Yeah, it feels like those consoles would be more expensive, for hardware that’s not going to be terribly stronger, to play games which don’t need the visual upgrade, and all of that wants to be paid by players with less money to spend.
I feel like this isn’t really a new development. Back when LAN parties and local multiplayer were still a thing, games like TeeWorlds, Worms etc. were popular, because they ran on potatoes and you could often get them for free.
The actual fun then came from dicking around with or competing against your friends. The game itself does not need to be ground-breaking for that.
Hell, it technically started even earlier than that, with physical card games and board games and such. Just play them with friends and it’s fun.
I believe, rings of evasion are generally quite good for tanks, because you can be running around in the clunkiest armor and still get a flat +6 or so to evasion. Same goes for mages and rogues with rings of protection.
But yeah, I’ve also killed so many characters due to hasty decision-making. Just killed an Armataur + Wu Jian run today, because my health was running low and I figured offense is the best defense. I could’ve blinked away no problem. Hell, I could’ve launched a much better offense at practically no cost by using Serpent’s Lash, but nope, just ended up tapping the keys I always tap and hoping for RNGesus to save me.
I mean, I don’t have a ton of skin in the game here, as I don’t care much for horror games either way.
But yeah, I just assume that they say they’re cautious to calm the fans, but they actually can’t be cautious, since well, they can only really delay by a whole year at a time, and if they do that, then they have two games in the year afterwards.
They did only pre-plan a handful of years, so maybe they can just delay the following games by a year each, too.
Oh man, and they’re gonna want to release in autumn, too, to be in time for spooky season. So, if it isn’t done at that point, they’re likely to release in an unfinished state rather than delay by a whole year…
I would argue that a substantial reason for their popularity is also just that devs have fun when developing them.
With most other genres, you’ve seen the story a gazillion times, you’ve done each quest a thousand times etc… It just gets boring to test the game and it becomes really difficult to gauge whether it still is fun to someone who isn’t tired of it.
Meanwhile with roguelikes, the random generation means that each run is fresh and interesting. And if you’re not having fun on your trillionth run, that’s a real indicator that something needs to be added or improved.
Ah yeah, it does auto-save regularly, too. But I don’t think, I’ve ever seen it crash without me doing some out-of-game fuckery. 🙃
Well, and of course, losing progress is baked into the gameplay of a roguelike, so whether your savegame corrupts or you die yet another stupid death, you just start another run and you’re right back into the action.
I also think ANY game should have a “full potato” mode capable of running in older computers with NONE of the fancy graphics stuff that we have access to today, despite having a decent computer now.
Problem is that the fancy graphics stuff isn’t just additive.
For example, raytracing is actually relatively simple to implement, since you just make light behave like it does in real-world physics, according to a couple relatively straightforward rules and material properties.
Lighting without raytracing involves tons of smokes and mirrors hacks and workarounds. For example, mirrors were often faked by building the same room behind the wall, with everything inverted, including the player character’s animations.
So, making a game with potato graphics typically requires building a second version of the game.
Of course, there can be a mode that does just turn off the additive stuff, so only that which does not require changing the game implementation. But that can just be one of the graphics presets…
There’s a roguelike I play, which combats save-scumming by only giving one save slot per character. And so the only reason to save the game, is when you’re done playing. So, you hit Ctrl+S to save, and it instantly quits as well. 🙃
Yeah, I also have to say that I’ll often not even bother trying to work out what’s good and what is not, because there’s a voice in the back of my head that says, well, it should all be equally viable, because of balancing.
That’s a big part of the reason why I like random map generation, because it isn’t possible to make all options equally viable. Sometimes, you level up your axe skill and never find a good axe, and just have to deal with that.