered this issue today myself. Immediately after learning about it, I sent a follow-up email to Steam Support to inform them of this situation and requested that they process refunds for players who purchased the game recently (after the unintended free access became available).
To clarify: The original purpose of our free promotion is to ensure that players who have already purchased the game can continue to access the game’s ongoing updates. There are no hidden agendas or "conspiracy" behind this decision. We simply hope new players can enjoy the game, and existing players can benefit from sustained support.
They should make a parody action movie where the protagonist in the end lets the antagonist live, because of moral reasons. Then they walk away and the camera zooms out and you see them walk over hundreds of dead bodies. Maybe Austin Powers or Naked Gun did this already.
Some history is in order. The two most influential JRPG developers are Square Enix and Nihon Falcom. Square Enix gave us Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy.
Uhh… credibility lost. They’re saying history is in order and they immediately begin by rewriting history.
Squaresoft and Enix were two different companies for decades, particularly when they were giving us Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest.
Immediately after saying “some history is in order”.
Square Enix didn’t give us the original Final Fantasy nor the original Dragon Quest. They give us those games now. But writing as if they were always one company feels like rewriting history.
I think there might be a small misunderstanding. I wasn’t saying they’re one company—just noting the influence they both still carry today. However you look at it, Square Enix are the caretakers of Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest, much like how Bandai Namco continue to carry Pac-Man forward.
Instead of focusing on the negatives, why not celebrate what these games have meant to so many of us? Their impact is still worth appreciating.
bin.pol.social
Aktywne