Thanks for sharing, interesting article.

This is unfortunately very common. There are many games with interesting mechanics, themes and graphical styles that never seem to get any exposure.

To be fair, marketing an indie game is not easy, there is honestly a lot of luck involved. But something like posting to relevant reddit subs (let’s be real, for all the efforts of regular posters/curators, the Threadiverse lacks real scale), emailing at least ~100 small to medium sized content creators with a very well thought out email is a must.

The combat was honestly subpar (especially guns), but the quest design, character design, conversation and skill/clan system was super well done (I would argue these are critical elements for gameplay).

But those 81 cities take up a tiny portion of global land area.

A quick Excel import of the table from Wikipedia suggests that the “urban area” for those 81 cities is 190 K KM(2).

Total land mass on early 148.94 M KM(2).

So the world land could hold ~63,400 such cities.

It would likely take many years to build a city like Guadalajara (#81 on the wikipedia list).

So basically it has little to do with the original VTMB and what made it great (other than the brand name).

They should have just made a random vampire adventure game.

I think The Chinese Room makes solid games, but they have zero experience in immersive, complex RPGs.

Now that you say it, it does look a bit like Farlanders, but with a more grimdark sci-fi aesthetic.

Was going to try this on the weekend.

Too bad the demo is so bare bones.

If I ever get to it, I will post an announcement in !games@lemmy.world and !pcgaming@lemmy.ca. :)

I wonder if it would be possible to make a single-player release for EOL.

I’ve been thinking of setting up indie tycoon/strategy blog, but writing good reviews takes a lot of time.

Not every entry has to be a “feature article”, but I am also not interested in writing content with a few paragraphs. :)

This actually sounds like a lot of fun, and I like the top down map paper-map style view.

That being said, with multiplayer indie games population might be an issue. And games like this (with a real world map) can be taken over by toxic individuals.

So I am big fan of indie tycoon/economic strategy games and I honestly think most indie devs are terrible at promoting their games.

They don’t even post in say r/tycoon or r/citybuilder which allow promotions by devs with some restrictions. Not to mention reaching out to YouTubers (especially smaller ones or country-specific content creators who are willing to highlight a game in English).

Considering how much time I spend posting about indie games and playing them, I sometimes feel I should open a “results only” type indie gaming promotion service offering.

Haven’t tried it, but the price in my country is low enough that I might just give it a go. I love Mars colonization games and I am curious about the implementation of turn-based city-building.

I’ve been meaning to try this out.
Thanks for the reminder!

So many good games to try and as it happens right now I am super busy outside of posting on Threadiverse during my daily walks. :)

It does look very promising. I am going to check it out once I have time to try out demos on weekend.

It also depends on the genre/community.

For city-buildet (especially indie ones), tycoon games and economic strategy in general, people are usually very chill with the most heated discussion being about nerdy gameplay issues.

For what it’s worth, this has always been their style (I started reading them in 2010), even before the Eurogamer acquisition in 2017 or so.

I agree that it does feel more forced now, they a bit more subtle and tasteful back in the day.

I think it’s done well, with style and flair.

Noticed that as well (even though I didn’t include it in the heading). :)