The unfortunate fact is, the conceit of most action games relies on some pretty dumb ideas.
Every opponent is committed to ending your life, even to the point of fighting on when 80% of their unit is dead.
Your hero is skilled enough at combat to win hundreds of fights without any permanent injuries
The “light, casual” quests you’re put on like retrieving a child’s missing doll are important enough to for enemies to relentlessly guard with their life.
People have pointed this out for everyone from Mario to Nathan Drake, etc. Some games even try to base a “moment of introspection” around it, and it sort of falls flat.
It’s definitely not just indie games. I was looking forward to the Trails in the Sky remake, checked on its discussion forums, and it’s polluted with overblown “censorship” claims, sprinkled with “Guess the game FAILED cause it went WOKE” cringe.
If only Steam had something like BlueSky’s crowdsourced blocklists. That would be a freeform way of handling the issue.
Before the poster makes any other posts, they must answer the prompt: “Apologies! We’ve been dealing with an influx of hate speech and bigotry, so to clarify your concerns, could you please provide the intended meaning of the word “Woke” in this post?”
The excuse doesn’t work well when “retro 3D” games are actively being made by indie devs today.
As long as it’s a uniform aesthetic aimed for and achieved by the devs, it can survive a long time. I’d say just as much of GTA: SA and a lot of Nintendo games.
It also goes to show that a lot of tactical/modern Xbox / 360 games never really had any stylistic imitators in the modern era, and for good reason.
Unfortunately, there are some very celebrated games that commit to this approach. Final Fantasy XIV and WoW keep getting away with it, and there are others.
Of course, they had to work for a long time to earn that pedigree and price tag. This certainly has not.
I’m sure it’s a good time to mention Portal though. Many gamers have said they want tighter, more focused experiences that are really worth the price tag. I guess question being, is this game all that amazing, and are gamers honest about that thinking towards prices.
I don’t think it’s such a direct lesson since it could’ve been other financial information on there. Instead of a crypto key, the game could’ve installed a keylogger that read the player’s banking password later.
It’s more of a general warning that Steam games are not necessarily safe.
From what I know of Concord, it kind of was a 7/10 game - It was functional, but just not impressive or interesting. The thing is, when it’s released with a fervent anticipation of being a “Live service HIT”, it was critically important to have a flood of players. At least indie singleplayer games can hit success late (Among Us being a perfect example, its first release didn’t really strike big)
A lot of it reads as lazy DLC meant to satisfy investors that want “value-adds” without taking a lot of development time. I’d imagine only obsessive fans (admittedly, there are many) would be considering them.
But the fact that it’s a remake of a 20 year old game doesn’t seem like it would affect the value. For reference, the old one was top down with prerendered chibi sprites. The new one is fully 3D with voice acting. It’s a pretty sizable change in appearance, even how the combat functions. $60 is probably normal, though it makes sense that for anyone unsure about it, either play the demo or just wait for it to go on sale.
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.