The Creature Sim Dilemma: A Decade of Stagnation

Описание: Please excuse the shoddy editing and voicework on this video, as it's my first time doing it.

With 2025 coming to a close, I felt like I had to make a piece like this. Ten years ago I was in High School, and looking back I find so much has changed in my life. Except for these games, which have technically changed visually, but failed to do the same mechanically, despite the entire decade since their conception.

This critique isn't meant to bring down these games. I still enjoy playing them, and will continue to do so. What I made this video for was to simply spread awareness of the fundamental problems this genre has. They're problems that took me years of playing to realize, and I hope this video can be a shortcut to understanding for newer players.

A few notes I forgot to mention in the video.
I accidentally conflated the ideas of "PVP mentality" and "Deathmatch mentality". I think there's merit in differentiating these things.
PVP isn't a bad thing, nature is basically one big PVP match when you think about it. Deathmatch mentality, where players grow, run to hotspots, fight until they die, and repeat until bored is what needs to be addressed.
Progression plants no longer exist, but equivalent self feeding tactics still do. Like apato egg farming in BOB or growing alt account Maia's in The Isle.
Rule servers are a band-aid fix. Neither players nor devs should expect them to be permanent solutions to these problems.

Frankly, this video might even be redundant now. I began working on it months ago, and in that time we got announcements like POT's upcoming matchmaking system. Plus the release of The Isle's Elder System. Which as awkward as it is, still technically qualifies as a complete gameplay loop. (A first for this subgenre) I called them stagnant in this video's title, but that may be proven wrong sooner than I think.

That's all I have to say. If you disagree with or want to know more about anything mentioned in the video, just comment below.