Summers Game Fest 2023

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>more Beastiballs info
oh boy time to bitch some more

Why are the creatures "wild" if they're clearly friendly and human-adapted? Pokemon!
Why do they start at level 5 instead of level 1? Pokemon.
Why do they evolve??
...well, actually, that's pretty much a staple of the genre by this point (I think the only games that haven't indulged in an equivalent of it are SMT, MHS, and DQM, all of which are spin-offs of another series, and I'm not even sure about SMT because you could qualify fusing as evolving in some cases if it's a linear progression of one concept).
But why do they evolve based on level as opposed to literally any other form of acquisition? POKEMON!!

The trailer music is fine, it's fucking... it's fine...
I don't understand what it's going for. Why does it use mostly 8-bit chiptunes before briefly sliding into something more akin to gen 3 Pokemon at 0:27? The latter would be a pretty unique direction for the entire soundtrack (especially seeing as how, even in Pokemon, that soundfont only lasted 3 games before FRLG decided shitting all over the orchestra was a better idea than actually trying), and yet it sticks to the far more generic NES sound instead outside of that brief and misplaced interlude. Very confusing. It sounds okay otherwise, though...

The Kickstarter is also officially up. Aiming for ~70k dollars. It's halfway funded already and it hasn't even been a day. I didn't expect any less considering the tiny cult of people spurred on by Monster Tamer Ed shilling out thousands to fund only the most mediocre and derivative shit imaginable, but it still makes me a bit sad lol.

The rewards are really funny. 25 bucks gets you the game, whereas every higher tier gets you... t-shirts... a few pins... and stickers? I'm glad there aren't any Kickstarter-exclusive items or anything, but it's funny seeing that you can pay 40 bucks for an art book but 115 bucks gets you a t-shirt.
Also this promotional gif shows that half of the player's animation frames have transparent scleras. That, or compression did a number on this gif in particular.

Game is advertised as an "open world JRPG". Bosses are still denoted by low-rank and high-rank. Just call it non-linear at that point.

Beasties have hidden "recruit conditions" and you "catch" them by fulfilling those... this is actually interesting. The Kickstarter says you'll have to "research" them by battling them repeatedly to gain more info on them- which is a concept I actually really like and wanted to incorporate into my own game for a while. I've since soured on it because... well, it's really repetitive. Yo-Kai Watch also does this and I remember being consistently frustrated by it. I had to battle 40-some Smogrellas before I learned their favorite food, and once I did it was still a massive toss-up as to whether you got one or not. There's no telling whether this game will be nearly as reliant on RNG (from the demonstrative gif it seems like it's a simple case of "find this item and give it to this monster"), but having to wait in and of itself is a problem imo.
I think Pokemon does things better in this regard by letting you immediately catch a monster after you see it- that adrenaline rush of finding something new is still there, and it spurs you on to catch the creature and get a bit of dopamine while you're at it. Then, to find out more about the creature, you just use it on your team. You get the benefit of learning new things about it and being glad that it's on your side all in one go.
There's obviously some merit to stretching that experience out for longer and giving yourself a side-goal of getting a creature, but I think that too-easily slips into frustration if it takes longer than, say, three or four attempts. Putting the player through a small trial while still giving them a near-guarantee of getting the creature after it is ideal, imo, like how Fossil Fighters handled its Head Fossils.

Anyways, back to bitching about stupid shit instead of pondering game design: none of the creatures have visible genders, and they are all referred to with "they" in the singular. Splendid.

Also apparently those items are just jerseys. It's just Pokeballs, but with shirts. NEVERMIND THAT YO-KAI WATCH COMPARISON, THEN.

Always a good sign when the developers admit to prioritizing competitive over singleplayer, too. Because who needs well-crafted singleplayer campaigns in 2023? I certainly don't!

And no RNG either. Joy.
This entire paragraph makes me groan.
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The OST outside of the trailer music (and including it) is very very saccharine. It's well-made, it's not bad, but it's super cutesy and it doesn't give the game much of an identity. They have a few previewed music tracks on their Kickstarter (which is where I'm getting most of this info from), and I can't say I really like or would remember any of those tracks. Getting really sick of the "normal instruments alongside 40-year-old chiptunes" genre that's been rampant in the indie scene since Shovel Knight and Undertale nearly a decade ago, please just stick to one or the other...

Game team is also collabing with the studio who made Night in the Woods and Untitled Goose Game. This is starting to feel like indie dev Smash Bros.

I don't know why they're bragging about a "mixed 2D and 3D world" when this looks like the exact same tech they've been using since Chicory. I guess it makes for decent marketing? Dunno.

That should be everything the Kickstarter and new trailer went over. No new monsters, just a hint of one after Kichik evolves at the end of the trailer.

There are some more creature-collecting games in the wholesome direct, if i'm not mistaken, so I might do a follow-up with dissertations on some of those too. I don't know if anybody really cares, but I do so I'll do it anyways lol.

EDIT: turns out all the other creature-collecting games were farming games instead, and the closest relation they had to the genre was the fact that some of them had living plants
nevermind lol
 
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Miller said:
I wonder who pays these indieshit studios to make that crap.
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Most of them are crowdfunded by consoomers who just throw money at whatever people on twitter tell them to.

The Xbox thing is on this evening and i'm only going to be able to watch some of it live because i'll be in work. My expectations are incredibly low and it looks like it is going to be an extremely lean couple of years for decent games. Fuck this industry and what it has allowed itself to become.
 
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Anonitolia said:
And no RNG either. Joy.
This entire paragraph makes me groan.
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I kinda get what they're saying though. I've always been interested in an RPG system where you could reasonably determine future enemy moves instead of it being 100% a crapshoot.
I haven't come up with a reliable method yet but I'm interested with trying out markov chains (pretty much just a state machine with some RNG) rather that just a standard random pool.
E:
Anonitolia said:
View attachment 5156374
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SonichuStats.jpg
 
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Coolio55 said:
I kinda get what they're saying though. I've always been interested in an RPG system where you could reasonably determine future enemy moves instead of it being 100% a crapshoot.
I haven't come up with a reliable method yet but I'm interested with trying out markov chains (pretty much just a state machine with some RNG) rather that just a standard random pool.
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See, that's the funny part, because Temtem has already tried this and its competitive scene is so dead in the water that it's hilarious. The same 20 entrants show up to every tournament and only barely allow the tourneys to even exist by doing so. Meanwhile, its shiny hunting community (completely predicated on luck and stalling) is thriving.

This shit has been tried before, and the exact reason that it hasn't been repeated is because it just isn't fun. There is no thrill to a battle when you know exactly how everything is going to play out. Even Into the Breach, a game so predicated on playing to counter your opponents that it telegraphs all of their attacks ahead of time, still has RNG in the form of Reputation upgrades at the end of an island and the Grid Defense system (which can sometimes be infuriating, as I painfully learned when I lost an entire fucking run by going from full grid HP to nil while having 32% Defense, may god smite every Blobber ever to grace the game's code amen) and it works. The game is stupid amounts of fun, and every time I end up slipping and lose a building I sit there praying it'll resist even if my Defense is at the lowest possible percentage.

The problem with RNG isn't RNG itself, it's the game design relying too heavily on it. I think Pokemon gets close to doing that with how it not only has random damage rolls but also random chances to crit and random chances of capture, but I still think it's plenty playable and definitely fun. Going any further than it has gone, imo, is a bit much.
Going in the opposite direction, however, is fucking stupid, especially if you're going to keep the same battle system. Pokemon's is notoriously slow and boring in the campaign, where almost every battle is painfully easy to counter and those that aren't tend to be minor struggles at worst, and yet instead of doing anything to change this all of these clones just copy the same battle system (as well as the lack of difficulty that comes from it) and then remove the only exciting element of it, which is typically the RNG.

Why have critical hits endured so long throughout gaming (and especially RPGs) despite being the definition of random bullshit? Because they're fun.
Why has RNG not been completely eliminated from any game with a hint of a competitive scene to keep things "fair"? Because it gives the losing team a slight possibility of turning the tables without pulling some genius strategy out of their ass.
Why has Temtem's competitive scene died completely despite having no RNG whatsoever- a theoretically "fair" fighting plane? Because it's no fun to participate in a solved game, nor one in which you know exactly how things will go from team composition alone!

You could argue that second point is a bad thing, and that teams should always have to try their very hardest to win, but at that point I think you're starting to lose sight of something very fundamental. At that point, I think you're starting to forget: video games are supposed to be fun, not fair.

And if a game isn't fun, why bother?
 
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So many gardening and cafe games, it's been about 70%+ of the indie games that have been one or the other. Gardening games and the such are huge time sink, so not like players will move onto the next one, they will stick one the one or two they like for years, it's why Stardew Valley has such high player base still despite countless other similar games after it.

The picture I got from the Wholesome Direct is that the indie space is some how less creative than even the shitty AAA one, and needs an even bigger reality check. Already started to see Unpacking like games after that game did well with awards in 2021, wouldn't be shocked if next year showcases that was type of game was every other indie game.
 
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Todd will save this not-E3.

Product Placement said:
So many gardening and cafe games, it's been about 70%+ of the indie games that have been one or the other. Gardening games and the such are huge time sink, so not like players will move onto the next one, they will stick one the one or two they like for years, it's why Stardew Valley has such high player base still despite countless other similar games after it.

The picture I got from the Wholesome Direct is that the indie space is some how less creative than even the shitty AAA one, and needs an even bigger reality check. Already started to see Unpacking like games after that game did well with awards in 2021, wouldn't be shocked if next year showcases that was type of game was every other indie game.
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This genre is for w*men and fags.
 
Product Placement said:
So many gardening and cafe games, it's been about 70%+ of the indie games that have been one or the other. Gardening games and the such are huge time sink, so not like players will move onto the next one, they will stick one the one or two they like for years, it's why Stardew Valley has such high player base still despite countless other similar games after it.

The picture I got from the Wholesome Direct is that the indie space is some how less creative than even the shitty AAA one, and needs an even bigger reality check. Already started to see Unpacking like games after that game did well with awards in 2021, wouldn't be shocked if next year showcases that was type of game was every other indie game.
Click to expand...
They see that one Indie game does well (because its an original idea) and instead of coming up with something new, or being inspired by that game, they just outright copy it in an attempt to get money from it. Indies used to be about creativity and originality, now they are about making money with little effort, hardly any different than AAA games.
 
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Miller said:
Todd will save this not-E3.


This genre is for w*men and fags.
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Not got issue with the genre even if it's not for me, just with the amount of them.
Most will fail not because the game is bad or good but because it's crazily over saturated genres with most doing the same thing as each other. I know it's hip with that crowd to be anti-capitalist but can't they see it will lose them money due to the insane amount of competition.



Epoch said:
They see that one Indie game does well (because its an original idea) and instead of coming up with something new, or being inspired by that game, they just outright copy it in an attempt to get money from it. Indies used to be about creativity and originality, now they are about making money with little effort, hardly any different than AAA games.
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100% agree with that, but they are so dumb they can't see that so many other indie devs have had the same idea, so after the two years+ of work when they are ready to show the game so are all the other dev who did the same thing, now it's too late to go back and do something creative like they should have at the start.
 
Epoch said:
They see that one Indie game does well (because its an original idea) and instead of coming up with something new, or being inspired by that game, they just outright copy it in an attempt to get money from it. Indies used to be about creativity and originality, now they are about making money with little effort, hardly any different than AAA games.
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Exactly right. They are far worse than AAA devs at this stage.

The Limbo people for instance have made essentially the same game 4 or 5 times in a row now.

It's literally just throwing enough mud to see what sticks and then milking that idea to death but the "indie" goodwill clouds peoples judgement so they don't get called out on it.
 
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nu-fable with black people all over the place

Edit: so many black people already, thanks microsoft
 
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