I always try not to get overhyped but words can not describe how heartbroken I am by Cyberpunk 2077 because I never thought it would be this big of a disaster.
well, why were you hyped in the first place? setting? assumed quality from an established studio? production values? amount of playtime you'd get for 60 bucks?
once you figure that out it's easy to substitute.
I guess I got to go home because the indie scene just doesn't interest me much, I don't care about the ten millionth pixel art roguelike metroidvania, the indie scene seems as creatively bankrupt in it's own way as the AAA scene to me.
I see a lot of potential in the indie scene but I don't see them making games that really interest me, maybe I'm not looking close enough?
you'll always have people following the FOTM, either for money or because they legit enjoy it themselves and want to make "their" version of it. way back that was the source for most mods.
with indie of course comes the problem that they can't afford hundreds of people across the globe churning out AAA assets, so they focus on what they can do - most of them at least: gameplay, story (without annoying voiceovers everywhere), writing etc. if that's your thing it's easy to find stuff, and how much 8k HDR penis textures does a point&click adventure need really? but that also means some genres will never really be indie due to the investment required, like MMOs (although you could argue customized private servers are kinda that, I'd put it more in the mod corner). so if you're into that good luck.
with that also comes more room for experimentation, even if it's just "x with a twist". like kingdom (or kingdom new lands). if you go by the tags it's sounds like your average run of the mill pixelshit "roguelike" survival game - but it's also strategy and a sidescroller? how does that work? then you give it a try and it works for you or it doesn't. and these devs need to experiment more and more now that the competition grows so fast, so you'll get a lot of "almost there" games where there's something missing to make it truly great, but that doesn't mean the game can't still be good enough for some fun times.
AA is more hit or miss, either because it has the stigmata of being AAA rejects or the air got thinner with a harder balancing act. if your pixel platformer you worked on in your spare times bombs it hurts, but no big deal. AA is where it starts to hurt financially (unless you were naive enough to go all in on your prolific indie career).
in the end what works for me is really not give a crap what other people play or (don't) like. last week I finally came around playing recore after it was on my list for eternity, and it was probably the most fun I had in a while. it's certainly rough around the edges and has a "mixed" rating on steam, but it's a game I'll remember longer than some others. same for extinction, which has some of the most retarded negative reviews I've ever read but stuck with me for some reason (and if I'd go just by the mixed rating I'd prolly never played it either).
what I noticed in general the last few years is some cynical elitism mixed with LE IRONIC reddit retardation. every game is a copy of X (game being hard doesn't make it a dark souls clone, dumbfucks), and you're not allowed to honestly enjoy games anymore besides the approved/hyped ones else you got "shit taste". once you get over that notion and recognize most people are retarded anyway, it gets much easier. mainstream vidya was a mistake.
You can kind of see it actually. Especially with the awful facial animations, stiff robotic character movements and bad pathfinding.
that's just rookie mistakes and general lack of competence/polish, nothing necessarily limited to one certain studio.
for example, the fish lips are quite common when you model only from the front, common beginner mistake. there's a reason almost every 3d software offers 3 viewpoints.
animations probably aren't hand made, so either they fucked up the rig or didn't polish the mocap data. same for face scans when they try to fix the animation without having the final model look like a goblin. it's especially egregious because it's something humans are wired to notice immediately - of course it helps if you have at least basic knowledge of anatomy how that shit should work.
pathfinding issues just reek of automated generation without another manual pass or proper logic in combination with assets (there are several ways to prevent an npc to noclip through shit, so hard to pin down where the issue is exactly without the source. you can have the best logic but it doesn't matter if it doesn't recognize a lamp post as obstruction).
half of that can also come from time constraints, and given what we know so far about cyberpunk's development it's probably a healthy mix of both.
Skillup was one I always used as a reliable source of information. His viewpoint as well as the rest is now worth dirt.
>watching streamers in the first place
even I know the name from some other fuckup, can't remember which game it was tho. might have been about battlefield or something else pretending to be retarded.
if you just want to keep up use something like bluesnews.