[...] even if they do end up completing their project, I'll probably have forgotten about it. I'm not gonna wait a decade to play a game. So, either they downgrade the scale and work on a less ambitious project (which they had with the UE4 build) or they ACTUALLY use the EA Steam feature for once (that was the point on putting the game on Steam in the first place) and work from there with the Steam playerbase feedback and provide the advertised 3 months builds per year.
At the end of the day, the real problem here is them using Steam as a billboard to get people to their Patreon and since there is this Patreon trend that's been here for a while where you get money by doing bare minimum work, it's really hard to be optimistic.
Really missing those days where devs were more interested in giving something new and fresh and enjoyed working on a game rather than working in the industry to only rack in the money.
Sadly,
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, as says Nintendo. Standards have risen since the greats stay forever, what hasn't been tried is quickly taken for projects, and much of what's new fails due to unexpected problems. Players will unfortunately wait literally decades for certain game releases, as is the case with Elder Scrolls 6 (currently about 13 years), Baldur's Gate 3 (about 20 years), Duke Nukem Forever (over 14 years), Star Citizen (expected to die before its release in 30 years), etc. You have to lower your standards to the point where developers don't feel afraid, meanwhile Triple A studios have lowered their standards exactly so, people buy their overpriced half-assed work because advertising with a big name and flashy media will force it through to be spread by the masses. I can see why they want to try hard. They want to be seen.
I had to take a bit longer to think about the patreon problem. Steam regulates developers firmly, and patreon doesn't. That's problematic, I agree. Unfortunately for some projects, "new and fresh" definitely takes a long time.
I'd even call those projects "cursed", the kind of concept that arrives to you in an intense dream one day, haunts your memories for years, and will always be hard to get support for as the details are so different from what people know they would like that you can't even talk about it to most without a strong set of ready concepts to present and probably something playable and attractive to boot.
The problem really isn't that they upgraded the engine, it's that UE5 is so vastly different in gameplay. UE4's general gameplay feels a lot like Skyrim, but UE5's more like Dark Souls. It's somewhat sluggish, harder to control your character, and combat feels like it wasn't even tested, because some features don't even seem like they work properly.
Where a game has done engine upgrade right however, is Stardew Valley. At no point does it ever completely change any mechanics, only improve and add new features.
Or if you want an Early Access example, the Project Diva (not-quite-a) fangame: Project Heartbeat. Its most recent update, upgraded the engine to Godot4, and improved the input handling so that the game reads them more accurately. On the surface, it looks no different from the previous version, and that's can actually be a good thing, but some developers don't understand that upgrading doesn't mean that you have to change everything.
Your post brings me unexpected nostalgia. Before Skyrim there was Oblivion, Morrowind, and Daggerfall. You can say standards there were lower from a technical view, but Morrowind had the best story and atmosphere, Oblivion had the most fun combat speed, and Daggerfall had the best dungeon exploration. Half-Life 2, its episodes, and Alyx came out but people still play HL1 and its multiplayer mode for its uniquely frantic flow. People still return to those games to this day. They're not the market majority, but checking game dev news recently it seems there's hype for retro-inspired projects like the
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(inspired by HL1),
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(inspired by Hexen / HL1 / Souls),
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(inspired by Daggerfall).
As for souls games, Dark Souls broke the media around action games like
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broke theatre for about a century and became a foundational inspiration for techniques in film. I personally don't care for soulsborne as a comparison term because not only does it make consumer talk dumber by skipping specific nuances of the game they're actually talking about, but it makes game development dumber as games like Lies of P really dive into the mentality of this actually being
the kind of game people really want, and they make a clone that feels too close to the original comparison item so everyone's passionless about its reception.
The rest of your post intrigues me, you seem to have a point about graphical fidelity. For example, Terraria has been around forever and still goes strong. Graphically it's aged poorly but the game itself has flourished even despite competition from ex-staff in Starbound (which died horribly in $#% circumstances).
Your examples are pretty sound. Yes, I'm glad Godot is seeing use instead of Unity and input handling is more important than people give credit for in responsive games.
What worries me from a gamedev perspective is the conscious decision to make the game "better" by
changing things that
might have worked well enough to draw an audience already. Like an author might change their story ending yet people actually liked how the story ended, to change gameplay is something that will bother people - rightfully - because it had merit. It's like looking back at your work and thinking that the new way was the way it should've been, but the old way was what people enjoyed even if it clashed with your vision.
I personally enjoy the slower and methodical pace of a "souls" game approach, but as I said, I had great fun with Oblivion even with its weak story because the dungeons were fun (better than Skyrim's), and the combat flowed at a speed such that it felt like a boomer-shooter if you spawned a bunch of enemies in an area and everyone had high agility. Yeah, I'm pretty sure paladins in armor aren't supposed to move as fast as Sonic the Hedgehog and swing claymores as fast as kids hyped on breakfast cereal on Christmas morning will swing empty gift wrapping cardboard tubes at each other, but... it felt fun, not gonna lie. It's like that.
So I'm sorry for your loss. I resolved to only sticking with the new game to playtest efficiently what is being worked on without being biased by the old version, but you have a solid point.
I think in times like this the developers would make a new system that's in between the old systems. The developers of MOBAs tend to do this more often. Especially the ones with constant balance issues, for better and worse. In short, system A is fun, system B is less fun to some, and system C blends the good of both. Hopefully balance is good enough that no further patching is needed. Yeah, that's tough to uphold. That's the way to do it though.
