Probably why Lethal Company, a game made by one person with little experience, is the 9th highest selling game on Steam.
I hope this happens more often and AAA studios realize they can also make small experimental games with small budgets and few staff. They don’t need to spend 10 years doing nothing but work on their next monolithic title. Give some passionate staffers a chance with their unique idea and release smaller games along the way.
It is disingenuous to say that the lethal company dev (zeekers) has little experience. He already has like 5 games on steam and some of them got very popular.
And the only options for mobile games nowadays are gachas! Rip gaming
Truth. I have a decent amount of spare Google Rewards credit to spend on games but there are no good games to get. (any recommendations?)
Polytopia if you like strategy. You can buy tribes if you want to, but the basic 4 they give you have the “strongest” in the game, there’s no p2w. I’ve ended up buying all the tribes and am well on my way to all the skins (they only have one extra skin for some of the tribes at the moment) but that’s because I play it a ton and have for years, so it’s just to support the dev.
Dev is active and makes improvements regularly, just released a long anticipated update that had some significant game play changes so it feels fresh, and the changes seem to make it more interesting / balanced so far.
There’s also a very dedicated fan community on discord that sets up frequent tournaments or team games if you find you like it.
I actually considered going back to Polytopia and grabbing a tribe or two. Can you recommend any specific one if you were to choose only one?
Hmmm. I’d say if you want to try some very different gameplay, one of the “special” tribes. Cymanti or Polaris can be quite fun. Aquarion used to be fairly weak but they’re a lot better following the update, elyrion was actually pretty weakened by the update but devs know this and are working on ways to make them a bit stronger.
If you just want good music, I like Yaddak and ai mo. Quetzali are fun as well. Lux is versatile but they’re more expensive than any other tribe just as a joke about their in game culture lol so buy them late imo. Wouldn’t recommend vengir till later also, swords are cool but can be hard to play since their econ takes time to develop.
I was in the same boat and stumbled on Dawncaster. It’s the best mobile game I’ve ever played. I’d honestly play it on PC too, but it’s strangely mobile only. You could compare it to Slay the Spire, but I have found Dawncaster much more satisfying and fun for me personally. Also very active devs who are opposed to micro-transactions.
Spaceflight simulator. Good stuff. Free for the basic stuff, you pay for extra components, planets and building space
Even some PC Games are Gachas now, disgusting.
I wouldn’t say the only option
You can run Winlator and play indie games and older games (runs Fallout 3 and Oblivion)
The industry at large has gone to shit, but there are positives. Game dev tools are more accessible now than they’ve ever been. The indie market is thriving and has recently produced games that are some of the most creative and interesting I’ve ever seen
Share some gems? :)
If you like story focused games:
Outer Wilds
Disco Elysium
Omori (TW very dark game, haven’t finished it yet)
If you need a good gameplay with it:
Katana zero
Sanabi
Furi
Hollow knight
It’s not great! 2023 games that I have really enjoyed this past year have been Tears of the Kingdom, Cassette Beasts, and Hi-Fi Rush.
After Cyberpunk I decided to be done paying $50+ to take up a quarter of my disk with a highly-acclaimed game that turns out to be the same old cookie-cutter 3D game with an expensive makeover. Anymore I mostly just play small indie games that friends recommend, and generally have a way better experience for it.
After this supposed stellar update dropped that overhauled the game or when the game initially came out?
This was back when it was new - my thoughts the entire 30 hours I was playing were things like:
“Johnny Silverhand is more annoying than Jar Jar and I will do anything to not hear his stupid fucking voice anymore” “this ‘hacking’ is one of the worst minigames I’ve ever seen” “the setting is ripped straight from PK Dick and doesn’t feel like it really lends anything to the story besides ‘high tech stuff that looks flashy on screen’” “oh the background i spend ten minutes consiering before choosing does fuckall about shit except slightly reword a few dialogs” “my god, every single character is insufferable” “oh wow, my inventory is full again already, and not a single thing in it is worth fuck for shit” “these physics are just as shitty as that Witcher 3 game I wasted money on last year” “this button feels really awkward to press when i need it but i don’t feel like editing the config by hand again” “holy shit when will this cutscene be over? There we g- DAMN IT THERE’S MORE? STFU ALREADY”
It was buggy but the bugs were the least of my worries. I came away feeling like I was promised Mexican food and then was given a cold soggy leftover Taco Bell burrito, and frankly after having basically the same experience with the super-awesome totally-finished fully-patched all-dlc-included GotY version of The Witcher 3 I really don’t trust CDPR to fix shit.
Thanks for the write-up, sums up my experience with both games
Oh, man, I had forgotten those were this year.
My list also includes:
Pikmin 4
Baldur’s Gate 3
Spider-Man 2
Street Fighter 6
Mortal Kombat 1
Dead Space and RE4 remake
The Talos Principle 2And I didn’t even get around to Alan Wake 2, which everybody’s been raving about. Or that Dave the Builder thing. Or Lies of P. Or Jedi Survivor. And I guess I’m not counting the new Prince of Persia because that’s this year, technically. And I’m not into 2D Mario games, so I’m guessing skipping Super Mario Wonder makes me a bit of an outlier.
Look, I know it feels good to be jaded and edgy and cynical, but… yeah, no, it was an all-time great year for games in 2023. And a terrible year for the games industry. But the games? So good.
… your list is basically all “20+ year old franchise/licensed property”. bruh if there’s that little that’s fresh or origninal then I’ argue that’s a terrible year for games.
Talos Principle 2 does demand my attention though, the first one was stellar and still looks gorgeous.
That is a very weird take.
So let me get this straight, Street Fighter 6 is a “20 year old franchise” so not fresh and original (it is maybe the biggest redefinition of the series since SF3, but hey). Somehow The Talos Principle 2, a direct sequel to a 10 year old game… not that.
But also, Dave the Builder, Sea of Stars, Hi-Fi Rush, Life of P, Lethal Company, Terra Nil, Humanity, Against the Storm… even going by new IP alone it’s been a great year. Not that I accept your premise, sequels and licensed games can obviously be, and indeed have been, fantastic and innovative.
I am very confused and you are either being disingenuous or so comitted to arbitrary requirements that any year is an equally good year.
“the nth iteration of sold-out BRAND that’s older than most people reading this that belongs to a genre so niche only its dedicated fanbase can tell what the hell is even different from the last entry is at least as fresh and original as the sole sequel to a one-off game that was actually made in this century” and “looking forward to an original game you liked getting a single sequel makes you a hypocrite for not also thinking the 2893598th BRAND niche game most people can’t tell from its predecessor is equally exciting” strike me as outright bizarre things to say and it’s weird and sad that when you reach for “fresh and original” the thing you come up with is [moldy franchise] [#].
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I said one thing on that list sounded interesting to me and you’re having a tizzy because i think the rest sound like the brand cash-ins they are. Sorry I don’t think “they made another DnD CRPG and a Spider-man game the way they’ve done thrice a decade for forty years” makes it “a great year for games”.
It’s also weird that you take time to dissociate BG3 from the rest of the series despite the number, and then go on to pedantically assert that I should care about spider-man 2 as much as talos principle 2 because number (I think that was your point anyway, it’s not very lucid). I’m tired of elves and wizards and superheroes and fucking remakes dude, it’s so fucking stale. It’s not fun to me - sorry for being happy about the puzzle game I liked getting a sequel while being shit-tired of grindy crap and dead genres.
how dare i say that I’m glad the weird existential puzzle game got a sequel while not also simping over FRANCHISE that I was bored of by the time I hit puberty like a good consumer?
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Too bad pretty much everyone, including Larian, Owlcat, all of these “we’re doing it for the game and for the fans” adherents have also fallen for the “Rush to Market, Fix It Later” mentality. Been deep-diving Rogue Trader for the past weeks and playing through rough Beta content really isn’t fun when the game is considered launched and complete. Same for Baldur’s Gate 3, I binged it at launch and had to stop in Act III because most of my quests were soft-locked, or displayed incorrect information in the Journal.
You could have figured that out in the century it spent in Early Access, I suppose.
Honestly, yeah, I do think devs need to reassess what is a showstopping bug and what isn’t. Not much question on that. But also, I have seen worse. I even played a ton of Cities Skylines 2 at launch. Which paid off weirdly, because once they fixed the balance (or at least improved it) my starter city is now an insane utopia.
In any case, my backlog is enormous, I can wait for games to be actually finished before I play them. In BG3’s case, I think there was the one quest that didn’t pop once, but I spent a hundred hours on it just fine… and then had to go live my real life, so I still have to do the last act at some point. I’ll get to it.
None of that changes that this year had banger after banger, from studios large, medium and small. You can complain about many things relating to the business, but man, the skill, creativity and artistry from game developers of all stripes is nuts.
I couldn’t get behind Tears of the Kingdom. Idk what it was, just didn’t draw me in. Couldn’t keep at it. Put in 10hrs and haven’t picked it up in…3 months?
Part of it for me was that the people you meet in the first game don’t reference the first game. Like pyrah for example has a massive crush on link in BotW yet in TotK she acts distantly to him. Also I felt it was repetitive, especially when I’ve already done similar if not the same things in BotW like korok seeds.
It did really feel super samey. I think if I hadn’t played BotW I would have seen TotK through to the end, but sadly I did.
The steam reviews for cassette beasts drove me away from it, what did you like about it? Also what’s your in game time, if you don’t mind me asking?
I’m curious considering it’s currently at 96% positive, what about the reviews drove you away? For me, the game captured the feeling of playing Pokemon for the first time (Heart Gold) again. It was similar enough on a basic level to draw me in, but all the fundamentals and mechanics are totally different and bring a wave of fresh air to the stale Pokemon formula.
If you’ve played Pokemon on the DS and didn’t like it, this game probably won’t be your kind of thing. If you did though, Cassette Beasts has a lot going for it. It has creative monster designs, a cast of unique side characters with their own story quests, a very memorable soundtrack (including my most played song of 2023), a not-overwhelmingly-massive open world with plenty to do, and just a smidge of analog horror.
I have ~30 hours in it iirc.
It’s just Pokémon but if the series grew up with the fanbase instead of stagnating on the age group it did.
It’s a really good “monster collector” game with solid gameplay and a mature story.
I played ~30hrs and there is still a lot to go.
That being said, it’s not AAA by any means.
It’s pretty sad that I can’t tell if this list was made yesterday or four years ago. If people are able to have fun despite a stagnant industry, all power to them, but I haven’t seen a good game out of AAA in a long while.
I really hope one day business schools will start teaching people that trying to blindly follow trends in art has literally never worked. Hasn’t worked for all the film studios trying to make their own cinematic universes, hasn’t worked for game studios trying to chase the new live service dragon, but still we get braindead suits getting senior level positions approving derivative drivel.
Alright, new theory:
You guys don’t play too many games, right?
For the record, the best selling games of this year had fewer live service games than last year and the year before. The top of the charts was consistently single player games without microtransactions and this is one of the main GOTY candidates of 2023 following trends from “business schools” straight into… eh… a climactic absurdist musical number.
I’d tag that as spoilers if I could because, as I said, it’s increasingly clear you guys haven’t been playing this stuff.
Baldur’s gate 3 wasn’t the top earning video game this year, just the top selling one. The business school cronies only care about the profit, not the quality.
Different metrics, though.
I do have to disagree that this chart proves what you say it proves, though. Arguing that Rockstar in particular does not care about quality is… a sizzling hot take.
Look, there are plenty of grifters in gaming, particularly those coming from the tech side of things (not “business school” so much, honestly). And yeah, there’s a lot of money to be made and the majors are going to want a piece of that pie. Which is fine, because I want them to have money to also go after the big flashy triple-A single player stuff.
But it’s obviously not true that all you get from the games industry is cookie cutter GaaS stuff. It’s less true by the minute. Which is not to say I want online games to go away, either. I will actively play some of the games on that list. On purpose. I don’t want them to be the only thing there is to play… but fortunately they’re not, so… cool?
You’re right, the best selling games have been single-player focused. So why has Ubisoft, EA, Square Enix, ActivisionBlizzard, Warner Bros, and Sony Interactive been pushing to jump on the recent extraction shooter trend? Hell, find me a triple A publisher that does not have a live-service game being maintained, I’ll wait.
If you’re argument is that AAA is not wasting millions of dollars on chasing trends, you’ll have to find more evidence than all their projects being failures.
Because they’re not all failures, they’re also making single player games and you’re assuming that the one example of publishers wanting to tick a box in their lineup is somehow all they (let alone the entire industry) are producing.
The fact that people are making extraction shooters doesn’t mean they’re not making anything else. Warner’s biggest game this year is a narrative RPG. EA’s biggest game is (as always) a sports game, and their highest reviewed games are a Star Wars single player action game and a single player horror game. Sony’s biggest game is an open world superhero action game. I don’t know about Ubi’s sales off the top of my head, but what they’ve shipped recently is a 2D metroidvania and a throwback to classic Assassin’s Creed.
I don’t understand why you want publishers to be judged by what they don’t make, as opposed to what they make. Major publishers are billion dollar companies that put out many games. I have zero problems with EA running Apex Legends if I get to play Dead Space. I have zero problems with Sony trying to get a live service game going if they keep making insanely refined narrative action games. I don’t enjoy every game people make, but I don’t hate that people make games that are not for me if there are also games for me happening at the same time.
Larian
I just had someone telling me if I can’t tell the new street fighter installment from the old one then i must not have eyes. It looks practically identical to the previous three installments. I think I’m done trying to interact with gamers for literally anything.
If this is turning into an indie/AA game recommendation thread, I highly recommend RAILGRADE. I bought it Sunday night and put in 13 hours between that and the next day and I’m only like 1/4 of the way through the campaign.
It’s basically like Satisfactory meets Mini Metro and it’s so goddamn addicting.
I have Railgrade on my wishlist and I have been back and forth about it. I’m a big fan of Satisfactory though.
ITT gamers melt down and act like rowdy children when other people have opinions about games
edit: guys guys guys Larian studios will be fine, you don’t need to defend them or shame me into compliance because BG3 doesn’t look enjoyable to me. Jesus christ you’d think I was trying to take the game away from everyone.
edit2: guys capcom isn’t going to sleep with you because you bravely defended the literally 40th Street Fighter title against some rando’s disinterest and failure to hail it as a great moment in gaming or something. sheesh.
TBH I had a pretty good time since the CRPG-resurgence.
I’m glad you’re finding content to your taste, but I kind of have the opposite problem: I find RPGs exhaustingly tedious and convoluted, and every genre is infected with its worst parts - grinding and levels and crafting and loot and fetchquests and equipment - because it’s the “in” thing to do. everything feels so damn confused about what kind of game it’s trying to be and ends up doing nothing well.
Boulders Gare 3 doesn’t really even have a concept of grinding. There are no procedurally generated encounters and each battle can only happen once.
You could say doing all the side quests and exploring the side areas is a type of grinding but it’s really just “content” IMO.
after watching a BG3 gameplay video, I’d rather grind. it looks horrible to play.
I think you are depressed :/
thanks doctor i’ll take that into consideration
I mean to each their own but all I’ve seen in this post from you is just negativity with very little knowledge. You shit on games while knowing very little about them, which is kind of sad
sorry anything short of abject praise registers as shit talk to you, up to and including subjective reactions to seeing gameplay. the game does not look to my taste and i think i would have a bad time with it. If I’m coming across negative it’s because people have been trying to shove this game up my ass for 12 hours and throw fits when I say how it looks to me. not everything is for everyone and I wish we could be adults about it and let people speak their fucking minds here.
it’s a niche game that i know little about, have no interest in, and definitely am not going to shell out money for; he’s bitter that I don’t care and I’m not impressed that a franchise older than I am shat out another entry.
This you? This was what I was referring to when I was saying you were being negative. You knew basically nothing about the franchise and yet automatically assume it’s shit. For the record, neither do I, but I don’t make judgements based off of zero evidence
Nowhere in that post did I say it was shit. In fact nowhere anywhere have I ever said anything about the actual quality of that game, I described the company “shitting out” another one because they do so every year and it’s not a notable event in my book. Christ bro, Capcom will be fine without you rushing to their defense over someone on the internet being disinterested I promise. my god you are a thin skinned weepy bunch in here
i’m glad you like it, DnD makes me actively disinterested anymore though.
What part of D&D do you not like? Depending on the specific issue, you could have fun with Pathfinder: Kingmaker or Divinity: Original Sin.
the part where you sit down at the table and it takes all night but it’s 90% keeping yourself occupied while waiting around and nothing of consequence ever happens and everyone loses interest after four sessions max, and this is so predictable and dependable that in 20 years of never saying no to a TTRPG I’ve never leveled up a character
the part where the underlying rules systems are deeply flawed in every edition, down to the d20 being an awful choice for the skill die due to how swingy it is, to the point that you may as well make your own better game from scratch for how much you have to homebrew to make it not clunky as hell
the part where every group has been toxic as hell and defended their bigots to the person until I decided it wasn’t acceptable and quit playing
the part where I would spend a month filling a binder with campaign plans and the average player does everything in their power to intentionally avoid everything I’ve prepared because it’s funny to waste the fuck out of my time or something.
not to mention the setting is the genre equivalent of plain yogurt, it’s just straight up uncompelling and done to death.
i used to LOVE the idea of TTRPGs but in two decades of “giving it a chance” it’s literally never been a good experience.
Sounds like you’ve just had shitty friends / gaming groups.
over a dozen different groups in three cities over the course of 20 years. i don’t think the issue is luck, i think it’s the culture around the game.
The computer takes care of all the tedium, speeds the game up like 50 times compared to tabletop, and the genre is decidedly singleplayer so you never risk encountering toxic players.
Either way, there’s lots of CRPGs that aren’t based on anything tabletop, like Divinity: Original Sin.
I’d agree with your first point re: D&D ®️ esp re 5th Edition. My wife took a long time to get in to ttrpgs, something that I’ve enjoyed for over 30 years bc I kept trying to do the D&D®️ thing. I’d recommend you try other games that actually “play” at the table. Dungeon World is great and almost anything in the PbtA family does such a great job of driving the action forward (5e doesn’t), having actual stakes and danger (5e doesn’t), actually meaningful character choices (5e doesn’t), not a beat-the-designer/video-gamist philosophy (5e DOES have this), and not ran by a shitty corporation that hires mercenary thugs to intimidate people, since literally anyone can make a PbtA game about anything.
Agree 💯 on the d20. I think it works in some games, notable Mörk Borg and like b/x D&D - games where if you are rolling dice, you already have fucked up
I can’t speak to the groups you played with , but have you tried getting people that aren’t in to the hobby in to it? I run games for new players often and they never have the baggage I think you’re speaking about
Re the preparation you do, be sure to always prep situations not plots. There should be a law that states “the more prep the DM puts into a game is directly proportional to how quickly the players will force their prep off the rails”. The game is a conversation, and I think D&D®️ 5e has fucked this up bc of how they format their adventures WITHOUT EVER TELLING YOU HOW TO ACTUALLY RUN A GAME! Plus, Christ they are fucking textbooks written by committee! I would say a couple things, first: look at Dungeon World as a guideline for how to format your adventures, and second: don’t plan huge arcs, just plan individual moments that you want to happen. The characters will get there, even if it is a roundabout way. The Lazy DM by Sly Flourish has a lot of help here that can work for any game, and there’s this blog post that talks about the literal easiest foolproof prep method.
Your last point doesn’t make sense… Check out itch.io and their physical games category. There are RPGs for literally any genre or setting you can think of. TinyD6 and FAE are two really good generic games that if you can’t find your setting, you just slap these bad boys in there and you have an RPG
It really is a fun and exciting hobby and I’m sorry you’ve had a bad time previously.
A lot of the worst experiences I’ve were trying to run games to get friends into it, doubly so because I have so little practical experience running a game beyond reading books and copying from them thinking I’m about to have fun, and none actually playing beyond what I described.
I’ve explored alternate systems such as GURPS and tried brewing a few of my own. I can criticize the rules all day but at the end it was always much the same experience trying to run those against a group that intentionally spites any prep (usually geared more toward worldbuilding and important NPCs than any specific story arc, I realize you can’t force that stuff) I tried to do. Anything that I had a sheet of paper for, they would turn and walk away every single time.
As for setting… fam there’s not a lot I can do when everyone i know who plays only ever wants to play vanilla DnD or their take on MtG flavored DnD, and they’re not going to change what they’re doing just because I’m sick to death of generic corporate fantasy worlds and waiting around for 9/10 of the time we’re at the table.
Have you tried playing CRPGs instead of RPGs? They tend to be a lot less heavy on grind and crafting, and the combat systems are usually much more fun IMO (though I totally understand if you’re not into that style of combat).
Diablo 2, skyrim, oblivion, the witcher 3… all felt like having a crappy boring job where i have to interact with people i don’t like all day and nothing really feels worth doing but i gotta pick something and do it anyway. it also doesn’t help that 90% of the genre is indistinguishable tolkien knockoff worlds either making no effort or trying way too hard to stand out as unique and I’m beyond sick of that crap.
Those aren’t CRPGs. I’m talking the likes of Baldur’s Gate, Divinity: Original Sin or Shadowrun. Completely different gameplay.
I looked up CRPG because to me it mean “computer role playing game” but apparently now it refers to top-down point-and-click games under the heading “classic role playing game”, like that’s any more descriptive or clearly defined. Because this disjointed, confused genre needed more vaguery in the names of its subgenres.
Anyway most of these examples look like Diablo 2 so I’m going to assume that’s the type of game you mean - and I think it’s the same crap from a different camera angle. I don’t think I could say it’s “completely different gameplay” to something like Skyrim without feeling like a liar because the loop is bang on the same.
This stuff is pretty much the opposite of Diablo. Honestly insulting that you assume that I wouldn’t recognize that.
I’m sorry the terminology is so vague and inconsistent, and I’m so disengaged from “gaming” culture and behind on genre labels that I honestly don’t know what you’re talking about. Do you mean the genre formerly known as “point-and-click adventures”, like Disco Elysium?
The top-down isometric RPG experience is what it always meant, because it’s a computer replication of the original tabletop RPG experience. TTRPGs were just called RPGs, and adapting them to game format added the c, therefore becoming cRPGs.
I’ve never been into big A games. I’ll pay them if they’re highly reviewed and end up on sale, but I guess sim games are my thing. NFS underground me would never believe the driving sims I do with a sim rig and vr headset.
Simple solution, do not play triple AAA games. Find newer studios, indie devs, or smaller publishers who have yet to have private equity sink their teeth in to them.
no you must be shamed into compliance with my opinion that Age Old Franchise 5 (the fifty-fourth Age Old Franchise game) was decent and acceptable therefore AAA is good.
Be glad the points aren’t:
-ads
-microtransactions
people who complain about ads and microtransactions in games are confusing to me. just don’t buy it -> no ads no microtransactions ezpz. people really be throwing money around every year out of FOMO and complaining about the thing they knew they were buying afterward.
If that makes it a 10/10 game for them thats cool. I’d check a screenshot if those animated boobs overwhelmed all the rest of the negative review.
