I don't see a post about the game, and based on my experience with it and the numbers, it may be because half of you are playing it right now. Game went to the top of Steam's sales list on Day 1, which is impressive, because that list is by volume of revenue, and it displaced CounterStrike 2, the Steam Deck, and Helldivers 2. So, an early access game on sale for $29.99 on the first day made more money than CS2 skins, Helldivers 2, or the Steam Deck. Top concurrent players was in the 160K range, and the game had 3 million wishlists on launch day.
The game is excellent. Imagine if Banished and one of the earlier Total War games had a child, and that child married the offspring of Age of Empires and Cities Skylines and had kids of their own. There's seasonality, you have to plan ahead when you produce food-- but you don't have to micromanage-- and traffic is taken into account, so the more traffic a road sees, the wider and deeper the ruts get. You can double up families in housing if you lay the plots out correctly, and cottage industry can produce food and export goods.
And the game was developed by one guy. He contracted out some work (the music is stellar, and the voicework is atmosphere building), but this is a 7 year passion project from one guy.
Owned the game a day, have played almost 10 hours. 11/10, quintuple A game from one turbo autist with a dream.
Posting professionally, if you want something authentic you really want to spend some good money on proper voice actors and music. You might be okay with crappy voice generated AI, but I don't think most people are and I know I always find it very jarring finding AI generated anything.
To put it into layman terms when it comes to AI especially. It's like the difference between somebody taking the time to come up with a funny meme and doing it up themselves versus some leftist or boomer that keeps pooping out those awful meme generator images that are usually some variant of wall of text which I now automatically ignore because the person's that fucking lazy they put whatever point they were trying to make through a meme generator rather than a well thought out post.
AI generated shit all starts to look the same after awhile and that's because it is. As an example I've scouted a very professional violinist for my game who can do all sorts. I need to check whether they can do space opera actually because I've got plans, they'll cost a significant chunk of money but it's going to be worth it for the sake of giving my own projects that polished feel. An AI simply isn't going to be able to do that and I don't think it ever will because I know how it works. If I did any of my work in AI it would look generic as fuck.
Getting rid of woke bloat means that you can spend more money on quality music and voice actors anyway. Your money is going to the development of something worthwhile rather than some leftist shits who hate gamers and are just there to collect a paycheck. Oh by the way before I forget, there's of course the issue of sound. Learning even decent foley is another example of how to increase how professional a game looks as we all know. Nothing like some proper atmospheric sound effects instead of awkward silence or blandness.
Are you talking about netflix? Or youtube? Or modern AAA #2 or the pre-sequel?
Fucking all of them lol, once you see it you can't unsee it, the star wars titles can get particularly jarring as you realise they've just duplicated 'high detail' models they clearly had lying around in their internal assets which just made me lose interest completely. Duplication of assets at a distance or with large scale conflicts is totally understandable because budget and everything but even the guys at Hollywood are abusing the fuck out of it now.