It’s only a demo and when it releases it will be in early access, but it’s easy to see the potential here. I believe this may prove to be a great alternative to the limited RPG maker and can allow artists a way to more organically introduce their work in a game. Best of all you (allegedly) don’t need programming experience to make stuff either, which I’m sure would be a relief to a lot of people.
It doesn’t look… Too terrible. I don’t think it really serves any neglected niches, but I suppose there’s never any harm in another engine being released. While isometric isn’t impossible to implement (especially in the very limited way they’ve show here) in other game engines, I suppose it might be nice to have something more off-the-shelf for smaller-scale games or prototypes.
I am a bit wary of a couple of things, though. They seem to want to run a proprietary marketplace specifically for games made with the engine, which isn’t necessarily wrong in and of itself; however, they aren’t particularly forthcoming with information about monetization or whether or not a user is capable of creating a standalone executable.
Their intention to integrate generative AI into the engine to generate assets is another concern. While I don’t hate AI like some might, I am concerned on two fronts. Firstly, it’s not mentioned anywhere in the marketing save for the mandatory “AI Generated Content Disclosure” section on the Steam page; while the stipulations in the disclosure seem semi-reasonable (i.e., models trained on the studio’s own art team rather than images scraped from literally anywhere), it does strike me as odd how much of an afterthought it seems to be, and maybe a little dishonest. Second, and more subjectively: The art in the trailer is just kind of bad, to be frank. I presume the artists that the studio used to create the assets in the trailer are the same ones that will be “training” the AI, so… Garbage in, garbage out, unfortunately.
I think this thing will be mostly harmless, but I’m not sure I see the potential.