Oh those guys? Yeah those are just the dozens of professional voice actors we could afford to hire with our tiny baby game studio budget! And those guys? Yeah that’s just our 7-person “engineering” team. What do you mean your entire studio is 4 people?
suck off me
(for the record I’m not dunking on Hades or Hades 2 as a game this is just something that pisses me (and I assume only me) off)
“Indie” had been adopted to mean anything not AAA, because “AA/A/B studio” sounds rude. Which is silly, because B level studios have produced some real bangers and fill/ed important niches. Even if a game ends up with 100+ devs, if the studio WAS indie, its ‘indie’ forever (at this point). Something like Paradox ain’t indie anymore, but good luck relaying that broadly.
Similar thing happened to “roguelike”. First it meant low-graphic gameplay/storytelling focused RPGs. Then people added “permadeath” to the defining features. Then it just meant permadeath, or “hard”, or “has multi-run progression”. Now people call Balatro a roguelike. People tried to adopt roguelite, but 1. sounds too similar, and 2. language will be used how it is understood, not how some of us want it to.
Or like how CRPG literally means “computer rpg”, which sounds like it could fit practically any rpg, but actually means a specific style of rpg.
Semi-related example: “friendslop” has been coined to mean “multiplayer coop semi-casual progression game”. People (who understand the jargon) immediately know what you mean when you say it now. Its goofy and kinda bad, but it works so it’ll be hard to stop it from becoming THE genre name.
Basically, yeah its annoying. Yeah its “wrong”/“bad”. But its sorta impossible to stop without going the Fr*nch route of having a word-use decider (even then I’ve seen a lot of younger French largely ignore it). Especially in a living language adapting to a (sorta) new thing. It irked/irks me because I like the idea of words/language having a clear and logical meaning. But I’ve been killing the redditor urge to go “Uhm actually” and its been pretty good for me personally.
idk i think the AA thing went away when midway games and all the other studios that size couldn’t keep the doors open.
Kinda like the death of mid-budget cinema. Now everything is either a cheap passion project or a 300 million dollar extravaganza
Midway being AA is also funny because they were a Bally subsidiary that was publically traded and had like 600 employees. Same with Lucasarts.
Doublefine would be one that could take that moniker probably, since they mostly self fund and have a staff size small enough where most people probably still know each other (~100)
I don’t think this is the right history of the term. Old roguelikes were games that were similar to Rogue: procedurally generated permadeath dungeon crawlers with little or no progression between runs that were as unforgiving as old editions of D&D. Then you had a bit more breadth to it with things like Dwarf Fortress falling under the label despite not being a D&Desque dungeon crawler at all. “Roguelites” then emerged as games trying to copy the procedurally generated permadeath dungeon crawler archetype but with some sort of meta progression to make the player stronger between runs, but the term merged back into “roguelike” for basically the reasons you gave.
Now it’s like a vague category of short procgen runs with no safety net (meaning you have to restart a run if you ever fail), usually with some kind of meta progression between runs, although what a “run” is in context can vary a lot between games.
Yeah, not sure where they got “low-graphic gameplay/storytelling focused RPGs” from. Absolutely nobody called Ultima a roguelike lmao
Roguelike was just another way of saying Rogue clone, so games like Nethack, ADOM, and so on. It’s like how FPS was originally just called “Doom clones.”
Well that all just sounds awful.
Sound like Moody’s credit ratings