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Video game thread.
I played return to moria this past two weeks. It's a survival crafting game. Gameplay wise it is fairly standard for the genre. The setting of middle earth is fun. I'm not a massive LOTR nerd, so I'm sure I missed some subtleties.
There are some mechanics that definitely make the game better suited for co-op. I played it alone and felt like I was missing out. Storage sizes always felt too small, there were legendary gear items that you could only carry one of, and you could be picked up upon death by a comrade if you had one. I eventually downloaded a mod to fix the first two issues. It expanded storage and allowed carrying multiple legendary items.
Progression happens entirely through gear. And gear drops on death. Corpse runs were not as brutal as I feared. The game seemed to handle agro and grave placement in a way that helped corpse runs.
Resource collecting was generally pretty standard but sometimes I'd find myself making fun little mining platforms to get higher.
The map is procedurally generated, but it's more like pre-made rooms that are stuck together in an odd assortment rather than fully new terrain each time.
Navigation was tricky with the map not helping much except to provide general directions. I ended memorizing a lot of tunnel layouts in order to get where I needed to go.
Replayability felt low. I didn't want to totally start from scratch after getting used to all my awesome gear. The next update is supposedly adding NPCs for bases, I'll probably replay the game when that comes out.
I've still mostly been playing Silksong. It is fantastic. It is a great followup to Hollow Knight, a great example of a sequel: more content with just enough of a new spin to keep things fresh while still staying true to all the things that made the first one great.
The thing that most confuses me is: why aren't more games like this? At this price point. It was made by 3 people. Yes, it took 7 years and probably re-used a lot of development assets from Hollow Knight but... why aren't more games like this? This level of quality to price ratio. Why can't more studios make similar games on similar budgets? You wouldn't need to charge $60 for your game if you only needed to pay 3 salaries. And on the other side, there are lots of cheap indie games that are crap in comparison. Why can't all of the 3 people studios produce games of this quality?
Obviously there's talent and inspiration and stuff that varies and this might just be an outlier of 3 geniuses who are disproportionately skilled at what they do. But what are they actually doing differently that all of the other indie studios haven't been doing?
I hope you value information over good writing, for I only have the former.
I'm quite sure that the product of Silksong was the goal, and not the money it made. A lot of old games were made by intelligent people who loved video games. Many newer games are made by soulless corporations who only want money, and I bet only the programmers that said company hire likes video games. The managers and CEOs probably don't know much about games at all. I'm also very confident that these programmers aren't given a lot of freedom over the product, nor time to make it. If the end product is chosen by somebody who doesn't know video games and who wants to make lots of money, then it will be a generic copy of something which has been proven to work. It will deliver the minimum gameplay, and be designed to use every exploit to get players hooked to it (gambling, log-in rewards, loot-boxes) and make money (always-online-model, selling user data, requiring an account, DLC), and minimizing moderation costs (bad servers, no voice chat, strict rules, no user-created content, no mods, no private servers, rootkit anticheats, poor support). Such a game will never be great, for it will would be released before it could ever be polished to that degree; past the minimum viable product, ever new update would be dedicated not to add additional value, but to milk the current value. I'm not sure how Candy Crush and Angry birds squeezed billions of dollars out of two games which are actually clones of old, free flash games (which didn't even become all that popular, look up Crush the Castle and Bejeweled), but a lot of companies seem to think that they can do it too.
Arjin is correct, too, programming is pretty hard. And programming has this interesting property where bad code makes all the future programming vastly harder.
So, why don't we have more good indie games? From what I can tell, people who make Indies aren't doing anything wrong, they just stop too early. Most games I have on steam can be completed in 10 hours or less. It feels like I'm buying demos. All the legendary games which has existed so far (TF2, Garry's mod, Warcraft 3, Terraria, Minecraft, Factorio, Diablo 2, Roblox, and The Sims come to mind) are ones you can play for 1000+ hours. Notice how all these games have communities and user-created content? They have custom servers and modpacks. They basically allow the users to create more content, and content created by users has soul. Games which are merely good or great still have 100+ hours of content or a lot of replayability (Pokemon, older GTA), and multiplayer (Monster Hunter, Fortnite, newer GTA). By the way, if your mix all the traits of a popular game but lack programming ability, you get games like 7 Days To Die :P 11 years of early access! And despite being "released", it's clearly not finished.
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