The laziest professional video game review I've ever read

[Sima Tuna]

I do wish I could give one piece of advice to indie devs in general though:

Please keep your scope/ambition in line with your time and budget. Make a smaller game and focus on replayability and enjoyable game mechanics. I see far too many indie games that end up failing spectacularly or staying in Early Access hell forever because the developers tried to be all things for all people. Make a small game first, please. And complete it. If it sells well, then you can gradually scale up your ambitions. But please don't shoot for the moon the first go-around, because very few games can stick the landing.

[BryanM]

Yeah and part of the problem is when devs without a strong conviction about their game start reacting to the chatter, if not see it as a guiding light. Does the Diablo 4 team know what they want to create or will they wait for youtube content creators to tell them how to fix it?

Imagine an alternate reality where From did seasonal updates complete with Ted talk/roundtable type developer announcements. Insert random guy with headset mic and high-pitched nerdy Todd Howardesque voice. "And we've been listening to fans. We're happy to reveal for Dark Souls season 2: easy mode!!" Applause. "And now . . . World's first reveal trailer. Dark Souls map mode. Fast travel anywhere. A golden arrow above your head will point to the next boss. No more getting lost. No more learning map layouts to progress." Thunderous applause. OMG From is listening. This is so hype. My body is ready. We did it. We complained so hard they changed the game.

Well yeah, those are two different things. An incompetent designer might as well listen to what their players want. And players that want an easy mode From game, have implemented the feature themselves.

Blizzard is incredibly unique by its design incompetence. They really had no clue what the hell their goals were besides "make another Diablo game". Reading their blogs is always a depressing way to spend an evening. (Gotta love that "we spent hundreds of hours to finally conclude: Mario should be able to jump.")

At the end of the day it doesn't matter. Bad designers will make bad games for no one. Good designers will make good games for somebody. Blizzard products will sell millions of copies because of invested fanboys who won't play a different game. It doesn't matter if you can make Ryu's hair pink in the next Ninja Gaiden or whatever - most things about a game are all skub wars.

Customer feedback can be very helpful, if used correctly.

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A candid stream by one of the Starcraft 2 guys (whose dad is literally the no-life guy from the South Park Make Love Not Warcraft episode) mentioned the fact that the first $15 horsie in World of Warcraft made more money than Starcraft 2, is always one of those things. That shows hard work and effort really, really aren't always rewarded.

Of course they could make a free to play RTS with modular army pieces that harkens back to those games we used to love back in the day. But that would require them understanding what we loved about them in the first place, and also understand the current monetization models. Things like giving people hope and something to look forward to, instead of perpetually feeling trapped in the bottom of a dungeon with nowhere to go.

Hellgate London's subscription service sure did everything wrong... It was hilarious reading Gamasutra articles at the time about all the lessons about online games developers were learning at the time. Rule #1: Never ever divide your playerbase, when it comes to being able to play together. You can't wall off or monetize maps or zones.

Old boxed expansion packs always come to mind - fewer and fewer people bought them over time. MMO's were an exception since their players were affluent, continuously invested in the game, and used to renting game time with their money.

[Steamflogger Boss]

From games do have an easy mode tbh. It's called over leveling and using the broken equipment instead of whatever you want. But yeah..difficulty sliders...I hope we never see that in their games. It's getting harder and harder to find actually interesting video games.

@bryan: RTS is a dead genre sadly.

[BryanM]

Ok here's a fun genre: People giving the Playstation 1 Metal Gear Solid re-releases poor scores for being re-releases of Metal Gear Solid.

"I bought this game. It was exactly what it told me it was, not a tiny whiff of subterfuge or false advertising was used. I FEEL SO RIPPED OFF!"

I know all opinions are held. But jesussss....

[Sima Tuna]

Ok here's a fun genre: People giving the Playstation 1 Metal Gear Solid re-releases poor scores for being re-releases of Metal Gear Solid.

"I bought this game. It was exactly what it told me it was, not a tiny whiff of subterfuge or false advertising was used. I FEEL SO RIPPED OFF!"

I know all opinions are held. But jesussss....

Does the MGS1 re-release run at 60fps? Because one reason people shit on the MGS2 re-release is they cut the framerate in half. MGS3 is back down to 30FPS as well. I mean, it was originally 30, but then the old hd collection upped MGS3 to 60. So it's back to the original framerate.

[BryanM]

1 is supposed to run at 30, like the original game. According to Konami, the PSX2 games unnaturally lobotomized to 30 is only for the Switch version.

I did hear that there are some nontechnical doofuses setting it to the PAL version, in all its wonderful 50 hertz glory.

lol at the MSX games requiring Windows 10 and 8 GB of RAM. Every day we move further from god's grace.

The prices, are well, you know. 20 bux each is a little steep. I bought my copy of Snake Eater back in the day for 3 bux. Amazon sells it for 15. Which isn't unreasonable with inflation and them shipping the thing to your house.

We kind of got into high-priced old games in the Labyrinth thread with the Etrian Odyssey ports (the fonts were bad!). It's a bit more egregious here, with the lower cost of the original games and less work was done to port these.