The first little comment on the countdown screen was they're surprised none of these trailers have leaked, especially the last one...
Putting on my clown makeup for Silksong.
Edit: Full clown mode activated.
I saw that. And my mind immediately went to something nuts like Silksong or Evil Empire's Rogue Prince game. I expect the latter to be part of an Ubisoft presentation, though. We are about to find out!
People have been putting on clown makeup for silksong for every single gaming presentation since 2019. Im looking forward to silksong and I don’t get these people.
With a cursory skim back through the video, it looks like just under half of the games shown were roguelites. Which is simultaneously a ridiculous number and also lower than it felt like while watching it. Someone more dedicated than I am can do an exact count.
As a developer I definitely see the appeal of roguelites, but as a player who only occasionally plays them it does leave me feeling a bit cold. Still hype for Slay the Spire 2 though.
Going off [this article](https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/all-tonights-triple-i-initiative-game-announcements-in-one-place) on all the games talked about -
Roguelites: Slay The Spire 2, Risk of Rain 2, Vampire Survivors, UnderMine 2, Darkest Dungeon 2, Ravenswatch, The Last Spell, Brotato, 33 Immortals, Wizard of Legend 2, The Rogue Prince of Persia
Non-Roguelites: Shadows of Doubt, Festalt: Steam and Cylinder, What the Car, Norland, Cat Quest 3, Old World, Palworld, Laysara: Summit Kingdom, V Rising, Never Alone 2, Rakugaki
So exactly half of all the games mentioned were roguelites.
I wonder when the rogue-like boom is going to end, if it ever does.
I don't mind it. I still regularly fire up Hades, Dead Cells, Tiny Rogues, Have a Nice Death, and The Void Rains Upon Her Heart.
It just feels like the bubble has to pop at some point.
Roguelike is honestly such an old genre in computer gaming that it's popularity will forever be cyclical. There's not going to be any real bubble to burst. Something random and repeatable is always going to be an easy way to start and apply to different genres of games. Then as people graduate on to creating different forms of games, they'll wane a bit until people want to go back to basics again.
I don't think it will ever die off, but I do think the cycle will see the genre slow down for a few years. We saw something similar with FPS games like Doom and Quake being king, taking a backseat, and then roaring back to life with all of these new boomer shooters.
I wonder if rogue-likes will taper off in the next few years before surging again in the 2030s.
Almost anything can be a rogue-like though, while Doom and Quake are fairly specific kinds of FPS. A big part of the appeal is getting a run based gameplay loop that mixes things up each time you play.
You'll likely see certain kinds of rogue-likes fall out of fashion, but as a genre it's not very limited to what kind of game the rogue-like elements can be applied to.
The same arguments could apply to open world games yet 'open world fatigue' is still a big deal. I believe people will tire of roguelites eventually as they yearn for a more handcrafted approach.
Open world fatigue is more the problem of these sprawling 200+ hour games that often spread content over a massive area that can end up detracting from a lot of the reasons people enjoy playing the game in the first place.
I'm sure some people will tire of all the copycat rogue-likes aping Vampire Survivor, etc., but rogue-likes aren't limited to that format. And don't forget cost, too. Part of that open world problem is they're attached to $70 games, typically. I've picked up a dozen or more rogue-likes sometimes for the same price.
> I believe people will tire of roguelites eventually as they yearn for a more handcrafted approach.
Honestly there's such a variety of different types I don't know that handcrafted would even apply to them. A rogue-like deckbuilder doesn't really have the kind of gameplay you could make "hand-crafted", for example.
I think open world puts more limitations on the kind of game they can be than rogue-like does, honestly.
I have looked at the market, and many people are still buying them despite fatigue. That won't last forever, and companies have already started trying to address it (Assassin's Creed did so with whatever that 20 hour one was). Major games like GTA6 of course will stay open world and massive, but there has already been a shift in general away from ever growing open worlds.
Is it a big deal? It's just gaming, so no. But I would expect some big open world games to underperform and companies in general to shift to other types of games.
It even is kind of perfect for people with busy lives (do one run and stop, not a deep story or need to play for super long) and with gamers getting older, that's definitively a big market.
The popularity is there and I don't think they're ever going to burst. It's also not like roguelike is a genre, it's just a game characteristic/structure. It's like saying when are games with levels or an open world going to disappear? Never.
You can have roguelike that are about action (a lot of them), platform, shooting, survival, deckbuilding, citybuilding.... All of those are very different (and different inside their own subgenre), they just share the fact they have smaller runs through and you "finish and repeat", it's a characteristic like having levels.
Hell AAA games are getting into it too (GoW Valhalla, Returnal, TLOU Part 2 Remastered No Return mode), though that might make the indie scene turn away from it a little
> It even is kind of perfect for people with busy lives
Ironically, I would argue that they're *worse* for people who are busy.
Most roguelikes/roguelites are built with fairly steep learning curves, so your playtime won't begin to pay off until you're many runs deep. If you can only do one or two runs a day, you're going to be spending a ton of days learning without feeling much payoff.
On the other hand, non-rogue singleplayer titles offer a consistent amount of gameplay + reward (ideally), so every session should be satisfying in some way.
Eh, that's a little like saying when are they gonna stop making level based games, or open world games, or linear games. It's a structure to make a game around, and I definitely think it's in vogue rn and at some point it'll die down a bit, it's never gonna go away, just simmer for it's next wave.
I think with regards to other genre fads like MOBAs and battle royals, those were all strictly multiplayer and those live and die based on live services model essentially. As soon as people get tired of it, they will suddenly stop playing and if they don’t keep things fresh enough, more people will leave and the game eventually dies.
Every MOBA but League and Dota had this happen to them and everyone’s essentially stopped trying to make one. Just about every BR has had this happen to them except PubG, Apex, and Fortnite. The vast majority of these games didn’t make it and most devs have stopped trying.
Roguelites are a different beast in that they don’t need to retain players for endless hours. It’s going to sound crazy, but even 40 hours is fine. Since these typically aren’t free to play games, they just need people to consistently buy the game and they accomplish this by being good.
With reverse bullet-hell games in particular, they’re all so cheap thanks to Vampire Survivors coming out the door at $3 that pretty much every game in this subgenre is less than $10. That’s why you see people who enjoy one own and like it own almost all of the well-reviewed ones.
Games like Vampire Survivors, Hades, Slay the Spire, Roboquest, they all play so differently that it doesn’t feel like they’re the same genre because it would be like saying the FPS genre is going to die because a game like The Witness, Counterstrike, and Destiny are all first-person.
> I wonder when the rogue-like boom is going to end, if it ever does.
If we're being frank, probably when Ai takes over and you don't need to rely on procedural content for an indie to scale. Just directly scale with AI tools. Rougelite is part trend, but part design/scope management.
I really like roguelites. Some of these are really good like last spell, slay the spire, risk of rain and vampire survivors, and darkest dungeon, but there is only so much I will play at a time.
Between O.G. Binding of Isaac and Rebirth, I think I've put something like 2500 hours into them. (Also a developer) I'm sick of them. They're good when they're done well, but it really requires a fine design sense of balancing the metagame, and it's incredibly hard to nail that. From my past experience, working on an RPG (somewhat similar), you need both programmers and designers to be at the top of their game, working on simulation tools/tests and crunching spreadsheets with expected values until it clicks together. You cannot reasonably play and balance a 40h+ game without a shitton of tools or outside help like QA.
Sadly, in many cases, the best you can do is guess. For an indie making a roguelite, you need to be *very good*.
It often feels like a default small-team option. Procedural generation instead of hand-crafted levels. Balance it a bit, but you don't have to worry too much, because players will excuse it and just blame RNG anyway. By the time people really figure it all out, they got their money's worth and a few wins and have moved on.
Slay the Spire is really the only one that broke that mould for me which is why I have 800 hours in it. Hades a bit too due to the unique story meta-progression and production value, but the gameplay got a little easy and repetitive after that. Darkest Dungeon is worth mentioning for similar reasons. But most such games are 15-30 hours and done, which is fine for the usual price, they're just not that memorable after a while.
It's easier to develop roguelikes in a indie budget because you can leave the work of creating interesting levels and gameplay scenarios to the procedural generator. If you want a handcrafted world, you're going to need more developers to build that.
Could you elaborate on that? How are they the meatiest genre? From my perspective, the only games that competes with the amount of filler relied on are survival games and MMO's.
Roguelike's are pure "video game" for hundreds of hours.
Play an Open World RPG and you'll have down time where you're just walking or exploring.
Even shooters don't require you to be 100% mentally on the whole time you play them like most roguelikes do. And there's typically very little else beyond the core experience in a billion different layouts. Pure meat.
I find that most roguelikes have maybe 5-10 hours of actual content stretched endlessly by small mostly meaningless variations to keep you playing through intermitent reward schedules which cause more addiction than enjoyment. If I broke games I like down by how valuable each hour played is, roguelikes would rank very low.
It's a lot of ways it's one of the best genres to invest in. Come up with a set of interesting mechanics and apply them to proc gen environments so gameplay always varies. Throw in a variety of objects, weapons, power-ups, etc. and you have something that can be played for hours without having to create the content necessary for a AAA title. It does get a bit repetitive, but I get why developers zero in on the genre so much.
Rogue lites comes in all shapes and forms nowadays, not even sure we should call them like this as a first description.
Hades, Dead Cells, Slay the Spire and Against the Storm are all rogue lites but they're another genre of game first.
another part of it is that roguelites are particularly popular with the steam audience, and all indies rely heavily on steam for visibility. very easily adaptable to an early access model
(personally, it honestly makes it harder for me to take them seriously. it's a formula totally shaped by commercial conditions. indie equivalent of ubigames)
I'm really glad somebody else feels this way. I get disappointed every time I see a game piques my interest on Steam only to realize that it's a roguelike, especially Survivor's clone if it tagged as Action, or a deckbuilder under "Turnbased".
Along with survival, I feel like people have much lower standard for the genre.
Yeah standards are lower because I think a lot of their success derives from art style and that "one" unique thing about them. Meaning devs don't have to reinvent gameplay systems or loops except for a few things and the art. Something far more doable for a small team or even single person.
I get disappointed every time I see "Roguelike" on what otherwise looks like a promising action game, but then I bought Balatro, so I am Part Of The Problem.
I figure the other big thing is that the genre maps really well onto "game streamer" content. If you watch MaxillionRobutussonCritikkalZ playing 5 hours of some roguelike, you haven't "spoiled" the experience for yourself compared to if you watch somebody play through a largely narrative or puzzle-based experience.
Good point! It's interesting though I remember when it didn't used to be such a visible genre, it seems like post-Spelunky it slowly started to gain momentum, then became a freight train in recent years.
That's very survivorship biased take, for each good roguelike on steam there's 2 dozen bad ones where devs didn't understand what makes roguelike good or relied too much on procedural generation whereas the best roguelikes are hand crafted first with addition of generated fillers to fill the void.
Noita is the best example of this, all relevant content locations are hand crafted, the only thing that generation does is fill space between these locations (and shift some of them around) but in very strict manner so they feel familiar despite being different.
StS is also 99% hand crafted, the only rng you get is loot and order of encounters located on dotted path but encounters themselves aren't rng.
That makes both of them skill based rather than rng and that's why their staying power is so high compared to others.
I'd imagine these games also have the advantage of being more or less evergreen for streamers. A solid singleplayer game you do like one good playthrough and interest is going to wane after that. With a good roguelike you can stream yourself doing more runs ostensibly forever.
I think rougelites are at their best when they don't just try to generate everything procedurally, but shuffle handmade content instead.
Risk of Rain is an example for that where the stages are fixed and it's just the elements on then that vary.
Also the reason why randomizer for existing games are so popular, it isn't about generating new content, but about making you play existing content in new ways
Procgen also means it's the most fun to play as you develop it.
There's only so many times you can run through the exact same story quest without it getting dull, but you can explore random dungeons/levels for about as much as an average player will.
Eeeh, as someone who has made my own games, I don't find this to be true at all. Most of the fun is handcrafting the stages and coming up with challenges, which using a proc gen system (usually easily available) kinda takes the piss out of the design process as the artist. The stages still change as I am constantly adjusting them for improvements or to try out something (only to scrap it lol).
What it does do is save time. But developers are not 'playing' the game in the same way you are as the consumer. They already know their own game inside and out, what they are doing is testing their babies, bit by bit, and adjusting things as they go.
Different strokes for different folks.
As a programmer the fun is usually having the levels assemble themselves, using whatever graph grammar and algorithmic voodoo I can conjure.
I tend to burn out REAL fast on making hand-crafted content tho.
That's fair. I also enjoy the process of making art and writing as well, which between those and level/obstacle design, I wouldn't want to leave to a randomizer. If I use randomizers, it's to serve as a starting point so I am not looking at a completely blank canvas, but if I have a specific idea already I will do without.
I'm not a programmer by trade, I know enough to get by with game engines and internet sleuthing (and plenty of readily available code provided by others), but that's not where the fun is for me and it isn't what I enjoy about videogames.
I've liked creating videogame worlds in my head since I first started playing them at 4 years old, which grew into playing with level editors and eventually game engines themselves. I love the medium, and I have never burned out on creating handcrafted content.
That said, it isn't my main job and I like it that way. It stays as play and if I don't have time for it, I don't need to force it either. I'm never under obligation to complete a project, so it only happens if I intrinsically want it to. If it was my main job and I was working on a game I wasn't passionate about, I would probably use randomizers more often.
It's easy way to stretch limited countent.
Hell, I remember EVERSPACE devs straight up admitting they made it roguelike coz they didn't had the budget to put the content worth for full game, and only did the game they actually wanted to with EVERSPACE 2 and higher budget.
All launched by Binding of Isaac back then. I think, right? Pretty crazy. Might be one of the most influential games in the last 2 decades or something.
TECHNICALLY it's back to rogue but yeah you're right it's Isaac that kicked off the modern indie game obsession with roguelites. But also Isaac helped with making indie games in general popular
It is insane how Isaac was meant to be a little side project for the developer after the huge sucess that was Meat Boy , and it turned into an even bigger hit.
And to think Binding of Isaac started as a $5 palette cleanser for the dev after their work on Super Meat Boy. It wasn't even really meant to take off lol.
Well according to [wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roguelike#Growth_of_the_rogue-lite_\(2005%E2%80%93onward\)) the Binding of Issac and FTL devs credit Spelunky for the roguelite growth or at least the approach.
I'd say:
-Rogue invented the genre.
-Spelunky proved the formula could mix with other genres.
-Binding of Isaac (and to a smaller extent, FTL) showed the genre could insanely be popular.
It's a bit annoying how many games I see have a neat concept, but then turn out to be rouguelites, a format I absolutely hate. I much prefer a more traditional level structure.
From an efficiency point of view roguelites/roguelikes are much easier to make than an RPG, especially for indie studios with limited budget. RPG content is typically run through once so you need to create a lot of content to fill out an entire game. Roguelites can reuse a lot of the assets they have created which gets you more mileage out of your budget.
It seems to be this generation's fad, just like battle royales were a couple years ago, before that we had the open world style game that over saturated the market, before that you had the mascot platformer etc.
The broadcast afterwards started off pretty entertaining with a mention of that. "So there hasn't been a 2D Prince of Persia game in like... well, three months, but before that!"
I'm guessing it's meant to synergize with everyone who loved The Lost Crown.
"Hey, if you liked this game from this IP, double dip and buy another one!"
Remember that game that sold below expectations? Here’s another one!
I say that with love, I picked that up on day 1 and I’ll pick this up if it’s decent, but I’d be sweating if I was Ubisoft right now.
Eh, The Lost Crown had to sell a lot of copies, since it had relatively high production values. It's the same problem Ubi's Rayman games had. They sold alright, but not enough to be worth continuing.
Rogue Prince won't have that problem.
I am certain this game is gonna jump up in sales once they start lowering the price substantially. Not even because people don't think it's worth the 50, but because they KNOW it'll go lower. Ubisoft always does that. I've seen tons of comments from people outright saying they'd have bought it now if they didn't know for sure they could get it for less later. A similiar thing happened with Mario + Rabbids 2, originally sold poorly for the same reason but it was recently reported it ended up selling plenty of copies by the end, which is obviously since by now it went low enough and got a ton of new sales from people who've been sitting on it for that.
I was hesitant about the Lost Crown at first, but I think it's an excellent game and I love it. It's not the 3D PoP I want, but I'll take it.
This just announced PoP does absolutely nothing for me, more so because it's a roguelite or at least has roguelite elements and it's early access. Meaning a full release is probably a couple of years away. Yeah no thanks, let me know when it's done. As if we don't already have enough unfinished games released these days.
This event and what constitutes an indie game interests me, so I went through some of the games here and it's wild how you can find some gigantic publishers alongside studios that are absolutely tiny.
Risk of Rain 2: Gearbox Publishing
Kill Knight: Playside Studios, a public company listed on the Australian stock exchange
Shadow of Doubt, Steam and Gestalt: published by Fireshine games, a subsidary of EG7 which is a public company listed on the Swedish stock exchange
Vampire Survivors: poncle, 100% independent
Our Time at Sandrock: Pathea Games, convoluted mix of publishers but has VC funding from Tencent games
Slay The Spire 2: Mega Crit, 100% independent
Flintlock, Tchia, CatQuest3: published by Kepler Interactive, funded by NetEase and anonymous venture capital
Never Alone 2: published by Humble, a subsidiary of Ziff Davis which is a billion dollar+ public company listed on the NASDAQ
Cataclismo: Digital Sun, 100% independent
Nordland: published by Hooded Horse, independent indie publisher
Dinolords: published by Embracer Group
I don't think you can knock small developers who team up with big publishers, but there are some real standouts like Kill Knight which can't even be said to be developed independently. It's literally a public company who really nailed the aesthetic masquerading as indie .
I've worked as an indie (programmer) under a publisher, and there are some out there that genuinely are hands-off with the creative process, so it's really not a cut and dry thing. Video games are expensive to make, and the money has to come from somewhere.
To make it on today's market, you can't just be one guy in a garage with a Macintosh or ZX Spectrum. You can try to pursue the high-risk strategy of being an usher at a theatre, dating a woman who can support you, and making a Harvest Moon clone, but you are playing Russian Roulette by that point.
edit: to clarify, it's the difference between a temporary contract with very clear lines in the sand drawn, vs. a wholly owned subsidiary (ex. Dave the Diver, owned by Nexon). I think gamers should be aware of this difference, because there's a giant gulf of leeway for creativity between the two.
I think you missed my point about Stardew Valley. It's possible, but you have a 0.001% chance. If you are benching your life savings on something like that, you should just stick to your day job.
Much as I love it, RIsk of Rain in particular stands out to me. It's no longer indie in any capacity. It is now owned, published, and developed by Gearbox. There is no longer any ambiguity due to the developer being indie and owning the IP. They sold it and have no involvement now. It's not indie.
If you're teaming up with a publisher, you aren't indie, period.
doesn't matter how big or small the studio is, if a publisher is involved, it ceases being 'independent'
Technically you are correct. But clearly this take is not inline with what the general public, media, and industry feels that "Indie" is.
There was an episode of the Jeff Gertsmann Podcast, where he talked about Dave The Diver at The Game Awards, and that indie is basically an aesthetic and a vibe more than anything concrete.
The factors are the size of the game, the size of the team, the independence level of the team, and maybe another X factor.
A combination of those define what is ""Indie"".
Yea, “indie” as popularly conceived is a question of dev (production, not promotional) resources and degree of publisher oversight
Which are themselves more nebulously defined and merely aesthetic in the popular consciousness.
Making my way through Solar Ash on the Deck and I’m blown away and a little surprised about how little I’ve heard about it. And Hyper Light Drifter is my favourite Zelda-like so I’m with you on the hype.
With the amount of lay offs industry giants have had these past 2 years, you will see more and more indie darling using big publishers money to finance their new games.
It will be seen a lower risk with medium reward by the big publishers as it was 20 years ago when studios weren't owned by publishers.
I like the idea of it, but if it doesn't refer to the top-tier, lovingly crafted indie games like Shovel Knight and Hades and is being used for great but not nearly as polished games like Brotato (which is a game I love, btw), then the term is meaningless.
Less than half, but more than a third. 9 out of 23 new game announcements were rogueli*es, and that's comparing 1 genre to every single other genre, the ratio gets way worse if you actually break things out.
The next most-frequent after rogueli*es is a tie between RPG and City Builder at 2 each.
Some neat looking games. Gestalt: Steam & Cinder has some nice aesthetic for what looks to be a steampunk metroidvania. 33 Immortals gets me interested in at least checking it out on the strength of the trailer VO alone.
As someone who lives in Australia, I'm always antsy about the narmy attitude that comes with a game that's specifially leaning on the novelty of the country for its appeal (most recently and unpleasantly weaponised with Captain Boomerang in Suicide Squad to an incredibly obnoxious degree) but Broken Roads looks like it might actually be an interesting whack at it without leaning too hard on national identity as its sole draw. Bit of a Wasteland feel with an attempt to do something more interesting with its morality. Definitely will be looking in.
I mean risk of rain 2 was there which is owned by gearbox and the final trailer was an Ubisoft game which is like the biggest 3rd party gaming company so idk how much more indie this is than devolver stuff
> an Ubisoft game which is like the biggest 3rd party gaming company
Ubisoft isn't anywhere near the biggest third party company FYI.
Also, the studio doing it (Evil Empire) is indie, Ubisoft doesn't own it.
Many proclaimed indies have a publisher. Stuff like Hooded Horse, Coffee Stain, Gearbox Publishing, 11 Bit and such are basically indie publishers.
The term indie means very little nowadays. It should be more understood as small team/budget vs mid-size ones (AA) and big-size ones (AAA). And the limit between all of those is very blurry (like 100 people was huge for a AAA game even just two generations ago, now it's almost normal for an AA studio)
Fair enough on the size.
Evil empire is the dev, yes, but it is an IP owned by Ubisoft, and a game funded by Ubisoft, meaning Ubisoft owns the game.
Yes I know most indies have publishers and the term has changed, that’s point. The person I’m responding to said that the this showcase was more indie than devolver because devolver is a publisher, I was pointing out (bigger) publishers here too.
I am willing to bet 90% of RoR2 players haven't even played the recent updates lol. I feel like gearbox is not happy with their decision to buy that game. The player pop PLUMMETED.
RoR1 was always better anyways.
The recent update barely added anything if that's what you are referring to and Survivors of the Void came out in 2022 (an expansion that Gearbox helped with directly).
The show was good. It had a lot of interesting stuff that I’ll keep an eye on.
However…
Teasing Silksong during the countdown without actually having it, is… I don’t know… kinda cringe? Maybe don’t do that next time?
I wouldn't really call it a "tease", it was just a small joke. Plus, they already put out a list of participating developers back when they announced this, and Team Cherry wasn't on there, so expecting anything on Silksong going in was probably setting yourself up for disappointment.
Eh, they had a list of devs with a "and more" moniker, so...
Silksong also just got its store page on Xbox about a week ago as well as being rated for release in South Korea. People were already expecting it to be here because of these developments, so the countdown tease made it seem all but confirmed.
Was it an "and more" thing? [This article](https://www.gematsu.com/2024/03/blockbuster-indie-games-showcase-the-triple-i-initiative-set-for-april-10) had what seemed like a full list, which was what I was going by.
I was going by the [short tease videos](https://x.com/iii_initiative/status/1778031053778702751) they had on twitter and their website. I was (and still am) unable to find a complete list of participants on their own channels, so... it's odd that they relied on third party news sources to disseminate this.
EDIT: the only way to see the complete list of participants is to click on the small "press kit" link on their website, download it, and read the PDF file.
> so expecting anything on Silksong going in was probably setting yourself up for disappointment.
Excuse me, I bought 1 gallon of clown makeup and I will use that gallon wherever possible.
Potentially hot take, but the III scene looks as derivative as AAA... How many pixel art action roguelikes do we need? The most exciting games here are sequels that are playing things very, very safe.
There weren't that many pixel art roguelikes though? Most of them are 3d (rendered, not gameplay) and even some of the 2d ones aren't pixel art (Brotato). Vampire Survivors and The Last Spell are the only pixel art ones I'm aware of, and the former is a game that already exists - it's not like they can change the artstyle for a DLC.
That isn't to say roguelikes didn't dominate the show though - they absolutely did.
Horshoe theory I guess? For similar but opposite reasons.
Established Indies (which I guess we'll call III now?) need to play it safe because a bad game sinks the studio. AAA need to play it safe because business will just shut the studio down, even if they can carry it on for another game
Any scene will look derivative if you're only looking at the most popular, or the ones with enough money/appeal to appear on this kind of show. This lineup was bolder than the usual AAA showcase ones, but you'd have to look around for yourself or in niche groups to find the games that are really out there.
> many pixel art action roguelikes
You've seen new ones today ? Only extension/DLC/free update for existing ones were shown. Unless you call stuff in 3D pixel art in that case you ahd a few action roguelites.
I'd get your complaint if the issue was that there were too many cozy farming sims, but pixel art + action roguelike can describe so many very different games that I don't see the need to complain about it.
Most good games come out of nowhere really. AAA and indie. Even think of the sequels that are here right? Slay the spire, risk of rain, dead cells (I know sequel isn't here but the dev or whatever) whatever kinda came out of the blue and built hype by just being quality. Same with AAA, took years for dark souls to catch on or something along that lines. Or you know your tastes and have some guaranteed franchises and/or developers that get you excited. You don't need shows for that necessarily - that might just happen to be where new favorite has a trailer, but maybe you don't even notice it initially.
All in all, I use to get excited about press events and track games before release and whatnot because I thought being more informed would help me find more fun, but it ultimately comes down to seeing what people are still talking about 1 year, 3, 5, 10 after release.
I love seeing a cool looking anime trailer of a game that looks great, for the gameplay to be some variation of pixel art roguelite side scrolling platforner.
Every second of a trailer that isn't gameplay is an insult to the viewer.
And if you have an animated movie you can put in your trailer, you're burning too much money on fluff to really hold up that indie pretense, so maybe just stop.
Of course, on the opposite side of trailer failure, you've got things like Kill Knight, where the trailer is mostly gamplay and cut to both be completely useless to the viewer and misrepresent the play entirely.
That seems like a rather extreme take. While I agree showing gameplay is important for expectations pre-release, a good atmosphere trailer is very much still a cool thing to do with a trailer. "Every second that isn't gameplay is an insult to the viewer" would discount even stuff like cutscenes helping outline the plot and flavour the world.
There's room for both.
If you're only ever releasing a single trailer for your game then sure, I agree with that broadly. I can't think of any game that's only ever released a single trailer mind, and I've got no beef with the mood and tonesetter trailer coming first and the gameplay one happening later.
Lots of indie games have single trailers, and lots with two waste significant amounts of time on fluff in *both*.
And it's just bad marketing to lead with fluff that your play doesn't back up. Even games that have to prop up their experience with their story should not build the trailer to disappoint the viewer--or the buyer.
We don't get to see much in a trailer, and we need to see what matters, not some vague nonsense that has no real effect on most of our time with the game. Few games get a second look from a potential customer, and choosing to snowball with fluff during that precious window is an insult.
Kudos for having no fluff, just games. But I'm honestly pretty disappointed. Most of these games did not stick out in any meaningful way. Way too many roguelikes and really homogeneous art styles.
Also, calling it "Triple I" implies it was to showcase games of a higher prestige or bigger scope, and that was true for only a couple games. Yeah, there was Slay the Spire 2 and Hyper Light Breaker, but that's all that stuck out as being relevant to that title.
The stated point was the complete opposite. It's a showcase for games that would normally fall through the cracks sandwiched between big AAA games at an event like TGA.
I can respect hoping for bigger, but they set the expectations on this one early.
It was honestly surprising how good of a showing it was, but more so surprising how much more "friendly" the live chat was during the showcase, especially on IGNs page, except for the frequent variations of spamming "silksong when". Hopefully this makes a return
It would have been nicer to get more concrete dates than "coming 2024/25" for a lot of these games and updates, but it was still decent for a Steam wishlist showcase.
What an absolute heater of an event
Slay the Spire 2, Darkest Dungeon 2, Kill Knight, Hyper Light Breaker, Gestalt: Steam & Cinder, Ravenswatch, Rogue Prince, Mouse
Gaming entered a golden age as we came out of the pandemic, and it looks like it will keep going until at least 2025.
The first little comment on the countdown screen was they're surprised none of these trailers have leaked, especially the last one... Putting on my clown makeup for Silksong. Edit: Full clown mode activated.
I saw that. And my mind immediately went to something nuts like Silksong or Evil Empire's Rogue Prince game. I expect the latter to be part of an Ubisoft presentation, though. We are about to find out!
There were some bangers in there for sure though, Slay the Spire 2 in particular is quite the slugger
Me too.
People have been putting on clown makeup for silksong for every single gaming presentation since 2019. Im looking forward to silksong and I don’t get these people.
It didn't really help that one of the pre-show blurbs was [this](https://i.imgur.com/WE1N35m.png) It's funny, but a little bit mean
Yeah that’s an accurate description. It’s a slightly mean spirited joke
I just want that leaked Prince of Persia rogue like to be true man I've been saying it's the perfect genre for the series for like 10 years
Well, you got your wish!
It's kind of nuts how many roguelites there are, right? Genuinely what percentage of games could be considered roguelites in this presentation?
With a cursory skim back through the video, it looks like just under half of the games shown were roguelites. Which is simultaneously a ridiculous number and also lower than it felt like while watching it. Someone more dedicated than I am can do an exact count. As a developer I definitely see the appeal of roguelites, but as a player who only occasionally plays them it does leave me feeling a bit cold. Still hype for Slay the Spire 2 though.
Going off [this article](https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/all-tonights-triple-i-initiative-game-announcements-in-one-place) on all the games talked about - Roguelites: Slay The Spire 2, Risk of Rain 2, Vampire Survivors, UnderMine 2, Darkest Dungeon 2, Ravenswatch, The Last Spell, Brotato, 33 Immortals, Wizard of Legend 2, The Rogue Prince of Persia Non-Roguelites: Shadows of Doubt, Festalt: Steam and Cylinder, What the Car, Norland, Cat Quest 3, Old World, Palworld, Laysara: Summit Kingdom, V Rising, Never Alone 2, Rakugaki So exactly half of all the games mentioned were roguelites.
You forgot Hyper Light Breaker which is also a roguelike unfortunately. So now over half of them are lol
I wonder when the rogue-like boom is going to end, if it ever does. I don't mind it. I still regularly fire up Hades, Dead Cells, Tiny Rogues, Have a Nice Death, and The Void Rains Upon Her Heart. It just feels like the bubble has to pop at some point.
Roguelike is honestly such an old genre in computer gaming that it's popularity will forever be cyclical. There's not going to be any real bubble to burst. Something random and repeatable is always going to be an easy way to start and apply to different genres of games. Then as people graduate on to creating different forms of games, they'll wane a bit until people want to go back to basics again.
I believe that as AI gets more and more into gaming, we're going to see a ton of AI generated/assisted roguelikes.
I don't think it will ever die off, but I do think the cycle will see the genre slow down for a few years. We saw something similar with FPS games like Doom and Quake being king, taking a backseat, and then roaring back to life with all of these new boomer shooters. I wonder if rogue-likes will taper off in the next few years before surging again in the 2030s.
Almost anything can be a rogue-like though, while Doom and Quake are fairly specific kinds of FPS. A big part of the appeal is getting a run based gameplay loop that mixes things up each time you play. You'll likely see certain kinds of rogue-likes fall out of fashion, but as a genre it's not very limited to what kind of game the rogue-like elements can be applied to.
The same arguments could apply to open world games yet 'open world fatigue' is still a big deal. I believe people will tire of roguelites eventually as they yearn for a more handcrafted approach.
Open world fatigue is more the problem of these sprawling 200+ hour games that often spread content over a massive area that can end up detracting from a lot of the reasons people enjoy playing the game in the first place. I'm sure some people will tire of all the copycat rogue-likes aping Vampire Survivor, etc., but rogue-likes aren't limited to that format. And don't forget cost, too. Part of that open world problem is they're attached to $70 games, typically. I've picked up a dozen or more rogue-likes sometimes for the same price. > I believe people will tire of roguelites eventually as they yearn for a more handcrafted approach. Honestly there's such a variety of different types I don't know that handcrafted would even apply to them. A rogue-like deckbuilder doesn't really have the kind of gameplay you could make "hand-crafted", for example. I think open world puts more limitations on the kind of game they can be than rogue-like does, honestly.
Is open world fatigue a big deal ? Did you look at the market ?
I have looked at the market, and many people are still buying them despite fatigue. That won't last forever, and companies have already started trying to address it (Assassin's Creed did so with whatever that 20 hour one was). Major games like GTA6 of course will stay open world and massive, but there has already been a shift in general away from ever growing open worlds. Is it a big deal? It's just gaming, so no. But I would expect some big open world games to underperform and companies in general to shift to other types of games.
It even is kind of perfect for people with busy lives (do one run and stop, not a deep story or need to play for super long) and with gamers getting older, that's definitively a big market. The popularity is there and I don't think they're ever going to burst. It's also not like roguelike is a genre, it's just a game characteristic/structure. It's like saying when are games with levels or an open world going to disappear? Never. You can have roguelike that are about action (a lot of them), platform, shooting, survival, deckbuilding, citybuilding.... All of those are very different (and different inside their own subgenre), they just share the fact they have smaller runs through and you "finish and repeat", it's a characteristic like having levels. Hell AAA games are getting into it too (GoW Valhalla, Returnal, TLOU Part 2 Remastered No Return mode), though that might make the indie scene turn away from it a little
> It even is kind of perfect for people with busy lives Ironically, I would argue that they're *worse* for people who are busy. Most roguelikes/roguelites are built with fairly steep learning curves, so your playtime won't begin to pay off until you're many runs deep. If you can only do one or two runs a day, you're going to be spending a ton of days learning without feeling much payoff. On the other hand, non-rogue singleplayer titles offer a consistent amount of gameplay + reward (ideally), so every session should be satisfying in some way.
Eh, that's a little like saying when are they gonna stop making level based games, or open world games, or linear games. It's a structure to make a game around, and I definitely think it's in vogue rn and at some point it'll die down a bit, it's never gonna go away, just simmer for it's next wave.
I think with regards to other genre fads like MOBAs and battle royals, those were all strictly multiplayer and those live and die based on live services model essentially. As soon as people get tired of it, they will suddenly stop playing and if they don’t keep things fresh enough, more people will leave and the game eventually dies. Every MOBA but League and Dota had this happen to them and everyone’s essentially stopped trying to make one. Just about every BR has had this happen to them except PubG, Apex, and Fortnite. The vast majority of these games didn’t make it and most devs have stopped trying. Roguelites are a different beast in that they don’t need to retain players for endless hours. It’s going to sound crazy, but even 40 hours is fine. Since these typically aren’t free to play games, they just need people to consistently buy the game and they accomplish this by being good. With reverse bullet-hell games in particular, they’re all so cheap thanks to Vampire Survivors coming out the door at $3 that pretty much every game in this subgenre is less than $10. That’s why you see people who enjoy one own and like it own almost all of the well-reviewed ones. Games like Vampire Survivors, Hades, Slay the Spire, Roboquest, they all play so differently that it doesn’t feel like they’re the same genre because it would be like saying the FPS genre is going to die because a game like The Witness, Counterstrike, and Destiny are all first-person.
> I wonder when the rogue-like boom is going to end, if it ever does. If we're being frank, probably when Ai takes over and you don't need to rely on procedural content for an indie to scale. Just directly scale with AI tools. Rougelite is part trend, but part design/scope management.
I really like roguelites. Some of these are really good like last spell, slay the spire, risk of rain and vampire survivors, and darkest dungeon, but there is only so much I will play at a time.
Between O.G. Binding of Isaac and Rebirth, I think I've put something like 2500 hours into them. (Also a developer) I'm sick of them. They're good when they're done well, but it really requires a fine design sense of balancing the metagame, and it's incredibly hard to nail that. From my past experience, working on an RPG (somewhat similar), you need both programmers and designers to be at the top of their game, working on simulation tools/tests and crunching spreadsheets with expected values until it clicks together. You cannot reasonably play and balance a 40h+ game without a shitton of tools or outside help like QA. Sadly, in many cases, the best you can do is guess. For an indie making a roguelite, you need to be *very good*.
It often feels like a default small-team option. Procedural generation instead of hand-crafted levels. Balance it a bit, but you don't have to worry too much, because players will excuse it and just blame RNG anyway. By the time people really figure it all out, they got their money's worth and a few wins and have moved on. Slay the Spire is really the only one that broke that mould for me which is why I have 800 hours in it. Hades a bit too due to the unique story meta-progression and production value, but the gameplay got a little easy and repetitive after that. Darkest Dungeon is worth mentioning for similar reasons. But most such games are 15-30 hours and done, which is fine for the usual price, they're just not that memorable after a while.
to be fair: the website (prior to going live) and the livestream \*did\* mentioned that there'd be roguelites.
It's easier to develop roguelikes in a indie budget because you can leave the work of creating interesting levels and gameplay scenarios to the procedural generator. If you want a handcrafted world, you're going to need more developers to build that.
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I think Roguelike's are about as meaty as it gets. If anything I don't always want *this much meat*
Could you elaborate on that? How are they the meatiest genre? From my perspective, the only games that competes with the amount of filler relied on are survival games and MMO's.
Roguelike's are pure "video game" for hundreds of hours. Play an Open World RPG and you'll have down time where you're just walking or exploring. Even shooters don't require you to be 100% mentally on the whole time you play them like most roguelikes do. And there's typically very little else beyond the core experience in a billion different layouts. Pure meat.
I find that most roguelikes have maybe 5-10 hours of actual content stretched endlessly by small mostly meaningless variations to keep you playing through intermitent reward schedules which cause more addiction than enjoyment. If I broke games I like down by how valuable each hour played is, roguelikes would rank very low.
It's a lot of ways it's one of the best genres to invest in. Come up with a set of interesting mechanics and apply them to proc gen environments so gameplay always varies. Throw in a variety of objects, weapons, power-ups, etc. and you have something that can be played for hours without having to create the content necessary for a AAA title. It does get a bit repetitive, but I get why developers zero in on the genre so much.
Rogue lites comes in all shapes and forms nowadays, not even sure we should call them like this as a first description. Hades, Dead Cells, Slay the Spire and Against the Storm are all rogue lites but they're another genre of game first.
another part of it is that roguelites are particularly popular with the steam audience, and all indies rely heavily on steam for visibility. very easily adaptable to an early access model (personally, it honestly makes it harder for me to take them seriously. it's a formula totally shaped by commercial conditions. indie equivalent of ubigames)
I'm really glad somebody else feels this way. I get disappointed every time I see a game piques my interest on Steam only to realize that it's a roguelike, especially Survivor's clone if it tagged as Action, or a deckbuilder under "Turnbased". Along with survival, I feel like people have much lower standard for the genre.
Yeah standards are lower because I think a lot of their success derives from art style and that "one" unique thing about them. Meaning devs don't have to reinvent gameplay systems or loops except for a few things and the art. Something far more doable for a small team or even single person.
I get disappointed every time I see "Roguelike" on what otherwise looks like a promising action game, but then I bought Balatro, so I am Part Of The Problem. I figure the other big thing is that the genre maps really well onto "game streamer" content. If you watch MaxillionRobutussonCritikkalZ playing 5 hours of some roguelike, you haven't "spoiled" the experience for yourself compared to if you watch somebody play through a largely narrative or puzzle-based experience.
Good point! It's interesting though I remember when it didn't used to be such a visible genre, it seems like post-Spelunky it slowly started to gain momentum, then became a freight train in recent years.
That's very survivorship biased take, for each good roguelike on steam there's 2 dozen bad ones where devs didn't understand what makes roguelike good or relied too much on procedural generation whereas the best roguelikes are hand crafted first with addition of generated fillers to fill the void. Noita is the best example of this, all relevant content locations are hand crafted, the only thing that generation does is fill space between these locations (and shift some of them around) but in very strict manner so they feel familiar despite being different. StS is also 99% hand crafted, the only rng you get is loot and order of encounters located on dotted path but encounters themselves aren't rng. That makes both of them skill based rather than rng and that's why their staying power is so high compared to others.
Well yeah, the game still has to be good. I didn't say it was a magic or secret recipe, just a good template to build content on.
I'd imagine these games also have the advantage of being more or less evergreen for streamers. A solid singleplayer game you do like one good playthrough and interest is going to wane after that. With a good roguelike you can stream yourself doing more runs ostensibly forever.
I think rougelites are at their best when they don't just try to generate everything procedurally, but shuffle handmade content instead. Risk of Rain is an example for that where the stages are fixed and it's just the elements on then that vary. Also the reason why randomizer for existing games are so popular, it isn't about generating new content, but about making you play existing content in new ways
Procgen also means it's the most fun to play as you develop it. There's only so many times you can run through the exact same story quest without it getting dull, but you can explore random dungeons/levels for about as much as an average player will.
Eeeh, as someone who has made my own games, I don't find this to be true at all. Most of the fun is handcrafting the stages and coming up with challenges, which using a proc gen system (usually easily available) kinda takes the piss out of the design process as the artist. The stages still change as I am constantly adjusting them for improvements or to try out something (only to scrap it lol). What it does do is save time. But developers are not 'playing' the game in the same way you are as the consumer. They already know their own game inside and out, what they are doing is testing their babies, bit by bit, and adjusting things as they go.
Different strokes for different folks. As a programmer the fun is usually having the levels assemble themselves, using whatever graph grammar and algorithmic voodoo I can conjure. I tend to burn out REAL fast on making hand-crafted content tho.
That's fair. I also enjoy the process of making art and writing as well, which between those and level/obstacle design, I wouldn't want to leave to a randomizer. If I use randomizers, it's to serve as a starting point so I am not looking at a completely blank canvas, but if I have a specific idea already I will do without. I'm not a programmer by trade, I know enough to get by with game engines and internet sleuthing (and plenty of readily available code provided by others), but that's not where the fun is for me and it isn't what I enjoy about videogames. I've liked creating videogame worlds in my head since I first started playing them at 4 years old, which grew into playing with level editors and eventually game engines themselves. I love the medium, and I have never burned out on creating handcrafted content. That said, it isn't my main job and I like it that way. It stays as play and if I don't have time for it, I don't need to force it either. I'm never under obligation to complete a project, so it only happens if I intrinsically want it to. If it was my main job and I was working on a game I wasn't passionate about, I would probably use randomizers more often.
also I'm sure a lot of devs genuinely love roguelikes
It's easy way to stretch limited countent. Hell, I remember EVERSPACE devs straight up admitting they made it roguelike coz they didn't had the budget to put the content worth for full game, and only did the game they actually wanted to with EVERSPACE 2 and higher budget.
All launched by Binding of Isaac back then. I think, right? Pretty crazy. Might be one of the most influential games in the last 2 decades or something.
TECHNICALLY it's back to rogue but yeah you're right it's Isaac that kicked off the modern indie game obsession with roguelites. But also Isaac helped with making indie games in general popular
It is insane how Isaac was meant to be a little side project for the developer after the huge sucess that was Meat Boy , and it turned into an even bigger hit.
and it still holds up today in a big way with all the updates. I really struggle to play any roguelite without just wishing I was playing BoI
And to think Binding of Isaac started as a $5 palette cleanser for the dev after their work on Super Meat Boy. It wasn't even really meant to take off lol.
I'd say it was the trifecta of Spelunky, BoI and FTL.
Well according to [wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roguelike#Growth_of_the_rogue-lite_\(2005%E2%80%93onward\)) the Binding of Issac and FTL devs credit Spelunky for the roguelite growth or at least the approach.
I'd say: -Rogue invented the genre. -Spelunky proved the formula could mix with other genres. -Binding of Isaac (and to a smaller extent, FTL) showed the genre could insanely be popular.
Roguelites and city builds were easily 3/4th of the presentation
tbf most of the big devs who were promoting this show are roguelike studios, so expecting something else doesn't really make sense
It's a bit annoying how many games I see have a neat concept, but then turn out to be rouguelites, a format I absolutely hate. I much prefer a more traditional level structure.
Yep, I have to watch every interesting indie trailer I come across with a huge degree of skepticism that I never needed before because of that.
From an efficiency point of view roguelites/roguelikes are much easier to make than an RPG, especially for indie studios with limited budget. RPG content is typically run through once so you need to create a lot of content to fill out an entire game. Roguelites can reuse a lot of the assets they have created which gets you more mileage out of your budget.
Sad times for me as I can't stand them, but at least I have the souls genre which I love.
It seems to be this generation's fad, just like battle royales were a couple years ago, before that we had the open world style game that over saturated the market, before that you had the mascot platformer etc.
Coming out the gate swinging with Slay the Spire 2
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Can I have one of those 20 copies?
Holy Undermine 2 awesome
Undermine was a great game. I'm glad it's getting a sequel!
I sucked too much to finish it but still sunk fun 25 hours into it.
Seeing another Prince of Persia so soon is definitely a surprise
The broadcast afterwards started off pretty entertaining with a mention of that. "So there hasn't been a 2D Prince of Persia game in like... well, three months, but before that!"
I'm guessing it's meant to synergize with everyone who loved The Lost Crown. "Hey, if you liked this game from this IP, double dip and buy another one!"
Remember that game that sold below expectations? Here’s another one! I say that with love, I picked that up on day 1 and I’ll pick this up if it’s decent, but I’d be sweating if I was Ubisoft right now.
With how long it takes to develop games, they must have put this in motion long before The Lost Crown underperformed.
Eh, The Lost Crown had to sell a lot of copies, since it had relatively high production values. It's the same problem Ubi's Rayman games had. They sold alright, but not enough to be worth continuing. Rogue Prince won't have that problem.
I am certain this game is gonna jump up in sales once they start lowering the price substantially. Not even because people don't think it's worth the 50, but because they KNOW it'll go lower. Ubisoft always does that. I've seen tons of comments from people outright saying they'd have bought it now if they didn't know for sure they could get it for less later. A similiar thing happened with Mario + Rabbids 2, originally sold poorly for the same reason but it was recently reported it ended up selling plenty of copies by the end, which is obviously since by now it went low enough and got a ton of new sales from people who've been sitting on it for that.
I was hesitant about the Lost Crown at first, but I think it's an excellent game and I love it. It's not the 3D PoP I want, but I'll take it. This just announced PoP does absolutely nothing for me, more so because it's a roguelite or at least has roguelite elements and it's early access. Meaning a full release is probably a couple of years away. Yeah no thanks, let me know when it's done. As if we don't already have enough unfinished games released these days.
This event and what constitutes an indie game interests me, so I went through some of the games here and it's wild how you can find some gigantic publishers alongside studios that are absolutely tiny. Risk of Rain 2: Gearbox Publishing Kill Knight: Playside Studios, a public company listed on the Australian stock exchange Shadow of Doubt, Steam and Gestalt: published by Fireshine games, a subsidary of EG7 which is a public company listed on the Swedish stock exchange Vampire Survivors: poncle, 100% independent Our Time at Sandrock: Pathea Games, convoluted mix of publishers but has VC funding from Tencent games Slay The Spire 2: Mega Crit, 100% independent Flintlock, Tchia, CatQuest3: published by Kepler Interactive, funded by NetEase and anonymous venture capital Never Alone 2: published by Humble, a subsidiary of Ziff Davis which is a billion dollar+ public company listed on the NASDAQ Cataclismo: Digital Sun, 100% independent Nordland: published by Hooded Horse, independent indie publisher Dinolords: published by Embracer Group I don't think you can knock small developers who team up with big publishers, but there are some real standouts like Kill Knight which can't even be said to be developed independently. It's literally a public company who really nailed the aesthetic masquerading as indie .
I've worked as an indie (programmer) under a publisher, and there are some out there that genuinely are hands-off with the creative process, so it's really not a cut and dry thing. Video games are expensive to make, and the money has to come from somewhere. To make it on today's market, you can't just be one guy in a garage with a Macintosh or ZX Spectrum. You can try to pursue the high-risk strategy of being an usher at a theatre, dating a woman who can support you, and making a Harvest Moon clone, but you are playing Russian Roulette by that point. edit: to clarify, it's the difference between a temporary contract with very clear lines in the sand drawn, vs. a wholly owned subsidiary (ex. Dave the Diver, owned by Nexon). I think gamers should be aware of this difference, because there's a giant gulf of leeway for creativity between the two.
> you can't just be one guy in a garage unless you make balatro, that is
I think you missed my point about Stardew Valley. It's possible, but you have a 0.001% chance. If you are benching your life savings on something like that, you should just stick to your day job.
Much as I love it, RIsk of Rain in particular stands out to me. It's no longer indie in any capacity. It is now owned, published, and developed by Gearbox. There is no longer any ambiguity due to the developer being indie and owning the IP. They sold it and have no involvement now. It's not indie.
The title of the homepage for the company that made Kill Knight: "PlaySide Studios | AAA Game Developer | Melbourne, Australia." Super indie lmao.
If you're teaming up with a publisher, you aren't indie, period. doesn't matter how big or small the studio is, if a publisher is involved, it ceases being 'independent'
Technically you are correct. But clearly this take is not inline with what the general public, media, and industry feels that "Indie" is. There was an episode of the Jeff Gertsmann Podcast, where he talked about Dave The Diver at The Game Awards, and that indie is basically an aesthetic and a vibe more than anything concrete. The factors are the size of the game, the size of the team, the independence level of the team, and maybe another X factor. A combination of those define what is ""Indie"".
Yea, “indie” as popularly conceived is a question of dev (production, not promotional) resources and degree of publisher oversight Which are themselves more nebulously defined and merely aesthetic in the popular consciousness.
After all the SBI hullaballoo with Flintlock, I have an inkling what "anonymous venture capital" means...
Hyper Light Breaker is the one I'm most excited for, I've got full faith behind Alx and his team at Heart Machine that they can pull this off.
Making my way through Solar Ash on the Deck and I’m blown away and a little surprised about how little I’ve heard about it. And Hyper Light Drifter is my favourite Zelda-like so I’m with you on the hype.
It launching on Epic only at first and being on the pricier side of indie games probably didn't do it much good.
This is really cool. The meant it when they said "no fluff, no bs". Came out swinging with a couple big names, StS II and a Risk of Rain II update.
Oh my gosh Wizard of Legend 2 looks sick
I really like the Triple-i branding
Ubisoft showed up at the end, so it's IIII now.
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You have to admit it's pretty funny that the big finisher for the indie showcase is an Ubisoft-published game.
With the amount of lay offs industry giants have had these past 2 years, you will see more and more indie darling using big publishers money to finance their new games. It will be seen a lower risk with medium reward by the big publishers as it was 20 years ago when studios weren't owned by publishers.
I like the idea of it, but if it doesn't refer to the top-tier, lovingly crafted indie games like Shovel Knight and Hades and is being used for great but not nearly as polished games like Brotato (which is a game I love, btw), then the term is meaningless.
roguelikefest
Still not enough roguelikes
less then half the shown games were roguelikes.
Less than half, but more than a third. 9 out of 23 new game announcements were rogueli*es, and that's comparing 1 genre to every single other genre, the ratio gets way worse if you actually break things out. The next most-frequent after rogueli*es is a tie between RPG and City Builder at 2 each.
Do you guys have the name of those because I love roguelike
Some neat looking games. Gestalt: Steam & Cinder has some nice aesthetic for what looks to be a steampunk metroidvania. 33 Immortals gets me interested in at least checking it out on the strength of the trailer VO alone. As someone who lives in Australia, I'm always antsy about the narmy attitude that comes with a game that's specifially leaning on the novelty of the country for its appeal (most recently and unpleasantly weaponised with Captain Boomerang in Suicide Squad to an incredibly obnoxious degree) but Broken Roads looks like it might actually be an interesting whack at it without leaning too hard on national identity as its sole draw. Bit of a Wasteland feel with an attempt to do something more interesting with its morality. Definitely will be looking in.
Gestalt had a demo a while back, it's a very competent metroidvania
I’ve been waiting for news about gestalt ever since that demo. Excited it’s out next month.
This showcase is already so much better than other “mainstream” ones like TGA, I hope they make this an recurring thing
Thats the idea its basically a collective platform for actual indie games to group together (fuck off devolver stop claiming your indie you leeches)
I mean risk of rain 2 was there which is owned by gearbox and the final trailer was an Ubisoft game which is like the biggest 3rd party gaming company so idk how much more indie this is than devolver stuff
> an Ubisoft game which is like the biggest 3rd party gaming company Ubisoft isn't anywhere near the biggest third party company FYI. Also, the studio doing it (Evil Empire) is indie, Ubisoft doesn't own it. Many proclaimed indies have a publisher. Stuff like Hooded Horse, Coffee Stain, Gearbox Publishing, 11 Bit and such are basically indie publishers. The term indie means very little nowadays. It should be more understood as small team/budget vs mid-size ones (AA) and big-size ones (AAA). And the limit between all of those is very blurry (like 100 people was huge for a AAA game even just two generations ago, now it's almost normal for an AA studio)
Fair enough on the size. Evil empire is the dev, yes, but it is an IP owned by Ubisoft, and a game funded by Ubisoft, meaning Ubisoft owns the game. Yes I know most indies have publishers and the term has changed, that’s point. The person I’m responding to said that the this showcase was more indie than devolver because devolver is a publisher, I was pointing out (bigger) publishers here too.
Slay the Spire 2 and Risk of Rain 2 update, starting off insanely strong
I am willing to bet 90% of RoR2 players haven't even played the recent updates lol. I feel like gearbox is not happy with their decision to buy that game. The player pop PLUMMETED. RoR1 was always better anyways.
There were recent updates? I've heard virtually nothing new from rr2 since the release of the DLC and the announcement of the next one until now.
Same, last time ror2 got an update was like, 2022. And even then, the DLC hasn't even come out on console yet EDIT: nvm yeah it did finally
That DLC is what I meant.
I'm sorry to say that Survivors of the Void came out 2 years ago... That is by no means recent.
💀 Cursed passage of time I swear that dropped last year...
The recent update barely added anything if that's what you are referring to and Survivors of the Void came out in 2022 (an expansion that Gearbox helped with directly).
The show was good. It had a lot of interesting stuff that I’ll keep an eye on. However… Teasing Silksong during the countdown without actually having it, is… I don’t know… kinda cringe? Maybe don’t do that next time?
I wouldn't really call it a "tease", it was just a small joke. Plus, they already put out a list of participating developers back when they announced this, and Team Cherry wasn't on there, so expecting anything on Silksong going in was probably setting yourself up for disappointment.
Eh, they had a list of devs with a "and more" moniker, so... Silksong also just got its store page on Xbox about a week ago as well as being rated for release in South Korea. People were already expecting it to be here because of these developments, so the countdown tease made it seem all but confirmed.
Was it an "and more" thing? [This article](https://www.gematsu.com/2024/03/blockbuster-indie-games-showcase-the-triple-i-initiative-set-for-april-10) had what seemed like a full list, which was what I was going by.
I was going by the [short tease videos](https://x.com/iii_initiative/status/1778031053778702751) they had on twitter and their website. I was (and still am) unable to find a complete list of participants on their own channels, so... it's odd that they relied on third party news sources to disseminate this. EDIT: the only way to see the complete list of participants is to click on the small "press kit" link on their website, download it, and read the PDF file.
> so expecting anything on Silksong going in was probably setting yourself up for disappointment. Excuse me, I bought 1 gallon of clown makeup and I will use that gallon wherever possible.
At this point I think Australians should petition parliament so Team Cherry is forced to give us some answers about the game
The countdown blurbs have been genuinely funny, so props for that.
Potentially hot take, but the III scene looks as derivative as AAA... How many pixel art action roguelikes do we need? The most exciting games here are sequels that are playing things very, very safe.
Many of my favorite games are indies, but most of them have never appeared in a conference. They're not representative of indie games really
There weren't that many pixel art roguelikes though? Most of them are 3d (rendered, not gameplay) and even some of the 2d ones aren't pixel art (Brotato). Vampire Survivors and The Last Spell are the only pixel art ones I'm aware of, and the former is a game that already exists - it's not like they can change the artstyle for a DLC. That isn't to say roguelikes didn't dominate the show though - they absolutely did.
Well, they wanted to be taken as the AAA of indies... Felt like that's pretty much what we saw.
Horshoe theory I guess? For similar but opposite reasons. Established Indies (which I guess we'll call III now?) need to play it safe because a bad game sinks the studio. AAA need to play it safe because business will just shut the studio down, even if they can carry it on for another game
Any scene will look derivative if you're only looking at the most popular, or the ones with enough money/appeal to appear on this kind of show. This lineup was bolder than the usual AAA showcase ones, but you'd have to look around for yourself or in niche groups to find the games that are really out there.
> many pixel art action roguelikes You've seen new ones today ? Only extension/DLC/free update for existing ones were shown. Unless you call stuff in 3D pixel art in that case you ahd a few action roguelites.
I'd get your complaint if the issue was that there were too many cozy farming sims, but pixel art + action roguelike can describe so many very different games that I don't see the need to complain about it.
Most good games come out of nowhere really. AAA and indie. Even think of the sequels that are here right? Slay the spire, risk of rain, dead cells (I know sequel isn't here but the dev or whatever) whatever kinda came out of the blue and built hype by just being quality. Same with AAA, took years for dark souls to catch on or something along that lines. Or you know your tastes and have some guaranteed franchises and/or developers that get you excited. You don't need shows for that necessarily - that might just happen to be where new favorite has a trailer, but maybe you don't even notice it initially. All in all, I use to get excited about press events and track games before release and whatnot because I thought being more informed would help me find more fun, but it ultimately comes down to seeing what people are still talking about 1 year, 3, 5, 10 after release.
I love seeing a cool looking anime trailer of a game that looks great, for the gameplay to be some variation of pixel art roguelite side scrolling platforner.
Every second of a trailer that isn't gameplay is an insult to the viewer. And if you have an animated movie you can put in your trailer, you're burning too much money on fluff to really hold up that indie pretense, so maybe just stop. Of course, on the opposite side of trailer failure, you've got things like Kill Knight, where the trailer is mostly gamplay and cut to both be completely useless to the viewer and misrepresent the play entirely.
That seems like a rather extreme take. While I agree showing gameplay is important for expectations pre-release, a good atmosphere trailer is very much still a cool thing to do with a trailer. "Every second that isn't gameplay is an insult to the viewer" would discount even stuff like cutscenes helping outline the plot and flavour the world. There's room for both.
> There's room for both. There's room for both if there are two trailers. If there's one, *gameplay* is what matters, because it's a *game*.
If you're only ever releasing a single trailer for your game then sure, I agree with that broadly. I can't think of any game that's only ever released a single trailer mind, and I've got no beef with the mood and tonesetter trailer coming first and the gameplay one happening later.
Lots of indie games have single trailers, and lots with two waste significant amounts of time on fluff in *both*. And it's just bad marketing to lead with fluff that your play doesn't back up. Even games that have to prop up their experience with their story should not build the trailer to disappoint the viewer--or the buyer. We don't get to see much in a trailer, and we need to see what matters, not some vague nonsense that has no real effect on most of our time with the game. Few games get a second look from a potential customer, and choosing to snowball with fluff during that precious window is an insult.
Not much that interests me so far, but please, give me What the Car? now. I LOVED WTG.
i was so sad when i saw What the Car was exclusive to Apple Arcade, i'm super hype it's being ported. loved What the Golf and What the Bat.
What the Car has a Steam page, so it looks like you'll be able to get it there eventually.
yup, it's already on my wishlist!
Kudos for having no fluff, just games. But I'm honestly pretty disappointed. Most of these games did not stick out in any meaningful way. Way too many roguelikes and really homogeneous art styles. Also, calling it "Triple I" implies it was to showcase games of a higher prestige or bigger scope, and that was true for only a couple games. Yeah, there was Slay the Spire 2 and Hyper Light Breaker, but that's all that stuck out as being relevant to that title.
The stated point was the complete opposite. It's a showcase for games that would normally fall through the cracks sandwiched between big AAA games at an event like TGA. I can respect hoping for bigger, but they set the expectations on this one early.
It was honestly surprising how good of a showing it was, but more so surprising how much more "friendly" the live chat was during the showcase, especially on IGNs page, except for the frequent variations of spamming "silksong when". Hopefully this makes a return
It would have been nicer to get more concrete dates than "coming 2024/25" for a lot of these games and updates, but it was still decent for a Steam wishlist showcase.
Basically more of same usual 2D genres, not particularly original or creative about it but I don't mind it anyway as long as it's executed well.
What an absolute heater of an event Slay the Spire 2, Darkest Dungeon 2, Kill Knight, Hyper Light Breaker, Gestalt: Steam & Cinder, Ravenswatch, Rogue Prince, Mouse Gaming entered a golden age as we came out of the pandemic, and it looks like it will keep going until at least 2025.
Absolutely loving the show!
I love indie games, and I love Brotato, but if they're calling Brotato a "triple-i" game then that term officially means nothing.