I’m a casual Half Life enjoyer. Spent some time on the subreddit and man is it off the wall.
Tunic has an interesting fandom. That writing system has inspired a lot of cool stuff. The subreddit is censored six ways from Sunday because of how spoiler-sensitive the game is, but I have to wonder what random passers-by must think.
The Undertale fandom has permanently put me off trying the game. It’s not really my kind of game anyway, but I enjoy the soundtrack.
Minecraft has to have had the biggest demographic shift in its player base I’ve ever seen. I bought the game when it was in beta. Most fans were adults who were able to give a random Swede 20 bucks via PayPal. After the game’s release, and especially after the console ports and eventual MS buyout, the average age got younger and younger. I miss the old Minecraft forums.
Man, I remember when the star map was just a path with dots on it and there was a total of 5 frames. Excal, Loki, and Mag were the starting frames.
I remember them adding the star map and people hating it cause it made figuring out how to navigate to new planets confusing as fuck before they added in the being able to walk around your Orbiter and the updated mission tracking menus.
But the community existed and we all helped each other figure it out and progress with each other. Guilds and friendship grew naturally with people who were at the same point of progression you were. Without that community helping figure things out the game wouldn’t have been able to get past those growing pains and become the absolute behemoth it is today.
It’s really weird. I played in those early days (there’s a handful of badges available for the game, so most people don’t have one, but I get to be special because there’s an alpha or beta badge), and I really enjoyed it. We had one tileset, and that was enough. Now, I’ll occasionally get the urge to play it again, and there’s so much more, but I’m so much less interested in it. Everything feels less impactful. It’s just too easy now, and there’s no reason to keep going. Back then you needed to progress to survive.
The community is still as nice as ever though. I’m glad that hasn’t changed. Not many games grow as much as they have and keep that. Studios should really try to examine what they did and try to replicate it. It’s something beyond game design. It must be partially how they communicate (weekly streams, and just very up front about their plans), and also how important that is to them. It’s so important that the community lead was made the game director. What other studio has done that?