@Snazzyjones Not surprised, none of them are hype games.
None of them are for the faint hearted. All of them are massively unapproachable. But if you’re curious about any of them even a little I’d recommend diving in.
They all offer something special in their own way.
The games industry is changing dramatically. Since Valheim launched in early access here are the games that I have fallen in love with:
- Star Citizen
- Project Zomboid
- Dwarf Fortress
- DayZ
All of them I got into after the game has been in public development for 10+ years.
AAA is dying. Don’t let the annoying rich corporate dick heads convince you that means the whole games industry is dying. Everything people care about is basically indie at this point and indies are thriving.
Fuck AAA, fuck it in it’s dumb corpo ass. Let it die.
All of them offer super unique and super innovative gameplay experiences that consistently blow me away.
None of them are AAA. All of them cost me < £30 and haven’t required me to spend a penny since the initial purchase.
It’s my birthday tomorrow. I plan on doing a birthday stream. Starting approx. 7-9pm UK time and ending whenever I pass out. I want to have fun playing whatever I feel like. Most likely starting with some Valheim speedrun stuff. See you then.
I strongly believe there are entire companies right now under heavy AI psychosis and its impossible to have rational conversations about it with them. I can't name any specific people because they include personal friends I deeply respect, but I worry about how this plays out.
I lived through the great MTBF vs MTTR (mean-time-between-failure vs. mean-time-to-recovery) reckoning of infrastructure during the transition to cloud and cloud automation. All those arguments are rearing their ugly heads again but now its... the whole software development industry (maybe the whole world, really).
It's frightening, because the psychosis folks operate under an almost absolute "MTTR is all you need" mentality: "its fine to ship bugs because the agents will fix them so quickly and at a scale humans can't do!" We learned in infrastructure that MTTR is great but you can't yeet resilient systems entirely.
The main issue is I don't even know how to bring this up to people I know personally, because bringing this topic up leads to immediately dismissals like "no no, it has full test coverage" or "bug reports are going down" or something, which just don't paint the whole picture.
We already learned this lesson once in infrastructure: you can automate yourself into a very resilient catastrophe machine. Systems can appear healthy by local metrics while globally becoming incomprehensible. Bug reports can go down while latent risk explodes. Test coverage can rise while semantic understanding falls. Changes happens so fast that nobody notices the underlying architecture decaying.
I worry.
I’ve been thinking about releasing a build of Earthen Heart that is just one room of one dungeon for free. Just to gather feedback on the combat and make sure it gets tested thoroughly. The idea is for it to be a tiny little combat sandbox. I see no downside.
This way limited secret behind the scenes testing of small groups of trusted people would only really make sense for full builds. Which will still be important. However doing things this way means I can get feedback way sooner, more often and at higher volumes.