I’m wondering what people think about the methods used by the game “Hate Free Heroes” on Greenlight. If you go to the page (linked below) and stay on the Greenlight page rather than redirecting to its Steam Store page, and then scroll back several pages in the list to see the ruckus some months ago, it becomes clear that the devs initially deleted every single criticism, even the mild ones, by labeling them “hate”, before finally being forced by community outrage to cease. One guy said his comment was deleted over 90 times before they finally allowed it. Most of the criticisms were polite, especially by Greenlight standards. The game itself is based around a group of superheroes who fight “hate” (presumably including mild criticism?) by getting rid of “Aggromites” (entities which increase aggression, presumably including reviewers).
I think it’s hilarious. If someone confronts them, they can always fall back and say what they did was coherent with their game and that they did it strictly for marketing purposes. I mean, obviously it’d be an excuse, but no one can prove that.
isnt that RPG maker???
you can sell games made with RPG maker now i guess huh? i remember selling a game, back in the day it wasnt allowed, was against the terms of RPG Maker
lol i made RPG Maker games waay back when, when i was like 10 or something?? lool
but i mean, thats great, whoever needs an artistic expression outlet gets one lol
iam only a little jealous they get to sell em … i might not’ve trashed mine to the empty space of 1s and 0s hell
… then again all the assets and stuff were other people’s stuff lool … but back then there was like 20++ sites (probably like 200) full of other people’s stuff for totally free, but it even included like michael jackson songs and mario and stuff lool … internet was different back then!! … i dont think the word “internet piracy” was even a thing LOL … well iam sure it was but noone knew it was a thing…
Don’t know about RPGMakers terms today, but tons of RPGMaker stuff is flooding steam since quite a while. So I guess this term is either no longer in RPGMakers EULA, or the devs using the engine tend to ignore it, and RPGMaker isn’t enforcing it.
Having said that, RPGMaker games have attained quite some notority among steam users… I am not sure why, or if these games really deserve to be singled out.
Looking at the general low average quality of Indie games getting flogged on Steam nowadays, many of which are 3D games NOT created with Unity (which also attained some notority in some circles because they think its the engine of choosing for bad devs producing shovelware), I certainly welcome ANY Indie game of good quality on Steam. If it happens to be an RPGMaker game with vanilla looking characters, but good gameplay and story, I am all for it.
But of course, that is just like, my opinion man. I am an elitist gaming hipster who spends up to 100$ for old SNES and PS1 JRPG gems that are still missing in his collection, even though I know I will not finish or replay all these games for years. So 8-bit or 16-bit graphics and slightly cookie cutter graphics (Well, I played and enjoyed Lufia back in the day, and that looked cookie cutter even in the 90’s) do not bother me in the slightest bit as long as the game is good.
If a dev achieves creating a retro looking JRPG game with a fresh, good story, I will gladly add it to my Steam collection so I can play some good old retro JRPG fun on my PC.
Do the devs have the option of blocking critical reviews on the Steam store like they did during the Greenlight process? If not, how will they cope with all the hate?
Back when I made that first post I did a search and wasn’t able to find an answer to whether a developer could delete reviews for their game so I’ve been assuming it’s just not possible short of perhaps reporting the review to Steam due to inappropriate content.
They need to do something ‘different’ since the game looks, and appears to play like the 60 other jrpgs released this past year, and the 100+ jrpgs released last year … and the year before last. etc. etc.
I also (used to) really like this genre, unfortunately I’ve not been as keen to pick up any jrpgs for over a year because they are samie-same, with very little to no positive innovation. And I’ve never found much interest in ‘Eastern’ jrpgs. The stories just don’t interest me, teen - high school heroes who save the world from mystical god-like forces, with heavy emphasis on adolescent relationships.
Genuinely interested. Have you found any quality jrpgs over the past years that have some interesting/cool innovative mechanics on top of the tried and true, standard jrpg model?
To be honest, not really. The most interesting things I have found on Steam has been “Trails in the sky”, though that is neither an Indie game nor really a new one, rather a re-release on PC of an older japanese title… and I still need to sit down and play it, cannot say if it is any good yet. Just that is looked interesting
Guess I will have to look into Undertale given its an extremly retro looking, JRPG inspired Indie game that seems to be receiving a lot of praise. And then there is about a ton of other not-JRPG games that might scratch that itch somehow.
But a true JRPG on Steam that REALLY pushes the envelope on quality and innovation… no, I haven’t found any yet. Not that I looked around that much, given my backcatalogue of old JRPGs I still need to play on my old consoles
As to the JRPGs having somewhat childish characters and somewhat kid friendly stories… well, depends on the game really. Some games managed to surprise. Breath of Fire was never a series with a GREAT story… too much character recycling, quite bland and cliche stories and really, you just played it for the really great character sprites, the enjoyable battle system and the one or two GREAT characters in each iteration (Katt, yay! Why not recycle her? )
And then came BoF IV, and for the first and only time in the series my mind was blown away by the story. The tragical twists, and that ending. The playable endboss with an actual story and motivation that made you sympathize with the bad guy!
There are the story gems hidden amongst the cookie cutter JRPGs…
As to the RPGMaker games and story gems. Meh. I would love to find one. My personal guess is that most of these will NOT be scratching that particular itch given the creators are most probably death bent on recreating the most iconic JRPG stereotypes from way back, to ewoke those retro feelings… forgetting that 100’s of other game creators will do the same, while their particular niche of players most probably has played it all before in all the JRPG games since the 90’s.
The problem with jRPGs that I have is that sometime in the last decade they lost the ability to present a good story to save their ass. Even if the stories were good (not that they usually are), they can’t have it acted out without having to add an extra digit or two to the budget. So instead, you get cardboard cutouts that represent the pinnacle of anime techniques, which is to say to animate almost nothing but make it look cool. You end up with scripts that are almost entirely bloated drivel that no one ever takes a second pass at to cut down. Hell, they won’t even change the camera angle, just so their crappy assets don’t have to be scrutinized in detail.
As much as people have a knee-jerk reaction to “cinematic storytelling,” there are some seriously valuable uses for it.
^I agree. I tried playing one a while ago and the character blabbed on and on about the most pointless crap.
“These… flowers, they remind me of my home in kaldblish. It makes me feel the sadness, that must be what the birds feel. What inner power was master golibonki talking about, do I have this power?”
Well, deleting the hate messages does save the authors of the hate messages from embarrassment in the future and so is helping the authors of the hate messages. The people deleting the hate messages shouldn’t be wasting their time deleting the hate messages - they didn’t write them and have seconds thoughts about the wisdom, or lack of it, expressed in those messages.There is a line though when the verbal abuse is persistent in it’s abuse of the victim(s) that the hate messages become illegal threats and the abuse should reported to authorities.
At any rate, the rating systems shouldn’t allow reviews of products that aren’t expressed in civil language so that there is no need for the person reviewing the ratings review messages to try and distinguish between hate and threats as compared to legitimate product reviews.
If the people deleting the hate messages were simply motivated to do that to save others the indignity of reading abusive insulting pseudo-reviews then they were doing the general public a service.
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