UBON'S PROFILE

functionality is one thing, but the price point is another. it's formerly free and currently cheap, and I already see a lot of people in peripheral circles picking it up to fiddle with and make cool things on their own time. I think most of us take access to the full suite of game design tools for granted, but for a lot of people having a cheap, quick, and accessible alternative means a lot, you know?

this is big for me because I'm particularly interested in seeing outsiders and peripheral hobbyists thrive. there are a lot of people who are excluded from participating in game design by one thing or another, and if they have more of a chance to get involved and follow their own aesthetics then that can only make the field more interesting, you know?

for me, Dark Souls made me think less of what they did than what they could have done with the same component parts. the environmental storytelling was largely wasted on establishing the basics of the setting, with most of the interesting elements that made it stand apart from typical medieval fantasy only glossed over or hinted at -- what was the deal with the primordial serpents? if humanity itself is a literal substance inherently corrosive to the world around it, what does that even mean, and why is the primordial state of the world something I might be convinced to restore? where the hell is the Furtive Pygmy? the game purports to answer a few of these in a well-hidden text dump, but that's not only a disappointing way to resolve them, the speaker is also almost certainly lying. a liar giving easy answers would be an excellent method, but only if the real answers were somewhere else to be found, or at least implied -- instead, Kaathe's word is unopposed, with little else to go on if you don't choose to believe him.

Dark Souls 2 did a poorer job of that than the first, too, and never addressed any of the mysteries left behind. buoyed up on the success of the first, they brought in a whole lot of interference to bring it more in line with what they thought people liked about the 'brand', with a lot of blatant nods, reused level design principles, and ridiculous cameos.

but the core principles, of a game that tells you about where you are only in brief and untrustworthy pieces, kind of struck me, and I think it's something worth remembering now that I'm finally maybe getting into a position where I can move forward with things.

(and for the record, the IWBTG comparison is too 'easy' to be true. there are a number of shameful and disappointing spots where the level and encounter designers went 'well, we're making a hard game, right?' and sprung things on the player without warning, but the basic flow of Dark Souls is ruled by internal consistency. new hazards, enemies, and strategies are (unreliably) telegraphed, and the game goes out of its way to reward slower, more investigative playstyles. the end result is something that will still at a few key points present a blatantly unfair challenge and leave you with no alternative strategies (the bottleneck in Anor Londo being the most famous), but on the occasions where they succeed what they set out to do the underlying philosophy is hugely different from IWBTG, which just throws thing at you at random and expects you to memorize them. at its best, Dark Souls will establish rules and teach you to anticipate hazards. it's hardly ever at its best, but the foundation is there. if it weren't paired with a few arbitrary mechanics meant to make failure more punishing, I feel like it would flow much better.)

(basically, Dark Souls has many indefensible parts, but its problems are (mostly) totally separate from IWBTG's problems. we can't try and mix the two together just on the basis that there are a lot of nerds beating their chests about how good they are at hard video games in both cases.)

e: really, though, you can often learn more from a flawed game than a very good one. copying things wholesale isn't a great practice, so starting out with an idea of what you would do differently is excellent. I think this is about half of what I find so interesting about the series -- it's got problems, but they're not the same banal problems that the bulk of the market has right now. they're cool problems, and problems I can think about.

rpg maker 95 is truly the future

Aka, I think reviewers should be able to discern the difference between a more mainstream game with more man-power and one that had less support,less marketing, and less of a budget to work with. (Even in the indie scene)

be careful not to let this become a crutch. the rm community as it stands is horrible about this -- quality is judged only relative to other rpg maker games, and very few of the examples people use are anywhere close to the limits of what one person can do with the engine. this is largely why the engine is sort of viewed as the punchline of the entire independent game development scene.

do what you can. do everything you can. don't make excuses unless you're bleeding.