I've been writing a review for Stadia off and on, but for now, look at this game that just came out. It's a Stadia exclusive, and it's free for Pro accounts. I claimed it because I claim every single freebie on whatever platform I'm on, because I'm a digital hoarder.
Yeah, I don't think I'll be spending much time with this. Even the banner has that whole uninspired look where the artist tried to make it seem super unique, but ended up being completely devoid of style and looking like everything else from this era. Oh look, a gender-ambiguous, dark skinned endomorph with multicolored tied-back dreadlocks for hair on the left, a white girl with three different hair colors with hands bigger than Shaq's on the right. Literally nobody else is representing styles that look exactly like this, because the entire game industry is full of literal Nazis and every single other game ever made is exactly like Active Shooter, Super Seducer, and Tranny Deadnamer 2020.
And the afro girl, front and center, has Dreamworks face.
Even the game's title gives me pause. "Crayta", so... like, crater? Is this game gonna crater? Oh wait, it's like the word "creator" but annoying to say.
The actual game is one of those "make your own game within this game" things:
Crayta brings together players of all abilities and backgrounds to create and play multiplayer games with their families, friends, and the rest of the world. Create and collaborate in real-time, then share your games instantly with the Crayta community. Powerful, flexible, accessible, fun – game creation is now a game in itself!
The Premium Edition also includes free seasonal content throughout 2020.
So I started it up to look at it, which drops you right into a character creator. It's not one of those crazy detailed ones where you can adjust the ridge of your character's nose, though this is one of those games that'd benefit from it, since there's no way to not make your character look like a total faggot. Here's the most masculine one I could come up with:
That thing over his eye was supposed to be red.
As for the game itself, eggghhh...... In general, things like this never really tend to find their own identities. You're putting the cart before the horse by selling a game creation tool first, and a game second, but when you need the creation tool to even start playing the game you made, your audience is exclusively limited to other people who have it. Which will be other people aspiring to make their own games, not looking to play anyone else's. RPG Maker lets you export your games into their own dedicated EXEs and distribute them freely, letting anyone play them without ever actually touching RPG Maker. And then you've got mods where people make games out of other games, which refreshes a game they already enjoy, which gives you a built-in audience from the start. Hell, there are plenty of games out there that started as mods of other games. The two biggest new genres to explode in the 2010s started life as mods: MOBAs were born from DOTA, a mod of Warcraft III; and Battle Royales were born from DayZ, a mod of ARMA 2. The perks of making a game by modding one you like is that you already know all sorts of details about the limitations of the engine, any quirks in the game's logic, and a general idea on how what should go where.
Crayta is like the Esperanto of game design. In theory a good idea, but in execution as clumsy as it gets. English is the most widely used language on the planet, but it's built out of scraps from lots of different languages, as cultures converged and the language grew. Video game engines are similar in their growth.
Wait, no-, don't cringe, I- look, here's a family tree of Western languages:
and here's a family tree of game engines, from Quake to Source 2:
which is technically incomplete, considering Quake is built from id Tech 2, which is the followup to the Doom engine, made by a team whose first project as their new company, id Software, was building a proof-of-concept remake of Super Mario Bros. 3 for DOS, to pitch to Nintendo, which in turn was later reworked into Commander Keen.
The point I'm trying to make is, mainstays tend to be built on the shoulders of giants. You already know the ins and outs of your favorite game. You have an idea of what made it so good, and how you approach different scenarios in that game. Crayta, on the other hand, is a black box until you've played it enough, and without any real direction within the game itself, and how it relies on community content, it's hard to get a feel of where to start. There's a low enough barrier to entry to where good, high quality content becomes buried in a sea of zero-effort garbage, so novelty things like working calculators and songs made from level elements tend to rise to the top, since they're some of the only things where you'll know what you're getting going in. This is a game designed to be modded, but only in ways they approve of, using only their assets. It's a fucking Stadia (timed) exclusive, for God's sake, there's no way to get into the game's files at all without heisting some Google data center. I fucking love seeing new games from random creators with great ideas, and this kind of shit is anathema to the creative process. Toby Fox, the motherfucker who made Undertale, which is kind of an extremely successful fucking game, got his start making a romhack of Earthbound where the final boss calls you a faggot. This Crayta shit's just a lazy cashgrab.
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