I guess I just have a whole different approach to games (and other entertainment, by the way). I’d rather react to what a game is rather than what I want it to be, based on expectations or otherwise. Which I understand is mostly what you’re doing when you say House of the Dying Sun “[isn’t] very good”. I understand that. But whether it’s good or not – I think it’s very good for the reasons I’ve explained – is a different question entirely from whether it needs to be an open-world game with randomly generated missions and the ability to fly around between star systems instead of picking missions from a branching tree structure. We have plenty of open-world games and a lot of them are poorly made, without personality, and crammed with filler. Mike Tipul made the right call by scaling House of the Dying Sun to his capabilities and as such, there’s one less ambitious game fallen short asking for your money. There is instead one more shrewdly focused design with personality, unique gameplay, and an unforgettable aesthetic, to boot. Tipul is a better designer and House of the Dying Sun is a better game for focusing on what it can do rather than fixating on something that didn’t work early in the design process.
That’s one of the dangers of the “design in a fishbowl” approach that I don’t like: people don’t understand that one of the hardest parts of game design is knowing what to leave out. They feel like they’re being deprived of something when a feature goes by the wayside, regardless of whether that feature would have made for a better game.
At any rate, House of the Dying Sun still has some development to go. It’s getting a survival mode and I wouldn’t be surprised to see some sort of replayability added to the missions, like scores or random parameters. That might bring around some people who can’t accept hand-crated missions as a viable way to make a game.
-Tom