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The most recent example of a very short but good/immersive game was Metro 2033. Steam tells me I played a total of 10 hours to finish it, it was good but I'll probably never touch it again (not even to unlock the pointless achievements). Now, how many people will regularly pay 40-50 Euros for 10 hours of gameplay and how relevant are those people for the market? I suspect that games such as Mount & Blade and Torchlight, which are obviously low budget, will be more profitable for developers in the long run and appeal to a larger audience (due to the lower price) and it's only the (expensive) marketing that helps sell the 40-50 Euro games. Steam has been flooded with low budget games recently, perhaps you should ask them what they think...

behold mount and blade, one of the last year's stars http://www.taleworlds.com/

the creators are a husband and wife from turkey, who left their daytime job some years ago to chase this dream. they didnt have any capital, they didnt have any investors. instead, they made their prototype, gave it as shareware, and asked people to support/contribute. a few years later, you have the game. at no point any investment got involved, and they only sit down with a publisher (paradox) after the game was complete.

the game much less rivals pirates in the hybrid/open ended scope, but passes in a medieval feudal world, with unprecedented (common consensus of all gamers and critics) mounted combat. turns out they also have been able to incorporate strategic, roleplay, and rts elements too.

they got high reviews last year in all prominent online gaming magazines.

this alone proves fun, vision beats the hell out of investment and the 50 million dollar budgets you are talking about there.

gaming died when wall street entered into it. it will reincarnate when enough number of players realize gamers and wall street dont mix well together.

Googles gotten:

Galcon
Gratuitous Space Battles
Mount & Blade
Plants vs. Zombies
Puzzle Quest

Tremulous
OpenArena

If you are interested in hack&slash on horses with tactical elements Mount&Blade is your game. There are also tons of historical mods available. http://www.taleworlds.com/

Maybe the easiest way to describe Mount & Blade is Elite on horseback, with an incredible hand-to-hand combat system.

There are several nations at war, and you can work for any of them, or none of them. Each nation has their own unit style, and it takes very different tactics to succeed with viking-style heavy infantry as opposed to Mongol-style light cavalry + horse archers as opposed to medieval English-style heavy cavalry + bowmen.

It's a fantastic game. It's been in beta for years, has been playtested for zillions of man-hours, and the developer has payed a lot of attention to the community feedback.

download the demo here.

I'm surprised that Mount&Blade wasn't mentioned. It was released recently, and it's awesome. For those that never heard about it, think Pirates! in a medieval setting. It's a great (if not the best) melee combat simulator i've ever played, and horse combat is amazing. It also has some light RPG elements.

Check the developers' site (http://www.taleworlds.com/), and play the demo. You can enjoy the full game until level 7. After that you either create a new character or buy the full version. And I highly recommend it.

If you prefer, Paradox (the publisher) also sells through their site: http://www.paradoxplaza.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=395&Itemid=228

You hit the nail on the head, but you must understand than the people who make the decisions for a developer of ANY size are NOT interested in "making a living". They was to make as much money as possible, and thus have absolutely no interest in catering to the original fans.

One-two man shops can afford to make niche games for their rabid fans. I'm a big fan of Dominions (Illwinter - two guys), Geneforge (Spiderweb - one guy), Mount and Blade (man and wife) I love their games, buy every new release, and get exactly what I expect. But these guys are not getting rich, nor really trying to. Their graphics are at least five years behind the curve, their engines are worse than what I could built in an year, and their games are not selling enough to support more than a few people.

A company that can produce a AAA title needs dozens of millions. They cannot afford to go for anything but the lowest common denominator. And most of such games fail. Serves them right. The one-two men shops release games faithful to the franchise, and are assured a welcoming audiance... of a few thousands at best. I have no idea how new people get hooked up.

Actually here is how you should get hooked up: (I'm linking to demos)

Dominions A insanely complex, turn based, fantasy strategy. Crappy graphics, retarded AI. Awesome multiplayer, if you are willing to play a game that can take a few months to resolve itself, and if your self-esteem take accept that each game produces one winner out of up to sixty players. http://www.shrapnelgames.com/Illwinter/DOM3/DOM3_page.html

Geneforge/Exile/Avernum Old style RPGs with an extremely involved story, very detailed multiple endings - the kind you can replay a dozen times if you can imagine a dozen characters with different morals. http://www.spidweb.com/geneforge3/index.html

Mount and Blade First person slasher. The one and only mounted combat simulator that reaches for the right feel. As someone who has used a saber from a horse, and trying to shoot a bow, I can tell you it does an incredible job. It is ngreat at modeling hand to hand combat and archery on foot as well, but that's been done. http://www.taleworlds.com/mb_download.html

Wow - this was the first time that I actually had mod points to mod something up I cared about. Every gamer should try it, it has recently gone retail.

The developers site
A soon to be released mod that enhances graphics quite a bit
Buy it online

Did you read the last paragraph, where I explicitly said there needs to be a profit motive and that hasn't been addressed by proponents of this plan? Probably no, because otherwise you wouldn't have ended your post with "NOW do you see the problem?" if you'd read my acknowledgement of the problem.

By the way, if you're making an epic RPG today you're probably doing it as part of a large team of other programmers, artists, animators, musicians, writers, and so on. And guess what? You're paid a salary for your work. The copyright and distribution rights are owned by the game's publisher, who is the one paying your salary. YOU do not get royalties from it. YOU are paid to do a job. (There may be some exceptions to this, for example if you're a rockstar coder who can negotiate a special deal for yourself, but by and large this is how it works. Just like application development.)

Taleworld's development model for Mount & Blade is an interesting one. I'm not sure how far it could scale though; their team is very small in comparison to many others.

I've haven't actually used the Wii controller before but from the sounds of it a game like Mount & Blade would go well with it. I can imagine using one controller to steer your horse and the other to wield your sword. Would be a lot of fun.

best mounted combat game ever for PC and I had never heard of it before I saw a posting on a forum.

I was suprised this game exists.

this is the main website.

http://www.taleworlds.com/

Check out Mount and Blade: http://www.taleworlds.com/ it's a work-in-progress and last time I checked there wasn't any story but the combat system was fun.

...by putting out more interesting, fun games than the big shops. Currently my favorite game is Mount&Blade, which was begun by a husband and wife team.

Hi, Jeff.

Loved Nethegate, bought it and subsequently several more Avernum/Generforge titles. Looking forward to Nethergate 2.0.

Speaking of indie rpgs, have you tried the Mount and Blade betas?

Spiderweb needs a better engine, those guys need a plot and an English spellchecker -> a marriage made in heaven!

The point is, is the game innovative in the right direction?

There are genres and general ideas not followed by any mainstream titles, but have considerable demand from gamers. For example, I always wanted to play a somewhat realistic game with medieval setting and without any magic, basically some kind of freeform RPG game, but without any supernatural nonsense. I finally stumbled upon Mount&Blade. And I found out there are many people who would be waiting for a game like this coming from the mainstream market, but alas, it never came from it.

Of course, if you define innovation as doing something no one ever thought of before, it's something else. But success based on innovation, as in doing something different than others, not doing something previously unthinkable, is not out of reach of indie devs.

Just stumbled on this little gem in the rough and thought I might share it http://www.taleworlds.com/

...there is.

He's mostly working on the combat engine and has very little plot, but the skeleton of the game is downloadable and very playable. It's kind of like Diablo right now, not plot but lots of enemies to slaughter.

This is the first combat engine I've seen that makes effective use of mounted troops - playing a mounted character is a lot of fun.

A review here.

Don't bother to download if you can't live without Half Life 2 quality graphics.

PS - not affiliated with those guys, but this is a cool game