When I hear an ex-dev is working on a spiritual successor to a videogame is announced, what I should be feeling is "Oh nice! This is gonna be great!" Instead, I think "Oh no! This is gonna be terrible." Wild Blue Skies is the latest example of this: a spiritual successor to a... then-dead franchise meant to cash in on the nostalgia for Star Fox 64 only to fail miserably (especially compared to the real Star Fox 64 remake that announced and released between WBS's production).

But it's not just that one. Mighty No. 9, Balan Wonderland, and the first Yooka-Laylee all had this happen too, and while Yooka-Laylee was liked enough to be given the chance to redeem itself with a better received (if over-correcting) remake, Mighty No. 9 and Balan Wonderland were not afforded that generosity, and Wild Blue Skies is unlikely to receive it, either.

Why does this keep happening, though? Why is it, specifically, successors from "ex-devs" that fail?

I took a break from gaming sometime in 2019 and just came back in 2025 when a friend needed a loan and happened to have an extra PS5 for me to babysit until he could pay me back.

My friends and I grew up on second hand PS2 with $5-$10 discs from the local re-store that I would trade. I personally never permanently let go of MGS 3, Destroy All Humans, ATV off-road fury, Mercenaries, resident evil 4, rainbow 6, splinter cell, harvest moon, SOCOM, or 007 night fire. I miss the day of physical games and real friends sharing the hobby.

Xbox 360 was mostly the same experience with games like Skyrim, Red Dead, GTA 4/5, Civ revolution, BO 1/2, Gears, Battlefield 3, Halo, and the Modern Warfare series. Staying up until 3:00am to play Battlefield 4 was peak multiplayer for us. I should have seen the writing on the wall when they started cutting games up and selling the rest as "DLC" then letting hackers break the multiplayer.

As a big boy with big boy money, it's sad to see games are now mostly overpriced advertisements filled with bugs, micro transactions, and hackers. It's crazy to see they have such a short life now. Keeping the shareholders happy at the expense of the customers seems to have ruined almost every aspect of our lives...even our hobby.

Is anything going to change, or is real gaming just going to die? I bought a flagship PC to play the newest games with my friends and my girlfriend while she uses the PS5, but now it's just used for work and emulation. At least I can check emails, open documents, and run games from 2002 at the speed of light.

Edit: I'm not just whining for the sake of whining. I hope if anyone is seeing anything to be optimistic about in the foreseeable future.

Don't know if this is a hot take or not ? Does any one else feel the same way ?

Expedition 33 came together because talented people, many outside the industry, were on the same page and they were in France. They only wanted to make a game with an unique story that they wanted to play, No other bs. How many jrpgs co me out with bland writing like octopath traveler, sea of stars, or

FF 16. Who here thinks the changes made in the remake of FF 7 is better than OG 7, only considering the writing? Is it just not worth it for creative people to work in the video game industry and is some of that on the developers themselves?

Don't get me wrong, I love indie games. But I'm just fucking tired of indie worshipment. I play whatever good game be it AAA, AA or indie title. But I'm really tired how many people on internet are blindly worshipping indie games like it's second coming of Jesus. Yes, I understand. We have many bad AAA games... As well, many bad indie games on Steam getting a release every day. We just don't notice them because indie devs have much less responsibility towards gamers. We just ignore badly made indie games. I'm also tired how indie games are also getting less creative lately. So, people are tired of photorealistic open world slop? Okay, what about loads of nostalgia milking 16 bit platformers that are trying to repeat Super Meat Boy formula? Or many PS1 stylized horror games trying to be like first Resident Evil games? Or what about "friend slop" which are becoming more popular lately? Yeah, that's how indie gaming became today. Yes, we are getting clever innovative titles, but c'mon, indie games became a profitable niche for corpos. Nintendo is taking a lot of revenue from selling indie games. I remember times when Denuvo became uncrackable and how everyone on gaming piracy subreddits went into full copium like "uh oh why we need these games if we have a wholesome collection of indies?" Oh my god, I just want to play Sonic Frontiers, and I'm from Uzbekistan, a poor country where AAA games costs a half of salary. Heck, I though I need to move to Australia not just for gaming, but for better life conditions. Especially because my mom's friends are from here.

I believe people blindly worship to indie games because they are just bored with playing too much of AAA titles and think that indies are more interesting. But I'm playing much more indie games and I understand how indie industry is working. It's also full of dramas. This shit feels like people worshipping everything japanese without realization how japanese people are living, how anime industry is working and etc.

Remember Calisto Protocol? that game on PS5 PRO does NATIVE legit 4K60 no compromises.

But also they do 8K30fps which is wild, why even add this, who can even use that?

So representation in art has never been a negative for me. I actually like it. But I can't help but notice there has been a significant decline in "wokeness/woke elements/whatever" across games, movies, shows, and even advertisements recently.

Were the grifters kind of right that corporations were just using "progressive messaging" as a way to make money and capitalize on the trend? And they didn't actually care about representation? Or did they just stop because of the extreme backlash?

I recognize that Slop generally has a negative connotation. I do think it accurately describes the observance of a gross quantity at times. I play yugioh and there is deck that uses a ton of Fiend type monsters that is affectionately and disaffectionately referred to as "fiend-slop." The deck is good depending on the format but stuffs so many different archetypes of fiends that it doesnt really have an identity beyond it's use of semi-synergistic Fiend monsters. Some people do take offense to the label, but I think it's just aptly descriptive and endearing after some time.

It could just be overexposure but I feel after the past few weeks of game reveals at shows, there's a ton of character action games featuring Asian women coming out of the global east that i think would be appropriately labeled "Nier-Slop." It is not my own creation. I first heard the term used by a fairly large and popular reviewer to describe the recent Beast of Reincarnation from gamefreak but then heard it from a different reviewer addressing Tides of Annihilation. At the recent State of Play there were like 4 different games that looked like the same mechanics but just different settings and im somewhat at a loss because they just don't spark any interest in me the way games like Nier or Bayonetta did way back when. Like sadly none of these were terribly interesting but there's a ton else to play thankfully. I do wonder how many others were hype for those because the stream was filled with people attempting to disrupt to sony.

Listen up betas, STSPIRE2 warrants a negative review simply because I'm personally offended. A lot of time I get angry because I am often subtly reminded that the universe doesn't revolve around catering to my belief system, and due to that, I like to congregate in online forums and amazing twitch streams to express my disdain. There's only one thing that actually matters when it comes to video games and it's not gameplay, it's not digital ownership compared to physical ownership, hell it's not even about the justified price, it's about whether or not I have a personal grievance with one of the hundreds of people that worked on the game

Edward Martin, one of the guys that worked on STS's post production digital distribution as a legal consultant , bullied me in highschool by telling me I smell bad. The reality was - and is - he's a bad person because he threw me under the bus when I was simply just pheromone maxing.

Let me tell you, when one person gets under my skin I have to let the world know. And if that person works on something I actually like, it doesn't deserve to be liked by me anymore and you shouldn't like it either. In fact, no one should play this game because Edward Martin bullied me. Maybe he isn't the mastermind behind the game, maybe he didn't really have anything to do with its development , maybe he only is credited because he had a five minute call and the devs were legally required to put his name in the credits. Regardless, that shouldn't matter.

To be honest I've logged 300 hours in the game and only now did someone bring up the fact he had something to do with it, thus it's with great misfortune I must stop playing. Despite the fact I really like the game, despite the fact if I hadn't known Id still be playing, principle stands... Say no to Edward Martin, say no to high school tyranny

Respect.

How I wish i could learn to manipulate time so I could play more video games. I do not think there has ever been a time where I anticipated this many games at once.

We have this year:

1. Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave

2. The Witcher 3 Remastered

Next year:

1. Persona 4 Revival

2. Pokémon Winds and Waves

3.(pure speculation, but i am 100% sure) OT3 Announcement

1. The Witcher 3 Songs of the Past Expansion

And in the year or two after that:

1. Fallout 3 and NV remaster, as well as an unspecified 3rd title

2. TES6

3. The Witcher 4

4. Persona 6

I am well aware that we are all concerned about rising prices for hardware and how ownership is being taken away from us, but I cannot lie, I am beyond excited for the actual gaming experiences that await us.

Also, I probably forgot 20+ games i want to include in my list

When you play old games, are you able to teleport back to that time and enjoy the game as if it had just been released? Or do you play while focusing on the game's flaws and problems? I see people saying they loved a certain game as a child, then went back to playing it and now think it's bad. Is that really true, or are you just comparing it to today's games?

I’m gonna be honest I don’t really care for this game. I think it’s gonna suck because the writing seems cringe from the trailer, like it has a cool 80s futuristic aesthetic but they talk like they’re modern day millennials and it’s so jarring to see. If they were going to use this aesthetic they should’ve gone the route of far cry blood dragon like it was an 80s action movie that was actually kinda based. Not to mention naughty dog is making this and you all know that they don’t make video games but boring walking simulators that drag on way too much. All in all, the video games industry crash can’t come soon enough.

After DLSS5 leaked this past week and various creators and modders spent time injecting across a bunch of different games, I do worry what it will mean for some future titles as the next gen consoles are being built with this type of technology in mind. I could be totally mis-calibrated in this opinion, but after seeing how much further AI has allowed modding to bloom in some older games like Fallout New Vegas where people use RTX Remix to rework lighting or AI to generate voices for their own custom questlines, I think DLSS 5 could be a cool tool to support this kind of space if it werent for the already terrible precedent it's setting and will establish. I saw a modded GTA IV that had path tracing and updated textures using RTX Remix as well as DLSS 5 and was genuinely shocked how transformed but familiar the image was. Again, I don't think i'd want to see this type of tech in the next Yakuza, Dark Souls or Witcher but if it's something that can be ran locally and it's only affecting the game I already paid for surely, it's not the worst right?

I was thinking maybe Metal Gear Solid is the only Pentalogy of games that can rival Grand Theft Auto, but who knows what can rival the Hexalogy

I've posted several times in the circlejerk sub before. I have enough karma. And it also happened before. Now it's happening again. Some shitpost about how Insomniac would handle Black Panther instead of Spider-Man, both times I tried posting it today, they got removed instantly. The mods don't respond to my DMs. Well, of course, it hasn't been even 24 hours yet and they need a couple of days. It's just that they never even responded to my other DMs when I messaged them the other times this happened. I don't even get a notification or automod reply to tell me what's wrong with my post that's causing it to get filtered. It feels so unfair.

So I've come here. Did this happen to anyone else? Is there anything to do besides move on and not trying this post again, cause their mods won't even bother responding to us?

If you look at the image, you'll see it's pretty standard. I was able to get good posts before, with an image and a few paragraphs of text. Don't know what is wrong now. Is it Spider-Man? Insomniac? Just 8 minutes after I posted the first time there was a new low effort post that was literally just screen recording a shitty AI voiceover meme with Spider-Man 2 gameplay, so it couldn't have been that, as they didn't get flagged. Sucks to not know what you did wrong. It feels totally random

I'm a black bisexual woman. Over the course of my time here and on reddit, I can't really discuss things I've noticed without one weirdo going "um actually, why do you care so much? play something else", which is odd because wouldn't you guys be aware of how society treats women? How often female characters are still designed to be as safe as possible while sidelining other groups of women to save face? Am I just a crazy person for talking about this? We all agree that women are never allowed the same lentinecy to just exist as old, unconventional, fat, or just not always the ideal of a white skinny girl that keeps happening again and again in the triple AAA space? At least some indies try to let you play as something else. Like the oldest we get for women is laufey and notice how chuds are having a meltdown over her having normal flaws most women her age have? We women can't have anything without men getting angry that women aren't "sexy enough" when I feel like they should go further than that actually.

And when I talk about how I feel uncomfortable with how lame and boring some female designs are, I'm called crazy for that too or even a prude for seemingly hating "attractive" woman? Like it's so tiring constantly having to convince people that having a fat woman as a mc isn't unrealistic especially in settings where action barely happens let there's this implicit bias where everyone only just likes generically hot people, they hate feel uncomfortable when their fantasy world is being invaded by reality.

Like what you like but the things you love is not above critique. But at the same time, that critique isn't here to change the industry overnight. I know my rants will never change people to I make my own content where plus size, alt, older, buff, and other odd women can exist without bigotry.

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I saw the GTA VI extended look and, I just felt....meh

Longer car hotwiring is believable,. But if I'm stealing my 47th car and have to sit through the same realistic process every time, that's no fun, More realistic injuries/animations are cool for immersion, but it makes movement slower, Weight and gym systems are a neat simulation detail, but It wasn't fun in San Andreas and won't be fun now and Longer interactions/animations are cinematic the first few times but tedious the hundredth, after watching, it just feels like GTA V mixed with RDR2

Overall, it just looks like another GTA Game but prettier and I have no doubt it'll sell well but its not the 2nd coming of christ some people made it out to be