I’d be happy if they pandered more to controller players without removing the decision making in base building, like Halo Wars did. I always look to Cannon Brawl as an indication of what RTS can still be (by which I mean, not exactly like Cannon Brawl).
Is this a modern/old dichotomy? Playing through Metaphor right now, I agree that they go with the old-school dungeon crawler approach, but Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy VII are definitely not modern, and I don’t think they’d fall into the same bucket.
I’d make that trade, easily. More often I find games these days are too long to their own detriment than that they felt like they ought to be that long. Your mileage may vary on a game by game basis, but in general, that’s how it’s been lately.
It’s true, and I’d certainly like to see some of these studios try to target making many games at that budget than a single game at ten times that every 7 or 8 years, but even these “cheaper” games you listed still take a long time to make, and I think that’s the problem to be solved. Games came out at a really rapid clip 20-25 years ago, where you’d often get 3 games in a series 3 years in a row. We can argue about the relative quality of those games compared to what people make now and how much crunch was involved, but if the typical game is taking more than 3 years to make, that still says to me that maybe their ambitions got out of hand. The time involved in making a game is what balloons a lot of these budgets, and whereas you could sell 3 full-priced games 3 years in a row back in the day, now you’re selling 1 every 6 years, and you need to sell way, way more of them to make the math work out.
Alright, not like for like exactly, and at 34M, we’re stretching the definition of shoestring. I’ll bet KC:D’s sequel spent far more, for one. I’m with you that more of these studios ought to be aiming for reasonable fidelity in a game that can be made cheaply, but when each of those studios took more than 5 years to build their sequels, that becomes more and more unlikely.
Baldur’s Gate 3 showed studios that gamers are looking for an actual complete game for their $60
This language always misses me. Every game I buy is complete. Adding an expansion to it later doesn’t make it less complete, and it’s not like BG3 wasn’t without major bugs.
It’s hard for them to realize because good graphics used to effectively sell lots of copies of games. If they spent their graphics budget on writers, they’d have spent way too much on writing.
I felt far more restricted by D:OS2’s armor system. Freeform classes sound great on paper, but it also means you kind of naturally end up at a spot where you’ve got everything instead of making meaningfully difficult choices in classes or multiclassing. Learning abilities from books leads to a lot of money bottlenecks and leveling decisions that I didn’t care for. The way that the combat usually doesn’t have any chance to hit, but then does very occasionally, makes missing an attack feel like bullshit rather than a calculated risk. I’m also looking forward to whatever they do next, maybe even a sci-fi interstellar RPG, but I hope they don’t go back to the Divinity well too often for RPG mechanics.
I can’t say conclusively that every LAN game on GOG is DRM-free on Steam, but there are times where Steam’s DRM has caused annoyances for me when trying to play offline on Steam Deck that I would not run into with side loaded GOG games, which I detailed in another comment here.