Allow me to explain:
Taking the “Crafting Survival” genre as a prime example, why do they all have the same feeling of being cheap, amateurish, and janky af? There is just this certain something about how every single one feels to play. The differences tends to be more in the grind, progression, and aesthetics while the game feel is exactly the same. The way your character moves, the way combat feels cheesy and unbound, the often minimalisticly artistic UI (like it’s just a 50% transparent box with text/icons on it), and almost always riddled with bugs.
Even the big budget ones made by giant, long-lived developers tend to feel exactly the same as the independently made-by-one-dude-in-a-garage games. They might have better visuals, but everything else feels cheap and just to the point of functionality.
The weirdest part of this, to me, is that Minecraft doesn’t feel like this and it is basically the grandfather of the genre. It’s just every other one built in Unity or Unreal that feels like a janky ARMA module made by someone who just learned how to code. With so many developers making so many games in this genre, you’d think at least one of them would make one that feels more “luxurious.” I lament not being able to put into words exactly what I mean; it’s really something that can only be described through comparison and experience. But I have to believe others who have played games like Rust, Ark, Valheim, etc know what I mean.
I think this might be a bias towards the sample taken, given how easy it is to make a game these days, you can probably say the same abot any genre given the right sample.
If you want examples of survivalcraft that might not fit that (subjective) model, there’s stuff like sons of the forest or Terraria.
You might feel tempted to say these are exceptions, but I’d argue that anything that is more common would by definition fall into same-y-ness
I also want to add that the ui problem goes beyond genres.
Given your distaste for the genre, whichever one you might feel is “luxurious”, you probably haven’t played. Minecraft also has the benefit of working in precise squares/cubes.
Systems-driven games tend to have more bugs than ones where all of the solutions are finite and predetermined.
Can’t say this is the case in shmups, action games, or fighting games, TBH. That’s all I play though, I don’t know nothing else.
crafting survival base building pvp extraction shooter with zombies and microtransactions, available as a service with >$60 upfront price tag
Crafting “survival” quickly became one of my least favourite genres. It’s 99% the same boring bullshit and the word “survival” is doing some heavy lifting when it is really just a crafting action game or something.
There are a few exceptions to the rule like The Long Dark and Don’t Starve though.
You’re surviving against bad game design :P
I presume they all buy the same animation package and then barely bother to modify it.
IMHO:
It feels like that, because that’s what it is. There were a few awesome titles in the genre and as soon as AAA (and some cheap ass pseudo indie developers) realize people love them, they try to jump on the train by ripping off the successful game.They don’t want to create something original, they just want a piece of the pie, and that’s what shows.
You can see the same shit happening in deck building rogue likes. E. g. Slay the spire and Balatro were creative and new but also obviously not made to just grab some cash. Meanwhile the market is now flooded with tons of similar working and / or looking games that are just boring rip offs. Not a single original thought went into these games.
I guess the crafting survival genre is just one of the bigger “me too” bandwagons, which is why all of them feel cheap. Tho even the original breakout hits feel like that because they actually were made by amateurs. If we could see the source code, I wonder how often we’d see the same systems just straight up copied and pasted from another game. 🤔
Extremely unlikely they used the literal same code unless it was from a template or asset pack.
That’s also probably intentional because people tend to like the familiar ‘tropes’ and if you go out of your way to do it in a weird way, that design may be burned at the stake in the reviews/feedback.
