Thanks for copying the list out; I'm not visiting YouTube either at the moment. I think I probably saw this video a while ago though -- at least, that particular set of games looks very familiar...
I've played some of them and have some things to say about them:
Paradise Killer: I liked the music in this one. I'd never encountered the vaporwave aesthetic before bumping into this game via a Let's Play (back when I was still going to YouTube) which probably enhanced the weirdness factor of the game for me. It clearly took inspiration from Danganronpa, so if you liked that game you might want to check it out (or vice versa if you somehow ran into Paradise Killer without having heard of Danganronpa, I guess).
Crosscode: I found this game frustrating. I liked a lot of things the game did -- like the interaction with party members (EXCEPT for dungeons) and running around the map searching for secrets -- but... the default difficulty seemed to be set to maximize annoyance. I mean, it's doable. I was very stubborn about not changing the timing setting -- probably too much so -- and was eventually able to beat the main game, but the way it was tuned definitely reduced my enjoyment. The game claims that adjusting the setting doesn't matter, but tracks statistics about it (like GTA-style stats) which made me really stubborn about not changing the setting. A lot of the challenges in the game are Zelda-esque timing puzzles -- from hell. Like hit the switch then run over and do something before time runs out but with 20 steps instead of the one or two you'd find in a Zelda game. (If you don't like those sorts of timing puzzles you probably won't have a good time with this one.) So, of course, the timing is set in such a way that it's often tricky to actually pull off (particularly with aiming involved) even once you've figured out exactly what needs to be done. I did it, but more often than not got pissed off while doing it. The game additionally had the interesting idea of having competitive dungeons. Your party members would challenge you on the overall time to clear dungeons. So, in addition to the time pressure of individual puzzles, there was an overall time pressure to race through the puzzles as fast as possible. I liked the idea of where they were coming from with the party member interactions for dungeons but I'd have preferred to take my time with things frankly. It ultimately doesn't matter that much whether you win or lose those (I won about half of them), but having the game rub my nose in it for being too slow after getting frustrated at puzzle timing and aiming for an hour or more in each dungeon kind of sucked. The overall plot of the game was interesting enough to go through, and I liked the characters for the most part, but a lot of the gameplay was frustrating. Very mixed feelings on this one.
Phoenotopia Awakening: This game was another mixed bag. I really wanted to like it. There were a lot of parts I did like... but it is very flawed. First is the gameplay. It presents itself as a mostly cute pixel platformer/adventure game, but the developers seemed to be thinking "Dark Souls" with stamina and such and... it really did not work for me. Thankfully, you can turn most of that crap off -- and I did so unabashedly. (I beat DS1 before playing it, and since playing it I've beaten DS2 -- so it's not like I can't handle hard games. It just did not feel good to play with those mechanics enabled.) Second is the story. There's a decent enough hook to get the main adventure going fairly early on, but the game doesn't deliver on it. You get to the end and the big dramatic question of the game is... still unanswered! That is really not ok! (Instead you get a bunch of unnecessary backstory for the main character that I took as a big "fuck you"; I won't say more than that in case someone does want to play it and find out for themselves, but the ending was really unsatisfying to me.) The game had a lot going for it -- the music's good (and I still listen to some of the tracks occasionally), and there was a lot of charm in places. Some of the areas were really pretty and there were a bunch of fun little interactions -- but I really don't know what they were thinking with some of it!
I had a hard time making it through this video. This guy's shtick is grating. At 1.5x speed, there's still tons of pregnant pauses for where he thinks I should be laughing, I guess. However, this is a point I agree with:
[In a segment about asking "the right kinds of questions":] "What, rather than scope, do we really want more of?"
Baldur's Gate 3 would be just as fulfilling of an RPG at half the length. I'm in Act 3, about 70 hours in, and I skipped a lot of stuff along the way knowing how much game I had ahead of me. Further still, there's a lot of stuff I didn't do along that same way because my character build didn't open those avenues or because I just didn't know it was there. It's a very dense and deep game, and that's what's important to me rather than the length. It's important to me that they continue to do what they've done well in Divinity: Original Sin with all of those tiny interactibles and the way all of the systems work together to allow you to come up with your own solutions. The raised standard, to me, is that they managed to iterate on that with Mass Effect level production value in the conversation system where you don't just get a story that's written well or voiced well but also performed well. On top of that, the game brings back old standards that this industry mostly forgot in that it has LAN and direct IP connections as well as being available DRM-free so that the game or its multiplayer features don't have an expiration date attached to them. I didn't necessarily need this game to be 100 hours long in order to get the enjoyment I'm getting out of it.
And the thing that the author of this video seemed to miss is that several of the quote reply tweets to that thread were from AAA developers, which is where the IGN video came from (which wasn't even the first video to bring this up). The same thing happened when AAA devs behind the likes of Assassin's Creed were publicly criticizing aspects of Elden Ring as though people weren't fed up with the kind of experience that Assassin's Creed provides, and it led to that famous UI barf mock-up of Elden Ring. Elden Ring, like Baldur's Gate 3, only happened because its team iterated on something smaller, and it too avoids lousy monetization schemes.
Baldur’s Gate 3 would be just as fulfilling of an RPG at half the length
I could take courses on rhetoric for the rest of my life and still wouldn’t be able to disagree more with that statement. If anything the game could need an act or two more.
Honestly, whenever I see someone complaining about a long game I wonder why they are in such a rush to finish it. What’s the problem with a 500 hour game? Just take your time. No need to finish it whenever you’re done with it, even if it’s only years later. But I guess gamers today just need their next dopamine fix and can’t be bothered anymore to invest some time into a game. After all the next overhyped game is just a week or so away and it absolutely needs to be played right at release! Best make every game like a 2 minute tiktok so gamers can consume at an even higher rate!
The problem with a 500 hour game is pacing, finding natural calls to action and conclusions to those story arcs. And the next game that comes out in a week offers a fulfilling experience in a different way, and it's nice to see a breadth of different great experiences rather than just one really long one. I say that as someone who's put 1500 hours into my favorite game. I'm not necessarily wishing for Baldur's Gate 3 to be shorter, only that Baldur's Gate 3's scope could have been scaled back without affecting how much I enjoy it or how much value I got out of it. I would really like to see a batch of D&D 5e games on this engine the way there was a batch of Infinity Engine games back in the late 90s and early 00s, and even those games were much shorter than BG3. In general, I'd say games over a certain budget threshold sacrifice a lot of enjoyment in order to make their games bigger and/or longer, and games like BG3 and Elden Ring are the exception, so in most cases, I'd rather big games like Halo Infinite or Assassin's Creed scale down to the smaller experiences they used to be.
Now you’re talking about the quality of a game. That’s a completely different discussion. I obviously take a good, short game over a long, bad game as well. But given that the quality is equal in all aspects, I would always take the longer game over the shorter one.
I don't think it is a completely different discussion. The length of the game affects length of development time, the available budget that they can spend on a game, etc. There are all sorts of effects on development, which circles back to me not feeling the new Halos or the new Assassin's Creeds are as good anymore. I hardly consider length of a game at all in how I feel about it or prefer it, as long as feels like it should be that long, which comes back to pacing again.
Noodle is hilarious and his pregnant pauses are top-tier.
This video was specifically defending the indie dev, Nelson, that made the post that kicked this stuff off. Sure, other AAA devs responded to him, but it was Nelson that got most of the negative attention and death threats, even though his opinions were VERY measured and reasonable. It was also a criticism of the IGN guy that directed everyone’s attention and pitchforks towards Nelson by cherry-picking his statements and taking them out of context.
The specifics of the length/scope of the game are honestly less important, IMO. The video is just a level-headed look at why this excellent game is so excellent, and why it’s unrealistic to expect every game from now on to be like this. That, and he’s trying to get gamers to chill the fuck out and stop with the death threats.
Obviously I wouldn't support death threats, but moving on...
This video was specifically defending the indie dev, Nelson, that made the post that kicked this stuff off. Sure, other AAA devs responded to him...
Which the author didn't acknowledge or seem to understand why the IGN video was calling out AAA devs.
The video is just a level-headed look at why this excellent game is so excellent, and why it’s unrealistic to expect every game from now on to be like this.
It's realistic to expect the likes of Bethesda and BioWare to meet a lot of expectations from Baldur's Gate 3. Or rather, it's fair to hold those games to certain standards that Baldur's Gate 3 manages, but none of us should expect those studios to meet those standards, because they haven't shown they're interested in meeting those standards. BioWare made Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 and Neverwinter Nights, D&D games with cooperative multiplayer, like Baldur's Gate 3, with no reliance on the publisher's server to play. When multiplayer shows up in Mass Effect though, it's some microtransaction-fueled horde mode instead of just replicating a tabletop RPG and letting your buddies play the other members in your squad on missions; Fallout 76 was Bethesda's idea of multiplayer Fallout, which is far worse. You can make decisions in games from those studios, but their character sheets have been sanded down, as have skill checks, and outside of putting a bucket on someone's head in Bethesda games, you often can't use the systems to get creative like you can in Baldur's Gate 3 or a tabletop RPG. It's fair to hold these games to those standards. Given the success of games like Disco Elysium and Kickstarter games like Torment: Tides of Numenera, I don't think anyone's really expecting scope and scale like BG3 from indie efforts, but those games do let you feel like you can play them your own way in a way that AAA's most expensive efforts often don't. That's what this argument always felt like to me from the perspective of the IGN video which, once again, was not the progenitor of the argument, even if it had the most eyes.
This looks amazing. Being able to switch your class at any time seems a bit weird. I wonder why they don’t just have you take control of one of the other characters in your party instead?
So if one is not very experienced in game engines but likes to tinker and try out a game engine, is Godot something I could check out? I mean, without knowledge of coding.
Yes! To just tinker you’ve got GdScript which is Godot’s built in scripting language similar to Python. I haven’t tried it myself but I hear it’s great for beginners.
I see the word EPIC in a gaming title and my brain immediately goes "OH NO, not them again. What fucked shit are they trying to convince everyone of now?"
It’s almost as if Epic actually does have developers’ and the industry’s best interests at heart despite the shit takes from the terminally-online Gamer™ crowd…
It’s not entirely against their own self-interest. More accessible engines on the market means more beginner devs who may graduate to Epic in a few years, and more products to sell on the EGS. Also more devs potentially means more asset store customers.
Regardless, it’s certainly more helpful to the industry than Unity at the moment.
Mozilla’s primary revenue is from Google, because Google doesn’t want Chrome to be broken up by the FTC. Same reason Microsoft kept Apple afloat in the dark times before Jobs returned.
I was thinking the same thing! It’s always weird when I see these videos and it looks like they have no clue what’s going on. I guess I just assume everyone that would be associated with the game would also know how to play them.
Someone who is sponsored by an account seller, i.o.w. who doesn't mind breaking ToS but then seems to complain about others scripting, i.e. breaking ToS might not be the most unbiased and reliable source.
They wouldn’t act like this, if this stupid game wouldn’t exist. They never neglected other people, this started with them playing lol. I tried playing with them, but they kept insulting me for dying and even started a kick vote against me the last time I played with them. This game changed them and destroyed our friendship.
this is utterly bullshit. Everybody can get addicted to something, this has nothing to do with the personality. The game changed them, they were never like this.
You have a very biased and immature mindset towards the situation tbh and I can’t really waste any more time on this, but blaming the game for your friends not being nice to you anymore is just not realistic
it seems more like you are biased towards the game because you are defending it with false claims and calling me immature. An addiction can influence the personality but the personality cannot influence if a person developes one. Everybody is able to be addicted, some people are genetically just more likely to.
Addiction, compulsion, whatever you want to call it, it’s well known a lot of games have mechanics intended to keep people playing a long time, and for some it can be a serious problem. I’ve had friends (yes, more than one) addicted to MMOs who would play for 48+ hours literally non-stop. That’s not healthy, especially if real life responsibilities and connections are being neglected for it. Skinner box mechanics can be as bad for players as loot box mechanics.
I would love a nice league community in the fediverse, but I'm not that much of a hardcore League nerd, so I'll guess I'll wait until one finally takes off.
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