Dynasty

"Dynasty" is, well, a failure, and it's easy to see why. Often game developers bash out a lot of code, create a Steam developer account, pay $100 for Steam Direct, and then ask themselves, "Is this a good idea?". Ready, Fire, Aim! What do you do in the game? This is a social deduction game with the social aspect removed. Ah, you say, then they added content and narrative to replace the other players, this is better! Haha, no, they didn't. They use procgen instead. This is a contentless playerless non-PvP game. I wonder why it got absolutely zero attention from gamers? It is a mystery. This game features very lacklustre minimalist "art" for graphics instead of anything remotely contemporary. In fact, it's mostly text. So, just like they couldn't work out how to make this a PvP game, and they also couldn't work out how to create content and tried to use procgen as a substitute, they couldn't do graphics either. I'm sure the "developer" thought this would come across as "artistic", but it doesn't, it comes across as "really lazy". Yes, contemporary 3D graphics take a lot of time and effort to create. That doesn't mean it's okay not to bother! Developers must try to understand that gaming is a visual medium, and gamers spend a lot of money on high end gaming rigs for a reason. And that reason is not so they can look at lazy, phoned-in half efforts like this. This might as well be a webpage. Developers must try to understand that Steam is not here to compete with Chrome and Firefox. The developer chose not to do the job of a real game developer and create meaningful bespoke levels, narrative based gameplay progression and so on. Instead, they decided that "Procgen IS content!" and lazily tried to use procgen algorithms to create infinite, samey, repetitive, soulless levels, because that's a lot less work. As a result of this poor decision, the game gets tired and repetitive almost immediately. Developers must learn that procgen is a terrible substitute for creating real content. It should not be used as "ez-mode" for content creation, as the developer tried to do here. Not every "free" game really is. There's often MTX, or content locked behind DLC, or donations being requested, or any other number of things that could mislead gamers, but in this case I'm glad to say this really does appear to be a fully free game. Nothing demonstrates a developers belief in themselves and their work than giving it away without any remuneration. This is a service to themselves, and the gaming industry, and should be applauded. Of course, just because something is free, doesn't necessarily mean it's valuable. Even though this is "free", it failed to appeal to the 120 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB showed the game peaked at only 3 concurrent players... this is a dismal public reception. This was so bad they couldn't even give it away. Bearing in mind that free games don't add +1 to your game collector count, should you bother adding this to your library and downloading it? Nope. This isn't worth downloading. While this didn't cost me any money up front, I still feel ripped off.