Here's your AAAAAA game in the Current Year.

(The AAAAAA is me screaming and never stopping)

Just in the dialogue along, there's so much weirdness to unpack it's unreal. They use modern speaking social conventions in what are supposed to be past age fantasy elements for starters, then introduce a shit ton of shit that wasn't even real not even twenty years ago about nonbinary or whatever and it's just
what a flaming fuckheap. I can't even begin to criticize the enormity of wrongness in this nonsense. This is what happens when you let theater kids make shit, they turn it into complete faggotry that cannot be divorced from their "personalities" (read: collection of paraphilias they use to interact with what used to be a sane world around them).
I don't know who or what this game is for anymore.

@Owl @noyoushutthefuckupdad It's not hard: it's a game for Redditors/Tumblrites who used to be male nerds in the 2000s/2010s/similar and who ate up Bethesda slop and now it's a game "for them" at the expense of excluding everyone. It's a niche audience given those people tend to eat Nintendo slop instead.

Unlike Mass Effect, there also wasn't the whole hype of it being an ambitious project that by 3 went off the rails. Dragon Age II was panned, Dragon Age Inquisition was divisive as well and it had a ROUGH development cycle due to it's use of the jank ass Frostbite engine that many developers hated due to EA's failed strategy to have every developer using it:
https://www.eurogamer.net/years-later-bioware-reveals-why-dragon-age-2-expansion-exalted-march-was-canned
https://www.vg247.com/how-the-frostbite-engine-became-a-nightmare-for-ea-in-general-and-bioware-in-particular

This didn't end with DA:I as Mass Effect Andromeda and Anthem also had the same engine issues:
https://www.vg247.com/the-frostbite-engine-nearly-tanked-mass-effect-andromeda
https://www.techspot.com/news/79501-anthem-development-plagued-mismanagement-frostbite-challenges-report.html

Thanks to these issues and shit game design choices, Bioware at this point is no longer the Bioware of the 00s that seemed to be able to churn out gold nonstop.

>It's not hard: it's a game for Redditors/Tumblrites who used to be male nerds in the 2000s/2010s/similar and who ate up Bethesda slop and now it's a game "for them" at the expense of excluding everyone. It's a niche audience given those people tend to eat Nintendo slop instead.

This is what really fucks me up about this. Companies legitimately listen to these people and think they're going to burn millions in development and entire studios just to listen to these people because they're telling them "this is the modern audience?" Like there's no speculation beyond taking these complete retards at their word?

And somehow despite the constant failures, these people can still pretend they're "totally taking over the hobby?"

Where is the sense?

Businessniggas lie all the time to get into business and they become so comfortable with lies by the time they are running companies that they forget what truth is, and this is why they think Twitter opinions and pajeet resumes are real.

This is also why they are so obsessed with AI (LLMs/iterative chatbots) and why they think they're real. AI just strings words together and makes shit up, and this is literally the only thing suits do. It's just as sentient as they are, and they recognize that, so they try to make it dumber with censorship rather than making themselves smarter.

In general, fediverse users are way more open and honest about who they are than anyone who has ever had a LinkedIn account, yet LinkedIn is practically a staple of business/career life to the point where even the career coach guy at my highschool told my entire class we had to make an account there in order to get good jobs.

LinkedIn race gatekeeps what big budget games get made and who gets to make them.

@lonestarr @Owl @noyoushutthefuckupdad The problem is aside from DEIslop, you'll end up with oversaturated genres like "hero shooter", "loot shooter", "battle royale", and more. This leads to shit like Hyenas, Concord, Lawbreakers, Battleborn, and more.

These were all games that tried to chase the trend in an oversaturated market (and worse, charged money for them) when people were playing XYZ, without offering anything to set themselves apart. For example with Battle Royales, Fortnite set itself apart from PUBG with it's cartoony art style and being F2P initially, Apex Legends had fast paced movement, and Warzone was a spinoff of a successful franchise with the gameplay of said franchise intact as well.

It's no different than the "Halo Killer" meme of the 00s with games like Haze, Killzone, and others trying to ripoff aspects of Halo. Turns out, the real Halo Killer was an entirely different game with entirely different gameplay known as Call of Duty 4. Then the trend became to ape Call of Duty or major aspects of it's gameplay.

@PurpCat @lonestarr @Owl @noyoushutthefuckupdad this this this and this. AAA, as the time goes on and it gets more expensive, as always been a weird goldrush to make the mostly samey focus grouped bullshit, when in the end, actually making something different is actually what makes new franchises, genres and trends and right now the money requirement is so high they practically cannot pull this anymore without veering wildly into "safe slop"

@coolboymew @lonestarr @Owl @noyoushutthefuckupdad The indie success stories you hear about are either games filling a void (Palworld), or games that do something new/unique. Even the short term success of early indie "art games" faded out as the clique's influence faded.

Nobody is going to care about another 3d platformer trying to mimic the same Nintendo games with trans flags and every character having pronouns and some mental disability, except for a small niche audience on Twitter.com and someone craving more slop. Those developers have the issue of being pigeonholed so hard that they end up making slop, and before the DEI stuff being added in these games had the issue of being samey.

Wow, you're making a Sonic influenced game that adds little new. That's really cool, but you can fire up Sonic 3 in an emulator.

@PurpCat @lonestarr @Owl @coolboymew @noyoushutthefuckupdad I always complain about modern games not being as wild west as they used to, but with indie games you have to be a little bit too wild west to get popular.

@xianc78 @lonestarr @Owl @coolboymew @noyoushutthefuckupdad That's because indie games are either four things: crybaby "my life sucks" walking simulators, games mimicking the old games you can run in emulators with a side dose of DEIslop, games that do fill a void, and schizokino outsider art.

@PurpCat @lonestarr @Owl @coolboymew @noyoushutthefuckupdad The market is over-saturated. Everyone who has skimmed a programming text book is making their own game now. You need to be really unique or drown in the endless sea of shovelware, no matter how good your game is.

I thought about getting at least a cult following by porting my games to obscure operating systems like BSD or Haiku. There is probably an audience for people who want to play something other than Tux Racer on those platforms.

@xianc78 @PurpCat @coolboymew @noyoushutthefuckupdad Well even on BSDs, Haiku, illumos, or holy shit 9front, you have emulators for various retro systems.

That said I think it's worth it for indie games to have some kind of Unix-like support (or retro-platform support lol) because they have strong communities so word of mouth likely works much better than doing yet-another Windows/Android release.

@lanodan @xianc78 @coolboymew @noyoushutthefuckupdad Even a Linux port is a cut above what many devs do.

@PurpCat @xianc78 @coolboymew @noyoushutthefuckupdad Well for most it's just letting Unity/Godot/RenPy/RPGMaker/… do a Linux build and *maybe* testing it into a VM/spare-computer or asking a friend.

At least I don't think most game"devs" build their own engines (or do much coding really, for a lot of games you can get away with scripts).