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.
It's one dude from Eastern Europe who named his company Slavic Magic. Cuckery chance is about 0. But his money was very well spent on the music and voicelines contracts. There are a lot of people who can play a hurdy gurdy poorly... not so many that can play it well.
My thoughts exactly. I'll wait a bit with it but I will watch it with great interest. AAA should feel ashamed by solo devs showing them how it's done.
Voices aren't as much of an issue now. Plenty of generation options that can cover most of your NPC needs without many issues in quality. Though the higher quality from such measures is fairly recent, so it's not something a lot of new games (like this year) could've incorporated into their development cycle.
There's also a lot of generic voice pack assets that can cover the usual combat voice sounds. Which can be a bit limited in usefulness.
Music is tricky though. There's a lot of purchasable assets, but it can be really hit or miss, and may rarely come anywhere close to fitting a developer's ideal vision. And it's not something most devs would have the natural talent to learn and do themselves, even with musical composition software.
Are you talking about netflix? Or youtube? Or modern AAA #2 or the pre-sequel?