For the last decades they are a second party developer at best. And Nintendo owns 1/3 of the Pokémon Company. And another third is owned by Creatures which is independent from Nintendo only on paper.
Praise where praise is due: They did pump out a ton of free updates. Does this compensate for the terrible state the game was released in? That’s something everyone needs to judge for themselves imo.
Does the game have what they once promised now? Is it “good” yet? I think that’s a more difficult question. If I was to criticise Hello Games for anything, than that even now they have not met some of the expectations they set. At least not for me personally.
And I’m not talking about bs speculation or hype, I am talking about things they have said would be in the game, some of which are still not here, and many of them feel like an alpha version of what you would expect. I can’t help but feel disappointed even today.
Given the number of upvotes by posts, it seems that the reaction to Hello Game is a reflection to the industry rather than the actual quality of the game and the intention of Hello Games.
I only played RPG Maker games when RPG Maker 2000 (and 2003) were the only ones available. And just recently tried out some later releases with the Open Source implementation of RPG Maker 2000/2003 called EasyRPG using RetroArch. :D As someone who is oldschool, my favorite games I played are Vampire’s Dawn and Chocobo Panic (and Chocobo Panic in Space). The Chocobo games aren’t RPGs at all, and are stylized Pac Man like games. There are a few German games I played (but never finished) and don’t remember the names anymore, mostly horror themed adventures… :-(
There are some modern RPG Maker games that look pretty “professional”. Need to play one to see how things have evolved.
They continued to work on the game years after its bad reception. They could have stopped and ignored it. But they worked on it and gave lot of free updates that changed the game dramatically. Other companies would ask money in form of DLC in example. The launch was a disaster and they deserved the hate. But the “redemption” is a different issue and they earned the good will.
I know your question is likely rhetorical, but for the same reason. They improved on it enough to drown out the bad press and turn people’s opinions.
I think that both games are good games, and they’re both fun. They had to meet unrealistic release expectations both internally and externally so had a terrible experience at launch. There’s clearly more money in fixing the product and improving public opinion though, so they did.
I think people often forget that many games are the product of a really significant amount of people working for a significant amount of time, and that both the company paying them and the people working would like money to go in instead of out.
Selling entertainment/art is sometimes self contradicting.
Demons Roots is probably the best RPG Maker game I’ve played that was actually playable as an RPG. (So, not counting things like To The Moon which other people have already mentioned.)
I wasn’t a fan of most of the sexual content in Demons Roots, but taking the whole thing as basically a giant love letter to fucked up doujinshi stories – i.e. to unpolished indie writing with wild genre bending plot twists in addition to the hentai stuff – I can accept it for what it is. The game has that RPGMaker wabi-sabi; it’s not especially well-crafted software… but the combat was OK (unlike a lot of indie RPGs), the music was good – a mix of original and mostly well chosen asset packs (I still listen to some of it occasionally!), and, without getting into spoilers, it did a couple of very memorable things…
That dominoes shit makes no sense to me. I’ve tried to look up the rules multiple times online and then I go into the game and try to make a legal move and the game won’t let me.
Pretty confident “Look Outside” is an RPG maker game. I cannot recommend it enough. It is an immaculately written game, and oozes passion and personality.
Because instead of the usual triple a studio promising the moon for sales then delivering a pebble and not giving a shit, it was a guy who got caught up in the hype and handled it badly, and then him and his small studio worked their asses off to make the game justify the price charged. I know it’s hard to drop the cynicism living in the modern world has instilled in us, but I genuinely think it was a collosal fuckup and not malicious, and they ACTUALLY put the time and effort in to deliver the promises they could and a fuckload more atuff that wasn’t. In a day and age of companies lying on purpose for profit and not giving a shit, it’s a breath of fresh air.
That I am willing to give the benefit of the doubt, but the mythology of redemption through free update is part of being a beta tester for LNF, that’s pragmatism on HG’s part shift their burden to the fans, not a colossal fuck-up as you claimed.
and somehow it wins “Best Ongoing Building” every year.
Except it doesn’t. It’s been nominated for Stream’s Labour of Love award six times in the past ten years, and never won it. In fact it’s never won any Steam Awards. It won Best Ongoing at the Game Awards twice, out of a decade of being ongoing, and it won a similar award from PC Gamer once.
Well that is what lot of devs do, after scamming and getting the quick money and stop working on it. But they kept working for years, still ongoing 10 years after launch. Even with the hate they got and after they got exposed.
Because, as this article that you keep linking says, they already made bank with the broken product in the first place. They could have just taken the money and closed the studio, or at least rebranding and going for the same trick again and again, as so many other actually do. They did not do that, they chose to do the opposite, which was an incredibly bold decision at the time.
You also keep linking another article showing how they made so much money recently, like in 2022, but you forget that this is now, with hindsight. In 2016 just after release, it was more dangerous for them to keep working on a game nobody trusted anymore.
And for the record, I bought NMS in 2022, and liked it okay-ish. It’s far from the best game ever, but arguing like you do that “they only added stuff they said would be in the game in the first place” is clearly fallacious.
Fair enough, I will address that. It’s a commendable act…in the game industry, but at the same time, it is the professionalism expected in another industry, which is why I brought up the building analogy in my original post.
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