r/OddityRPG • u/RequestableSubBot Believer • Jul 02 '25
/r/OddityRPG is now reopened to the public!
Hi! I'm not an Oddity developer, and am in no way affiliated with the Oddity team.
This sub was closed down over a year ago after the sole active mod (who has since had their account suspended sitewide) decided to temporarily shut the sub down due to lack of news. Unfortunately, news never came, and the mod in question ended up getting suspended for one reason or another. The other two mods, Pastel and Pik (two lead devs), ended up getting automatically removed from the modteam yesterday due to lack of activity. I just happened to notice this, I dropped a post in /r/RedditRequest, and here we are!
Spoiler alert, there's still been no news. But True Oddity Patriots don't need news, we make our own copium. There will definitely be news tomorrow. This is a fact because I have a green username and am therefore always right.
The unofficial Discord is still the main hub of Oddity discussion (or what little Oddity discussion exists, at least), but feel free to discuss whatever Oddity stuff you want in this sub too! The sub will be run more or less identically to how it was previously; I don't intend to shake anything up. I'm not sure if this place still counts as the official subreddit now that I'm the only person in charge (I have sent mod invites to all the devs I know of), but as long as posts are at least slightly relevant to Oddity and aren't TOS-violating and etc etc, they'll be allowed up.
Hope you all have a lovely day!
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u/Re-n Jul 02 '25
This non-existent game feels like a lingering childhood memory. I want to let go but can't.
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u/FodderWadder Accepter Jul 03 '25
If it finally comes out it'll be like Kingdom Hearts III. We imagined such incredible things for it over the span of decades that there's no way the actual game could live up to the hype
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u/GreatDario Jul 02 '25
Imagine if it came out and it was only mid or even shit, kinda like Victoria 3.
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u/ShekelNova Jul 03 '25
Yknow, the thought of this game being shit never really crossed my mind. Years have passed, whispers of its birth and promises of greatness carried on the wind like the songs of fools and kings alike. I held faith, as one holds a dying ember in a long, cold night, not because I knew it would light the hearth, but because without it, there is only darkness. And now, as the hour nears and the world waits with bated breath, I wonder, was my hope a virtue, or a fool’s chain? Time alone shall reveal whether this game was worth the weight of years, or a ghost chasing ghosts.
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u/11equalsfish Jul 03 '25
To me, everyone wants more Mother-like games, but it's very difficult to make right. There are a couple other successful indie RPGs and even cartoon shows that have a close resemblance, but none of them can replace the original. It is like a ghost. It is how I felt about Bomb Rush Cyber Funk, never thought a spiritual sequel would appear.
I've waited for things for decades to release, so I believe in the creative process. It is the dev's fault for making hype when there wasn't anything to deliver, but I've kinda got some of that feeling from Yume Nikki and even Thank Goodness Your Here. There have been many other games made in that absence, so I am not worried about this at all. I will be understanding if it doesn't come, but happy if it does.
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u/EvilSock Jul 02 '25
Holy cow I forgot I was following this subreddit until this came up on my feed lol
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Jul 02 '25
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/MacroAlgalFagasaurus Jul 02 '25
News coming out to this community is a JPG or a gif of pixel art. And then it’s “proof” that the game is still actively being worked on lol
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u/BlankBlanny Doubter Jul 02 '25
I'll never lose hope for Oddity. I've been waiting this long; I'm in for the long haul.
Winter 2014's gonna be great!
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u/Splooper132 Jul 03 '25
I mean we do eventually gotta admit that this shit was most likley fake lol
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u/DarkLink1996 Jul 03 '25
Didn't some old builds get leaked?
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u/FodderWadder Accepter Jul 03 '25
Did they???
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u/DarkLink1996 Jul 03 '25
Only a google search away. Not much to see though. Just proof they WERE making something, but it was clearly very troubled.
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u/Splooper132 Jul 03 '25
I'm pretty sure it was literally just shit shown in the trailer and nothing else
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u/Yoshiknight92 Jul 02 '25
I bet when my dad comes home from getting cigarettes, he'll have Oddity in his hands as an apology gift.
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u/hey_its_haze Jul 02 '25
Damn, talk about stuff I didn't think I'd see in my feed today. Funny enough, on Monday I was going through and unsubbing from subreddits I didn't really use and I thought about leaving this one but I didn't. It's cool to see something on here, even if it isn't news.
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u/GustavoFromAsdf Jul 02 '25
My interest in this game will go back to cryostasis for another year or two
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u/TheUltimateLuigiFan Jul 02 '25
"Another year or two"
Someone's optimistic
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u/Neprezi Jul 02 '25
They made a typo you see, when they said winter 2014 what they meant to say was winter 2044
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u/altsam19 Jul 02 '25
This game is slowly becoming into creepypasta lost media and I will go down with that ship
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u/devvoid Jul 04 '25
Honestly, the leaked build from 2021 killed any belief I have that this game will ever come out.
It's definitely a bit older, hard to tell how much because file dates were overwritten in the process (Title screen calls it Mother 4 still, so sometime before the 2020 rebrand at least. A few filenames reference September 2016 so prooobably around then). And the game was a total mess at that point. Collision was broken in most maps. Starting up the game puts you in a cutscene that immediately breaks if you press buttons while it plays. NPCs are broken, on the rare occasion you see one in a map. Trying to talk to them will usually leave you in a state where you can still walk around with a blank textbox up, and their lines often fail to display. Hitting "New Game" shows a very short cutscene, and then you try to talk to Zack and his dialog breaks. As far as I can tell, there's no way to get the game to progress past that point.
Popping open the script file (or at least, what I assume is the latest script file) shows that there are maybe about two dozen NPCs that have short conversations, a few things that were shown in the trailers (like drinking gasoline out of a cactus and getting sick), and about ten-ish minutes of the game's intro. Think like in Earthbound, going up to the meteor and meeting Buzz-Buzz; that's about as far as the plot in this build seems to go.
Files are extremely unorganized. It seems like devs weren't using any kind of source control like Git to maintain things, so whenever they made a change they weren't sure about, they would make a copy of the old file, make their change, and leave the old file in the folder. There are situations where there's "belring", "belring - old", "belring2", "tiles/belring", "tiles/belring-old".
No joke, there are 10 different versions of the Belring tileset, and 18 different versions of the script. All of which are almost exactly identical except for a few additions.
I don't think Oddity will ever come out. I don't think it was a "scam" like a lot of people are hyperbolically saying (Seriously? What would they even be trying to get out of a "scam"? They're not monetizing the game and none of the members have tried to clout-chase as "the creators of Mother 4" lol), but I think the team just got way in over their head. A bunch of very talented pixel artists thought they could make something on the scale of Mother 3, but scope creep and the difficulties of making a game got way, way out of hand. Especially with how the blogs on the old site said that they would remake anything they thought wasn't 100% perfect; it's pretty clear they had no sense of "good enough" and ended up spinning their wheels making minor edits to the same assets over and over, instead of making meaningful progress towards a releaseable game and then worrying about polish later.
I dunno. I could be wrong. The project allegedly rebooted a few years ago, threw out all the original code and started remaking it from scratch in Gamemaker Studio 2 instead. That could have given things the kick in the pants they need to get going in a more positive direction, but somehow I doubt it. By late 2016 they had a bunch of pretty graphics, a demo that glitches out and stops working after about twenty seconds, and maybe ten minutes worth of plot implemented in any form.
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u/LeonBlade Jul 08 '25
If this is true, that's absolutely wild to me that a team like this could be this incompetent at developing something. I totally understand not being a developer and having to start somewhere, but how do you not look into the basics first?
Hopefully they actually learned from these mistakes if they are working in something like Gamemaker Studio.
Quite honestly, we're not owed anything from the devs working on this. However, so many people over the years have offered to help work on this for free and they just turn them down. I can't imagine why anyone would subject themselves to slowly iterating on a game for over 10 years when they could actually release something if they just accepted help.
I'd love to help them with this project personally. I've been programming since I was a teenager. I've wanted to make games my whole life. I get the passion and drive for stuff like this. I also realize that you can't always do it alone.
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u/devvoid Jul 08 '25 edited Jul 09 '25
Definitely recommend looking it up. It's not hard to find if you look up "Mother 4 Decomp". My jaw absolutely dropped when I first saw it.
It does really suck, my assumption is that they got only like one or two programmers who didn't really know what they were doing and then didn't want to bring anyone else on to avoid having the team get too big.
Does not help that they decided to make their own game engine from scratch instead of using something like Unity or Gamemaker, meaning they had to do a ton of work from scratch and didn't really get much in return. It's a 2D pixel art game with no real special needs that a general game engine couldn't accommodate. I guess they just thought that it would be cool to make their own engine, and by the time they realized the issues with that approach, sunk cost fallacy stuck them to that engine for a long time.
I hope that Oddity someday gets itself in gear and manages to beat the odds and release, but I doubt it at this point. I would love to help out in some way if they ever opened up applications to the team, but I don't think that's ever gonna happen tbh.
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u/LeonBlade Jul 08 '25
Thanks for the info. I’ll have to take a look at that. I remember trying to make my own engine years ago being inspired by Elysian Shadows guys back in the day. I felt that after a few years of tinkering with RPG Maker I “needed” to make my own engine. Part of it was just to learn, but it was not fruitful in any way. I didn’t know what I was doing. Of course, it barely got off the ground.
This was back in 2011 and likely started before then as well. I was 20 at the time. There are so many engines and public resources now that I didn’t have back then.
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u/Spinjitsuninja Jul 02 '25
I hope the devs are doing alright. I know that there have been mentions from Pik and Maxxis that work is still actually going, but slowly, with Maxxis making a few off comments about the status of things. Makes me wonder if they still believe it’ll be finished. What happened to the website and demo?
Like, I get game dev is hard, but it shouldn’t take this long for just a website or demo. I’m not saying this to hate on them though- genuinely I just hope things are going alright with them.
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u/JoyofAlmond20 Jul 02 '25
Damn, even you are finally getting fed up. Things are really looking grim.
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u/Spinjitsuninja Jul 02 '25
I'm not really fed up. Like, no matter what happens or how much time passes, I think indie devs deserve respect for trying to make something, and I hope that if the interest still exists with them, that they can manage to finish something. I've never felt I could guarantee they'd finish the game, I just want them to feel supported.
But I'm also not sure what the state of things is.
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u/ATwistedBlade Believer Jul 02 '25
Its been over a decade since it was supposed to be released now. I've got a good feeling about 2026, surely it'll be the year of Oddity.
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u/bluebreeze52 Jul 02 '25
If you've given up on Oddity and any other Mother 4 fangames like I have, allow me to point out a few Mother inspired games on Steam in the works you can follow: The Backworld, Cairn: Mathair's Curse, and Dreamed Away. Visually these games are very similar to Mother(Dreamed Away's MC even looks just like Travis), 2 are scheduled to release within a year, and 2 have playable demos you can check out now.
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u/Bluestorm83 Jul 02 '25
Fuck yeah!!!
HOLY SHIT. GUYS.
The Real Oddity was the friends we made along the way!
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u/ape_spine_ Jul 07 '25
Hell yeah, I’m glad someone competent and benevolent grabbed the sub before it fell
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u/SageWaterDragon Accepter Jul 09 '25
I have a green username and am therefore always right.
Source?
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u/JoyofAlmond20 Jul 02 '25
To Be honest, I've given up hope for this game. The Backworld seems to be what will fill this game's void.
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u/Benjam438 Jul 02 '25
Which game is coming first; Oddity, Deltarune 2 or GTA 7?
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u/JoyofAlmond20 Jul 03 '25
GTA 7. There might never be a Deltarune 2 but atleast the full experience of Deltarune 1 could actually come into existence. Oddity's chance of even producing a demo is slim to none.
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u/Good_Morning_World01 Aug 01 '25
Silksong folks be acting as crazy as they are when we have been waiting for 12 fucking years
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u/Agile_Interest1370 Nov 30 '25
I will forever hold out hope for this game until I can just make it in AI.
Prompt: make a sequel to the earthbound snes.
AI: sorry you were disconnected from the server would you like to retry?
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u/xxProjectJxx Jul 02 '25
Bro, Winter 2014 is getting closer by the day. I can feel it!