Comic: https://www.deathbulge.com/comics/441
Alt text: Yeah yeah, there's always exceptions, I mean look no further than the game in the 2nd panel, not the most thrilling gameplay, is it?
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If they are advertising their game that money that could have made the game better.
But then nobody knows about the game, it won’t sell well, and there’s no money to make the next one
Ultrakill, Deltarune and Celeste are my favorite video games, all indie I think.
Depends on how you define indie. By my definition, Deltarune is still indie but made by a quintillionaire so like, meh. Celeste was indie when it was just a fantasy console bs thing.
So if an indie game blows up because it’s great then it’s not indie? That’s a silly way to define it.
Have some mid-sized studios co-opted the term? Sure. Expedition 33 is on that AA spectrum, but a game by a very small team? In what definition is Celeste not an indie game?
Here’s one definition. If you go to the Steam page for Deltarune, it says “tobyfox” as developer, that’s a (nick)name. OneShot (2016) says “Future Cat LLC” but that seems to be made up since Steam asks for “company name”. Celeste’s “Maddy Makes Games Inc.” seems real, however.
You still haven’t defined anything. So if a game is only made by one person, it’s indie? Games made by very small teams aren’t indie?
Look, I get it, “indie” is actually a bit of a nebulous term, and is often co-opted by medium/large size studios who want to pretend to be “better” than the AAA games, but no reasonable person would call Celeste “not indie.”
I mean Deltarune was made by toby fox who became a millionaire from his other indie game Undertale. I think it definitely counts.
I did say “is still indie”.
You also said, “but made by a quintillionaire,” as if that is a point lowering its indie status, and as if money is the defining aspect of indie vs. AAA.
I think the most accurate definition is “produced without a publisher”. That’s the thing they’re independent of.
Where it gets grey is things like “okay it has a publisher, but they’re tiny and cute and only publish indie-feeling game”
So the “feeling” of indie is “made by a small group of people with a shared cohesive vision and minimal outside influence”, where publishers tend to be large sources of outside influence, and teams larger than, like, 50 people tend to be unable to all have a truly shared cohesive vision. And a single person, by definition, always has a shared vision no matter what they make. But if a publisher is low-touch, or brings a game that’s basically done to market without asking for changes, and the game feels cohesive and personal, then that’s good enough.
Right, that’s where the other definitions come in. I’d say itch is a distributor rather than a publisher, but even if you don’t care about that distinction, it is definitely the case that itch doesn’t tell the developer to do anything. So publishing on itch doesn’t affect the vision for the game.
Nintendo… I mean kinda yeah. They’re a weird one. Some of their games they’re just the publisher, and there is another developer with a different name. But some things they do actually develop and self-publish. And some of the games have surprisingly few people working on them…
There may actually be a few Nintendo games that are kinda indie, oddly enough.
both ultrakill and dusk look like arse, and that might turn people away
I love deltarune and I enjoyed the ultrakill demo, never tried Celeste though
Most games I play are indie ones cause those are the best imo
never tried Celeste though
How solid is your relationship to your gender?
honestly unsure
Well, then Celeste sounds like the perfect game for you!
Is this really the best takeaway from the game? I love Celeste and I’m pretty solid with my gender identity. The music and game mechanics are the best parts. You reference the story, which ain’t bad, but definitely not where the game shines.
Ehh different people take away different things from the game. One of the pivotal experiences that lead to me finding out I’m trans was beating Celeste.
not played those but deltarune, undertale, and celeste are on my planned list, and might check ultrakill out
i rlly like hollow knight and hollow knight silksong, which are 2 very good indie games
the main non indie ones i play are minecraft and the legend of zelda series
Minecraft is an indie game that became super popular.
So true! If you ignore big corpo and their slop, we actually live in a golden age of gaming.
We always have and I’ve often ignored big corp.
One sad thing for me is that even in story-rich indie games I’ve been seeing poor dialogues and developments. This area has been the most difficult one to find good stuff for me.
Or you have great writing and then the developer turns stark raving mad (Mardek RPG).
That’s always been a risk though.
I mean yes but there are also good games coming out that I wouldn’t call indie games. You just have to know your own taste and need a little bit of experience about which studios will fuck you over and which studio will most certainly deliver what you want.
i love indie. but sometimes i want eye candy game that excel in everything.
sure they remake a lot of stuff but most remake fail to capture the essence what makes it great
It’s a logical outcome. The big studios are risk-averse. Why bother with something that hasn’t been already ‘proven’, and also if they think something has gone “out of fashion”, then similarly don’t risk revisiting something that will make them look dated.
The pleasant creative outcomes stem from people who want to do it for the sake of doing it rather than constrained by predicted business results. It’s by no means a guarantee of quality, a lot of Indie stuff sucks, but certainly being overly business minded inhibits anything ‘different’ coming out.
The games I always remember/return to the most are the ones that had an amazing storyline.
That doesn’t require a huge budget. But it does require the developer to love the game too.
So many companies are run from an excel spreadsheet. No true leadership or vision.
There are all these people who think it’s only a video game if it involves big fightymen killing things. That’s hyperbole (they could instead be big sportsmen doing sports), but not by much.
These are the people who view graphics as the be-and-end-all of a game’s quality. There are more kinds of games than anyone could count, but you wouldn’t know it by asking those people.
Yeah, indie and AA-gaming are doing fine, its the AAA that is suffering. And I think they deserve it for sure: predatory practices, lack of innovation, everything looking and feeling the same… Indie and AA-games are the ones I look forward to.
Watching Paradox Interactive transition from AA into a AAA studio has been painful. They fill a niche that nobody else is really paying attention to, but they’ve become so entrenched that the games are really starting to feel like reskins of each other, and while I wouldn’t call their DLC strategy predatory, they feel just a hair below that point.
“Historical strategy simulator” is a pretty tough genre to attack as an indie dev, though.
I will happily pay full price for an indie or solo dev/small team game even if I end up not loving it. I will always wait for a sale for the big AAA games.
Tried God Of War, lost patience after 30 minutes - too much of a “guided experience” for my taste.
Picked up Valheim again for my 6(?)th run of it and only lost patience with it maybe a month (in real time) later.
Been doing Saelig since (got it as a promo from GoG) but now have so much money in that game and such a steady way to make more that it’s not really fun anymore.
Just updated Songs Of Syx to v0.71 and preparing for a new run on that.
I’ve been gaming for almost 4 decades, originally in a ZX Spectrum and after than mostly on the PC (tried modern consoles with the WII, but found it a bit meh).
For me the modern AAA gaming experience is seldom as much fun as some Indie games out there and AAA games now tend to have much less replayability: AAA games in the last 1 or 2 decades mainly have fixed game areas with fixed and reasonably simple game rules so once I’ve seen it and done it I tend to still remember how it was for many years after playing it, so the exploration fun isn’t there anymore in a new run (in my experience it takes maybe a decade before I can come back to the best such games and have fun with it again) whilst many Indie games have procedurally generated playing fields and/or complex enough game rules that after I’ve played so much of it that I got fed up, it takes me a lot less time to have fun in a new run.
Even supposedly great games like Red Dead Redemption II turned out to, for me, be engaging and interesting for far less time than things like, say Terraria - sure, the former starts a lot more impressive, but the fun goes down a lot faster whilst the latter just keeps throwing challanges at you. Also having played it until you’re fed up, some months later Terraria is fun again for another run, whilst if you go back to it a year later, for RDR II you quickly remember what’s were in the game area and how to go around doing stuff, so the “discovery” part of fun isn’t there anymore (this especially so for the story: it’s really only interesting once)
Mind you, there are actually older AAA games for which this doesn’t apply. For example, I can still go back to the Sims 3, start a new game and it will be fun for quite a while.
I think that the problem with modern AAA games is that far too much was invested into glitzy visuals and a heavilly curated game area (not just visually but even things like scripted events) and not enough in engaging game play, plus I get the impression that game play tends to be low complexity so as to be accessible to more people, and for me after 4 decades as a gamer, simpler game rules are usually boring unless the interact in complex ways. Further, all that curating (read, “tight control”) of the game experience goes against a great source of fun in games - emergent gameplay (how the interaction between game rules and between them and the game environment can create varied and complex situations that need different solutions) - something which, IMHO, is part of the reason why in some games multiplayer is a lot of fun when singleplayer is not (humans are great at creating the novel and unexpected) and which works especially well with game with tons of things which interact with each other and with procedurally generated game spaces.
God of war Ragnarok gets even worse with the backseating
too much of a “guided experience” for my taste.
This shit drives me crazy, and Sony games are far and away the worst offenders - Spider-man, GoW, Death Stranding 2, etc. Otherwise great and enjoyable games damn near ruined by constant nagging and pointers for the most obvious things, like “helpful” reminders to get to the objective you’re already going towards. I have other problems with Death Stranding 2, but that was one of the bigger ones. Stupid doll man wouldn’t. shut. up.
As I recall The Last of Us two found a pretty organic sweet spot. The character you’re with would just make oblique observations if you were stuck for a while, increasingly explicit, until finally an actual icon would appear in the UI pointing you in the right direction (configurable).
I really do find hifi environments too busy to make out “significant” features, and if you’re not going to splash yellow paint on everything some kind of hint system is nice.
Source: I’m not smart
I mean… if you only have a console (or even worse: only a Smartphone) I get why it looks like that to people. Some people apparently don’t even have a PC or laptop anymore.
A lot of great games have been ported to phones. Then you have emulation. I am playing games up until 3DS on a 6yr old phone with a blue tooth remote that sticks to the back of my phone.
Do you have the screen vertical or two screens horizontal? I’ve been trying to get through a run of radiant historia and I keep falling apart because I can’t get the screens lined up right
I’ve been doing the screen vertical. I have an McCon that can change the direction you place the phone on the remote.
if you only have a console
… then your an idiot in the first place.
If you spent $700+ on a gaming only device that you can’t use for most “PC activities” (office, banking, browsing the web, etc), than you obviously set your priorities wrong.
Most indie games run on 10 year old budget laptops/PCs and you can get them definetly cheaper than a console.
Do you know how goddamn cheap an old console can be? It’s insane value for money for entertainment. You do not have to buy the latest console. I played Star Wars Racer for hours the other day with my nephew, on the old Nintendo 64 in my games cupboard, gathering dust but still working perfectly.
Yeah cool, but the meme is about modern gaming…
The meme is, but you were saying that consoles are hella expensive. I was just saying they do not have to be.
I’m genuinely upset at how miserable the mobile scene is compared to the rest.
I’ve got a phone that’s orders of magnitude above a TurboGrafx or a Game Gear, but 95% of the games are GACHA crap or so ad bloated as to be unplayable.
Well, as a consolation prize, you can run PPSSPP on Android, Linux, and possibly iPhone. You can also find archived ISOs for pretty much every PSP game ever made such as Monster Hunter Freedom Unite, Monster Hunter Portable 3rd, Crash Twin Racing, Phantasy Star 2, etc.
Slay the Spire!
They need to release the sequel on mobile already. I’m dying here
There is nubbys number factory
And thats it, there are no other good mobile games
Yeah, it’s abysmal. I still rock a OnePlus 7 Pro from 2019 with /e/OS, that damn thing can run Crysis (I tried, works with Winlator - lots of compatibility bugs though). The SoCs are so powerful Valve designs a whole stand-alone VR system around it able to play full-blown PC titles. Modern phones got crazy performance.
Good games without all the extorsion money simply can’t compete in the attention game though and people won’t pay money for something worthwhile if there’s a storm of crap “for free”. The internet and digital spaces in general got utterly broken by surveillanve capitalism. But, you see… it’s for ✨the economy✨.
It’s unfortunate that the attention economy is what sells the existence of these indies in the first place.
people won’t pay money for something worthwhile if there’s a storm of crap “for free”.
I’ve got the first six FFs, which were remastered and released on Mobile. Got me through lockdown, when I was just trapped in a socially distanced office with nothing to do.
Like, it’s definitely possible to make - and sell - a good game that works well on a phone.
The internet and digital spaces in general got utterly broken by surveillanve capitalism.
Ain’t that the fucking truth.
Personally a big thing that holds me back from even seriously considering mobile gaming as an extension to normal gaming instead of “the best you can do when you don’t have access to better devices” is the input side. I hate touchscreen controls for anything with real time action because touching the screen obscures it from view, plus you don’t get the tactile feedback of buttons that makes it trivial to play without needing to readjust your finger positions constantly.
And I know there are external controllers you can use with phones, but if I’m making space (and remembering to bring) one of those, I might as well just bring my steam deck or even the switch instead.
I mean, yeah, why not bring a dedicated device, but the shit you can do with a phone and a controller is not unimpressive. I’ve got anything and everything psx and before emulated (including SCUMM and DOS, so I could play old lucasarts or sierra games. Fuck if I remember how to do that. Something on fdroid) on a oneplus 7 pro and galaxy s3.
I think the money aspect is a big one with this. Someone with a Steam Deck and/or Switch doesn’t see the need (well, Switch maybe unless it’s jailbroken), but if you just want something and money is tight then a new 50€ controller and your existing phone gets you way further.
50€? What has happened to the controller market in Europe while I was in the toilet?
EDIT Cheap gamesir for $35 USD. I’ve got an old gamesir g3s. Something like 10 years old. Still works great, i might have to reset it with the pin if I’ve been using it 8 hours straight.
I have a GameSir G4 and it’s trash, utterly awful input lag and the connection never worked correctly with any device other than Android either. Basically unusable without a cable, I’d never recommend their stuff.
You can emulate tons of consoles and games on your phone though
Just sucks without physical buttons. Using button on the screen covers things up and is much harder to use.
Agreed. Some emulators do have the option for haptic feedback via the vibrations. Which still isnt ideal but i found it quite useable for certain types of games.
Or you just buy a bt/usb controller for 20-50 bucks. A few phones even have usb-c dp alt mode and you can enjoy the games on the big screen.
Got a Bluetooth controller. Changed everything.
Even if you only have a console, it’s really not THAT bad especially if you’re not a conscious consumer. Like my kids love their Switch 2 games because they don’t really know any better yet. They see me playing different games on my PC or even indies on the Switch and look genuinely interested so I’ll get them to play those soon enough to expand their horizons (and eventually let them know how shitty a company Nintendo truly is lol).
But Switch exclusives are amazing anyway. 1st party Nintendo games are almost always good. And ever since Switch 1, pretty much all of the indie games are available on the platform. And since indie games don’t really need powerful hardware, it’s a great experience.
The quality is good, I give that to them. But their pricing, ownership model and especially opinion about copyright is abysmal (weren’t they the ones trying to patent relative motion?). Nintendo has some genuinely good artists and engineers who clearly love their job but they take the carrot-and-stick approach to the extreme and it’s disgusting.
Me playing Noita (the only game I will ever need) while everyone complains about gta6 which isn’t even out yet.
(actually send help, I cannot make myself play other games)
Noita is great value if you can get around the unforgiving nature of the game.
Now share your secrets with us, give us your go-to wand configuration.
Chainsaws on a trigger spell with an extra one at the end which gets cast at the same time as the trigger bolt to delete cast delay. Adding shit like add manas and heavyshot to the payload really make wands like that shine. Another good one is the lightbeams with the bouncing spells perk or the zig zag modifier.
I have to give the bouncy concentrated light a try. My two favorites are the classic homing (ideally accelerative homing for that increased damage) rock and the multipurpose ping-pong luminous drill (usually with also add mana to never run out of mana). Those are usually guaranteed to carry me far enough to a point where I can gather all the pieces for a high damage wand.
Noita can be such a time sink. I never felt like I properly understood wand crafting. The different ways effects interact is wild.
785 hours, 6 wins. I am perfectly capable of dying to dirt a world over and not need The Works help.
Played Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora recently, and it struck me almost immediately:
This is, without a hint of doubt, a Ubisoft game. The setting may change, the characters are swapped, but it is always the same gameplay. Like if they figured something that works with Assassin’s Creed and decided to never change it, ever.
Whatever Ubisoft action RPG you start, you always play Assassin’s Creed with extra decorations. Again. And again. And again. Zero creative vision, just new textures on top of the same mechanics.
They used to have good writing though. How’s Avatar’s story?
Well…it does have some good points. To provide an example without much spoilers, I’ll take one from the early game: while some RDA humans join the Na’vi resistance, and Na’vi are happy to have some help, they keep the original Avatar’s line of Pandorans’ mistrust towards the humans. You are being reminded that humans (the “Sky People”) might sometimes be allies, but they fight a proxy war, and you are here to protect your very homeland. This does get developed further down the story, and it’s a little gem, being a rare shift against humans in the game industry. It provides a nice shift of perspective, while being true to the original story.
Or, the fact that Na’vi clans all have their own vision of war, and some are hesitant to join in again after past defeats. This adds more political complexity to the lore, as opposed to “good guys - bad guys” mentality.
Also, on the crossection of story and game mechanics, there is a disharmony debuff granted when you get too genocidal towards local wildlife. It lowers your senses, makes you a pariah among na’vi, leads to your ikran abandoning you, and more. I think it’s nice, though they made a fairly poor job communicating what counts as a source of one.
On the negative side, it often feels like game design came before the story itself. A lot of it feels like they first planned where the player should go, and only then - the actual “why” behind it. This leads to some awkward turns in the story that feel like a patched afterthought.
you always play Assassin’s Creed with extra decorations.
Or if there are guns and vehicles, it’s all Far Cry :-)
