In principle, I agree, but I feel like part of that is just AAA vs. indie.
AAA games need to provide lots of lukewarm content, because many more casual players will buy them and expect much bang for their buck + haven’t seen this lukewarm content a million times already.
On the other hand, indies will basically only be bought by people more enthusiastic about the hobby. As such, they have to pick out one or two aspects and excel at them, so that it’s something new for that crowd.
Hello Games was indie and unknown at the time, so likely only attracted that gaming enthusiast crowd, which would have been more easily bored by the extremely lukewarm content in Starfield.
I watched it on my phone in 1080p60 and the scale didn’t bother me. It’s not like I have to read a lot of text and the precise position of the player character is mostly irrelevant, too. Like, if you get hit by a train or something, the screen will flash red and you’ll react to it, too, so I’ll know what’s going on.
Well, and I don’t look at the screen at all times anyways. 🙃
I’m not saying they’re mutually exclusive, I just find it tricky to draw information from that.
For example, I correctly assumed this to not be akin to Dungeon Keeper, which would be a city builder like Rogue in the sense of it being a dungeon crawler.
But at the same, I guess, I assume Against the Storm would have procedural map generation like Rogue did, even though I don’t really consider that typical for city builders.
And yeah, this fuzziness of the term ‘roguelite’ means I don’t really know how much city builder to expect…
Ah yes, a city builder, which is a genre pretty much opposite to the original Rogue, but make it like a lite version of Rogue. 🙃
I mean, I don’t really care. Words change meanings. But this one does hurt my brain quite a bit, trying to understand which parts of the Rogue formula they kept…
Tangentially is 2023 chock full of great games because the pandemic held up the development of so many studios?
I know, they all announced that, but as a software dev, I really don’t see why this should be the case. We largely just moved into home-office and continued working, often even at increased efficiency. I guess, building games might require somewhat more creative sessions, which are generally more productive in person, but I don’t see that making a huge difference.
My impression was rather that they had the usual delays, with maybe a few hickups at the start of the pandemic, and then they just declared the pandemic the whole reason for the delays.
As for 2023 being so full, the pandemic meant lots of people were at home, consuming digital goods. It caused a massive boom in the gaming industry. I imagine, lots of studios were able to secure (bigger) budgets during that time, which are now coming to fruition.
This is going to be an oddball suggestion, but quite a unique gaming experience, in my opinion: NodeCore
It’s basically Minecraft meets puzzling to progress through technologies.
The game is rather difficult. And it being so niche, there’s no wiki to tell you the solutions, except for actual Wikipedia, because somehow it’s relatively realistically modelled.
As such, it has this feeling of being the first human to figure these things out and I found it massively rewarding when I pushed through some of the more complex puzzles.
The whole game is completely free. Just download the Minetest engine/launcher and search for “NodeCore” in the Content-tab.
Yeah, it started its life as “Quick And Dirty Operating System” (don’t know, why they renamed it) and even that was basically a ripoff of CP/M: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/86-DOS
I guess, you can say that they did put in own effort into developing the windowing system. I wouldn’t want to call that “innovating”, since they were late to the party, but I guess, that would be moving the goal posts here…
Edit: I just remembered that even Windows was externally acquired, so I believe, it would be more correct to say that Microsoft has basically never innovated something themselves.
Gamedev is all about smokes and mirrors. A conventional software engineer will actively resent the shitfuckery you have to do, to make games run well (for good reason; it introduces complexity into already insanely complex systems).
Some performance work, you cannot defer, like fundamental design decisions (3D vs. 2D, raytracing or not) or if you’ve coded a tiny feature and for some reason, it completely obliterates performance.
But there’s always going to be tons of features that have been implemented well, they don’t obliterate performance, but if you replace them with an unintuitive/complex smoke-and-mirror solution, then you may be able to shave off 20% execution time for that feature. Or not. Often no real way to know, except to try it out.
Some of these do need to be tackled throughout development, too, but it’s easy to end up with a big block at the end of development.
Especially, if you had to rush a number of features that marketing promised, so that you can make the release date that marketing promised many months before anyone has any fucking clue how long it’ll take.
I have two open-source games to suggest. These not being in it for the profit means they can spend an eternity fixing bugs. Downside is that they’re not the most modern games in the world.
Anyways:
0 A.D. – Sort of AoE2 meets Empire Earth. Mind that the AI is brutal in this one.
Battle for Wesnoth – Turn-based, tile-based, with different terrain and time of day giving different races advantages. So, relatively dynamic gameplay despite being turn-based.