RPG Maker strikes again!

Noblesse Oblige: Legacy of the Sorcerer Kings is one of hundreds of low effort retro-pixel RPG Maker asset/construction kit flips spamming the Steam catalog, made with the RPG Maker video game construction kit... in their own words, "Our easy to use tools are simple enough for a child." Like all RPG Maker "games", this is essentially a bunch of low quality/canned assets from RPG Maker coupled with a cringeworthy high school anime club fan fiction.

This is an abandoned Early Access RPG Maker asset flip where the "developer" used RPG Maker to live out his fantasy of being in charge of a kingdom and having lots of imaginary girlfriend waifus (women don't ignore you if you're the king you see). It's an unadulterated cringefest, with flipped RPG Maker assets, terrible game design that looks like it's mostly ripped from the D20SRD (but worse than any D&D product ever made), and of course, all the high school anime club dropout fan-fiction writing you could shake a stick at.

As with all RPG Maker games, the poor quality engine displays badly in fullscreen and doesn't have full HD support or any graphics tweaking options, making this unacceptable for any dedicated modern PC gamer. The point can be made that the intention of RPG Maker is to make demos and small games to pass around friends, and shouldn't be used for "professional" game development.

Like most RPG Maker shovelware and asset flips, the game features extremely low quality copy + pasted 2D retro pixel art, looks awful, and has even worse gameplay. RPG Maker is an absolutely terrible construction kit, and never results in games of any reasonable quality or value to gamers.

The developers haven't touched this for 1 month. It's deep in development hell and there's every likelihood this will never be completed. This unfinished game is just polluting Steam and making it harder for gamers to find genuinely, completely made games.

This is only free in a rudimentary sense... the developer has their hand out for a $10 USD "donation" for this as you're expected to buy some extra DLC from Steam... digital panhandling. Like the homeless guys who splash dirty water on your windscreen at the traffic lights. No thanks.

Even after that the developer said he was going to try charge money for this.... beyond just the $10 USD donation he was fantasizing about. Imagine thinking an cringey RPG Maker asset flip fan-fiction was worth any money at all, let alone 10 bucks.

Despite having no up-front cost, this failed to appeal to the 120 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB showed the game peaked at just a dozen or so concurrent players, and now there's basically nobody playing it. Even though it's free. This is a dismal public reception, but it's easy to see why gamers rejected it.

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.

Developer Response!

The developer has weighed in to inform everyone they didn't read the Developer Usage Rules for Steam "partners", or they deliberately ignored the part where Valve says:

Though it may be tempting, not every review needs to be responded to. A developer response will frequently draw more attention than the original statement, potentially turning a small issue into a much larger community discussion. It's also not a good idea to use this feature to refute customer opinions. Your direct attention can be seen as validation or a defensive attempt to silence your customers.

The developer makes the rather serious claim that my review is inaccurate/contains information which isn't factually evident. But this simply isn't true... the facts of my review can easily be verified with just a glance at this godawfully crap product.

The developer makes libellous claims of falsehood for no reason than to try soothe his ego because he's psychologically incapable of dealing with his own failure, but anyone thinking because they wrote a high school dropout fan-fiction and dragged and dropped a few premade assets in the children's tool RPG Maker construction kit that they can tell their imaginary girlfriend that they're a real game developer isn't all there anyway. The developers incoherent and arrogant breach of the very important guidelines placed on developers by Valve makes that very clear.

We know that if there was any glaring inaccuracy in my review the developer would have jumped on it and pointed it out right away... but they can't even cite one single example. Because they know my review is accurate. They just don't like being presented with the facts.

So they make up these false accusations of inaccuracy to soothe their ego. Anything but facing up to the truth. But why is this intellectual dishonesty good for gamers? It isn't.

The developer whines about me warning gamers about the abuse of Early Access. This sheds light on a deeper concern as yet another unethical hack of a "developer", using a childrens game construction kit, claims he's incapable of producing an RPG Maker asset flip without a 3 year wait. The ridiculous timespan of around 3 years, when RPG Maker asset flips only take 1-2 weeks to produce at most (usually a weekend is enough), is simply setting out to abuse Steam Early Access and defraud gamers.

The developers digusting attitude here should serve as a warning to gamers.

Nothing in the developers pointless breach of Valve guidelines changes any of the objective facts of my review. My review stands unaltered. I cannot recommend this game to anyone.