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Psh, Valheim’s what started the resurgence of indie survival crafting games. Not giving it it’s due is naive.
Like one of the few contenders still with some players is Enshrouded. Enshrouded’s steamchart 24 hour peak was 18k, with a 30 day avg of ~16k.
Valheim had a 24 hour peak of 30k, and a 30 day avg of ~23k.
Valheim came out in 2021. Enshrouded in 2024.
A game 3 years older, is still dominating the space. Even just based on those numbers, it’s pretty clear which one is the gold standard in the space – taking your opinion out of it, and my opinion out of it, the data that devs should be looking at is clear if they want the game to appeal to more players.
The demo’s promising, but the game is a weak entrant into the survival/exploration space at present imo.
Years ago, Valheim entered the genre and basically set the bar – and as far as I’ve seen few others have come close since to mimicking the same immersion/feeling as it managed. It should be so stupidly easy for a game dev to play valheim / look at valheim mods, and say “ok, that’s the floor we need to meet in terms of mechs and whatnot, and we gotta move forward from there!”.
Easy example: Windrose is often billed/marketed as an exploration game. And they did proc gen maps, which is great for exploration mechs as it keeps the terrain ‘new’ and prevents easy google-scumming to circumvent ‘exploration’ gameplay. If you look at valheim on this front, you’ll note that a lot of players play without the map even, as it’s more immersive for exploration to have to make your own landmarks / navigation methods (one of the most popular mods makes it so the minimap is only ‘visible’ when you go to your base/a specific buildable station).
Instead of going that route and leaning in to the sorts of things that the literal fanbase of this genre has been modding in to games of this sort for YEARs, Windrose provides you with the minimap, and marks every POI nearby for you to ensure you don’t just randomly stumble across new things – I mean, who’d want that sense of discovery/exploration in an exploration game anyhow, right? Their markers even have a counter for how many ‘chests’ are available at the POI, and how many you’ve found, so that you can be sure to fully complete the location. It’s stupid.
Still, it looks fairly good, base mechs for combat are ok. So I’m leaving it on my wishlist for now, but if it doesn’t change a bunch before EA/release, it’ll likely sputter and poof.
That poor cat, are you forcing it to play EA games???
Animal Humane Society operates the primary animal cruelty reporting line in Minnesota: 612-772-9999 or report online at [email protected].
Eh, take it however you want I guess.
I still find games that I enjoy these days. Two that my friends and I have played through for a while are Valheim and Abiotic Factor. One reason those are more enticing, is that the proc gen on a game like Valheim means you can’t as easily stumble across a post saying “Go here to unlock bear porn scene” or whatever. And while Abiotic is less random, it’s less well known/saturated by marketing shit, so there’s plenty of “wait wtf was that?!” and “oh neat, I can do something new that we hadn’t realised we could do before!” as we play.
So given that I still find games currently that fall into my preferences from way way back, it’s still something some games are capable of accomplishing. BG3, I’ve basically never made it past Act 1, as I get bored with it and its pseudo predictability and mundane mechanics. Like even the Divinity series from Larian, I found more engaging from the tactical fight POV just because the way they did elemental combo attacks on enemies and interaction with world components far better than in BG3, from my perspective in terms of player engagement – like there’s still ‘traces’ of that stuff in BG3, but its neutered. Plus they were less known games, without a constant stream of marketing shit showing you exactly how to min/max those events.
Agreed. I’ve seen PE take overs of other software firms, and a big part of those take overs is the human capital / access to a team of skilled professional developers. PE typically doesn’t just ‘fire’ everyone en masse, but rather chops the shop up and resells parts of the org as it scavenges the remains.
So this smells like something more fraudulent, and connected to SS – especially as there have been notes that the intrepid ‘board’, on paper in filings, was just SS, the CEO. The messaging that came out from their comms director (I think that’s what she was?) yesterday seems to generally support this, in that the Senior Management team was completely in the dark about anything that was going on – they had practically the same notification of events, as everyone else. A board wouldn’t normally do that, as the senior management team would each have a relationship/reporting obligations tied to board meetings (eg. c-level HR managers working out HR policies/budgets, Accountants providing audited monthly financials to the board, etc). I mean, a company that size would likely have an accountant, who would report out the financial state of the org at senior manager meetings – so they’d all see the layoffs coming way in advance, not suddenly get a WARN notice that they aren’t getting paid for the last pay period. The CEO is ‘always’ at board meetings as managements rep, but other SMs show up / attend based on agenda items/topics. Long and short, a shift like this wouldn’t come out of nowhere at that level.
All that said, the comms director also noted that initially they’d thought it was just going to be 100 developers let go, but a day or two later found out it was everyone – and it sounds like these were all ‘local’ developers, given that she was setting up an in person job fair to try and help x-staff find work. AoC having over 100+ developers at ~100k salaries is an absurd carrying cost that would likely be impossible to make work longer term financially. The sub costs for the player count just wouldn’t support that spend, let alone licensing/server costs where they were already in the red pre-steam release (they had about $800k in hosting debts they were gettin sued for, from what I recall). So I really don’t know what Intrepids business case generally looked like, but based on information available it seems pretty clear that their business model was unrealistic, hence pumpy dumpy.
Oh, I’m not trying to say there aren’t some gems around. It’s just that the quality options vs the garbage is already at a really bad ratio, and to find something like a ‘quality’ indie game, you gotta sift through a lot of junk. And with marketing blitz’s, and the pervasive use of things like influencers who’ll steer conversations on various social media (including reddit, not sure about lemmy yet but wouldn’t surprise me if it was happening here too)… they’ll hype garbage, or they’ll inundate you with so much marketing stuff that it basically spoils parts of ‘good’ games.
Easy example: the thing I liked most about the old BG games, was discovering/exploring etc. That style of gameplay was obliterated for me by how much marketing / comments / noise there was about that game – noise that was basically impossible to avoid if you’re online at all.
Eh, the gaming industry generally feels pretty dry/dead these days to me, even with record numbers of games available. There’s just so many crappy half made ‘alpha’ or ‘early access’ things around. The very small number of ‘better’ games are often marketed so heavily that I find them boring and don’t even bother to finish them – like BG3. And a lot of the “triple A” content often trades engaging/fun gameplay for rent-seeking features without regard to actual player enjoyment.
A new tool from Google won’t fix that. So I guess I’d sort of agree with the take-two guy.
Yes yes, tactics matter a bit, as does RNG. But it’s still a fairly linear progression line. Like it’s possible to get to the first on-land brain thing fight without hitting level 2. It’s possible to win that fight as a level 1, with just you and shadowheart, technically. But its far far easier if you just play the way they intended, get to level 2 before that fight, and cheese it.
As noted elsewhere, I haven’t even been interested enough to get to the goblin village. So Halsin, Minsc, Minthara are all people I never bothered to get to. Emo goth cleric girl is feminine, though it feels very niche – like a ‘token’ straight semi-human looking girl. So if you want a ‘traditional’ partner, you’re stuck with emo girl? meh. At least if you play as a girl you have a choice of more human looking partners.
Wyll I sorta just assumed was gay, cause all the others were already gay for my ugly little gnome – plus you meet him while he’s taking care of children in the camp, and he runs around in light armor/isn’t a ‘physical’ character class. The most physical male in the first bit is asterion, but he is more agility/dex, which are traditionally more female oriented in d&d (I think old editions gave women +1 dex, men +1 str or something along those lines) – and he’s obsessed with sucking my gnome.
In a broader sense though, its the assertiveness of the different characters that I think causes the impression on my side. All of the women are pretty direct / blunt / to the point about ‘most’ topics (outside of story elements like shadowhearts whatsit); the men are sorta coy and demure.
There’s a whole lot more they could’ve done in that space, but they left it essentially the same as previous games – while I get that it’s well executed, I don’t think of it as having more ‘depth’ in this area than anything previous. So I find it boring / unmotivating.
It’s strange, I still have real difficulty getting ‘in’ to Baldurs gate 3, even with all the media hyping it for a long time. And one reason for that is I don’t find it all that ‘deep’, and its linear progression makes me lose interest partway through the starting areas (never gotten to the goblin camp or w/e).
Like take the romances. Even in the little bit that I played, the way affection is handled is just boring / tired / done. All the male chars are sorta femmy, all the female chars are sorta butch, and none of them seem to care that, like, I’m some tiny scrawny gnome bard. They all want to screw me, just cause I’m nice to them – all the men turned gay almost immediately after meeting me, something I guess they had to tweak in a patch. And it all seems to happen based on pre-determined/defined relationship algorithms - be nice, gain a point towards boning NPC X, if you cross a threshold trigger an event. That’s been done literally for decades and decades in the CRPG genre.
The encounters/combats are all really rigid and essentially scripted in nature, at least the parts I’ve seen. Go to point X, encounter monster group A, which is tooled to certain party level ranges. If you can’t win, you’ve gone to an encounter out of the general ‘order’ you’re meant to do them. Go back, find the encounter you missed to level up, then return and progress further. Again, very generic and something that’s been done for decades.
Rigid party size, camp with toons you can swap in and out, complete with a skill retrainer guy. Immersion breaking, but again, a trope / mechanic that’s been around for literally decades.
Yes, sure, ok whatever. Art is a generally iterative process that builds on prior attempts, historically. Even Shakespeare’s plays ripped off themes from similar contemporary works. Your claim that we’d be left with a homogenous list of games is completely unfounded.
ID software put out the earliest “big” FPS games, and many FPS games since have ripped off ideas that were used by ID. Hell, the idea of Grappling hooks in Quake/FPS came primarily from the popularity of a Quake Mod called 3wave CTF that brought those things in. “Dur dur, they shouldn’t have made any other FPS games using those same popular elements, cause homogeny!!”.
I’ve said what I wanted to say about the game, and supported it with some data that outlines how popular features are ‘outside of just my own opinion’. I’m gonna stop bothering to discuss this with you at this point, as I really don’t see any reason to do so given your stance. If they leave everything as is, and you get your quirky game with bland features for exploration etc, and it sputters and dies, I hope you think back to this exchange.