Not trying to sound like I have rose tinted glasses or whatever but lots of my favorite AA+ games, including AAA, are so low effort now. My favorite game ever is World of Warcraft, and it’s just shocking seeing how little content you get for your $15 a month. They have been drip feeding it for years, now they are going so far as to sell early access to the next expansion for even more money. It’s insane to me. People will pay $30 extra just to access the exact same amount of content, for just a few days earlier. That’s crazy.
Another game that I have really come to enjoy lately is Genshin impact from Hoyo. This is a gacha game, But it’s still relatively fun to play with no monetary investment at all because of how generous they are with being able to obtain the in-game currency, the entire storyline basically is available without any paywall. Cannot say this for a lot of games. You want to play the new Call of Duty or something, $70 minimum. You want to play Starfield, $70. That game was not even half finished upon release and they are still working on it! So gacha games aren’t exactly a bad deal if you take that into account. $0 investment some people spend hundreds on it of course. But still, they are for the most part extremely high quality…
Zenless Zone Zero though is so low effort it’s crazy. It’s just a half-hearted eroge/erotica game. It launched with tons of questionable imagery of imaginary women who are very young, they look like they are 15 years old or younger and half dressed. No healer like other games, so content is extremely challenging. They ignored most feedback from the beta about game features that people didn’t enjoy like the TV system which is globally hated by everyone, and there were tons of comments on their official forums back in December of people saying they didn’t like the system and that it was a really bad system, they launched it in this terrible state anyway even knowing people didn’t like it. Now, after release, still no healer like other games, there’s no support system like star rail and Genshin have so you can’t have a friend to come help you, you can’t borrow a character from someone else. The game is literally half finished garbage and people are just raving over it because of skimpy characters who look like they are 12 years old. Like wow…
I could give you a dozen more examples but these are the ones that are most obvious to me.
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We’re living in a golden age of indie games! I’ve been loving games like:
- Celeste
- Manor Lords
- Predecessor
- Fire watch
- What remains of Edith Finch
- Curse of the Golden Idol
- Cuphead
- Stardew Valley
- Luck be a Landlord
- Return of the Obra Din
If you want good bigger budget games there’s still great options like:
- Elden Ring
- Stellaris
- Palworld
- Balders Gate 3
- Deep Rock Galactic
I would argue all those games but Elden Ring and BG3 are more indie games (not familiar with Stellaris though).
You would probably also enjoy Dead Cells and Hollow Knight btw
I forgot Dead Cells! It’s so goooood.
And how could I forget Darkest Dungeons! MANY HAVE FALLEN IN THE FACE OF CHAOS, BUT NOT THIS ONE, NOT TODAY 😭
I’ll have to add Hollow Knight to the list, thanks for the suggestion
cyberpunk was good if you waited to buy when they got it fixed decently
Having played most of these indie games already, I agree with you completely. Indie gaming is awesome, and I can’t wait to see what new games are developed. I’m also hoping to develop my own title, but I have first hand experience with development, and it’s a crazy amount of work. It’s going to take me at least 12 months Just to even get the first town or area in my game done because of how much learning I have to do, how much design and development, then coding. Truly astounding how much work goes into creating something incredibly small scale. These big massive companies with billion-dollar equity behind them, They have all these crazy resources to Create these games absurdly fast. They can just plop down a resource generated set of walls and textures, and in days, You have an entire town created. I’ve seen it done, makes me kind of jealous and hope that indie developers can get this kind of stuff later on
People keep paying for it so why put more effort into it? When they do it doesn’t seem to pay off. The last game I bought from a big publisher was Hi Fi Rush. It was fantastic, original, clearly had more thought and effort out into it than the average AAA game, and look what happened to them. Hopefully their transition to a new owner turns out to be a positive one, but considering the industry trends I’m not holding my breath on that one.
This is why I do the patient gamers thing. I almost always wait for sales, bundles, etc. Most of my games come in at a deep discount, and the only ones I grab at a slight discount are because it’s got stellar reviews, had enough time to see how the updates, MTX bullshit, or servers played out, and is clearly still interesting enough to be worth both my money and time.
Isthereanydeal.com is my best friend for this. Gog.com is also great. Humblebundle.com is still occasionally worth looking at.
Yep, big budget games from megacorporations are usually terrible because their purpose is to make money, not to be a great game that people love. Even when there’s a team of dedicated devs that genuinely want to make something great, they have to fight hard for it in many companies, often losing their vision to their employer’s drive to make money.
Great games require risk, a game for everyone is a game for no one… but a game for no one sells consistently.
This problem would likely be solved if we simply implemented a new economic system in the USA revolving around employee ownership of companies. Having stockholders is what really kills passion and innovation at big companies. The only focus is to please the stockholders drive the stock value up, return on investment, stuff like that. There is zero incentive for these big companies to give anything back to the developers, so there’s also zero loyalty. Why would these developers put their heart and soul into something That requires them to work 60 hours a week, and provides almost nothing in return to them? That’s what I’m hoping to see soon, gaming studios that are for profit, with all profits being used to cover salary of the hard workers
Maybe, but only if you made it mandatory for all companies. And how would you decide how many shares someone in particular owns without stifiling creation of companies? The person who created the company in the first place will be taking on more responsibilty, and should have more incentive to stick around if the health and growth of the company depends on them.
Even your indie LLC has stockholders, as every corporation in existence has stock created at inception. Owener ship of that private stock can be one person, multiple people, or all employees as mentioned. I’ve participated in private companies with all three of these. In private companies you can also have profit bonuses given to all employees regardless of holding stock or not (I was an employee at such a company and they did very well - so well they ended up being sold to a public company at an extremely high EBITA multiple)
This can exist even in public company structures, like WestJet, where all employees were shareholders (No longer the case as of 2019, as the company was sold and taken private)
Without enforcing employee ownership people are just going to people, and when they are anonymous and can easily buy and sell shares without care about the long term or how it affects others that’s where the problem comes in. The “I got mine” mentality.
Not sure I have a point, other then its not that simple.
Dissenting opinion : ZZZ is actually neat. If you think about it, taking the f2p route, it has a nice and punchy battle system, the writing is quite good even if the story, for now, is quite… standard, I would say. I’m still going through the content, but even if I don’t think I’ll stick with this game forever, 50h of intense brainless fun for free is not something I’ll give an hard pass on.
That being said, yes, nothing beats a labor of love indie game.
Edit : couldn’t agree more with the character design, though. I wish it was less… let’s say… err… more… well, not what it is.
I really like the story and world design. I really dislike the incel inspired jiggle physics and objectification of female characters, and the cringe players raving about half naked women who look 13. It’s gross
I couldn’t agree more. I thought at first it would be different, but, this aspect is awful.
I had the great displeasure of visiting their subreddit wondering if a few codes would be posted there, it was truly sad and frankly upsetting.
