u/Additional-Bit-8615

I saw the new Wolverine gameplay. The Sentinel boss is the same “slam the arm down, hit the weak point, repeat” shit we’ve seen in a hundred games. The chase has a glowing red trail basically holding your hand the whole time. I said those parts look tired and overly guided. That’s it. Not “the game is garbage.” Not “Insomniac is trash.” Just that those specific things look recycled and safe for a game we’ve waited years for that’s gonna cost $70.

And the response is immediate: “Then don’t buy it.” “You’re just a hater.” “Salty PC player.” “You still hate Spider-Man 2.” “You just hate Insomniac.” “All those concerns are stupid.”

Like, You can be hyped for a game and still not like parts of i, but somehow being Skeptical gets treated like a personal attack or a conspiracy. As if raising an eyebrow at recycled boss patterns or heavy hand-holding is evidence of bad faith

It’s gotten to the point where you have to be either fully riding or you’re the enemy. There’s no room for “I’m still looking forward to it, but these parts look weak.” And when even a studio director frames the volume of normal criticism as a “relentless onslaught” that’s bad for mental health, it just reinforces the idea that questioning anything is the real problem.

I still think the game’s probably gonna be good. But I SHOULD be allowed to have something that is OTHER than blind hype

People keep pointing at Baldur’s Gate 3 like it rewrote the commercial reality of traditional CRPGs, But It didn’t, BG3 is a MASSIVE outlier due to the fact that It pulled in a ton of people who normally never touch the genre because of the D&D brand, high production values, solid multiplayer, cultural timing, and accessibility features, but That success does not change the underlying distribution of the genre.

Look at the next-best results and the numbers fall off a cliff: Divinity: Original Sin 2 was a genuine success for a CRPG but not a breakout hit and Most other modern CRPGs like Pathfinder sit significantly lower.

Publishers looking at risk and scale still see a relatively limited, dedicated audience for pure or near-pure versions of the genre, .Former BioWare staff often frame EA as simply not “getting” Dragon Age because it was “too niche, too backwards, too old-school.”which sucks but its Kinda true. Hell, Dragon Age: Origins itself needed, edgy marketing with heavy blood, sex and Marilyn Manson’s “This Is the New Shit” just to generate wider interest., Then the sequels systematically moved away from the CRPG genre:

• DA2 shifted toward action combat, a voiced protagonist, and tighter scope.
• Inquisition went further into open-world action-RPG territory.
• Veilguard completed the pivot into a more conventional action-RPG.

BG3 proved the ceiling for a traditional approach can be extremely high when everything aligns but It did not prove that the genre stopped being niche or that every studio can (or should) expect those numbers from a single player CRPG

One thing that has always bothered me is how people kept calling Palworld "the game Pokémon fans have always wanted." I put around 30 hours into it, and I just don't agree:

at first it sucked me in mostly due to the novelty of being a new Game but once the shock value wore off it just became old. There's no real story and progression sucks, and the game is just Ark with Pokemon and I already hated Ark, not to mention this game is also buggy and unoptimized as hell even with 1.0 and while it's more excusable than Pokemon for being in the same state, it's still inexcusable,

Plus,a Huge Chunk of its fanbase is based less around their love for it but rather a huge circlejerk that pat themselves on the back for "sticking it to gamefreak", That attitude, contrarily, contributed to killing Yo-kai Watch in North America, if you get into a series with a weird intention to try and use it to take vengeance on an existing series, you're getting into it for the wrong reasons and promoting it for the wrong reasons because it's stops the game standing on its own merits and forces comparisons in

Overall, Palworld is not a good replacement for Pokémon. What I want is better replicated in Persona/SMT, Cassette Beasts, Monster Hunter Stories and certain ROM hacks