Anon doesn’t believe in golden age of indie games

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Irapotato@reddit

I mean cruelty squad is pretty cool, as are balatro, slay the princess, undertale, etc. There are a shitload of great newer games if your dopamine receptors still work and you aren’t a bitter shell of a man.

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Icy-Tourist7189@reddit

Fear and Hunger 😈

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stormitwa@reddit

That game was such a weird rabbithole to fall down. The only proper use I ever got out of youtube shorts was introducing me to fear and hunger.

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mostie2016@reddit

I think the only thing stopping me from playing it is the lack of way to save my progress.

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stormitwa@reddit

I've never played myself, but from what I gather runs don't tend to last very long haha.

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Kasefleisch@reddit

I'm not the only one who randomly gets a pile of Fear and Hunger shorts for no reason, it seems.

I like the grotesqueness and the uncanny valley design philosophy, but why does it go rampant in my shorts? I've never heard of it before

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Commaser@reddit

Fear and Hunger rape speedrun any% is wild

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SilliusS0ddus@reddit

wtf it's actually real

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AegisT_@reddit

Funger is a masterpiece

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GeneralBoneJones@reddit

balatro does not belong there

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Irapotato@reddit

Balatro is objectively great

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Soft_Mastodon1818@reddit

Balatro's goated

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philkiks@reddit

"Objectively good."

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Soft_Mastodon1818@reddit

Bro, not even that, but also gameplay oriented indies

Enter the Gungeon, Hotline Miami, Katana Zero, Hollow Knight, fucking ULTRAKILL for Christ's sake. All amazing games that beat a lot of AAA 10-0.

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Rejukem@reddit

Why are we still here?

Just to suffer?

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NCR_High-Roller@reddit

They played us like a fiddle (past tense)

They are playing us like a fiddle (present tense)

They will play us like a fiddle (future tense)

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Glonos@reddit

Yes

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Vikerchu@reddit

Starsector and project wingman

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ambermage@reddit

you aren’t a bitter shell of a man.

Well fuck, can you suggest some titles?

I already got Rimworld, the war crime / genocide simulator.

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Pheeshfud@reddit

If you like Rimworld then Dwarf Fortress and Factorio are pretty much mandatory.

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Previous_Air_9030@reddit

I love Rimworld and hate both of those so it's not a universal appeal.

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Kuftubby@reddit

Dwarf Fortress and Factorio

Hey if you like Mario Kart then Iracing and Twisted Metal are pretty much mandatory.

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Osuruktanteyyare_@reddit

Well I can: Starsector, Mount and Blade Warband(Bannerlord is shit), Project Zomboid, Suzerain, Doorkickers 2, My Summer Car, Bomber Crew to name a few

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AegisT_@reddit

Bannerlord is one of the biggest heartbreaks I've had in a long time

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SikeSky@reddit

Kenshi

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Designated_Lurker_32@reddit

Disco Elysium. If anything, you'll relate to the protagonist.

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ceruraVinula@reddit

no it's better to be reductive and call everything "pixelshit platformers". big ego boost

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Zeldacrafter_Swagg@reddit

Yeah the most eye rolling thing about this post (and the 300 upvotes reply in this very thread) is that it pretty much just boils down to "indie games aren't following trends I like, therefore they aren't going through a golden age". All of the games you listed are great, and this isn't even scratching the surface.

Also most of these people give indie devs slack for being uninspired and doing "the same shit" but just want them to remake the games of their childhood over and over again.

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HazelCheese@reddit

Anon doesn't seem to understand that comparing solo indie Devs against entire companies is unfair.

Even if Doom was made by like 5-10 people before, that's still 5-10 different people who spent their entire lives learning different skill sets and can combine and parallelise them.

Most indie Devs are solo Devs who are having to learn art / programming / writing / marketing etc all at the same time as trying to make the game. They aren't choosing pixel art because they love pixel art. They choose it because making anything else would take them 30 years of Dev time.

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Zeldacrafter_Swagg@reddit

Oh my god don't get me started on that. Even if every indie game was pixel art, it still allows for a wide variety of style (like, I think if someone genuinely believes Shovel Knight, Turnip Boy, Terraria, Papers Please and Hyper Light Drifter share the same artstyle they deserve to be put down) that the rampant AAA hyperrealism doesn't allow, so I don't know what the big deal is?

100% agreed with everything else you said

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Business-Emu-6923@reddit

Dusk is a boomer shooter made in Unity by one dev.

And it is fantastic.

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BigBubsYuty240@reddit

Brother undertale is like a decade old but yea i agree

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EngineStraight@reddit

i picked up and left cruelty squad like 4 times before i powered through it, game's goor

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zombieGenm_0x68@reddit

lmao I was gonna mention cruelty squad

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WietGetal@reddit

Og poster is on 4chan so obviously a bitter shell of a subhuman being

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LarsRGS@reddit

I really like indie games, but for every Balatro there are like 100 Celeste knockoffs with reused assets and some dumb convoluted story that is supposed to be an allegory to depression or something like that

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Q_dawgg@reddit

On a technical level is it really this easy? I remember trying to code a simple side scroller in unity and it took days. Maybe with AI code writing can be easier?

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arbiter12@reddit

Back in the days (40 or so years ago), the preparatory work to allow you to get pixels to display and move would have taken months.

And no tutorial, no community, no communication. If you were lucky, another weird kid lived in your street and had suffered the same thing as you. But normally, just the manual from the language and the machine. You want to draw a line at the bottom of your screen? Well I hope you understand that a line is a colored pixel that is repeated for as long as the screen goes to the right. Oh but the pixel needs to be stored in memory before it can be used once. And if you want to use it many times, with different color, you'll need to allocate for that. For added fun, if you made a coding mistake in page 1 of your game, you need to delete all the code up to that point, fix the mistake, and then retype the code (no copy paste)

Now I'll let you imagine how many months it took to make this screen.

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ShrikeGFX@reddit

On the other hand they made full games in 3 or 6 months, which is now easily 3 years minimum

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dingodile44@reddit

Yeah but that is because games are much more complex. Those games that took 3 or 6 months nowadays can be done in less than a week probably, if you use a game engine.

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susimposter6969@reddit

Unity is annoying to use for simple projects, try Godot, clears out a lot of the nonsense

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ShrikeGFX@reddit

Using unity for simple projects is it's entire purpose

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DeliriumRostelo@reddit

I dont really find unity that bad to work with

What's annoying about it

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Q_dawgg@reddit

Honestly I’m thinking about getting back into it so I may give that a look. Thanks!

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yeezusKeroro@reddit

It isn't that easy. You can download premade code for a lot of the most popular video game mechanics (first person shooting, third person shooting, drivable cars, NPC AI, dialogue, character creation) and plenty of 3D models and animations, but actually getting all of the different packs you download to work together as a complete package will require some understanding of how the code works and the engine itself.

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TimeGlitches@reddit

Because you still need top notch performances, writing, and level design to create a masterpiece.

None of which these art college rejects have. Pros are still pros and amateurs are still amateurs, doesn't matter the era or the tech. Shit on them all you want but the iD that made Doom knew what the fuck they were doing. They were inventing, not copying someone's homework.

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AntiProtonBoy@reddit

Because you still need top notch performances, writing, and level design to create a masterpiece.

That's only the start. The amount of man hours required to put into a title is just unrealistic for indie devs. Which is the reason why they keep making pixel shit games, because that is a realistic goal to achieve.

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undreamedgore@reddit

I know people hate it, but AI is begining to open the door for voice work amd the like.

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Wk1360@reddit

The venn diagram of people who play up & coming indie games & people who would buy a video game that uses AI voice acting is a short drop away from becoming two separate circles.

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bunker_man@reddit

Why? Indie games can benefit more than anyone from AI. Sure, a whole ai game would be slop, but using it to help round stuff out is different.

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undreamedgore@reddit

I disagree. If the results the AI produces are good, why shouldn't people enjoy them? Or just use them?

Or is this more a case of elietism for the sake of elietism?

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kubapuch@reddit

I disagree, hear me out. I hate AI in a lot of ways because it’s mostly dimwitted management trying to cut people out but it has opportunity for the those who lack resources.

Lots of developers only get so far because they’re programmers, not artists, writers, or voice actors. They’ll program everything, so it’s a bonus if they do story, art, etc. because that stuff usually boils down to other people working for free or not much à la start up style.

It could be useful as a stepping stone, it’s just sad that right now because think it’s a direct replacement. It’s value comes in being an aid or assistant.

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designer_benifit2@reddit

You’re using too much logic for this app dude, Ai bad and carry on

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whydoyouevenreadthis@reddit

True, but they might change their mind if at some point AI-generated voice lines become so difficult to distinguish from voice acting every indie developer starts using them. They won't have much of a choice then.

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TimeGlitches@reddit

Any tech that is designed to fully replace humans in a creative work should be rejected, wholesale.

If you want to replace artists with a machine, do the human race a favor and stick your genitals or cranium in a meat grinder.

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undreamedgore@reddit

Fuck off. It's a tool like any other. Stop holding art on a pedestal.

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yeezusKeroro@reddit

I don't think anon is even talking about the writing, he's talking about gameplay. You use Doom as an example but that doesn't exactly come to mind when I think of good performances either.

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LemonFlavoredMelon@reddit

Wasn't Undertale done by like one dude?

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ChargeProper@reddit

Valheim was like 1 programmer and 3 helpers over a 3 year period, Risk of Rain 2 was a programmer and an artist,

The post might be pushing it a bit but the point kinda still stands

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Braindeadkarthus@reddit

Wasn’t palworld like, 4 guys that learned coding on the fly or something?

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yeezusKeroro@reddit

Hmm fair enough. The graphics on those games are a bit rough, but nowhere near "pixelshit" and actually quite impressive for such small teams. The gameplay itself is beyond impressive.

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wacco-zaco-tobacco@reddit

Doom was amazing when it came out. It revolutionized PC gaming and introduced everyone to the DOOM engine, which was a pretty simple engine to make games in, and even games now are being made in the OG DOOM engine.

The only game to come out and blow DOOM out of the water was Quake, and that was ID as well. No-oke could make games like ID back in the day, no one pushed tech like they did.

Sure it was mostly the Computer god housed within a flesh suit, John Cormack, doing most of the work on revolutionizing tech.

But it is objectively wrong to say DOOM didn't perform well

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Loudpip@reddit

Cant compare todays pythonkiddies with John Carmack lol

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yeezusKeroro@reddit

Performances as in acting.

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wacco-zaco-tobacco@reddit

Ah, well that's a bit different. At the time DOOM came out, the way story was told in games was blocks of text between chapters.

It wasn't untill around 96 - 97 where games with actual voice acting was the norm, such as Blood, Duke Nukem 3D, and Shadow Warrior.

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Bobthemurderer@reddit

I see what you're saying, but the three examples you gave for voice acting are literally just 3 different VA's quoting horror, action, and kung-fu movies respectively. Not exactly the pinnacle of writing.

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wacco-zaco-tobacco@reddit

I don't think you do.

That was the typical writing for games of that era. At that time the game was about the atmosphere and the gameplay, and had very little to do with story.

It wasn't untill 98 with Half Life that games became more interactive, more immersive, and more focused on telling a narrative.

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yeezusKeroro@reddit

Haha yeah I'm getting cooked but my point was just that the top comment is bitching about the acting and writing, which I'll admit is very cringe in AAA games these days, but completely misses the point anon is making.

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Dripht_wood@reddit

Palworld is buns though. They had some good ideas but it wasn’t a game that felt good to play.

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JackTheBehemothKillr@reddit

You use Doom as an example but that doesn't exactly come to mind when I think of good performances either.

At the risk of sounding old. To me, someone who had one of the first 3Dfx cards, this reads like someone that wasnt around at the time it came out.

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originalregista21@reddit

You use Doom as an example but that doesn't exactly come to mind when I think of good performances either.

Then you know nothing

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Soft_Mastodon1818@reddit

Bro, this sounds as if there aren't indie masterpieces.

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Revan0315@reddit

You can have a masterpiece with no voice acting

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AlpheoTheCleric@reddit

Outer Wilds! That one is a fucking masterpiece made by a small Indie Studio. Ubisoft and Co would have never been able to create such a project of pure passion. It is simply the best thing any medium of entertainment ever created. At least imo.

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schmitzel88@reddit

Came here to say outer wilds. By far the most captivating game to come out in the past decade, with no spoken dialogue and only outstanding level design to stand on

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andreslucer0@reddit

Fallout: New Vegas, widely considered one of the greatest FPSRPGs of all time, recycles the same 16 or so voice actors (of whom half are just developers) for its more than a hundred characters.

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uvT2401@reddit

Fallout: New Vegas, widely considered one of the greatest FPSRPGs of all time

The half eyed king of the blinds.

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andreslucer0@reddit

Yeah, you're right. For me it's THE best and my Steam hour count supports it. But I chose to be a humble king by calling it "one of the best".

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uvT2401@reddit

Now imagine your life if you had depth vision

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andreslucer0@reddit

Hating Fallout: New Vegas is a new kind of fixation I'd never seen before.

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uvT2401@reddit

You gravely overvalue the game if you think that I'm not shitting myselft from it is a form of fixation.

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Jack-of-Hearts-7@reddit

THANK YOU.

I'm tired of people glazing Indie studios/games just because they're Indie. If it's a good game it's a good game.

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Denis-96@reddit

Honestly creativity has to be the most important. A lot of those games are uninspired

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DiarrheaDrippingCunt@reddit

Always funny to read the opinion of Reddit's armchair experts who have absolutely no idea what they're talking about.

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TimeGlitches@reddit

Thanks DiarrheaDrippingCunt, your opinion has been noted and your expertise acknowledged.

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woodzopwns@reddit

They aren't art college rejects they are art college graduates with honours and baccalaureate, the standards have gone waaaaay down for designers and writers in gaming.

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AvidCyclist250@reddit

they learn how to abuse apis and wreck performance though

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rumSaint@reddit

Yup. Ofc there are some rare good games like Cultic, which is made by one guy, but it's boomer shooter inspired by Blood.

Deus Ex was a huge effort from the teams. No single developer could pull that off as it requires too much knowledge from various fields like writing, programing, level design etc. Deus Ex especially have so much interconnecting systems it's impossible for really smal team to do something like that.

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Otto_von_Boismarck@reddit

There's also some indie games that try to replicate deus ex now so anon isn't even right.

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robocop_shot_mycock@reddit

Lmao man shut the hell up, slay the spire is the only game in the last decade I am still playing

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DollarAmount7@reddit

Then why doesn’t anyone do it? I mostly play older games anyways from like 1998-2008 so I would love it if they still made games exactly as they would have been made back then. Like how directors sometimes shoot on film or use weird aspect ratios or black and white or silent films, it would be awesome if they made actual real games not just stylized but actually look and feel like something like half life 1 or the old Hitman games just simple singleplayer games designed to be played through once

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RufusKyura@reddit

Be the change you wanna see in the world, anon.

Ya cun-

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EZPZKILLMEPLZ@reddit

There's a good amount of system shock/Deus Ex style indies coming out. Immersive sims are surprisingly well represented in the indie scene as long as you go looking for them. Though I will admit not many have the level of writing that System shock of Deus Ex have, partially because those are like, GOAT'd in terms of video game writing. For GTA 3 stuff, haven't found much tbh, but its an open world on a scale that'd be difficult to do with a small team. Anyways, some indie immersive sims (or not, the genre is a bit vague) for anyone dying to play some, though this is mostly gameplay focused and not story focused. Gloomwood, Bloodwest, voltage high society, Pathologic series, CTRL Alt Delete, fortune's run, and a bunch other's I can't remember off the top of my head.

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PING_LORD@reddit

I mean we have games like Ultrakill for example, that's really awesome indie game, I'd say legendary shit

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SOMEMONG@reddit

Idk man one of my favourite games of all time was an indie platformer made by 4 people including the music composer.

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Sonova_Vondruke@reddit

Anon thinks making a game is easy, and don't require literally thousands of hours to complete. No matter how "easier" it is now. "Pixelshit" is much more achievable to complete with a few people, on nights and weekends for a few years.

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Vikerchu@reddit

Starsector exists and so does project wingman lol

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Traditional_Yam1503@reddit

what is anon comparing them to? COD 9, FFXXL, or World of Ree-Craft?

all the big money studios have to sequel prequel and re-release old IPs because they can’t secure funding for anything they think is a risk

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Allsons@reddit

It's a problem in every tech company that makes it big. Visionary artistic types make a company, change the world, then retire/die. Business school grads take over the company, but don't do anytrhing cool ever again.

Steve Jobs talked about it in an interview once. He didn't have a solution, just made the observation.

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TheBlueEmerald1@reddit

Anon browses the front page of every site he goes to and wonders why its all by the numbers crowd pleasers.

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DocBonezone@reddit

Started feeling like this only a few years after Cave Story, which I realize came out before most of you were born.

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ExtraPomelo759@reddit

Look up Architect of Games' "20 games you should have played"

It's a list of interesting games each year. Not the best, but definetly good, and quite obscure.

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Filibut@reddit

noooo you have to love my roguelite rhythm based platformer with deck building elements >:(

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xemanhunter@reddit

Tech improves, and the people using it change perspectives over time. There are plenty of games just as good, OP is just a dweeb with rose tinted glasses

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neomaniak@reddit

Anon is stuck in the past and can only enjoy games from before 2001 because he played them when he was a kid.

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butterfingahs@reddit

Someone sucks dick at looking.

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The_salty_swab@reddit

I'm just here to stan for Deus Ex.

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TheCatOfWar@reddit

Has there been anything like a spiritual sequel to it? Especially indie. Honestly even if it was just a fraction of the size of the original DX or came in instalments or something, it'd still be awesome. In the era of PSX graphics being all the rage, im surprised there isn't anything like it.

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uvT2401@reddit

Has there been anything like a spiritual sequel to it?

Yea, your everyday life in 2025

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TheCatOfWar@reddit

too real man

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Richard_J_Morgan@reddit

I couldn't get into the first Deus Ex, the controls are way too clunky for me and the technical aspect is way too outdated (couldn't even change the brightness for some reason, the mouse acceleration sucks balls and there were some bugs) and that's coming from someone who has finished Fallout 2 twice.

Human Revolution is amazing though, finished it twice.

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harryguini@reddit

The steam version is a mess and basically unplayable without one of the community patches. People are torn on it, but the Deus Ex Revision steam workshop fan mod is a decent enough place to get started with playing it on modern hardware.

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TheCatOfWar@reddit

Exactly the same boat! I tried og DX but never got more than a few hours due to clunkiness and outdated design. Love HR and played it a bunch, and mankind divided and its DLCs. HR was the peak balance between scale, accessibility and design but it is a real shame the franchise has been shelved.

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Otto_von_Boismarck@reddit

There has been. Corpus edax for example. There's a couple others in the works.

For some reason there has been a wave of Indie immersive sims in the last 3 years while there were basically none for the entirety of the 10s.

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neesters@reddit

GOAT game.

Amazing story. Fantastic voice acting. Good action. Decent graphics for the time. Level after level after level. Open world access.

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AHighAchievingAutist@reddit

A rotten way to die. What a shame, he was a good man.

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your_pal_mr_face@reddit

Paul…. I….I…. I thought you were GEP gun

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AHighAchievingAutist@reddit

A GEP is the most silent way to take down Manderly

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PatrickStanton877@reddit

Idk what anon is on. Some indie games have been amazing. And gorgeous too. Hyper light drifter, Katana zero, Tunic, Rimworld etc etc.

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Mr_BigYellowSun@reddit

I love rimworld. It reminds me of Oregon Trail but on a global scale.

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I_Am-Awesome@reddit

Path of exile started in Chris Wilson's garage in New Zealand in late 2000s. Now it's sequels paid early access is played by few hundred thousand players.

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Walink92@reddit

There is plenty of variety in indie games. Some commenters here are more re*arded than anon

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Historical_Tennis635@reddit

Valheim was started as solo project, and then eventually turned in to a whopping 5 man team.(Grown a bit after the game exploded)

It's interesting in that it's a low texture resolution but the game is absolutely beautiful.(1gb download size gets me rockhard)

https://youtu.be/bA1IxbFngJw?t=82

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Wk1360@reddit

No, please click on “upcoming indie games” and scroll 7 pages down, you’ll see that there’s a real epidemic of unpolished games made by one guy on his laptop in between classes at his high school. It’s disgusting that we’re even giving indie games the time of day when they’re all probably exactly the same as what I just described.

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notouchmygnocchi@reddit

\^ me when I go to w restaurant and insist on eating out of the dumpster and then complain about the quality of food

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hehehuehue@reddit

no, the restaurant is serving you dumpster food here

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MisterGoo@reddit

Same thing happened with Little Big Planet back in the days : everybody could make and publish their own level, and that was an endless sea of garbage, with a rare gem sometimes.

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Explorer_the_No-life@reddit

I need to agree with Anon, all that pixelart, "deep" games get old quickly. Good thing, that there are some cool 3D small studios games too.

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Psychonaut6767@reddit

And it's always a Rogue-Like or Metroidvania

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MindGoblin@reddit

You know shit's grim when the indies are about as formulaic as Ubisoft shit.

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Professional-Gap-243@reddit

Indies make rogue-likes and metroidvanias partially because that allows them to create less content for the same amount of gameplay (as in rogue-likes you keep replaying the same/procedurally generated levels, and in metroidvanias you have a lot of backtracking).

And as everything it can be done right (eg hades, hollow knight), but I agree the genres are becoming oversaturated.

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Ck_shock@reddit

I agree but at a certain point you over saturate the market and then you will turn the genre off to a lot of people.

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ShrikeGFX@reddit

I think rogue like is less of a genre and more of a campaign structure nowadays.

You can have:
- mission based (individually playable chunks),
- campaign (linearly played chunks)
- retry-based structure (randomized chunks with full restart)

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Professional-Gap-243@reddit

Agreed, the term rogue-like is more ambiguous as it is being used basically any game which you are meant to replay over and over (and originally it was procedurally generated, RPGs with permadeath etc)

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VMK_1991@reddit

You forgot cards. It's always those stupid, for lack of a better word, trading cards.

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Otto_von_Boismarck@reddit

You can blame slay the spire for that.

Honestly i don't mind it necessarily if it's executed well. Usually it isn't.

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Acceptable6@reddit

Anon doesn't realize that making 3d games takes like 10x more effort than a 2d one.

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hagamablabla@reddit

If it's so easy to make another Doom or Deus Ex and the market is sorely in need of one, anon should do it and make millions.

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c1n1c_@reddit

The thing with indie game is that there is no com about it. the one we hear about are the one that sell the most, but this is only the tip of the iceberg, there is a lot of good indie game that need to be digged. To counterpoint op opinion, I will cite "gloomwood" who is exactly what was Deus ex back then.

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Obliviuns@reddit

Well, we did get Signalis.

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mrpeluca@reddit

bro is playin slop

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mrpeluca@reddit

i went to slop town and everyone knew him

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mrpeluca@reddit

this is such a bro playin slop post

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mrpeluca@reddit

bro might be playin slop

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mrpeluca@reddit

playin slop on 2025 is crazy

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Spinnenente@reddit

not really true. Of course 8bit style platformers are pretty easy compared to other styles but there are a lot of impressive indie titles out there for example manor lords is a (mostly) one man project.

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Ck_shock@reddit

That was/is my main problem with indie games. Like 90% of the is retro style platformer or rouge like. Which is just not all that appealing to me.

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hundenkattenglassen@reddit

Isn’t that the “Oh yeah yeah”-guy?

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internetlad@reddit

OP is as right as he is wrong. For every balatro there's 1000 asset flip steam slops and AI renpy tiddy games. If you're willing to shift through the trash there are gems but they're few and far between after you've had your fill of the peanut butter cups in the box of chocolates

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ImCaligulaI@reddit

OP is much more wrong than they're right. There were mountains of shit games back in the day as well, they faded into obscurity and people remember only the good ones. It'll be the same with today's games in a couple of decades: nobody will remember the shit ones.

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girosvaldo2@reddit

Thats for like, almost every media ever, i didn't have to go "digging" for balatro, good games just become famous enought for me to buy then without me needing to download the lazy terrible games.

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AMLAPPTOPP@reddit

There were also 1000 dogshit games for every Deus ex back then, it's just that nobody remembers them. It's literally just seething for the sake of it.

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Wk1360@reddit

Ngl I respect the people who like, want to try & make video games but are kinda bad at it. Asset flipping is another thing altogether tho, those people have no interest in improving their craft.

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Otto_von_Boismarck@reddit

Asset flipping is fine as long as you actually make a fun game with it. I've played plenty fun asset flip games. House flipper is goated.

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theyeshman@reddit

I'm with you, I love experiencing some small piece of art someone has tried their best on, even if it's not that good. Sometimes it turns up being really good, too. Just love janky little earnest projects so much, be it a short film, game, novella, comic, w/e I can get that's actual human expression and not corpo slop engineered specifically to fry my dopamine receptors and make even MORE money than last year's [insert major property here].

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Ehh_littlecomment@reddit

idk man there is an absolute fuck ton on excellent indie games on steam.

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bootyzipperooni@reddit

I mean, shovelware has always existed

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arbiter12@reddit

The work of 100+ professional devs done by a single dude.....

By that logic, a single tractor carrying as much mud as a 1000 slaves, you could build a few feet of roman highway every minutes. All you need is a tractor!

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YorkPorkWasTaken@reddit

Man, how the fuck do you think roads are built?

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designer_benifit2@reddit

Except you don’t use a fucking tractor to lay roads down

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Pol123451@reddit

You dont need game development software to write a story.

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designer_benifit2@reddit

OOP isn’t referencing the advancements in game development tech, he’s talking about ai that can write a good narrative

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RoarOfErde-Tyreene@reddit

He’s right though. It is just pixel shit platformers and rouge lites. It’s all garbage

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Yuri909@reddit

Well, Dave the Diver has contributed more than OP will to society.

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djalekks@reddit

what "unparallleled technology" are you talking about? Unreal? You still need a shit load of knowledge...and why are you mentioning the biggest AAA titles of their time to make a point about modern indie games?

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ShrikeGFX@reddit

What nonsense, there are as many different games now than never before

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FieldOfFox@reddit

Cassette Beasts is a pixelshit platformer technically, but it's an actually good Pokeymong clone.

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GoldenGecko100@reddit

There's a lot of really good indie games though, including ones on par or even better than deus ex and system shock

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DeliriumRostelo@reddit

No shot

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MisterGoo@reddit

It’s really unfortunate that you didn’t care naming some of them, then.

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NHShardz@reddit

Just a giant dump of indie games of a ton of different genres I've played over the last year;

Nine Sols(my GOTY 2024), Bo: Path of the Teal Lotus, Inscryption, Killer Frequency, Slay the Princess, The Fabulous Fear Machine, Severed Steel, The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood, Little Goody Two Shoes, Fear and Hunger, Furi.

There's a few games I have my eyes on in the future. There's a game called Rubinite with a short demo out that I'm considering getting whenever it gets a solid release date. I've heard really good things about Crow Country. Cruelty Squad looks cool. I eventually wanna play A Crab's Treasure. Cryptmaster is a game I'll probably buy the next time it's on sale. I've heard amazing things about SANABI.

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VanTrHamster@reddit

I'm sure all of that slop is on par even better than the likes of dude sex and sissy shock

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HeldenhammerSig@reddit

Try Crime scene cleaner. It currently sits at 97% total positive reviews on steam. For a game where you just swing the mop and clean places it's really entertaining.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1040200/Crime_Scene_Cleaner/

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Rubikson@reddit

Come visit us at r/immersivesims if you want to find more games like Deus Ex and System Shock.

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Hyperversum@reddit

It's plenty of good indie, well outside of platformers. But Anon just wants to replay old games made new, not play good new games. Because anon is a gaming boomer.

Felvidek was a fever dream of a game, a funny RPGmaker game with an historical setting but weird, absurd and definitely not "realistic" in its history. You know, having demons and shit. If you just want to play a turnbased RPG that's different for once, you have it there.

Wooden Ocean is also a much more debilitating fever dream, but something I must quote. It's simply the result of a schizo, an actual one, building a game that's sustained through pure force of will because it shouldn't work the way it does, yet it works. It's honestly incredible how deep a single person can go in making a fucking nightmare of a game.

Tunic and Animal Well are some of the best puzzle game ever, you just need a brain to enjoy them.
Void Stranger is similar, yet extremely different to these 2. But anon of course hasn't heard of any of these.

Signalis was made by like 2/3 people and it's probably one of the best Survival Horror ever.
Haven't played Crow Country yet, but heard it's pretty good, being more of a "retroclone" of the OG Resident Evil, as opposed to Signalis using the same formula but modernized.

Extremely well known by now, but F&H2 was probably my Top2 game of 2023. Termina is an incredibly well thought game that's truly the ultimate result of Survival Horror and RPG mixed.

Shadows of Doubt is another example of pure schizo energy turned into videogame. But anon doesn't care, because it's not a shooting game either.

Just like anon doesn't care about stuff like Quasimorph, being a top-tier (and still in early access, lol) roguelite topdown RPG set in apocalyptic space thing.
Because anon wants slow methodical gameplay, but he also wants it to be the same exact thing it was in 1999/2000.

Anon doesn't want good indie games, anon wants to replay Deus Ex but with another coat of paint

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Walink92@reddit

Imagine blaming it all on indie devs when they are basically carrying the industry lmao
If it wasn't for them and maybe Valve & Nintendo the situation would be fucking DRY

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doctorwaffle1023@reddit

Whines about indie games when they are what are carrying the gaming industry. Tons of great games that are incredibly affordable, but wah they didn’t take a decade to make in blender omg pixels so ugly. Super excited for Call of Duty 97. Dude they brought sliding back!!! Omg worth another 70 dollars.

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Icy_Magician_9372@reddit

Golden age has been ongoing for like 10 years. Just have to actually spend time browsing instead of buying trash for consoomers. More options than ever at affordable prices.

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doctorwaffle1023@reddit

Took me way to long scrolling to find a sane comment of people not just complaining to complain.

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whyUdoAnythingAtAll@reddit

And tons of rust like games

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Pistacuro@reddit

Because 2d art is easier then 3d models. Its easy to create a 16x16 pixel monster sprite with little to none artisting talent, then a 4k 3d sculpture in blender. Also for 2d geometry highschool math is enough 3d geometry not so much. (If you want to create something more complex then a basic asset flip)

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CMD_TakeDOwn@reddit

It's much easier for them to be unoriginal.

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dagon_xdd@reddit

indie games are rarely perfect and when they are they're talked about EVERYWHERE. and i think it's the effect of 90% of the triple A games being fucking shit.

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Electronic-Bad4663@reddit

Hear me out, a project on the scale of Shenmue and of similar aesthetic

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s-josten@reddit

Do Darkest Dungeon and Don't Starve still count as indie? I feel like they were at the start, but then bloomed into something more in the mid-range between indie and triple a.

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full_knowledge_build@reddit

Today is the golden age of gaming, I don’t know why everyone is complaining and no one understands

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kubin22@reddit

Manor lords is a platformer? Well you learn something new everyday

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grownassman3@reddit

Op is missing it on some truly exceptional indie games

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yokmaestro@reddit

Kenshi stands on one man

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Ehh_littlecomment@reddit

Anon hasn't been addicted to Balatro

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Visible-Original4561@reddit

If it’s so easy why don’t YOU do it anon?

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dankspankwanker@reddit

Into thr breach was very good tho

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Chops03xx@reddit

Crazy to think that a self taught guy, Dean Dodrill, made Dust: An Elysian Tale, with the exception of the voice acting, single handed. Now full teams are putting out lesser stuff.

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wacco-zaco-tobacco@reddit

When Deus Ex came out, and before that, these games were "indie" as they were made by small teams working out of a basement (or a tiny office if they were lucky). The biggest publishers were companies like Acclaim, Raven Software, etc etc.

There are several games from this era that stand the test of time and are still amazing to play. Just to list a few: Doom, Doom 2, Blood, Shadow Warrior, Duke Nukem 3D, Postal, Postal 2, Prey, Quake, Quake 2, Half Life.

Indies these days are suffering from the same thing that happend on Atari when ET came out. There was so much shit being thrown to consumers that they stopped playing games altogether and the gaming economy crashed.

Indies are heading that way, as for every 1 decent indie, there's over 1000 shits ones. And the good ones that do stick out are usually inspired by games I just listed, and if not it's Castlevania or Metroid.

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koopcl@reddit

Shovelware always existed, and a huge percentage of commercial "non indie" games suck as well. For every revolutionary release like Deus Ex you had 20 Daikatanas or Doom reskins. The issue is that as the tools for game dev became more accessible, more people are making small indie projects in general, and as publishing games became easier (just throw it on itch or publish it on Steam for a small fee instead of needing to secure a deal with a publisher or hosting it on your obscure geocities site no one will ever visit) more people have front row seats to the parade of shit. Add on top that, at the same time, producing AA or AAA games has exploded in costs as well, further skewing the ratio to indie releases and blurring the line between "low key A or AA commercial game" and "high effort indie game".

So if years ago you had the experience of 100 commercial games coming out a year, 90 of which were shit and you would likely never hear of them, and 100 indie games, 99 of which were RPG maker asset flips hosted on obscure sites you would never see, and one release being something like Fez that would make people go "holy shit made by one guy? With no studio support?!", Now you get 50 commercial releases, and comparatively you get 1000 indie releases, of which 100 may be incredible but are blocked out by the 900 pieces of shit crowding the Indie tag on the Steam store.

Add on top the fact that "revolutionary" jumps before we're more noticeable, GTA2 and GTA3 were worlds apart, but this becomes harder as technology plateaus and gameplay conventions become more set in stone. Gameplay innovations still happen a lot in the indie area (games like Cruelty Squad, Stardew Valley or Balatro are innovative even if iterating on older ideas, and other games like Rimworld or Kenshi or Slay the Spire or Dwarf Fortress are as revolutionary as any commercial release), but are less flashy and hidden among the mountain of slop.

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