Unflattering Comparisons

By the time you read this, there's just two days left of the current Steam Next Fest. The semi-regular digital festival where Steam's packed to the brim with demos of upcoming games, dev-streams, and reveals.

While my wishlist isn't tripling like it did last time, I'm still finding lots of interesting games I never would've heard of had this festival not given me the chance to try a whole bunch.

The shortlist from me so far is easily OTXO, Wavetales, Potionomics, Gunbrella, Season, and The Entropy Centre.

Check 'em out while you can!

Especially OTXO!

In the meantime, I want to talk a little bit about most of the games I've dropped, not just during this Steam Fest but during most of them, and even outside of the festival.

I've been a major advocate for the middle market in gaming. I'm just as sick as everybody else of most modern games demanding attention at all times, becoming little more than time-killers, all about booting up the game as a senseless ritual, akin to watching the news on TV, or jerking it in the shower before work.

Completing challenges for a completely linear progression system to unlock one skin for one gun only available for one season, so you can occasionally say to your friend "look what I have."

Spending money on a skin for no reason other than you feel something is owed to this major super publisher that's going to take your money to pay off the lawyer fees arguing USA Government officials that, your honor, my client just groped that female intern ironically!

The industry is greedy, toxic, unfair, and exhausting.

It also makes some pretty incredible things sometimes.

And while that doesn't justify the worst parts of this industry, something I see far too often in the middle market and indie space, where theoretically these problems don't exist, and creative freedom is encouraged… theoretically, I've played far too many of these games which are little more than pale imitations of the AAA markets best work.

In one of the few driving games shown during Steamfest, one that promises ridiculous races, flying ragdolls, and Flatout-esk crashes, it opens with electro music as you're touring through a wide open-road listening to the event's announcer build up your entrance…

It's Forza Horizon.

It's very obviously aping Forza Horizon.

And I get it, Forza Horizon is a great series, one whose last effort enjoyed lots of conversation about being the best entry yet, and one of the best arcade racers out there, period.

You can't possibly compete with its millions of dollars invested into physics, music, presentation, vehicle selection, customization, or most obviously, graphics…

So WHY are you inviting this comparison?

Why are you making it the first impression of your game that has nothing to do with this Triple AAA project that to any impatient consumer, isn't going to possibly warrant any kind of attention compared to what's more conveniently available on the market?

One of the older videos on my channel concerned a game called Deadfall Adventures by The Farm 51, that immediately invites comparisons to Uncharted, Tomb Raider, and Indiana Jones, while looking, sounding, playing, and feeling worse than all of them.

It was so, so refreshing that one of the games this Festival, Wavetales, a innocent 3D platform with a cartoony art-style, DIDN'T force me to watch it's poorly voice-acted ten minute short-film, force me through a poorly written tutorial, or feature controls worse than Mario 64…

I've played so many of these Indie Platformers that I was on auto-pilot for a couple minutes until the game's flow made me snap out of it, realizing I was playing something not only competently put together, but one that was more interested in being its own thing, rather than just recreating something else.

Look, another thing I'm all for, are the "clones." Games which shamelessly rip from whatever the designers grew up with. SIGNALIS wears Metal Gear Solid and Resident Evil on its sleeves. People assume Gloomwood's a Thief game. There's now an entire genre called BOOMER SHOOTER.

I'm all for it.

I'm all for taking these games from the 90s, that have never been iterated upon since the '08 crash, sometimes, even earlier than that.

But that's because we can easily match the quality of those games with modern technology.

Today, the games that took Capcom an entire team to painstakingly build, can now be assembled sometimes by one madman.

You can't do that with modern games.

In-fact, it's borderline impossible.

Even when I'm playing games like Bright Memory which people take screenshots of to directly compare to Triple AAA, can't compare to these games made by thousand person teams in motion.

Call of Duty World at War had a developer whose entire job it was, to work on the smoke effects.

How can you compete with that with a team of four?

You can't.

And you know what?

You don't need to.

You can use effects relative to older periods which are now a standardized, and do with them, what nobody, in 10+ years of development and all of its thousands of staff and millions of dollars had neverdone.

It doesn't need to be earthshattering.

It doesn't need to be a new genre.

It just shouldn't be what the current Triple AAA market has already gotten a massive headstart on.

You're bringing a knife to a bomb fight.