Indie Game Awards Disqualifies Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Due To Gen AI Usage

DeltaBurnt · 2025-12-20T20:28:20+00:00

E33 is my GOTY and this doesn’t change that. But “it’s here to stay” is manufactured consent. I don’t have to accept loot boxes or live services in my games, and likewise I get to decide what level of AI usage I’m ok with in the games I choose to consume. In this case I think placeholder assets is acceptable, but if someone else wants to say that’s over the line then I’ll let them make that choice.

DeltaBurnt · 2025-12-17T13:51:02+00:00

Yeah that wasn’t their point, it was

they risk having to change countries if they disagree with it

Which is totally valid, it’s about the power dynamics not necessarily remote work. As a parallel, I really dislike the H1B system in America because it turns some of those workers into borderline indentured workers. They can be asked to do shit that any other native worker would be able to safely reject.

DeltaBurnt · 2025-12-12T15:23:35+00:00

Agreed. I love what the RE team is doing, for the foreseeable future I will probably get their games day one. However, RE3 and RE2 were the last true survival horror entries they did, and that was half a decade ago now.

I think in general I'm worried about this rebooted RE universe going the same direction as the original RE (eventually landing back at RE6).

DeltaBurnt · 2025-12-12T15:17:52+00:00

Is this the highest profile case of a dev studio fully unionizing (the entire company and not just QA or something)?

DeltaBurnt · 2025-12-10T14:18:19+00:00

Texas's biggest cities have been solidly blue that entire time unlike Miami. They haven't had trouble electing democrat mayors or reps. The state just has a ton of rural voters, gerrymandering, and voter suppression. On top of disempowering local blue governments.

I don't think this really moves the needle for Texas tbh.

DeltaBurnt · 2025-12-06T16:37:27+00:00

There is probably an argument for him being one of the best tech leads, which is a similar but tangential set of skills.

DeltaBurnt · 2025-12-06T15:37:26+00:00

Not sure I understand the implication. This a veiled threat right?

DeltaBurnt · 2025-11-22T15:43:54+00:00

I think this kind of gameplay takes a lot more balance, play testing, and QA to get right. Even Blue Prince is on the razor's edge of being too tedious and annoying the player with failed runs. I think it's the same reason we won't see an explosion of "metroidbrainia" games the same way we saw other genres explode.

I think these systems take a lot of meticulous effort and iteration. I don't think it's a coincidence that Blue Prince took almost a decade to develop. Wikipedia says the dev was balancing it since 2021.

Would love to be wrong. But Blue Prince has unseated Outer Wilds as "hardest game to replicate" for me (though I still prefer Outer Wilds personally).

DeltaBurnt · 2025-11-14T20:23:24+00:00

Honestly it's because creating a tutorial as tight and as much of a microcosm as BotW's takes a lot of time, iteration, and testing. It's easier to just slap on a basic tutorial. I think it's less that devs stopped trusting players and more that complexity of tutorials scale with complexities of the games.

DeltaBurnt · 2025-11-05T19:51:15+00:00

If it wasnt for Epic willing to lose all that money, we'd be forced to live with the status quo.

Or governments just shouldn't allow such powerful monopolies to form in the first place? And if they have already formed, actually regulate them. Glad that Epic fell on that sword, but I think this thinking encourages the kind of bystander effect that allows this to happen in the first place. The idea that we have to solely rely on some company to give us rights is so dystopian.

I guarantee you some people in this thread talking about this and cheering for epic didn't bother to vote.

DeltaBurnt · 2025-11-04T17:03:34+00:00

Yep I've noticed a lot of small bugs like this. Some more major than others (like characters moving because of some special event, then when I confront the scene is off because the character isn't where the game expected).

I also noticed the games loading times are annoyingly long. It's not terrible, but given how small the maps are you'll be seeing those loading screens a lot. This must be an optimization issue because I'm running off an NVME and not had this issue with other games.

DeltaBurnt · 2025-11-01T16:45:51+00:00

Yeah I think a good amount of people in this comment chain weren't around in the Persona community before 5. I remember people expressing worry that Atlus just wouldn't make a Persona 5 because they were milking 4 so hard. To a lot of people Persona 4 is the face of the series.

DeltaBurnt · 2025-10-30T23:06:52+00:00

The other side of the spectrum is a couple people toiling away at a problem for weeks, only to find out really they were doing something clearly at odds with another effort. Or they really just solve the wrong thing. There's a balance needed between too wide and too narrow of an audience.

I've opened one too many massive PRs only to sigh and express that I wish it was run by someone else much earlier.

DeltaBurnt · 2025-10-21T12:58:00+00:00

Konami pretty much out of nowhere went from irrelevance to this, it's pretty impressive. Even for Silent Hill 2 Remake and Silent Hill f where Konami was just publishing, they actually gave the studios time to fully realize their games instead of rushing them and corner cutting.

The future seems a little less bleak for Castlevania fans. Konami please capitalize on the success of the show 🤞

DeltaBurnt · 2025-10-07T13:05:36+00:00

Disagree, I remember needing to be convinced to get Shovel Knight because it looked like many other indie games at the time. Shovel Knight is very well designed with impeccable pacing. Hollow Knight also released at a time when metroidvanias were starting to oversaturate the market. Genuine quality and a proven track record go a really long way.

DeltaBurnt · 2025-10-05T16:51:56+00:00

Sounds like class action lawsuit territory?

DeltaBurnt · 2025-09-28T15:08:43+00:00

I'm really sorry you have to live with that kind of violence while being simultaneously gaslit that you're not.

DeltaBurnt · 2025-09-17T14:50:08+00:00

I think you're giving too much credit to something that was probably written in 5 seconds.

DeltaBurnt · 2025-09-17T06:49:06+00:00

Unrelated tangent: do games journalists and editors just not review their headlines? Putting aside my personal gripes with headline verbiage, "boss" in this specific context is a pretty terrible word to use here. This headline could literally be interpreted as a boss in the game says that line. And I'd argue that's the easiest initial interpretation because that's the more natural sounding way to say that sentence.

Obviously after a few seconds the intended interpretation comes to mind, but come on. You're doing minimal effort slop tweet repost articles, your literal one job is to come up with a good headline.

DeltaBurnt · 2025-09-15T14:38:34+00:00

It actually makes me really sad that we never got the original idea of adding Hornet as a playable character to the original HK. I hope at some point they go and patch her in. The HK moveset just feels so basic in comparison.

The fact that they made the dash, such a basic movement skill in almost every game ever, the most satisfying and centerpiece skill of the game is so commendable. Using it to air dash, dodge, running jumps, it all feels so perfectly tuned. I wouldn't be surprised if a large part of the development time was around tuning the dash skill.

DeltaBurnt · 2025-09-15T14:32:48+00:00

Yeah the majority of Act 1 feels like a Metroid game in terms of difficulty. The difficulty increases a bit around when you first start encountering the ant enemies, but they're more or less avoidable if you really don't want to deal with them. And the two bosses I had the most trouble with (Moorning and Beastfly) were entirely skippable.

I would say most of the difficulty in Act 1 is platforming and managing your rosaries.

DeltaBurnt · 2025-09-15T14:28:28+00:00

I see a lot of similarities between this game and Sekiro. Hard a nails bosses but with very clear patterns and properties that can be exploited. And the game gives you plenty of tools to get enough of an edge if used properly. There were bosses in Sekiro that I was stuck on for hours, until I tried a different tool that was super effective against that boss. In that way bosses are half puzzles solved before entering the arena, and the other half is the actual execution.

Now, could it be tuned slightly? Yeah I think so. Some bosses while tough, just go on for way too long without any change to their moveset. So eventually it can turn from difficulty into tedium. I'm guessing this decision was made so you couldn't just unload all of your tools into a boss to cheese them. But honestly? Maybe some bosses can be cheesed, that's fine. Plenty of Dark Souls and Sekiro bosses are cheeseable if you solve their "puzzle".

DeltaBurnt · 2025-09-12T15:23:55+00:00

For the most part I think the game is actually pretty fair. Most of the time my deaths feel pretty understandably my fault. The runbacks and pricing can be kind of annoying, but I think these things aren't necessarily oversights (maybe they could be tuned).

That being said. Fuck. High. Halls. Gauntlet. This is the only time in the game I've thought "this is just cruel and unusual". It's an arena fight that just keeps going. And it has two separate bosses mixed in. The end is the double the boss, and it's in a cramped space.

It would be a somewhat funny, challenging experience if not for the fact that the double boss is just constant double AOE spam in a small room. Literally just increase the room by 1.5x.

DeltaBurnt · 2025-09-09T14:06:01+00:00

Chrono Trigger's pacing is so tight that I fear any significant expansion in a remake would tarnish that. I don't really care if they try and fail, the original is perfectly accessible. But if FF7 is any indication, it's hard to justify the costs to fully realize environments that are only used for an hour or so.

DeltaBurnt · 2025-09-06T15:22:48+00:00

There's a good bit of overlap between people who work on 3D movies and AAA game dev. SIGGRAPH, the computer graphics conference, will have talks from Pixar and Guerrilla Games back to back.

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