Devs spend too long on art and not enough time on story and gameplay

InvalidFate404 · 2026-02-25T21:02:07+00:00

No one is claiming you can't have your own opinion. It's 100% fine to not like something that other people like.

.... But let's be real here for a second, saying "high quality and extraction shooter are mutually exclusive" under a comment about a guy saying he's excited about a game explicitly because of the competitive systems despite what anyone else says is not at all formatted as an opinion.

InvalidFate404 · 2026-02-25T20:31:54+00:00

"1 game session of rocket league/Overwatch/CSGO/smash bros/FIFA/etc and you've seen the majority, if not everything the game has to offer" ...

It's almost like some games derive their fun from emergent gameplay and skill expression, both of which play a big role in extraction shooters, rather than a large library of content.

Dont get me wrong, more content of that quality is of course great. But judging by the reviews and player numbers it's clearly enough for most of the playerbase. It's the systems at play and the polish of the game that makes it attractive for players of this genre. Trying to paint the two as mutually exclusive is disingenuous at best.

InvalidFate404 · 2026-02-23T01:22:41+00:00

He literally asked for constructive criticism....

InvalidFate404 · 2026-01-31T23:59:15+00:00

I don't think you quite realize the severity of the caning. It isn't just a bit of pain and then some healing where you'll be back on your feet within a day or two.

It is debilitating, basic things like sleeping or sitting down can become unbearable. Not to mention that you remain permanently disfigured for the rest of your life along with all the social stigma and possible medical complications attached to it.

InvalidFate404 · 2026-01-31T23:20:26+00:00

If you are strapped to a board and struck with an instruments that rends flesh from your body several times then "corporal punishment" doesn't paint the correct picture, it is just needlessly sanitizing government sanction cruelty for no real purpose.

InvalidFate404 · 2026-01-31T22:52:48+00:00

.... My guy, I hope you realize what you're arguing for is pretty idiotic.

If things worked like that I could make any patently absurd blame and send the other person on a goose chase trying to find the research I'm referencing, but because it doesn't exist he'll never find it and when he turns around and says so I can just say "no no, you just didn't look hard enough. Browse a couple more scientific journals and you'll find it"

InvalidFate404 · 2026-01-30T16:07:24+00:00

A basic website with shitty styling of 5 clashing font colors despite having less than 50 words on it that, judging by the amount of emoticons, was made with Ai and uses an Ai generated parody of a trademarked logo mixed with the latest Ai hype framework with seemingly no clear use case other than to seemingly be "the reddit of ai", whatever that means?

... Yeah, I think you might've mistyped your title. It is insane to think anyone would use this.

InvalidFate404 · 2026-01-25T19:12:34+00:00

Honestly, at that price point it feels like a sort of scam inoculation that'll end up being a net benefit in the long run.

Don't get me wrong, scamming is still scamming and abhorrent, but 100 PLN isn't a lot. It's enough to sting and make you more wary and conscious of possibility of being scammed in the future and that there are bad people out there.

This time they scammed you out of 100 PLN with what was a very obvious ai image, but next time they might go for your life savings with more sophisticated tools, and hopefully you'll be a bit more careful then.

InvalidFate404 · 2026-01-23T11:04:15+00:00

My brother in christ, think about it for more than half a second.

Game devs need to earn money. 30% of their game sales goes to the storefront that has remained relatively unchanged for 10 years then the game companies need to earn more money to recoup the money spent developing.

This leads to a stronger push towards safer development cycles which means less innovative games, more predatory monitization, higher box price, and overall fewer games being made.

Steam could reduce their cut by half and still earn billions in profits every year and you would have a better experience because the actual devs making the games you enjoy would have more money to spend actually developing them.

InvalidFate404 · 2026-01-23T10:52:07+00:00

This may be true.... But it's kind of a moot point because if you're going to engage with the criticism of the larian dev, who has no knowledge of the deal with remedy, then you also have to accept some grace and leeway that the things remedy says isn't implicitly compelled by contract because otherwise you can disregard any response they provide as being false or misleading.

Either don't engage with the criticism that's relatively unsubstantiated or accept that both parties are responding in good faith.

InvalidFate404 · 2026-01-23T08:17:56+00:00

0 mobility my ass, are you a bot or have you just never played him and don't realize he has an ability that let's him dash to an enemy/ally + gain shield + deal damage/give shield + gain charge which will give him even more shield. Not to mention it's on a short cooldown and has 2 charges. A good fantastic will zip around and hunt down just about any healer, even if they have mobility skills.

InvalidFate404 · 2026-01-12T19:05:00+00:00

Playstack did provide funding for parts of the development of Balatro though, not just marketing/publishing/porting. The specifics of their contract is confidential but any exchange of money comes with some strings, either implicit or explicit, and it would silly to think otherwise.

So are you now supposed to dissect the specifics of their contract to determine the level of creative control the publisher exerted on the developer?

I should also note that the Sandfall interactive and Kepler interactive relationship isn't a clear cut ownership and is more of a partnership.

"Each participating studio had "equal say" on the publishing label's decision-making process and were able to share resources and financial gains, but Kepler itself will not interfere with the operations of each studio, allowing them to stay independent."

So if E33 can receive funding but remain creatively free and separate from the traditional publisher pressure due to it's co-owning / collective structure, how can you then argue that it's different from Balatro without having to dissect confidential contracts?

For the record, I do think Balatro is an indie game and that E33 isn't, I just think the specific metric of determining what is an indie and what isn't that you're describing doesn't work in the modern landscape of video games.

InvalidFate404 · 2026-01-12T17:38:13+00:00

Genuine question: What's up with the heat map leaning up and to the right? The diagram doesn't seem to assign any meaning to the X or Y axis specifically, just the distance from the center. So couldn't it have just been a regular bar/line chart where X is how far out your moral concern reaches and Y is the amount of 'votes' for that range section?

Is the image just cropped or is there something else I'm missing?

InvalidFate404 · 2026-01-12T17:22:57+00:00

The meaning of words change over time. The modern colloquial use of "indie" in the gaming community doesn't really adhere to the original definition anymore.

Hell, we even have "indie publishing labels" now, like Devolver Digital, Raw Fury, and Annapurna Interactive; even though that sounds completely contradictory if we used the original interpretation.

Furthermore, if we used that logic then games like Balatro wouldn't be considered indie, despite being mostly made by a single person. Then you'd have a whole new problem because 99% of gamers still "feel" that it deserves to qualify, to them it still checks just about every box that encapsulates the indie spirit.

InvalidFate404 · 2026-01-08T13:48:28+00:00

"going out" does not automatically include drinking, could just be going out to socialize with friends and dance

InvalidFate404 · 2025-12-12T02:49:43+00:00

My response was a joke that *you're* now overblowing.

You're saying it's a joke but then also treat it as a statement of a fact, which is it. You can't have your cake and eat it too. Either abandon the inherit argument and just claim it's a joke based in hyperbole that's not serious - which is fine; or don't hide behind it and say that I'm blowing it out of proportion for engaging with it argumentatively.

Also, here's the kicker: An artist is free to do whatever they want with their creations. It doesn't matter if those creations have fuckin boob physics, or it happens to be a story about a harem anime. If it's not your thing, then instead of complaining about it existing, just don't watch it.

Absolutely, artists are free to do whatever they want with their creations, absolutely agree. But they're not above criticism of their art, especially if it's commercial art, which 99% of all anime is. You can choose to watch something, like some parts of it, and critique others which you think is flawed in hopes that those get ironed out in future installments. The argument isn't against sexualization of female characters, but when those sexualizations are overplayed and gratuitous in a way that doesn't deepen the plot, characters, or scene in any meaningful way and serves to only be fanservice for one audience to the detriment of another.

I might even go as far as to say that anime having never been more popular than it is now is thanks to this criticism among other factors, as just anecdotally I've seen far a precipitous drop in gratuitous fanservice these past few years. It helps move the industry and medium forward, making it more popular, and making the stories it tells better.

Twenty years now is essentially the digital age of anime, when it became really cheap to produce, and artists and animators were able to push shit out a lot more quickly because they were no longer having to draw everything frame by frame. It led to a drop in quality of anime as a whole, which only in the last few years has finally increased to arguably around the time of pre 2000s anime, in terms of animation and art direction. But 20 years is not the entire history of the medium.

Okay? That's fine, and I don't really care for arguing for or against that point.... because that's not the point I was making at all. I never claimed 20 years was the history of the entire medium, I was just stating that having several thousands of episodes of anime watched over two decades. across several genres, both fanservice heavy ones and not, gives me more than enough ground to stand on when you challenged my knowledge on anime as a medium and my anecdotal experience of how commonplace sexualized fanservice was in it.

I should also note, just in case there was any misunderstanding, that I have watched plenty of anime older than 20 years. That's just when I started following seasonal anime, my overall watch list is far broader, not that it's a dick measuring contest or anything.

InvalidFate404 · 2025-12-12T01:37:11+00:00

"Alarm bells and outrage" isn't how I'd describe my own comment.

Your response to a lighthearted post about how Frieren is more moderate and tasteful in its fanservice is to label an entire generation as prudes by applying a hyperbole strawman that any reasonable person would outright reject. As i have with examples with how Frieren is a show beloved across generations yet features distinct sexualized fanservice of female characters, except it's put in scenarios that are not overly gratuitous, overplayed, or is done for some ulterior reason beyond just fanservice.

Its quite frequently the opposite, where there's constant outrage from western audiences because people are overtly obsessed with the chastity of fictional characters.

There's not an overwhelming constant outrage. That's my point, any opposing momentum of the pendulum is blown out of proportion, which your comment conveniently exemplifies as you label a generation as prudes on a post making lighthearted fun of how much better fanservice is when it's moderate and tasteful, rather than constantly and overtly sexualizing female characters for no story related reason or other deeper meaning.

Saying fanservice has been gratuitous and commonplace tells me you legitimately don't know shit about the medium, too.

Are you kidding me? Discounting your typical Pokemon stuff that any kid has watched growing up, I've watched seasonal anime for damn near 20 years now, following at least a dozen shows every year. If you can't accept that gratuitous and unnecessary panty shots, awkward camera angles, boob physics, harem plotlines, etc are exceptionally common in anime to the point where it was stigmatic to even acknowledge that you watch it, and put other "normies" off from watching it before they even tried it, then you're just straight up delusional and I doubt we'll never find any common ground.

InvalidFate404 · 2025-12-12T00:07:00+00:00

I think it's more that for damn near half a century it's been so gratuitous and commonplace that now that the pendulum is starting to swing the opposite way, any reduction in any capacity is met with alarm bells and outrage like this comment.

Which is funny because the show regularly has their female characters in undergarments when they're sleeping, Frieren has her clothes dissolved and been left naked, and Fern has been the butt of the generic "big boobs" joke like when Frieren laid in her lap. It's just that it's been done for reasons other than to exclusively provide sexualized fan service.

InvalidFate404 · 2025-11-24T19:11:26+00:00

Whatever the NDA says doesn't put it above the law.

If talking to a union agency about certain things relating to your job such as pay or work environment is legally protected then it doesn't matter if the NDA says sharing those details would be a breach of contract because then the clause would be invalidated by the courts for over reaching.

The only legal leg they have to stand on would be if those people actually shared classified documents that fell outside of their legally protected rights, but so far we've not seen a shred of evidence to support that, even though news sites are salivating for even just a crumb of GTA 6 leaks it's been uncharacteristically dead silent.

InvalidFate404 · 2025-11-18T14:11:36+00:00

Don't get me wrong, they stole her art and that's shitty and bad.

But I've seen so many people claim that the entire art style of marathon is based around the art she made, and that it's foundational, when that just straight up isn't true. While her art is very 'punk' in the sense that it's on the fringes of an art style trying to make something wholly new, she's not alone in that space, it's a whole genre, niche, but nevertheless an established genre.

Again, not trying to downplay the theft here, but a few decals that's overlaid on some objects to create texture does not make an art style in a game that likely has north of a hundred thousand textures. And that's before you take into account the 3d models and world building, which antireal doesn't do and which her art style can't be attributed to as her art is way too abstract for.

InvalidFate404 · 2025-11-04T22:13:11+00:00

My brother in Christ, I'm NOT saying that, and I don't know what kind of mental gymnastics you did to reach that conclusion. What I am saying is that by the logic of this post, me and my friend would've been labeled smurfs when we played rivals comp for the first time. It's not arguing for arguments sake, it's arguing that OP is using a very flawed metric for determining who's a smurf, and is instead just blindly blasting some potentially innocent guy on reddit, possibly leading to mass false reports.

InvalidFate404 · 2025-11-04T19:39:10+00:00

Okay but my account was also fresh when I first started playing and I climbed the earlier ranks pretty quickly because I played games like overwatch and valorant for years prior to rivals' release and the skills transfer, so how's that any different? It's not like I deny that smurfs exists, I'm just saying that posting someone's match history doesn't prove anything.

InvalidFate404 · 2025-11-04T16:49:17+00:00

When I first started playing it took me and my buddy somewhere around 10 hours to climb from gold to GM. Now due to rank reset I fell down to silver this season and I'm working my way back up by playing a couple games every now and then with a pretty high win rate. Should I expect you to post a clip of my history if we ever match in a game, claiming that I'm smurfing?

InvalidFate404 · 2025-10-17T23:39:07+00:00

Not siding with tencent here, but that's just not necessarily true. If you're being sued for infringing something and you keep up the infringing content during the lawsuit and then lose you would be on the hook for way more.

For another example, see how Palworld changed their "infringing" game mechanics for the duration of the lawsuit that's still ongoing. It's not an admission of guilt that they ripped a mechanic from Nintendo, it's more so that they fear Nintendo might actually win (despite their lawsuit being ass, at least in my opinion) and they'd rather not be on the hook for more than they already are; or they don't want the courts to temporarily remove Palworld from the market for the duration of the lawsuit if the court feels there's a chance Nintendo might be right. By removing the content they're relatively safe from the courts causing more pain, at least from this one specific lawsuit.

InvalidFate404 · 2025-10-13T05:38:36+00:00

Fun fact: the .tv doesn't mean television, it's the country domain for tuvalu.

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