Rampant Games - Indie RPG Roundup
The Rampant Coyote has a new Indie RPG Roundup, with quite a few things we cover anyway but also some projects out of our scope, such as Magical Diary, Cthulhu Saves the World and Planet Stronghold.
Somewhat related, Sinister Design has a piece titled Reasons to Support Indie RPGs, mostly discussing 2K Marin's attitude to turn-based games:
2K Marin, the developer working on the X-Com series reboot, has become the latest big studio to take a turn at trashing classic turn-based games:
“Every studio we had wanted to do it and each one had its own spin on it,” Hartmann says of the revival of the XCOM brand. “But the problem was that turn-based strategy games were no longer the hottest thing on planet Earth. But this is not just a commercial thing – strategy games are just not contemporary.” So, it became a first-person affair, even if 2K seems somewhat hesitant to label it a first-person shooter.
Hartmann says the team at 2K Marin are trying to “renew Xcom but in line with what this generation of gamers want.”
My first thought upon reading this was simply “Again?” This is twice now in the span of a month. It seems the mainstream studios just cannot help themselves: they just have to justify their wholesale abandonment of slow-paced cerebral gameplay. And it seems that they all have the same justification: that modern gamers are all Ritalin-popping adrenaline junkies with the collective attention span of a piece of dryer lint.