orin

[knbyo] - I've Been Playing Starward and I Have Complicated Feelings About It

new blog post about starward. it's actually mostly worth playing, but i also kind of wish we didn't have to.
https://knbyo.neocities.org/posts/starward/

An image of Eggbug, the Cohost mascotte, saying "Well, well, well, not to easy to find a website that doesn't suck shit, huh?"

Image related to current happenings

I can't tell you how mad it makes me that practically the entire genre became something I don't want to play anymore and the only way devs will believe that simplification isn't the thing that creates success is if they all fail, so I have to pray for the genre's downfall to maybe get a game I like.

Me with discord

1 panel: Launch party 2xko Dev: Our Launch and our first tournament went pretty well, Yepi!! Riot: 2 panel: Riot: Okay how much money did it make 2xko Dev: Oh it was close to what we expected some good numbers!! 3 panel: 2xko Dev:... Riot:... 4 panel: 2xko Dev in a guillotine while Riot looks

I'm so sad at the #2XKO news that I made a little comic

yeah, I agree with that. mainly this is all motivated by my inclination to be a little bit particular about the "who" in my fighting game experience. which is funny bc the entirety of 2025 was learning that that didn't change as much as I thought it would lmfao

admittedly my exp is also kinda weird bc a big part of my shift was parts of the aus scene more broadly skewing younger and being highly suspicious of older folks, and that made its way into some sicko circles. idk man shit got weird for a while

maybe things are Worse in some sense, tangible or otherwise, but it's just different. and I too must move different by moving exactly as I have been

it's hard to communicate that I'm not really lamenting some loss of a past thing so much as I'm ruminating on how I probably shouldn't be thinking so hard about some shit that was never meant to appeal to a pervert like me in the first place, y'know?

kinda not really my point. like yeah i can always play the games i know i like, and i do, but there's been a broader cultural shift that has resulted in the priorities of most people in the scene now not really aligning with my own

It's all so funny that I gave an interview with Evo this time last year where I laid out how I'd like to see things go to make spaces accommodating to players as they age into their 30s and beyond, that segment didn't make it to the final article and now everyone over 28 is quitting.

ikebukuro sarah belting the piss out of people in vf1 in big 2025 is, in fact, what it's all about tho. that's the real shit

unironically maybe the most important fighting game release of the last decade

I'm still showin up at the house meets, playin games, gettin rowdy, enjoying the dinners and the company and the shit that reminds me why i ever bothered in the first place. I couldn't stop even if i wanted to, it's just that where I'm at is not where the scene is. just gotta do my own thing

i see you, i hear you, i feel you. i don't even disagree. i'm not really saying it's time to throw in the towel, just that the things i want from fighting games and the scene more broadly are not things that the mainstream culture is interested in providing bc I'm not the target audience anymore

it's not really even just a games thing, it's also a scene thing. fighting games are now for grinders aged 18-24, us uncs and aunties are stubbornly fanning the flame of the old spirit but the world has moved past us

he's gonna find out what a beast i am in [[i am dragged away by the authorities]]

idk man sometimes I feel like it's not worth having opinions on fighting games. when I think on it, I kinda feel like the past few years have ended up retrospectively being a referendum on who fighting games are for, and the verdict is that they're not for people like me anymore lol

maybe it was doomed to fail no matter what but it would've at least been way more interesting if the game leaned into the 2v2 format more, maybe let you buy upgrades between rounds and shit. get it in the hands of popular streamers, copy the sf6 marketing tactic

this is mostly because riot as a company doesn't understand the ecosystem they're trying to push into, but it is at least a little bit bc they made a fiddly fighting game with moba characters instead of a pick up and play fighting game with broader meta strategy - y'know, like a moba

2xko spent a decade in development and went through a full top-down rewrite of the game concept and ended up going from a fucking boring 1v1 game to a fucking boring 2v2 game that released into sf6 and just before marvel smokon. I'm not sure what riot was expecting to happen

It's absolutely unbelievable that 2xko blew nearly a decade of work to release only to start downsizing their team 3 weeks into launch.

Runeterra had years before they had to bite the bullet, maybe 2xko would have had longer if they hadn't spent 9 years not releasing

i need him

yeah, i mean i think people tend to respond to ai in anything with far too much zeal, but the shit does make software tangibly worse so I'm okay with the wait and see approach

Stoat Dev rolled back the AI that *was* used.
Figured people would want the update, I know some people are permanently turned off to Stoat over it being used in the first place.

unfortunately this is probably less "the project is irrevocably tainted" and more "these are the perils of open source software development in current year"

so i should point out I've seen some people saying "don't use stoat they use ai!" but apparently the last few github commits to the project got rolled back when the vibe coding was pointed out. so there is no longer ai. it is apparently still buggy but y'know

I'm really just mad that I think starward is actually good

can't help thinking about starward as i watch 2xko crash and burn bc that game is literally a waifu gacha clone of exvs and yet it somehow manages to be a much more engaging experience. it is, in a lot of ways, everything 2xko wishes it was lol