Strategy games are never featured outside maybe a grudging nod to StarCraft or Warcraft 3. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a list that mentions a 4X, a sim, or a non-Blizzard RTS. The closest you’ll usually see is someone listing Black & White.
Game journalists have to bounce between games as a job, so it sort of makes sense that the majority of them go for linear, shorter RPGs, and thus over-fixate on them.
Not even close. As others pointed out, this is definitely recency bias. Maybe 1-2 games this year will become “classics”. There are years out there with 7-10+ games like that.
I don’t know if anyone else here read the books as kids, but I’m hopeful they’re leaning more into the lore of D’ni, which the older games were always (imo) too slow and puzzle-focused to deliver well.
Yeah, I can imagine the frustration of seeing people who don’t know anything about what happened during development blame you as a dev for something that may have been design decisions or budgetary or time constraints that you had no say in or control over.
“So sure, you can dislike parts of a game,” he concludes. “You can hate on a game entirely. But don’t fool yourself into thinking you know why it is the way it is (unless it’s somehow documented and verified), or how it got to be that way (good or bad).”
“Chances are, unless you’ve made a game yourself, you don’t know who made certain decisions; who did specific work; how many people were actually available to do that work; any time challenges faced; or how often you had to overcome technology itself (this one is HUGE).”
This is a totally fair take. He explicitly says it’s fine to not like the game, but just don’t try to pretend you know what happened on the back end to make it the way it was, because you’re probably gonna misplace blame.
I think MTaP and to a lesser extent MTaS both really carried over a lot of the complexity from Planet Explorers, Pathea’s first game they released internationally. It’s a survival crafting game, with a LOT of complexity (e.g. manual, voxel-based weapon and vehicle designs). I don’t think it worked well in combination with other systems like farming being very underdeveloped (in MTaP especially).
Why does “Stardew Valley” get it totally right, and the rest not get it right at all?
I am not an expert on SDV, but my wife plays basically every HM-like out there, and her take is that Barone focused so heavily on the ‘economy’ balance in SDV that all of the activities feel like they’re worth doing, so it doesn’t become “only farming”, or “only adventuring”, etc, like many others do. Even just picking up wild plants feels worth it when you drop them in the sale bin in the evening.